August 16, 2006
Liberal Elites Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:00 PM EST Concerning “liberal elites,” a phrase John Steele Gordon and Josh Zeitz have been discussing, versus “limousine liberals”: As I remarked in a previous post, I think “limousine liberal” was effective polemical language because it referred to something real, material, and painful about the political world of the late 1960s. The phrase meant richer people advocating policies whose cost would be borne by poorer people who were not advocating them. For voters who found “limousine liberal” an effective taunt, the cry for justice seemed to have emerged from the mouths of people who would not have to live with the consequences, and the policies thus advocated were rarely without cost to someone. On occasion, some of the policies had some perverse effects.
By contrast, “liberal elites” may be effective polemical language, but I do not think it refers to anything nearly as real and material. For one thing, in the late 1960s liberalism had produced laws and policies, because liberals had a significant presence in the legislatures and judiciary. Nowadays the Republicans control both houses of Congress, the executive, and a larger and larger swath of the Federal bench. So how do those “liberal elites” accomplish their coercive villainies?
Well, they are alleged to control the culture: Hollywood, the networks, the press, the publishing houses, the professoriat, etc. As it happens, the purchase of movie tickets, newspapers, and books and the selection of television channels and applications to college are all voluntary commercial transactions. Unlike the laws and regulations established by sixties liberalism, none of these institutions compel action with the aid of the criminal or civil law and the consequent threat of imprisonment or fines. “Stop me before I shop again!” is not an impressive cry for justice.
Do liberal elites control the networks? Not Fox, and Fox’s successes compel partial imitation. Publishing? Ann Coulter’s successive volumes of increasingly mad and vicious ranting (liberals are traitors, Darwin caused the Holocaust and the Gulag, etc.) sell hundreds of thousands of copies each year; specialist political-conservative publishers appeared some years ago, and imitative lines then began to appear within mainstream publishing houses. Movies are made because the people who green-light them think they will sell tickets, and they are distributed on the same principle. Fewer people are reading The New York Times, which means that it matters less. The universities seem (in some academic disciplines) more univocally “liberal,” but if you don’t like Oberlin, you really can go to George Mason. Still, parts of the universities are an exception to the general rule; a little more on this below.
Elites are normally understood to be groups with greatly disproportionate political power, or very high status, or very high income. That seems to make the phrase “liberal elite” close to an oxymoron in modern America. Are people working in publishing houses, magazines, and universities an economic elite? If you work in those trades, you will now be laughing rather hollowly. There are some jobs at the top of those hierarchies that pay very well, but those are sharply sloped pyramids, and in my experience people below the apexes earn less than almost anyone with whom they grew up or were educated. Are these people a status elite? Not in my experience, not for decades. Back in the early 1980s, the people graduating with PhDs in the humanities from my university—Columbia—were already saluted with cries of “Taxi!” by the folks earning MBAs. That joke, I think, reflected relative status as well as relative prospective income. Are these people well-connected to our political elites? You be the judge: When the Chair of the English Department says jump, does the Speaker of the House ask how high? If you think that is an absurd reductio, how about the publisher of The New York Times? Outside New York City, political elites are likelier to bait The New York Times than rush to do its bidding.
Politics, in the words of Tip O’Neill, is always local, and there are exceptions to the broad picture sketched above. If you have locally heterodox politics and want a job in some academic disciplines in many colleges and universities, you are probably looking at trouble. That is a real problem, and some people within universities acknowledge it; I am not sure how it will get a lot better any time soon, but I do see some small signs of change. In my experience the more conservative people in some parts of some media outlets feel themselves marginalized, etc. (That is changing a little bit faster.) Nonetheless, the ability of elements within the Republican Party to persuade anyone that liberal elites wield significant coercive power over vast numbers of their fellow citizens is almost astonishing.
August 16, 2006
Reaganomics II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:20 PM EST Fred Smoler writes, “Did the Reagan tax cuts produce an increased propensity to save? Nope. The U.S. savings rate fell from a high of 12 percent in 1982 to under 7 percent in 1989.”
