Election 2012: 1860 Redux?

With Rick Perry now in the race and doing well, Michele Bachmann’s in trouble out in Iowa. A key staffer is leaving. I still can’t believe that all the Rockefeller Republicans I went to college with are going to stand for this Tea Party takeover. On the other hand, they do have a friend in Obama. As Matt Yglesias tweeted last week, Mitt Romney ought to run for the Democratic nomination.

I don't remember Bachmann making any big mistakes; she impressed me as a campaigner. I think Americans still have serious hangups about women in leadership positions. With time, we’ll get over this, thankfully.

Betty Draper

CTHULHU-INFLUENCED “GENERATIONS” DIGRESSION ALERT: There are so many older silent-generation (b. 1925-42) GOP women who would never vote for a woman for president. (This is the generation of women who were too young to have their value affirmed by the WW II effort and too old to join the 2nd-wave feminists—think Betty Draper in Mad Men.) This entire generation, both genders, is just plain confused about everything (generalizing here), and they’re not sure how to feel about women in power. This generation is also a key part of the GOP coalition. (Did you know that the Silents failed to elect a president? Mondale, Dukakis, and McCain were the only ones to even get nominated.)

How about this: a real 1860 four-candidate barn-burner: Perry wins GOP nomination, Romney starts new Prosperity Party, Obama wins Democratic nomination, and somebody runs to Obama’s left in a Progressive Party. It would have to be an old baby-boomer type, maybe Bernie Sanders (let me know if you can think of a better one...Tom Hayden?) The idea here would be to force through the generational transition of leadership from the Baby Boomers to Gen Xers. Obama’s an Xer; Romney's a boomer but he presents as a modern technocrat. Perry and Sanders will run the Baby Boomers’ last-hurrah campaigns. In this case, I'd say Romney wins, followed by Obama, Perry, and Sanders.

Facial Hair of the Civil War

During the summer of 2008 I engaged in some facial hair tomfoolery, growing full-cheek sideburns connected by a mustache in an attempt to emulate Civil War general Ambrose Burnside (pictured).

The Smithsonian Institution has gathered a collection of Civil War facial hair styles, Burnside's included. Readers are invited to vote for their favorite.

A New Blog on a Grave Subject

An old professional compatriot of mine has just started a new blog, called Gravely Speaking. It’s all about “graves, gravestones, and graveyards.” Check it out y’all!

When Politics Was a Lark

In the comments responding to Lord John Whorfin's recent post on ancient political themes to resurrect for a new era, the election of 1884 leaps to the fore. Desmoinesdem recalls that the Democrats were branded as the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion," prompting Whorfin to recite the bouncy couplet "Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine – Continental Liar from the State of Maine."*

Another catchphrase from that contest was "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?" a taunt directed at Blaine's opponent Grover Cleveland, who may or may not have fathered a child out of wedlock. The taunt backfired when Cleveland refused to disavow the child, and he won anyway, prompting his supporters to gleefully answer,"Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!"

Also, too: Mugwumps.

My own crackpot theory is that the period between Reconstruction and World War I — when it was clear that the U.S. was going to survive as a nation, but before it had assumed the mantle of world leadership — was America's adolescence. The nation was industrializing, and prospering, more or less, but it had no international responsibilities. The Presidents were callow political hacks, big-man-on-campus types, known more today for their fanciful facial hair styles than for their policies. The Lincoln-Douglas debates and the Gettysburg Address gave way to sing-song rhymes and slogans born of a nascent culture of advertising.

But surely the frivolity and whimsy of Gilded Age politics is preferable to the grim cable-news political culture of today. If your go-to rhetoric once a new president is elected is to accuse him of being a fascist/communist/socialist who wants to destroy America, you don't leave yourself much room to maneuver. You're pretty much required to compare all his policies to Hitler's from here on out. Both sides engage in this apocalyptic stuff, but it's undeniable that the Tea Party, abetted by the media, has taken it to a whole new level.

Well, nothing much to do about it, I guess, but wait and hope for a relatively peaceful transition of the U.S. to "hegemon emeritus" status, like the U.K., so that we can hopefully emulate the more down-to-earth regard that the British have for their head of government.

*Issue for further study: Does the relative ease of rhyming "Maine" in campaign doggerel hinder the presidential aspirations of politicians from the Pine Tree State?

Reaching into the Past

Whether you agree with some, all, or none of its points, there can be no doubt that the Tea Party movement has had an impact on American politics here in the 21st Century.

