August 31, 2006
John Brown’s Reputation Lies A-Mould’ring in the Grave Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:00 PM EST If I shouted “I love freedom” and then hit my dog over the head with a rock, would that make me a hero? Maybe not to you, and certainly not to my family’s poor little dachshund. But for those true Americans who are devoted to the cause of liberty, I would be a brave pioneer in a noble quest, willing to adopt unorthodox methods to protect the precious values our society holds most sacred.
At least, that’s the impression I get from reading today’s lead article on this site. I have not read the book under review and so cannot comment directly on its merits, but if our article is an accurate summary, the book’s author seems to be saying that everyone thinks John Brown was a crazy man, when in fact he was fighting for a noble cause. Now, the impression I have held since grade school is that John Brown was both: a crazy man fighting for a noble cause. And from my hasty survey of the resources available in the American Heritage library, this seems to be the view of most historians past and present—setting aside the large and vocal contingent who from 1859 to the present have portrayed him as a martyr of unalloyed nobility.
The first paragraph of our review says: “The picture of John Brown that has come down through time is largely that of a madman, a fanatic . . . deranged, a violent psychotic.” Whether or not this actually is the picture that has come down to us, there’s no question that Brown was a fanatic by any reasonable definition of that word, nor that he was violent. “Madman” and “deranged” are imprecise terms, as is “psychotic” once you get past its scientific sheen. Indeed, the same might be said for the whole concept of mental illness—and yet, like love or truth or beauty, it does exist and can be discussed.
John Brown is one of many subjects in American history on which it’s hard to find an impartial source (particularly if, like me, you have lots of other work to do at the time). It’s clear that his family had a history of mental illness and that some people who knew him thought he acted strangely. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who could plan and carry out the Pottawotamie Massacre, in which he and his followers killed proslavery settlers in cold blood, chopped off their limbs, and split open their heads, must be considered at least something of an oddball. You can say that the violent times made him crazy, but that’s just another way of saying that he was crazy. In any case, there were thousands of settlers in Kansas who did not go around hacking up their neighbors.
That Brown was kind and loving in many ways, that not everything he did was deranged, that he was capable of making plans and organizing operations, that he could speak eloquently, and that he had a noble cause in his heart do not disprove the assertion that he was insane. Charles Manson had devoted fans too. Yet, as I’ve said, defining insanity is problematic, and since we cannot talk to Brown today, it’s even harder to make a definitive judgment. So I would set aside the question of his sanity, let alone whether “psychotic” is the correct technical term to describe him (or, for that matter, “doughty stoic,” which would seem to be just the opposite). That debate is so heavily dependent on what one thinks of Brown overall that it can never be resolved. A more interesting, if no more clear-cut, question is this: Were his actions at Harpers Ferry right, and did they help the slaves?
The Harpers Ferry raid got 17 people killed, 10 of them raiders (including two of Brown’s sons, but not counting Brown himself and five co-conspirators, who were hanged after the ensuing trial). It freed no slaves and, thankfully, inspired no similar acts by others. It’s hard to imagine that it attracted anyone to the abolitionist cause who wasn’t already a sympathizer; if anything, it did more to alienate neutrals and stoke up hostility in the South, especially after so many Northerners praised Brown’s actions. The raid does seem to have heightened the already severe sectional conflict, and it may have brought civil war five or ten years sooner than it otherwise would have occurred, but if so, it’s unclear whether this was good or bad. At the risk of incurring a smackdown from Fred Smoler, I’ll suggest very tentatively that the North was industrializing much faster than the South and developing new weapons as well, so a war that began in 1865 or 1869 would probably have ended much quicker.
But, of course, John Brown was against slavery, so even if his raid accomplished no more than bashing a dog’s head would have, he will find sympathizers—just as today’s terrorists and guerrillas find apologists among those who agree with the causes they say they are supporting. Personally, I think Brown could have done much more to eliminate slavery by letting his sons live long enough to fight for the Union.
The antislavery movement has many genuine heroes. William Lloyd Garrison was one for tirelessly criticizing slavery and attracting adherents to the cause. The same goes for Harriet Beecher Stowe, whatever the flaws of her Uncle Tom’s Cabin; for the antislavery legislators in Congress; and of course for Harriet Tubman and the rest of the Underground Railroad’s supporters. These people used persuasion, law, and direct action to restrict, expose, and nullify slavery as far as it was possible. John Brown, by contrast, achieved nothing at Harpers Ferry, and he did it at the cost of many lives and much increased bitterness. He was not a hero. He was just a crazy fool.