This is an artifact of the very cramped definition of “savings” used by the government to determine the savings rate. The savings rate (the percentage of disposable income not spent) has been going down for most of the last 25 years and has from time to time actually been negative. Yet the net worth of the median household has been rising briskly in the same time period. How can that be? Well, the main reason is that mortgage payments on real estate, the main assets of most U.S. households, don’t count as savings. Neither do rising real estate values, until they are realized. So in many areas of the country, families have had zero savings rates while seeing their net worth rise by 10 percent a year, which means it doubles every 7.2 years. As Al Smith once said, “The United States will be the first nation to go to the poor house in an automobile.”
He writes, “Did the deficits shrink on Reagan’s watch? Nope. Over the long boom tax receipts nearly doubled, but the deficits ballooned.”
The “Reagan deficits,” like “tax cuts for the rich,” are a Democratic talking point. For one thing, Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution requires that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; . . .” In other words, the President cannot spend one dime of public money unless Congress directs him to do so, and the House of Representatives was in Democratic hands throughout the Reagan presidency. I suspect that, had it been up to Reagan—i.e., if he and he alone determined the federal budget—there would have been no federal deficit. He would have spent heavily on what he deemed important—rearming the military, for instance—and cut heavily into or eliminated programs he didn’t like in order to balance the budget.
But every program, no matter how silly or outdated, has its beneficiaries, and they will always fiercely defend it. Congress, as usual, took the path of least resistance and funded both Reagan’s programs and all the others. The President has very limited powers to control spending, thanks in good measure to the most misnamed act of Congress in the history of the Republic, the Budget Control Act of 1974. So, with limited political capital, Reagan chose to fight other battles.
In fact the so-called Reagan deficits were merely a continuation of the Nixon, Ford, and Carter deficits. The national debt tripled in the 1970s. But because of the raging inflation of that decade, the debt, as a percentage of GDP, declined. It was only when Paul Volcker, with the encouragement of Ronald Reagan, broke the back of the inflation with sky-high interest rates and a sharp recession, that the chronic deficit spending began to loom large in the public consciousness.
Congress is still pathologically incapable of controlling spending, because the political pressure from the specific beneficiaries of programs is much more intense than the political pressure from the population as a whole to control spending. The Wall Street Journal yesterday (subscription only) had an editorial about the wages of federal workers. The average federal worker earns twice as much in wages and benefits as the average worker in the private sector. Add to that the facts that federal workers have almost total job security—not many layoffs for bureaucrats—and are very, very difficult to fire for cause, and it is not surprising that the federal “quit rate” is far, far lower than in almost any private-sector industry. How much does the extra pay for federal workers amount to? Well, if they were paid what the average worker in the private sector earns, one third of this year’s projected budget deficit of $296 billion would vanish.
If Medicaid and Medicare were run with the same bureaucratic efficiency and fraud levels as private health insurance—and there is no reason other than politics that they can’t be—the federal budget would be in handsome surplus.
Fred Smoler writes, “I have never quite understood why my fellow citizens reelected Reagan in 1984, but I do not thereby assume that they were dolts, any more than John Steele Gordon is obliged to assume Americans [were] dolts because they reelected Clinton.”
I didn’t vote for Clinton, but he had a very weak Republican opponent in 1996 and still couldn’t capture a majority of the popular vote. Reagan won an overwhelming landslide in 1984. I think Reagan’s political triumph is easy to understand: By almost any measure you care to use, except the growth of the national debt, the country was in better shape—often far better shape—than it had been in 1980, economically, geopolitically, and spiritually.
The last should not be discounted as a force in politics. America is a nation of optimists—after all most of us are descended from people who chose to take a big chance in coming here—and Reagan’s sunny optimism was a blast of fresh air after the dismal years of the late seventies when we were led by the well-meaning but humorless, clueless, and preachy Jimmy Carter. Reagan changed the national mood almost overnight, and the people loved him for it, despite whatever faults he might have had.
There was another time when a new President’s spiritual power changed the mood with equal swiftness and equally good political results. That was on March 4, 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt assured a desperate nation that it had nothing to fear but fear itself. The Great Depression began to lift that very day.
That’s why, if there are ever to be more Presidents on Mount Rushmore (and I hope there won’t be), they will be FDR and Ronald Reagan. They both sang to the American soul.