From my vantage point in the 8th Dimension, it strikes me that this is likely due in large part to the marketing genius of reaching into the past and resurrecting a once successful American idiom from the 18th Century -- the Boston "Tea Party." Perhaps there is a Jungian collective unconscious dynamic at work here.

Let us have some ideas for hijacking old themes for today's movements. I shall start by taking over/under bets on the following proposition --- Within 14 months, Chris Hartman will be advocating for monetary reform with the following slogan:

Free Silver!
16:1

Send all checks and money orders to me c/o John Big Booty, Planet 10.

Why Did Trade Decline in the Interwar Period?

Paul Krugman theorizes that it had to do with electricity and the internal combustion engine replacing steam as the main motive powers in industry: steam was best suited for long-haul cargo transport, by rail and by ship, while electricity and the engine were most efficient in local contexts like factories and farms.

These technology explanations sound good, but I also wonder if the transition of hegemony from Great Britain to the U.S. in the the 1918 - 1945 period also played a role in retarding world trade. With no clear economic hegemon to write and enforce the rules of trade and encourage stable currencies, centrifugal forces took over and the international trade network disintegrated.

Related to this, I think, is the suddenness with which the U.S. found itself thrust into the leading position in the post-World-War-I power vacuum. It took a while, and another world war, for domestic U.S. politics to catch up with the new reality of the U.S. as a superpower. I wrote about this aspect of the story briefly here on Cheeze Blog a couple of years ago when I was doing some reading in economic history:

After 1918, the United States rather suddenly became the world’s most powerful nation. Unlike Britain, which achieved economic leadership gradually through the 17th and 18th centuries, the U.S. found international leadership thrust upon it by the devastating effects of the First World War on Great Britain and the other European powers. Having attained world leadership not so much by design as by default, the domestic economic and political characteristics that might have supported free trade in the U.S. were weak or underdeveloped compared to the characteristics supporting closure. As a result, over the course of the 1920s the U.S. turned inward, a move that cascaded throughout the international system.

Image: Modern shipping lanes. Global Map of Human Impacts to Marine Ecosystems, National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, 2008.

Tyranny

Given the fears of the Tea Party and some prominent Republicans that Obama is a tyrant in waiting, I can't help but wonder what they would think of this scenario:

The Supreme Court rules that a state law, on the books for generations and a deep-seated feature of the local culture, is unconstitutional. The governor of the state in question, responding to the vocal demands of his constituents, announces that he will refuse to abide by this "legislating from the bench" by nine unelected judges. He calls out the state militia to enforce the now technically defunct, but still overwhelmingly popular, law.

The President of the United States, unmoved by either the governor's appeals or an impassioned outcry from the citizenry, deploys an elite brigade of U.S. Army soldiers to implement the Court's decision. He also takes command authority over the state militia away from the governor. The President uses his constitutional power as Commander in Chief of the armed forces to impose his will on the state and its citizens. He wins the confrontation and abolishes, at the barrel of a gun, the state's duly-enacted law.

Of course this scenario really happened, 53 years ago. The President was the noted tyrant Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In 1957, the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which had been handed down three years earlier, was finally implemented, "with all deliberate speed," in Little Rock, Arkansas. The New Yorker has a stirring collection of photographs of the surviving actors in the civil rights struggle in the February 15 issue, and there is a multimedia feature on the New Yorker website. The photo below is from that collection. It depicts, some five decades later, the "Little Rock Nine," the nine Black high-school students who were escorted into Little Rock High School by U.S. Army paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division in 1957.

 

Image: Platon / The New Yorker.

Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Is, for Me, the Ideal Blogger

Because of posts like this: "There are No Desperadoes. There Will Be No Rosewood." It begins:

It's been twenty years since Nelson Mandela got out. This was like the defining political event of my youth. I was either a freshman or sophomore in high school, can't remember which. What I think is pretty cliche: Whatever South Africa's problems, the fact that the country (and its leaders) did not descend into mass revenge mode is an enduring tribute to compassion and empathy.

It's a great object lesson on how to handle being wronged. It's one of the things I've struggled to accept as an African-American. There is no Rosewood. Often you are wronged, and by your hand, or even in your lifetime, your persecutors will never be brought to account. There are limits to our justice. It doesn't mean you shrink in the face of injustice (South Africa did no such thing) but that you recognize that it's not really in your power to even the odds.

Read the whole thing.