August 30, 2006
The Fall of the Soviet Union Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 AM EST Alex Burns wrote AmericanHeritage.com’s lead article yesterday on the fifteenth anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union. It made me remember sitting in a living room in Cambridge, England, in the company of people who had grown up under Stalinist governments in Eastern Europe, watching first the news of the coup against Gorbachev and then its failure, when Boris Yeltsin rallied the Russian people in defense of their fledgling democracy. My Eastern European friends were much less astonished by the coup than by the civil courage of the people who thwarted it. We toasted the Russian people with the only Soviet alcohol we could find, a bottle of genuinely vile Georgian wine, the worst beverage I have ever tasted. It tasted like a thin molasses blended with gasoline. The toasts were in no way ironic.
I still remember my Eastern European friends’ morbid certainty that tyranny had again been effectively restored, and their combination of exhilaration and stark incredulity when democracy triumphed and swept away the Communist party. They had a weary confidence that nothing could change. That university was filled with very brave people who had been dissidents in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland and who knew in their bones that the world had frozen fast in the mid-1940s. Its unfreezing remains the most astonishing event of my lifetime, but I am struck by how little it remains in our consciousness and, all things considered, how comparatively slight was its impact at the time.
For the first 40 years of my life the balance of terror was omnipresent, and mutual destruction a never wholly forgotten possibility, for international politics seemed in one aspect utterly immobile: Almost no one could imagine a world that was not divided into hostile camps, each forever holding the other in check. We now live in apprehension of the development of the first Iranian nuclear weapon, which, if it appears, will for many years be unable to reach an American city unless smuggled in aboard a freighter. The Soviet Union, of course, possessed many thousands of such weapons; a fair number of the ones to be delivered by submarine-launched ballistic missile would have required perhaps seven minutes to reach their targets. Those weapons still exist, although we no longer much fear them. For now, we truly fear only lunatics who seem to detest modernity—not (mostly) rational actors with a scientific worldview plus control of a state possessing an apparently modern industrial economy, and for that reason extremely formidable. The disappearance of that kind of military threat, however, is scarcely the whole of it.
One of the courses I teach is on the postwar political novel in America. Some of the books deal with race, and my students understand those books, in many cases effortlessly. The books dealing with Communism are almost incomprehensible to many of them, the ones dealing with the political morality of the Cold War being especially baffling. The ones dealing with mutual assured destruction—Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is the greatest of them—depend on assumptions that must now be reconstructed as laboriously as the ones that underpin a difficult text from Greco-Roman antiquity. The sadness of a novel like Robert Stone’s A Flag For Sunrise, an allegory of Cold War El Salvador, is similarly inaccessible. The literature of the Cold War makes no immediate sense to my students; the tragedies and ironies of my world are not, for now, any part of theirs, but it is not reasonable to be surprised by such a thing. It may be more truly surprising that most of my colleagues do not seem to remember those ironies and tragedies. And I am chastened to realize that if not for Alex’s column, I would not have given a moment’s thought yesterday to those intensely dramatic, world-transforming events.
August 29, 2006
On Congressional Pork Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:15 PM EST Further to John Steele Gordon’s post on government pork, the following link is an indispensable resource for citizens who want to know just how much nonsense spending finds its way into congressional appropriations bills.
Click here for the website.
While I think the sponsoring organization misidentifies certain projects as pork, their annual Pig Book undoubtedly offers an instructive glimpse into the appropriations process.
August 29, 2006
Pork Barrel Politics Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:30 AM EST Pork is not a partisan issue and not a new one. The term “pork barrel” is over a century old in its political sense, an allusion to the regular handing out of joints of salted pork, stored in barrels, by plantation owners to slave families before the Civil War. Because it is believed with nearly religious fervor among many politicians of all stripes that pork is the sure-fire means to lifelong reelection, it has proved impossible to kill. As Jesse Unruh, speaker of the California Assembly in the 1960s, famously explained, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.”
Here’s a case in point.
The conservative Sen. Tom Coburn (R. Oklahoma) and the liberal Sen. Barak Obama (D. Illinois) have sponsored a bill, S. 2590, and have gathered 29 cosponsors of both parties.