August 16, 2006
More on V-J Day Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:30 PM EST Fred Schwarz’s post on V-J Day suggests out that one likely consequence of failure to use atomic bombs against Japan would have been a united Korean peninsula today brutally misruled by Kim Jong Il, rather than one divided between a monstrous tyranny of 22 million people and a prosperous democracy of 48 million people. This post interests me for a number of reasons, foremost among them its unusual place in a rhetorical field where the use of atomic weapons against Japan is often described as an unmitigated moral catastrophe. But not as an incomparable moral catastrophe; we hear quite a bit of one comparison, of which more below.
It is not simply that the atomic weapons are often asserted to have been at irrelevant to Japan’s surrender—that case is nowadays widely assumed, rather than argued—it is that the use of the bombs is considered as great an evil as people have ever inflicted on one another. The Second World War, and for that matter the twentieth century, are described with remarkable frequency as the war, and century, “of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.” This strongly suggests that Auschwitz and Hiroshima were comparable evils.
Were they? If the slaughter of innocents is the criterion, scale may matter, and also intention. In terms of scale, by December of 1945 as many as 140,000 people may have died as a result of the Hiroshima bomb; at least 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, and most modern estimates for total deaths at the Auschwitz camps circle around 1.6 million. If exponents don’t matter, can the twentieth century plausibly be described as the century of Auschwitz and Son of Sam? This is not to minimize the death of 140,000, a horrific number: It is to try to avoid relative minimization of ten times that number.
How about intention? Auschwitz was devoted to the racist mass murder of Jews, Poles, Gypsies and Soviet POWs. We often hear that Hiroshima was the target of similarly racist attack, and that the Allies would never have used atomic weapons on fellow Caucasians. There is no evidence for that proposition, and much against. 600,000 German civilians killed by strategic bombing also died by blast and fire, but not by radiation—does that make their deaths incomparably less horrific than the deaths of the civilians who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Again, why Auschwitz and Hiroshima?
Was Hiroshima a uniquely unacceptable target by the laws of war as then understood? Hiroshima was a city of industrial significance, with military camps located nearby, including Field Marshal Shunroku Hata’s 2nd General Army Headquarters, which was responsible for the defense of southern Japan. Hiroshima, also a communications center, storage point, and assembly area for troops, was a legitimate target by the standards that had prevailed in the European theater. Jewish, Polish, and Gypsy civilians were adjacent to no Allied military targets, and their murders cannot conceivably be described as even wanton and indiscriminate collateral effects of legitimate military action.
For Hiroshima to be an event handily bracketed with Auschwitz, Allied intentions ought to be morally comparable to Nazi intentions. So it becomes very important to assume that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not only irrelevant to Japan’s surrender but actuated by cynical and evil motives. We must have done it to impress Stalin. The evidence for this was never that strong, and in the specialized literature the case that we only did it to impress Stalin has become less and less impressive over time. The Allies had several intentions when using atomic weapons, but their primary intention seems to have been to end the war as quickly as possible, at the smallest cost in life. The German intention at Auschwitz was genocide. So why Auschwitz and Hiroshima? Why not Auschwitz and Rwanda? Is it a subliminal or in some case conscious desire to make the Allies morally comparable to their enemies? Maybe not, but it cannot but have that effect, and I find the comparison idiotic and repellent.
August 16, 2006
On Limousine Liberals Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:10 AM EST I shall feebly try to restore some of the bipartisan comity Josh Zeitz thinks is lapsing. I was just re-reading John Steele Gordon’s post of August 12 on his aborted career and other matters. I, too, am pleased that John Steele Gordon wound up writing history rather than press releases. I never did that job, but I once wrote freelance ad copy, four-sided brochures for book clubs. Most of the work was for an astrophysics book club, and it caused no great moral pangs; since I didn’t understand the books I was reading, I would simply retype and rephrase bits of text and hope for the best. By contrast, writing ad copy for a history book felt strange. It meant suspending all critical faculties in the interest of selling the product, and clashed with what I took to be the ethos of the profession for which I was then training (I was in grad school, studying history). In retrospect, that may sound priggish, but a similar feeling seems to explain why John Steele Gordon feels no regrets about giving up that fabulous prospective career in P.R.