Coates, or "TNC" to his growing legion of fans, is the guy who turned me on to the fascinations of 19th-century American history, and the almost-too-good-to-be-true Oxford History of the United States series, with his updates last summer as he made his way through James McPherson's definitive one-volume Civil War history Battle Cry of Freedom. Since then I've also devoured What Hath God Wrought. The Glorious Cause is already on my bookshelf, waiting for me to finish The Bauhaus Group.

Also, as usual, his commenters are off-the-charts outstanding on this post. This is all due to TNC's assiduous policing of his comments section: he warns, and then bans, the trolls and the topic hijackers. It makes all the difference, and it takes no small amount of effort on his part. If I could read only one blog (probably should read only one blog), it would be Coates's, no contest.

Are Two Poles Better than One?

Over the period from 1898 to 1945, from the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War to the final Allied triumph in World War II, Great Britain slowly but steadily ceded its role as world hegemon to the United States. The U.K. now serves as kind of an affable "hegemon emeritus," providing the rest of the English-speaking world with pretty good pop music, great TV comedies and dramas, and absolutely awesome clothes. Of course, that five-decade cession process also featured the slaughter of two World Wars.

Will the U.S. ever cede its world hegemony to China? And if it does, how could it possibly do so peacefully? It is hard to imagine that the U.S. would give up world leadership without a fight. Yet, China continues to grow. Before long, the size of its economy will surpass our own. Once China's domestic market is wealthy enough to purchase all the flat-screen TVs, iPhones, and laptop computers that it currently exports to the United States, what use will they have for us? It seems unlikely that they'll continue to finance our consumption like they have for the last 20 years or so. Then what?

It's part of why I'm starting to muse about some sort of international authority administering a single global economy, with minimal trade barriers between countries, sort of like a European Union for the whole world. There's a lot that would be troubling about such an arrangement, especially given the outsize role that multinational corporations would likely have in such a regime. Despite their professed love of open borders, we probably can't count on them to really go to the mat for reduced barriers to labor mobility, since labor arbitrage is a key source of profit for multinationals.

Another possible path would be a return to a bi-polar world, with China and the U.S. serving as the two big powers. Such a standoff would be scary but might also simplify domestic politics to good effect; a lot of social progress was made in the U.S. during the first part of the Cold War, primarily the period from 1945 to 1965.

During those two decades, the U.S. saw reduced economic inequality and rapidly-advancing incomes for middle- and working-class families, fueled in part by a massive federal subsidy of home mortgages and college and vocational education through the G.I. Bill, along with enormous investment in public education from kindergarten right on through graduate school. These spending programs, all of which added to the nation's physical and human capital stock and paved the way for future productivity gains, were funded by a steeply progressive income tax with top marginal rates above 90%.

In addition, de jure racial equality made serious strides forward with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, though the promise of racial economic parity has yet to be realized (in fact the economic gap [PDF] between whites and African-Americans and Latinos has barely budged in over 40 years).

Lastly, the arrival of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 added a key measure of security for Americans in their later years, allowing them to live independently longer, which in turn meant that fewer working- and middle-class families had that extra mouth to feed when Grandma or Grandpa – too old to work and too poor to afford to see the doctor – had to move in with the kids.

I conjecture that one of the reasons that the 20 years following World War II was a period of unprecedented broadening of prosperity is that American elites, who otherwise might have opposed the high taxes and generous social spending of the time, were keen to demonstrate that a mixed economy — state-directed at the macroeconomic level but mostly left to the free market in the microeconomic sphere — could generate both prosperity and equal opportunity at a time when central planning was in the ascendancy in the First as well as the Third Worlds.

Compare this period with the years from 1990 to 2010, when the U.S. straddled the world like the Colossus of Rhodes. Despite what neoconservative (at the time) Francis Fukuyama called "The End of History," America saw widening economic inequality, declining middle- and working-class economic security, and soaring personal indebtedness, all culminating in the economic meltdown of 2008. Meanwhile, the lack of a unifying national purpose in foreign affairs has contributed to the creation of a polity incapable of agreeing even on a common set of facts about the world. Against that backdrop, it's starting to be true that it's not only the paleoconservatives who long for the days of the Cold War.

Of course, the Cold War also imposed serious costs on the American people in the form of an overly conformist politics, not to mention the excesses of McCarthyism and COINTELPRO. And the U.S. and U.S.S.R also sponsored countless proxy wars around the globe, not to mention the first-person wars and invasions in places like Korea, Hungary, Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Grenada, all of which need to go in the minus column when assessing the benefits and costs of a dual-power equilibrium.

Howard Zinn, 1922-2010

"From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than 'objectivity'; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble."