The bill would require the Office of Management and Budget to establish a user-friendly website and post on it the amounts and recipients of all government contracts, grants, insurance, loans, and financial assistance that exceeded $25,000. None of this is secret information (any that was would be exempt); it is simply now hard to find in a systematic way. The bill has the backing of the Bush administration. As Clay Johnson, the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, explained, “What we like is transparency. We believe that the more public information that’s available about how programs work, about where we’re spending our money, who’s getting grants, who’s getting contracts, the more accountability there is.”
It was passed unanimously in a voice vote by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Majority Leader Bill Frist hoped to bring it up before the summer recess, and Senate passage seemed assured. It is hard, after all, to vote against transparency in government, especially where money is concerned.
But Senate rules allow any senator, regardless of party, to put a “hold” on a bill, no questions asked. This keeps the bill from being considered. Senate rules further allow the holding senator to do so in secret, and the public is invited to butt out.
That is what has happened with S. 2590. Who the secret senator is no one knows (or rather, those who do know aren’t talking). However a website called www.Porkbusters.org is trying to smoke him or her out. It has invited readers to contact their senators, ask them to deny that they are the secret senator, and e-mail Porkbusters the responses.
So far, 27 senators have done denied being the secret holder. That leaves 73 senators who have not. At least one senator’s office, that of Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R., Texas), refused to say if she is the anonymous holder and hung up on the person calling.
Twenty years ago there wasn’t much the public could do about such shenanigans in high places. But today, thanks to the incredible power of the Internet, there is. I hope Porkbusters is able to demonstrate how the balance of power between public officials and the public is changing by outing the secret senator.
August 28, 2006
More About Whitewater Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:05 PM EST John Steele Gordon wisely notes that the media love scandal, not least because it sells copy and attracts viewers, claims that the media are splendidly unbiased in their coverage of scandal—I’m not quite convinced of that claim—and thinks there was enough smoke around Whitewater to justify the assumption that there had to be a fire.
I think the first claim is true, although not necessarily a good thing. A constant drumbeat of scandal that conveys a false sense that all normal politics (and all politicians) are possibly odiously and at least ludicrously corrupt erodes indispensable trust in politics. One of the very likely preconditions for the triumph of anti-democratic politics is the broad conviction that democratic politics is inevitably a base and dishonest enterprise. When that happens, the allegedly incorruptible and avowedly anti-democratic counter-elite can start to look pretty good, precisely because democratic starts to be a synonym for corrupt. I do not think this is a probable danger to the United States, but it is something to bear in mind.
In terms of whether there was enough smoke around the serial allegations lumped together as “Whitewater” to generate a reasonable suspicion of a fire, I think the question is, how big a fire was it reasonable to suspect? Big enough to justify the duration and intensity of coverage those allegations received in papers like The New York Times? I think not; Mr. Gordon may think otherwise. I remember that during early but not first-blush Whitewater, a relative of mine ran into a pretty senior Times man and asked what was going on, since the likely fire didn’t seem big enough to justify the intensity and duration of the coverage. The senior Times man agreed that the coverage was peculiar and excessive, but denied that there was any authentic bias. He claimed that some younger reporters, knowing that a couple of very highly placed superiors had it in for Clinton, mistakenly believed that the way to advancement was to politicize your work and thus gratify your superiors’ political prejudices, since that was the way life was supposed to work, especially if you had recently graduated from one of our better universities. I think this is an amusing theory, but not necessarily a persuasive one.
Is media coverage of scandals splendidly unbiased, meaning, do left and right cover allegations of scandal by their own team as zealously as they cover allegations impugning the other team? Sometimes, but not, I think, too often. I remember being very impressed when some Second Amendment enthusiasts blogged about some possible fraud in scholarship by an academic on their side of the debate, after having covered in great detail the allegations of fraud in some scholarship on the other side. As it is supposed to have said beneath an eighteenth-century engraving of a French warship towing a defeated British warship into port as a prize, the sight was the more delightful for its rarity.
August 28, 2006
More on the Kellogg-Briand Pact Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon posted yesterday noting the anniversary—and what he took to be the absurdity—of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which outlawed war as an instrument of national policy. Since the Kellogg-Briand preceded by only three years a sequence of wars begun by pact signatories Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy, Mr. Gordon is perhaps understandably unsentimental about this anniversary. He goes on to make an astringent remark about treaties generally: “Treaties that ignore the reality of how non-democratic nations all too often act do not ensure the peace. Instead they help to ensure war.”