Okay, comity-restoration mode muted, and on to Mario Procaccino coinage, “limousine liberals,” denoting people John Steele Gordon deprecates in that same post, and who reappear in his most recent post rebranded as “liberal elites.” I remember being greatly annoyed by the phrase “limousine liberals,” in part because I was a liberal with no limousine, and almost all of the liberals I knew were similarly limousine-less. The phrase seemed bizarrely dishonest. In 1969 I do not think too many of my acquaintances, liberal or otherwise, had even seen a limousine outside of a movie. This was before stretch limos proliferated in the 1980s, so in 1969 the word did not evoke a bunch of young bankers out on the town, it evoked Daddy Warbucks in a Depression-era cartoon.
But with the passage of a few years, I realized that the phrase meant something real, which is why it was for a time an effective rhetorical weapon. John Steele Gordon suggests that a limousine liberal was someone who knew nothing about the poor in whose name he presumed to speak, but it also and more pointedly meant something else. “Limousine liberals” originally denoted prosperous people who advocated what they took to be a just end via a policy which would have real costs for other, less prosperous people, with few or none of those costs being borne by the richer folk doing the advocating. Like any effective caricature, the picture was distorted, but it was recognizable.
Busing was one example. In that case, the phrase denoted people with children in private or all-white suburban schools who believed that other people’s schools should be integrated in ways many of those other people found threatening. Busing may or may not have been an effective policy, but the very effective rhetorical point was that some of the people advocating it did not have to live with any of its costs. Another example: affirmative action in one of the forms it originally operated, when it meant altering the importance of seniority and civil-service exam scores for hiring and promotion in police and fire departments, in other civil service jobs, and in the building trades, in the wake of findings that access to those jobs had previously been restricted on racial grounds. In that case, too, prosperous people were unlikely to be applying for those jobs. The costs of justice would be borne only by others. A third and less perfect example: policies on crime. If you were “soft on crime,” it meant you wanted to advance the rights of suspects and prisoners at a perceived cost in public safety. If you lived in a neighborhood or town that was still insulated from the rising crime rate, that, too, looked like a form of justice demanded only at someone else’s expense. Here’s a fourth (although very local) example: open admissions at CUNY, the public university in my city, then advocated by some people whose children wouldn’t have been caught dead at CUNY.
Why did the phrase “limousine liberal” disappear? Reconsider the examples cited above: the kind of busing people most detested has been to some degree abandoned, while more and more people have bailed out of the public schools. The issue is more or less politically dead. How about affirmative action? It no longer applies only to working-class jobs; it also affects admissions to the Ivies and very good jobs. It has to some degree become less controversial—in the recent Supreme Court case preserving affirmative action, a decisive amicus brief seems to have been filed by the Armed Forces, who passionately defend affirmative action. The policy has been progressively modified by the courts, and, (reportedly) on account of a fear of being perceived as racist, the Republican party itself seems to be chary of advocating its abandonment; if the policy is overturned, it will die at the hands of the courts. In any case, the people who advocated the policy now share some of its perceived costs. How about “soft on crime”? As more and more people came to feel threatened by rising crime, support for suspects’ and prisoners’ rights diminished accordingly, and over the long haul crime fell dramatically. First there were fewer people who looked to be grandstanding at no personal cost, then the problem diminished very strikingly. How about open admissions? It has been abolished. So no one is still talking about limousine liberals, because there aren’t very many to be seen. Instead, we hear a lot about “liberal elites.” More on that in another post.