– Howard Zinn, You Can't Stay Neutral on a Moving Train (1994)

Whatever your political persuasion, be it left, right or center, try to "relinquish the safety of silence" whenever you see injustice. I myself have been silent too much and for too long. Or, if not silent, then cool, ironic and detached. Getting too old for that now...

There is No Crying in Politics, My Gen-X Bretheren and Sisteren

Am I disappointed in Barack Obama? Yes. Am I disappointed in the Democratic Party? Yes.

But I'm disappointed in them in the way that I am often disappointed in myself. They took too much for granted. I often do the same.

Obama is not a king. We have to carry our end of the load, even when it seems like Obama isn't carrying his.

I still maintain, I still believe, that he has a longer-term project in mind: moving us past the baby-boom political cleavage that has dominated my life and yours since nineteen-bleepin'-sixty-eight.

It is time for Generation X to stand up and be counted.... We Gen-Xers, of which Obama is an early model, have to drop our cool, alienated stance, a stance that served us so well as we came of age in the blasted American landscape of the early 1990s, and we must take charge.

We must sweep away the narcissistic Baby Boomers who came before us, and lead the idealistic Millennials who come after us into battle against the forces of ignorance, hatred, fear, anti-science, and division.

We cannot afford to be cool and detached any longer, fellow Gen-Xers. We're entering our 40s. It's time, in the words of Spinal Tap manager Ian Faith, to "kick ass."

Lester “Red” Rodney, 1911-2009

Dave Zirin pens an inspiring obituary of a sportswriter I had never heard of. Here Rodney recounts to Zirin a conversation with Brooklyn Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella:

“Roy Campanella once said to me something like, ‘Without the Brooklyn Dodgers you don't have Brown v. Board of Education.’ I laughed, I thought he was joking but he was stubborn. He said, ‘All I know is we were the first ones on the trains, we were the first ones down South not to go around the back of the restaurant, first ones in the hotels.’ He said, ‘We were like the teachers of the whole integration thing.’”

Trim-a-Tree

Book Review: Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

James M. McPherson
1988
Awards: Pulitzer Prize
Rating: ☆☆☆☆ –

I first heard about this single-volume history of the Civil War, part of the Oxford History of the United States series, from Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog. I was primed to plunge in because I had just finished Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic, which was given to me years ago by loyal commenter Alex and which I only recently got around to reading.

Some things I learned from Battle Cry of Freedom:

• The idea that some high-minded defense of "States' Rights" was the cause of the Civil War is laughable. The issue was slavery: the right to expand slavery to the territories so as to preserve the power of slave states in the Congress and Electoral College. For instance, in the case of the Fugitive Slave Law, the South all of a sudden didn't care so much about states' rights: it wanted the federal government to overrule state laws and enforce property rights on slaves who had made it to the North.
• Prior to the Civil War, women were not seen as fit to serve as battlefield nurses. Clara Barton and others made believers out of the generals.
• There were several abortive efforts by southerners to invade Mexico,  Central America, and Cuba in order to add more Slave States to the union.
• Diplomacy. Lincoln absolutely had to keep Britain and France out of the war. His Secretary of State, Charles Francis Adams, played a key role here, along with the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victory at Antietam.
  

The best part of the book is the first 300 pages, which feature an extensive discussion of the domestic politics of the 1850s, and the role of westward expansion in fueling the sectional conflict. Once the war started, I found the discussion of military tactics deadly boring. I understand that this is a moral failing on my part.

Cool New Travel/History Blog

Here Is Where: The little-known places where different historical things really happened.

The Demise of the Southern Veto

As a region, the South is more politically isolated right now than at any time since the Civil War. For most of our nation's history, the South has been so disproportionately powerful that the section has wielded a "Southern Veto" over U.S. politics and policy. A brief and admittedly oversimplified history of the Southern Veto over the years would include the following:

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson was forced by delegates from Georgia and South Carolina to remove a clause from the Declaration of Independence condemning the African slave trade.

During the drafting of the Constitution, the Southern states insisted on being allowed to include their slave populations to determine representation in Congress and the Electoral College. The Northern states objected of course, since they had few slaves. To break the impasse, delegates from North and South agreed to count three-fifths of a given state's slave population in determining that state's representation. This shifted the balance of power in the Electoral College to the South in such a way that it routinely swung antebellum presidential elections in favor of candidates that were acceptable to the South.