This remark is itself unexceptionable—after all, what sane person would entrust his country’s security to a document that ignores reality?—but I am less confident about what looks to be one of its underlying premises. The premise, which seems to be an example of some recent thinking about the relationship between democracies and war, is sometimes known as the theory of democratic peace. Baldly put, the claim is that democracies are more pacific than non-democratic regimes. There is a fair amount of evidence suggesting that the claim overstates the case.
Democratic Athens was much more bellicose than anti-democratic Sparta. The Roman Republic was a remarkably warlike polity. Republican (although admittedly not democratic) Venice was aggressive, similarly republican Florence, and the French First Republic was pretty bellicose. The United States did not look pacific to the Cherokees, or to Mexico, or to a number of others. Almost all of the British Empire was constructed by a parliamentary regime, a lot of the post-Napoleonic French Empire was acquired by the Third Republic, and the parliamentary monarchy of post-Risorgimento Italy could also be aggressively imperialist.
Is nineteenth-century imperialism an exception that somehow proves the rule, ditto the ancient world, ditto Renaissance republics, with the theory of democratic peace still holding for modern states? I don’t think so. If China democratizes, many people think it may be more rather than less likely to invade Taiwan, because nationalist passions will be less easily resisted by elites suddenly responsive to a patriotic electorate. New democracies may generally be particularly bellicose, for the same reason, and for that reason a more democratic Egypt may not be as inclined to maintain peace with Israel as the current regime has been, ditto a democratizing Jordan or Saudi Arabia or Syria. This does not mean that mature democracies are as likely to start wars as newly emerging ones can be, but skeptics of democratic peace theory have a lot of interesting evidence on their side.
Some people have argued that democratic regimes are more warlike for a good reason: Democratic regimes have greater legitimacy, and hence are better at concentrating force, so they are likelier to start wars because they are likelier to win them, and win them pretty cheaply; these theorists claim that if you are a democracy, the probable costs of going to war drop very significantly. I am doubtful about that part of the skeptics’ case, and I certainly do not think that possibly heightened risks of war make for an irresistible case against democracy. But the mixed evidence is fascinating, and in some respects disturbing.
August 28, 2006
The Whitewater Scandal Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:00 AM EST It seems to me that much of what Fred Smoler calls medias bias in his most recent post is instead simply scandal-mongering.
The media love scandal in high places—the higher the place and the more sordid the scandal the better—for the simple reason that it sells newspapers and gets eyeballs firmly planted in front of television sets. They are, I think, splendidly unbiased in their coverage of it. And there was more than enough smoke in the various aspects of the Whitewater scandal to make it reasonable to assume that there was a fire somewhere, and the media ran with it. Just consider:
1) One of the principal witnesses went to jail for contempt for a considerable period rather than testify before a grand jury. Those who have nothing of interest to say don’t do that very often.
2) The Rose Law Firm billing records went missing for several years and then suddenly appeared—like a mushroom after a rain—in a third-floor room in the White House. No one knows how they got there, or at least no one admits to knowing.
3) Mrs. Clinton made $100,000 speculating in cattle futures, having never speculated in commodities before and never having done so since. Anyone who thinks that was merely beginner’s luck doesn’t know much about trading commodities.
Any journalist worth his ink-stained fingers would be pursuing those stories.
My favorite example of the media’s wholly apolitical passion for scandal came at the very beginning of the Monica Lewinsky uproar. Pope John Paul II was scheduled to visit Cuba. The late pope was always a major story, and his visit to a once-Catholic country so officially atheist that it outlaws Christmas was bigger than usual. So all three broadcast networks sent their anchors to cover the event.
Suddenly the Monica story broke. What to do? Should the anchors continue to cover the pope’s visit to Cuba or hightail it home to cover a major White House sex scandal?
It wasn’t even close. Dan, Peter, and Tom were all on the plane to Washington before you could say pax vobiscum.