August 15, 2006
Self-Interest Posted by John Steele Gordon at 08:55 PM EST First, let me make it clear that Eugene Talmadge and I have nothing in common philosophically, politically, or any other way, except both being male and with deep Southern roots. Very different roots, to be sure: My Southern ancestors of his generation didn’t like him or his kind of rabble-rousing politics one little bit. He was, however, a world-class rabble-rouser, famous for saying, “The poor dirt farmer ain’t got but three friends on this earth: God Almighty, Sears, Roebuck, and Gene Talmadge.” It was the “poor dirt farmers”—in his day called “white trash”—not mill workers, who were his political base. Second, Joshua Zeitz is right that I love making fun of the liberal elite. But so many liberals have become so oblivious to just how elitist and out of touch they are that I often can’t resist. Most still seem to think we live in Gene Talmadge’s America, when it’s as dead and gone as he is. But I think Joshua Zeitz misunderstands what I’m getting at a little. By self-interest, I do not mean just economic self-interest, although that to be sure is usually a very big part of it. But there are lots of people who, for instance, do not work at jobs that would maximize their incomes, because they prefer jobs that are less remunerative but more fulfilling, like, ummm, writing history. Mother Teresa was pursuing her self interest in the slums of Calcutta, because she would have been miserable doing anything else. Self interest encompasses the totality of what human beings need and what they seek. The pursuit of self-interest, in other words, is simply what Jefferson called the pursuit of happiness. But this being planet earth, the pursuit is not always straightforward. For one thing, people differ wildly in their ability to perceive and pursue their self-interest. Some are easily led astray by demagogues and hate-mongers of both left and right. Some cling to outworn beliefs and outworn paradigms. Some, in Oscar Hammerstein’s words, were “carefully taught to hate and fear” when they were young and can’t break free from that early training. Congenital optimists will pursue their self-interests very differently from congenital pessimists faced with the same set of circumstances. And one’s self-interests often conflict. Everyone who hasn’t lived on Mars the last 40 years, for instance, knows that smoking cigarettes will kill you if something doesn’t get you first. Therefore it is in every smoker’s long-term self-interest to quit. But their short-term self-interest in getting that nicotine monkey off their backs makes that very, very hard to do. And politics is not a Chinese menu. You can’t pick and choose from a candidate’s platform; you have to take the whole platform or reject the whole platform. Many may have voted for Ronald Reagan because of his unfeigned and deeply held belief in American exceptionalism that the vast majority of Americans also believe in (but which is contemptuously dismissed by most liberals as vulgar yahooism) while they had grave doubts regarding his economic ideas. Then, four years later, the voters of 49 states went for Reagan over another candidate who promised to raise their taxes, not lower them. Why? Because the tax cuts had worked. Mondale wanted to go back to the 1970s, and a landslide’s worth of Americans said, “No thanks!” Lincoln was right. Democracy works because you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Had the Reagan tax cuts not been a great success, the Bush cuts would not have been possible. Neither would Clinton’s, for it was he who signed the bill lowering capital-gains taxes, with altogether happy results.
August 15, 2006
Reaganomics Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes that the idea that Reagan advanced the economic interests of the rich is “at best, a Democratic talking point and an unusually silly one. For necessarily implicit in it is the idea that ‘Reaganomics’ therefore retarded the economic interests of the non-rich.”
I do not think that is the best way to frame the question. First of all, what was Reaganomics? The polite way to describe it is as a theory focusing on the effects of marginal tax rates on the incentive to work and save, with adjustments to policy yielding increases in output. The theory’s consequences for fiscal policy were described less politely (by, among others, the elder Bush) as “voodoo economics”: tax cuts without proportionately reduced expenditures, which in the short run necessarily produce very large deficits. Did the Reagan tax cuts produce an increased propensity to save? Nope. The U.S. savings rate fell from a high of 12 percent in 1982 to under 7 percent in 1989.
In the longer run supply-siders assumed such deficits to be self-liquidating by way of increased tax revenues, which would result from the tax cuts acting as a stimulus to growth. Did the deficits shrink on Reagan’s watch? Nope. Over the long boom tax receipts nearly doubled, but the deficits ballooned. In our history, those ballooning deficits were not wholly self-liquidating. Bush increased taxes, Clinton also reintroduced some fiscal discipline, and those policies are normally assumed to have helped shrink the deficits. On the other hand, the economy expanded over the course of most of the eighties and nineties, which greatly increased tax revenues, and those increased revenues eventually did the lion’s share of reducing the Reagan deficits. Does that mean that the Reagan tax cuts produced the expanding economy? John Steele Gordon sometimes writes that it is hard to tell what produces economic outcomes, and at other times says the opposite, and I agree with both of his views. It is hard to be sure, and we tend to make guesses anyway, on the basis of whatever evidence we can find.