When the modern Democratic Party organized itself the 1820s, it decided to require a two-thirds majority in order to nominate a presidential candidate. This gave the South an effective veto over any Democratic presidential nominee. For over a century afterwards, the Democratic Party existed as a coalition between Southern slaveholders and segregationists and the big-city machines of the North. Thanks to the two-thirds rule, every Democratic presidential nominee and his platform had to be acceptable to the South.

As a northerner, FDR found his New Deal initiatives severely constrained by the Southern Democrats who controlled key Senate committees. For instance, to get Social Security passed, FDR agreed to exclude agricultural and domestic workers from the program, leaving huge numbers of Southern Blacks out of Social Security entirely.

Other than Obama, the only non-Southern Democrat to be elected President since FDR was JFK. His domestic social agenda, which included civil rights and Medicare, went nowhere until after he was assassinated. His Southern successor LBJ pushed through both initiatives, turning the "Solid South" over to the Republican Party in the process.

Today, with Obama in the White House, the G.O.P. boasts electoral strongholds only in the South and in the sparsely populated Plains states. The Southern Veto, and especially its power over the Democratic Party, appears to have been finally overridden, at least for the time being. For example, there was only one Southerner among the "Gang of Six" centrist Senators in this summer's health care debate: Mary Landrieu from Louisiana. It is instructive that this lone Southern moderate hails from a state with a polyglot, cosmopolitan culture and history that sets it apart from the rest of the South.

Barack Obama is the gravest threat to the political power of the South since Lincoln. Viewed against this backdrop, the current town-hall-birther-deather-teabagger freak-out makes a bit more sense to me.

America Before the Estate Tax

Back in early 2001, at my last job, I had kind of a loopy advertising concept to defend the estate tax against abolition: images of sooty, child-labor-y America around the turn of the 20th century arrayed beneath the headline "What Was America Like Before the Estate Tax?" (The estate tax was first enacted in 1916). It was too over-the-top for the people in charge of the pro-estate-tax campaign, and became kind of a running joke at my expense, but now there is a website full of these images.

It's easy to imagine that life would be just ducky if we just got rid of taxes and regulations and ran a laissez-faire economy, but we tried that already, and I don't think most of us would really like to go back to those days.

(Via BoingBoing)

Person(s) of the Year

Here are the results of my own little POTY survey, conducted via e-mail. Multiple votes in parentheses.

Donald Rumsfeld (3)
Keith Olbermann (2)
George W Bush (2)
Borat (2)
Michael Richards (2)
Milton Friedman
Democratic Party
Britney Spears
Sanitation Workers
Al Gore
The Blog
YouTube
Allah
Steven Colbert
Truthiness
Jack Murtha
This Moment
Barack Hussein Obama
Rahm Emmanuel
K-Fed
Wilford Brimley
Tomkat
Macaca
JPL's Mars Recon Observer

Religion in Government for Me but Not for Thee

Sorry, but I just can't let that Loudermilk dude go. One more thing.

He goes on and on about how we are supposedly a "Christian nation:"

Christian men and women, on Christian principles, founded this nation, and this is clearly documented.

Color me skeptical. There were some genuine Christians among the founders, but there were also some Deists and free-thinkers. I'll leave the debate on this point to others. I'm not enough of a historian to comment intelligently on the truth of this statement. All I know is that the very first clause of the very first Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

Which leads me to believe that keeping religion out of government was rather top-of-mind for the Founders.

Nowadays in the U.S. we have a lot of folks who want the government to help them pray, by keeping prayers on coins and on currency and having public school teachers and principals lead prayers and hold bible study and by putting the Ten Commandments in public schools etc.

Interesting then, as Helen pointed out, that an online poll announced on Wolf Blitzer's Sunday talk show on CNN is currently running 3-to-1 against having religion play any part in in the Iraqi constitution.

I can't help but wonder how many of the people who don't want a religion (Islam) to play any part in the Iraqi government think that it is just fine-and-dandy for the U.S. government to shill for a religion (Christianity) in our own country.

"Rovegate: The Movie" Cast List

Let's cast the movie about the Karl Rove scandal. Here are my suggestions, with help from Helen:

Ambassador Joe Wilson: Benicio del Toro
Valerie Plame: Sharon Stone
Karl Rove: Nick Nolte
Scott McClellan: Jack Black
Robert Novak: Ron Silver
Matt Cooper: Jason Alexander
Judith Miller: Joan Cusack
George W. Bush: Will Ferrell
Dick Cheney: Jon Voight
and NBC News reporter David Gregory as himself

EDITED to add Robert Novak.