August 27, 2006
Elephants and Donkeys, Continued Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:50 PM EST Fred Schwarz generously speculated about whether I know media bias as well as I know military history. He can stop wondering: I do not. As for the significance of what I called Clinton-baiting by what are normally taken to be liberal media organs: I think the persistence and intensity of their coverage of what proved to be imaginary financial scandals, in the absence of any persuasive evidence, was an example of bias. An unintended consequence of this biased reporting, which kept a sense of foul scandal alive despite the absence of evidence, was to give political cover to the Republicans for a remarkably protracted and for a very long time wholly unsuccessful investigation by Kenneth Starr. Starr eventually turned up some crimes by the expedient of what is sometimes called a perjury trap, but that perjury trap concerned a subject entirely unrelated to any earlier topic of inquiry. In any case, without the earlier and undeserved support of the liberal media, I do not think there could have been a sustained Republican campaign culminating in impeachment. What is arguably the most powerful recent example of the effect of media bias does not suggest that the only problem with media bias, including the biases of liberal media, is liberal bias. Protracted and disproportionate (i.e. biased) attention paid to a series of groundless charges was not liberal bias. I would never claim that what are called the “liberal media” are bias-free, only that they are periodically gripped by different sorts of biases (including some “liberal” ones). To pick another example of non-liberal bias in “liberal media”: The New York Times’ coverage of the strategic balance and the Salt II talks. Although you would not easily have guessed it from the press coverage, there was no dangerous erosion of the mid-to-late 1970s strategic balance, and the reporting did not adequately cover both sides of the controversies. To pick a third example: When in the election of 2000 a mob of Congressional Republican staffers stopped a vote count in Miami by noisy disruption and the implied threat of violence, and a senior Republican boasted that this behavior had successfully stopped officials from counting votes, the “liberal media” spent a lot less time covering that event than they spent on those never-to-be-proven Clinton financial scandals. Another point: biased journalism takes a lot of different forms. A traditional definition of bias is when the media organ’s editorial stance starts affecting its news coverage, but I don’t think that a sufficient definition. For example, when The New York Times, on the eve of the Iraq War, published an op-ed piece suggesting that Saddam Hussein had never gassed any Kurds, and that those notorious attacks had been made by Iran, that was in my view an example of bias. How can the choice of an op-ed piece be a demonstration of bias? Isn’t the op-ed page pure opinion? Sure—but who thinks the Times would have published an op-ed denying the Holocaust, or claiming that the Tutsi had massacred themselves? Giving publicity to a disgraceful though politically useful fringe view (if Saddam had not gassed thousands of Kurdish civilians, the focus on possible Iraqi WMD would have seemed less urgent) seems to me to be an example of biased journalism. Insofar as an op-ed page is imagined to fairly represent the spectrum of respectable views, an op-ed page can also display bias by letting the case for the other side be made only rarely, and then only by fools or the timid, while letting the case for one’s own side be made eloquently, aggressively, and frequently. I am not multiplying examples of what might be called liberal press bias, because I have every confidence that other bloggers can and will do so. I am only trying to suggest that there are interesting counter-examples from the same media. Also, I think I owe John Steele Gordon an apology. I thought he had made a reference to The New Republic, but I was misattributing to John Steele Gordon a quotation by Fred Barnes cited by Josh Zeitz, while he was arguing with Mr. Gordon. Since I generally enjoy reading Mr. Gordon, and do not recall much pleasure reading Mr. Barnes, I am particularly sorry to have made such a mistake.
August 27, 2006
The Kellogg-Briand Pact Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:55 PM EST In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Kingston Trio was a very hot singing group in the “faux folk” tradition, singing highly sophisticated arrangements of both genuine folk songs and contemporary ones that echoed the folk tradition. One of their big hits, for instance, was “They Call the Wind Maria,” written by Broadway’s Lerner and Loewe, not exactly a pair of yokels from the sticks. Another of their big hits was a song called “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” by Ed McCurdy:
Last night I had the strangest dream
I’d ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war I dreamed I saw a mighty room
Filled with women and men
And the paper they were signing said
They’d never fight again
Judging from the lyric, Mr. McCurdy thought this an excellent idea, if one unlikely to be adopted.