Why did the American economy expand so impressively for most of the 1980s and 1990s? Probably for a lot of reasons. Energy shocks wore off, before hitting again this decade. We began reaping the benefits of deregulation, a lot of which was done on Carter’s watch, in response to the theory of regulatory capture. Paul Volcker’s punitive interest rates, which began late in the Carter administration, broke the inflation while checking the economy, and we sometimes measure 1980s and 1990s growth from a pretty low base, the era of savage stagflation. At some point in the 1980s and 1990s, a vast investment in the information-technology revolution probably began paying increasing dividends. Manufacturing productivity went way up, the result of a host of innovations. An era of relatively freer trade produced gains from trade. Did Reagan’s lower tax rates matter, by spurring investment even while the national savings rate fell? Could be, although much higher tax rates did no obvious harm to economies at certain times in the past, and low tax rates have done nothing special for economies at other times. All other things being equal, taxes can be too high, choking off investment, or too low, failing to provide sufficient infrastructure, sufficient numbers of educated workers, and sufficient public safety, etc., all of those public goods tending to encourage investment. As John Steele Gordon sometimes writes, though, all things never are equal, so it really is hard to know with great confidence how specific public policies will work in the future, or exactly how they worked in the past.
Okay, did Reaganomics help the rich by retarding the non-rich? The key word is by: That zero-sum formulation may imply that the gains of the first group could not have been achieved other than at the expense of the second, and I do not think that is a good way to think about what happened. As suggested above, I do not think Reaganomics was the sole or even main cause of the recent increases in economic growth, so a theory that explains the richer rich as pure banditry is a bad theory. While the incomes and wealth of the American rich have increased disproportionately, this has happened in many countries over the same period, and the phenomenon has a number of possible causes. Insofar as recent policy may have in various ways reduced transfer payments from the rich to the less rich while the rich were getting richer, different policies might well have better served the less rich. If the rich get a lot richer and everyone else somewhat richer, everyone gains, but more proportionate gains seem to me to be better policy, and more just; John Steele Gordon may disagree.
And by the way, do I think that “the average joe is too stupid to know what’s good for him”? No, I don’t. I think people elected Ronald Reagan for a lot of reasons. My hunch is that in the first instance they did so because of the infuriatingly flaccid response of the Carter administration to the Iranian hostage crisis, and in response to the economic consequences of the second oil shock. I didn’t vote for him, but I had friends who thought hard about doing so, and those were their reasons, the hostage crisis coming first. I have never quite understood why my fellow citizens reelected Reagan in 1984, but I do not thereby assume that they were dolts, any more than John Steele Gordon is obliged to assume Americans dolts because they reelected Clinton.
August 15, 2006
V-J Day Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:00 PM EST Today is the anniversary of V-J Day, the date in 1945 when Japan’s surrender was celebrated (though a formal agreement was not signed until September 2). Remembering V-J Day naturally brings up the question of America’s atomic bombing of Japan and its role in bringing the war to a close. That topic has been discussed extensively, in American Heritage (here and here for example) and elsewhere. I do not mean to renew here the arguments over the morality and necessity of the bombings, or the endless parsing of memos and reports that were circulated beforehand. But I do think it’s worth considering what would have happened if no atomic bombs had been dropped.
The British historian Michael Hickey, whom I quote simply because we have one of his books in our library, summarizes a common anti-atomic-bomb view by saying that “it is questionable whether the bombs actually accelerated the end, as secret overtures had been going on between Moscow and Tokyo for some time.” At the beginning of August 1945, the Soviet Union was not yet at war with Japan, so it was well placed to act as an intermediary for peace negotiations with the United States. By that time Japan was shattered and virtually defenseless (though not entirely impotent; kamikazes were still flying their one-way missions, and on July 30 a Japanese submarine sank the USS Indianapolis, killing 883 American sailors). Japan could not have held out for much longer, the antibomb school says, so the use of atomic weapons was cruel and unnecessary.
But even if it’s true that the Japanese were on the verge of surrender, you have to concede that the atomic bombs concentrated their minds. On August 6, Hiroshima was bombed, and two days later Japan made an urgent peace proposal to the Soviets, which was rebuffed. On August 9, Nagasaki was bombed, and the next day the Japanese government announced its willingness to surrender if the emperor’s role could be preserved. Finally, on August 14, the emperor himself threw in the towel in a dramatic radio address, and the war was over. (The surrender was formally accepted and announced on the evening of August 14, Washington time, and commemorated the following day.) So the first atomic bomb prompted a desperate peace proposal within two days, and the second one prompted an actual surrender offer within one day. That clearly shows that the atomic bombs decided the issue and put an end to the stalling.
Still, do a few days or weeks make that much of a difference? If Japan would have surrendered soon anyway, was it really necessary to drop not just one atomic bomb but two? I say yes. In the previous paragraph, we saw that two days after the Hiroshima bombing, the Soviet Union rebuffed Japan’s request to transmit a request for peace talks to the United States. In fact, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, didn’t just tell the Japanese to take a hike; he told them that as of the following morning, Japan and the Soviet Union would be at war. The Soviet entry into the war with Japan had been planned for months, and Stalin had told the United States and Britain of his plans at the Potsdam Conference in late July, though he lied and said it would happen in mid-August.
So here’s the chronology:
August 6: U.S. drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
August 8: Soviets rebuff Japanese peace overtures and declare war.
August 9: Soviet troops invade Korea. U.S. drops atomic bomb on Nagasaki. (The dates for these two events had been independently set in advance and are coincidental.)
August 10: Japan agrees to accept the terms of surrender set forth at Potsdam but insists on preserving the emperor’s role. U.S. says no dice but stops bombing of Japan pending final surrender. Soviet troops continue advance into Korea.
August 14: Emperor Hirohito accepts terms, and Japan formally surrenders. Soviet troops halt at Pyongyang.
Now, there was no way for the United States to invade Korea from the south on such short notice; it would have taken months to prepare. So the only way we could stop the Soviet march through Korea, which was meeting little or no resistance, was for Japan to surrender. In just a few days, the Soviets had gotten halfway down the peninsula; another week, and they could easily have occupied the whole thing.
After Japan’s surrender, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. agreed that American troops would occupy Korea south of the 38th parallel and Soviet troops would do so north of the parallel. (That agreement was negotiated by Col. Dean Rusk, who would later serve as secretary of state under John F. Kennedy.) The usual vague plans were made for deciding Korea’s future by negotiation, and we all know how those turned out. But if Japan had dragged its feet for just a few more days before surrendering, most or all of Korea would have ended up under Soviet control. And when you look at how close the communists came to driving the U.S. out of Korea in 1950, it’s virtually certain that all of Korea would be controlled by Kim Jong Il today.
That’s why we had to drop both atomic bombs on Japan. Even if you don’t think the Japanese would have defended the home islands as fiercely as they defended Okinawa; even if a negotiated peace would have yielded the same surrender terms the Japanese agreed to after Hiroshima and Nagasaki; even if you ignore the terribly destructive conventional bombing of Japanese cities that was continuing undiminished; and even if you set aside the damage that Japan was still inflicting on our sailors in the Pacific and the horrific suffering of our prisoners of war—even with all these heroic assumptions, dropping the atomic bombs still made sense. If those bombs hastened Japan’s surrender by a week—even, perhaps, a single day—they saved what is now South Korea from 60-plus years (and counting) of slavery and hastened the end of the Cold War, possibly by decades.
I’m not saying that these considerations were foremost in Harry Truman’s mind when he gave the order to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like most Americans, he just wanted the war to be over, and the quickest way to make that happen was to keep hitting Japan as hard as we could. As he wrote in his memoirs: “All previous discussions on the subject of Korea had shown the Russians agreed with us that Korea should pass through a trusteeship phase before attaining independence.” The A-bomb drop dates of August 6 and 9 had been set well in advance, before we knew when the Soviets would invade. Yet Truman knew that letting the war drag on would have been a grievous miscalculation, because any number of bad things could have happened. With the atomic bombs, we had a way to end the war immediately, and we used it. That’s something that lovers of freedom everywhere should be thankful for.
August 15, 2006
“What’s the Matter With Kansas” Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:00 PM EST After a week or so of bipartisan comity, I see that the American Heritage Blog is slipping back into its natural state of ideological rancor. Which probably makes things more interesting.