In fact, it had been adopted already. Seventy-nine years ago today, in 1927, eleven nations signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, named for Frank Kellogg, U.S. secretary of state under Coolidge, and Aristide Briand, foreign minister of France. Basically it bound the signatories to renounce war as “an instrument of national policy.” Sixty-two nations eventually signed on to the Pact of Paris, as it is formally named, putting an end to war. It didn’t quite work out that way, of course. Unfortunately, there was no mechanism for enforcing the treaty—it was just a piece of paper—and many of the signatories regarded it as nothing more than a public-relations exercise. Only three years after it came into force Japan seized Manchuria, and Japan invaded China proper in 1937. In 1941 it attacked the United States. Germany forcibly reoccupied the Rhineland in 1935, seized the Sudetenland in 1938, and invaded Poland in 1939, setting off the greatest conflict in human history. Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and Albania in 1939. Japan, Germany, and Italy were all signatories of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Kellogg’s successor as secretary of state, Henry Stimson, with naiveté equal to that which brought about the Kellogg-Briand Pact, closed down the State Department’s code-breaking operation, saying that “gentlemen don’t read other men’s mail.” Gentlemen indeed do not, but nation states most certainly do, because so many of them do not act like gentlemen. Treaties that ignore the reality of how non-democratic nations all too often act do not ensure the peace. Instead they help to ensure war. One would think that by now everyone, even the most dewy-eyed naïf, would realize that pieces of paper don’t protect peace anymore than does a feel-good folk song. What protects it is countervailing power, and making it crystal clear to rogue nations that the democratic states are willing to use that power as necessary.
August 25, 2006
I Wouldn’t Let My Parakeet Poop on That Rag Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 06:15 PM EST If Fred Smoler knows media bias as well as he knows military history, I’m cooked, but I’ll take that chance and disagree with his post of Wednesday evening. By pointing to instances where liberal publications have pursued anti-Clinton investigations, or where their coverage has been governed by considerations other than politics, he does not disprove the assertion that these publications are biased; he merely shows that liberal bias is not their sole motivation. (This leaves aside the question of whether “liberal” and “anti-Clinton” are necessarily in conflict.)
You can’t disprove the existence of bias by listing some unbiased acts; you might just as well say that Fox News is unbiased because they report President Bush’s low poll numbers. Similarly, saying that New York Times reporters lack an “explicit sense of ideological mission” merely restates the old “everyone I know likes McGovern” line from 1972. They are so secure and unchallenged in their opinions that they don’t realize that they are opinions at all.
Fred points out that “before the 1950s, the American press was unabashedly partisan,” generally opposing FDR. That’s true, and the same went for Harry Truman. During the 1948 presidential campaign, Truman angrily told a reporter: “The Chicago Tribune and this paper [the Spokane Spokesman-Review] are the worst in the United States. . . . You’ve got the worst Congress in the United States you have ever had and the papers—this paper—are responsible for it.”
Most observers agreed with Truman that the papers he cited were strongly Republican. So, in varying degrees, were most other newspapers outside the South. Yet during that campaign, the press had great fun pouncing on the ill-advised statements of Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York, Truman’s Republican opponent, and his supporters. When Truman went on a campaign trip by train, Sen. Robert Taft, an Ohio Republican, mocked him for visiting “every whistle station in the West.” (A whistle station was a town so small that passengers had to signal the conductor if they wanted to stop there.) For days afterwards, newspapers gleefully reported statements from the mayors of cities along the route denying that they were “whistle stops.”
Later, when Dewey (whose hometown was Owosso, Michigan, for what it’s worth) was making a train trip of his own, a member of the crew bungled a braking maneuver, giving the train a sharp jolt. Dewey muttered that the crew member deserved to be “shot at sunrise.” This is the sort of statement that any of us might make in a moment of frustration, but unfortunately for Dewey, reporters were present when he made it. Regardless of their political views, newspapers did not hesitate to print Dewey’s statement, or to continue kicking it around for days afterwards.
Does this disprove the contention that newspapers favored the Republicans? No, it merely shows that one very strong motivation of American journalists has always been the desire to make authority figures look like jerks. If the ever-popular combination of fellatio and perjury is not available, then accusing powerful people of making fun of hicks will have to do. And that’s what makes America great.
To me, if you want to prove that The New York Times is biased, all you have to do is look at it. I recently heard someone defending the paper by saying, “It’s not that bad. The editorial page and the style section are really the only parts that make me want to throw up.” To which another person replied, “Yes, but these days half the paper is the editorial page and the other half is the style section.”
As Fred Smoler points out, this doesn’t mean that every single thing the Times does is calculated to advance a leftist agenda, though it does sometimes seem that way. Many other factors are involved. The White House security logs that proved Bill Clinton was a perjurer, for example, were leaked to the Times precisely because, being a liberal paper, it would have the most credibility. But over the course of time, a newspaper’s choice of what to report and how to report it will usually be governed by the political biases, conscious or unconscious, of its writers and editors. The fact that counterexamples can be cited does not make the principle untrue; it merely shows that other considerations are also at work.
I agree with Fred Smoler that newspapers used to be much more open about their biases. In the 1870s, when The New York Times was exposing the Tweed Ring, it advertised itself as “New York’s only Republican paper.” When I used to write the long version of “Time Machine,” I looked at a lot of newspapers from the late 1940s on microfilm. The Denver Post was particularly atrocious, essentially consisting of half wire copy and half vicious attacks on whatever local politicians they felt like taking down.
Back then the Washington Post was still a small-town operation. Whenever there was an important story about Congress or the Supreme Court, I learned to look in The New York Times for coverage, since the Washington Post rarely had anything more than wire-service articles, even though they were right in town. (By the way, I was amused to see that in the 1940s the Post sponsored a softball league called the Post Industrial League. I envisioned it being restricted to service-industry office drones, and when someone tried to bring in a ringer, the opposing team would say, “Hey, no fair—he works in manufacturing!”)
But the worst thing I saw in my “Time Machine” research was a story that ran in the Atlanta Constitution in October 1922. It was titled “Possum Season Opening Brings Joy to Negroes,” and it began as follows: “Make haste dere niggers and zoon around here. Dey’s sumpin’ a’doin’ aroun’ dis place tonight. De ‘possum time is come.” That’s right, the whole thing was written in dialect. That’s one tradition in American journalism that we are well rid of.
August 25, 2006
Elephants and Donkeys, Again Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:30 PM EST Fred Smoler writes, “In this regard, I was a bit startled when John Steele Gordon described The New Republic as in effect a hardcore left-liberal magazine (I do not recall his precise words), because I have recently been advised to spend more time reading TNR by friends who thought that various heretical remarks suggested I’d feel comfortable there.”
I am not aware of ever having described The New Republic at all on this blog. A search on my name and that of the magazine yielded nothing. Perhaps my memory is as faulty as the search engine, however. I may have once described The Nation as being a hardcore left-liberal magazine, but I don’t think there would be much dissent from that description of it.
I will confess to finding most discussions (or raging knock-down, drag-out fights) regarding political theory to be monumentally boring. First I find most of them to be utterly disconnected from the real world, and I lose interest real fast when angels start dancing on pinheads. Second, so many of them involve people who are emotionally invested in one side and regard the other side as infidels or worse. Jonathan Swift made wicked fun of this sort of politics in Gulliver’s Travels, where he described Lilliputian politics as passionately divided between those who cracked their boiled eggs on the big end and those who cracked them on the small end.
It may come as a stunning surprise to the chattering classes, but most people are bored by politics. Some simply ignore it and never even vote. Some decide early on that they are of one party or the other and think no more about it. Some pay attention in election-year autumns or to really hot races. But most, I think, regard one of heaven’s most charming attributes to be the fact that there is no politics there, at least not since Satan got the boot.
That’s one reason why I think the new proposal (in Arizona, if I remember correctly) to have a lottery, awarding $1 million to some lucky voter in hopes of luring new voters to the polls, is so asinine. Why on earth would we want to lure people who don’t give a damn into the voting booth? They are effectively voting by not voting.
I think this is why primary elections seem so often to be dominated by the fringe of each party rather than the center. Only the true believers turn out for them, with very distorting results. So I wonder if the Louisiana system shouldn’t be copied more widely. In that state—not exactly famous for being in the forefront of political reform otherwise—there are no primaries at all. Everyone runs in the general election, and if no one gets 50 percent of the vote, there is a runoff between the top two.
Party apparatchiks hate the idea, which, of course, is not the least of its virtues.
August 25, 2006
More Elephants and Donkeys Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:05 PM EST I have been mulling over Fred Schwarz’s post on elephants, donkeys, and gnats. Fred observed that “economically, everyone thinks of himself or herself as middle-class, and politically, everyone thinks of himself or herself as centrist.” I think the first claim is true, barring fringe cases, but the second is tricky. In current American electoral politics, people generally move toward the extremes to win primaries, then scurry back toward the center to win general elections. This is proverbially true of people running for the Presidency, but at all levels the likeliest primary voters are seen to be more ideologically committed than are members of the electorate at large, and significant numbers of them are assumed to look for fire-eating politicians while scorning the ideologically timid. Current thinking, especially among Republicans, is that if you want to get into the game at all, you have to mobilize the voters who are least centrist. Similarly, modern and very effective gerrymandering of Congressional districts means that incumbents and challengers may worry more about the primary fight than about the general election, and they do not often have to move as far back toward the center as a presidential candidate does. Senate races are different, since you cannot gerrymander a state. The voters who are looking for a fire-eater may still describe themselves as centrists under some circumstances, but they also have a passion for seeing themselves, and their chosen champions, as the opposite: as people with an intense passion for one notion of justice. In their eyes, centrists can be seen as shabby compromisers. But at the level of both small-group psychology and working politics, Fred is surely on to something. My experience may be unrepresentative, since I have spent most of my adult life working in colleges and universities, where large majorities are, by national standards, somewhere on the left, and will proudly so describe themselves. People who call themselves centrists, and in my experience there are not too many, will usually be assumed to be using a cowardly euphemism, seeking to conceal their conservative politics. This might seem to refute Fred’s assertion, but closer examination in fact confirms him. At the level where local politics actually happens—faculty elections for standing committees, disputes about policy, hiring, etc.—many people do like to depict themselves as centrists. Colleges and universities are closer to democracies than are normal work places—tenured faculty cannot be fired, and still exercise one or another degree of self-governance—and if you are out on the fringe, you can be fairly easily isolated and defeated. Democratic politics tends toward compromise, unless the electoral mechanism rewards (or at least fails to punish) people playing to the extremes. As Fred Schwarz also observed, people with a strong sense of political commitment generally miss a lot of variety when looking at what they dismiss as house organs for the other side. In this regard, I was a bit startled when John Steele Gordon described The New Republic as in effect a hardcore left-liberal magazine (I do not recall his precise words), because I have recently been advised to spend more time reading TNR by friends who thought that various heretical remarks suggested I’d feel comfortable there. This did not feel as if it was offered as particularly friendly advice. Indeed, a number of friends on the left consider TNR to be rightist, often odiously so, and have thought this for decades. In the same vein, I was struck by some recent posts on an interesting academic blog (Crooked Timber) describing Michael Walzer and Dissent, which Walzer edits, as apologists for the Bush administration. Last I’d heard, Walzer remains a democratic socialist. My guess is that John Steele Gordon would not find a description of Dissent as viciously rightist entirely compelling. From John Steele Gordon’s perspective, these may look like classic sectarian controversies: minute differences invisible to the vast majority of the political community, taking on fantastic significance when debated by competing factions within a cult. Similarly, I have friends who dismiss differences between social conservatives and libertarian conservatives as irrelevant in practical terms: Both groups are imagined to very faithfully support the administration on almost all questions, for party discipline has almost always trumped clashes of principle. In that case, the support by libertarians for, say, gay rights is scornfully dismissed as close to a bad-faith position, because its advocates are in alliance with political forces that are exploiting illiberal passions on the same question. Are most differences within camps our equivalent of theological controversies in early Byzantium, so that posterity will be astonished that people would become savage over what look, in retrospect, like trivial points of difference? Not necessarily, and to the extent that they are, the possible incomprehension of posterity doesn’t mean that the differences aren’t very important right now and for the foreseeable future. What exercised those bloggers at Crooked Timber was Walzer’s qualified support for the Israeli military response to Hezbollah’s most recent raid into Israel; TNR’s initial support for the war in Iraq has had a similar effect on some of my friends. For a lot of people the debate over American intervention in Iraq makes for a bright line separating angels from devils. This is true for a number of people on both sides of those questions, some of whom will have long memories, and if the vast majority of Democrats come out strongly against the war, the ones who came out first may continue to blackguard the latecomers. When politics gets superficially simplified by overwhelming passion over single issues, and fewer people insist on seeing themselves as centrists, the pleasure of indignation trumps the taste for seeing oneself as moderate. This happens among politicians, as well as among the most committed voters: recent politics within the Republican majority in the House is a case in point.
|