In his recent post on the long-term impact of Reaganomics, John Steele Gordon predictably bashed the “liberal elite,” claiming that they believe “the average joe is too stupid to know what’s good for him” and that their version of recent economic history is “silly.” This is a worn rhetorical strategy that I’d like to label the “your-mother” response. As in, “you’re mother’s a liberal elite.”
I’ll let someone else respond to Mr. Gordon’s economic argument and will focus instead on his narrower claim: “The rich, by definition, are a small minority of the whole body politic, and, in what is incontestably a democracy, pursuing their interests contrary to the interests of the great mass of the people would be political suicide. Either Reaganomics has helped the great majority or it would have died a painful political death.”
Mr. Gordon writes about economic and business history, so I understand why he might be inclined to think that people vote their economic interests first and foremost. But throughout American history, voters have subordinated their economic interests to a host of cultural and social concerns.
Many liberals like Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?, argue that working-class voters often allow themselves to be blinded to their economic self-interest by crass appeals to prejudice. For instance, the Bush tax cuts have worked far less magic for the working poor than for the very wealthy. A prime example: Republicans killed a Democratic proposal to extend the Child Tax Credit to 6.5 million families who earn between $10,000 and $26,500 per year. According to Frank and others, Republicans in places like Kansas (and Ohio, and West Virginia, and so on) have used divisive social issues like gay marriage to blunt the effect of their skewed economic policies. This is no conspiracy theory. One of Karl Rove’s strategies in 2004 was to put gay marriage initiatives on the ballot in swing states. Thomas Franks’s argument—that voters should care less about whether Bill and Steve get married, and more about whether they can afford to feed, clothe, and educate their families—may strike Mr. Gordon as elitist, but there’s something to it.
An historical example of the same phenomenon was the 1934 gubernatorial election in Georgia. That year Eugene Talmadge visited Rome, Georgia, the state’s center of textile manufacturing, and delivered incendiary speeches that appealed to raw race prejudice. He excoriated FDR’s National Recovery Administration (NRA) for issuing wage scales that placed black and white workers on parity. Talmadge won the election and carried Rome’s white working-class districts. Three days later he declared martial law in order to protect the “right to work” and sent 4,000 troops to bust the textile union. It was an odd way to repay working whites for their support—but, really, not so odd in the context of the Jim Crow South, where whiteness trumped economic status any day of the week.
One problem—and here I agree somewhat with Mr. Gordon—is that liberals too often insinuate that voters have been duped and hoodwinked by appeals to prejudice. A better argument can be found in the historian David Roediger’s book, The Wages of Whiteness (the title is borrowed from a quote by W. E. B. DuBois). Roediger argues that working-class white Americans have played an active and aggressive role in promoting their whiteness, even at the expense of their economic self-interest. They are, he claims, often savvy about what they want, and they often prefer “psychological wages” to economic wages. The same surely applies to working-class voters who are genuinely more opposed to gay marriage than concerned with material things.
So—surprise, surprise—I don’t agree with at least part of Mr. Gordon’s argument. Americans certainly vote their economic interests sometimes. But often they don’t.
August 15, 2006
The Ethnic Vote Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:00 PM EST There’s a column in Newsweek by Rabbi Marc Gellman, a noted Jewish political commentator, that raised my eyebrows. “Joe Lieberman did not lose the Democratic primary because of his support for the war in Iraq,” Gellman boldly claims. “He lost because of his lack of support from Jews. Joe got the support of black Baptists (except of course for Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who stood so conspicuously behind challenger Ned Lamont on election night). He got the support of Catholic Union guys. He got the support of all the Connecticut papers, and he got the support of most Jews, but not at all an overwhelming number of Jews and that is why he lost.”
For starters, Al Sharpton was licensed and ordained by Bishop F. D. Washington, a Pentecostal minister. Jesse Jackson received his theological training at the Chicago Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with the United Church of Christ. Whether they have since ministered to Baptist congregations, I don’t know. But not all black ministers are Baptists. More to the point, Joe Lieberman did not win the black vote in last week’s primary election. According to the CBS News/New York Times exit poll, Ned Lamont won 55 percent of the black vote to Lieberman’s 41 percent. The poll does not distinguish between Baptists and members of other traditionally black churches (like the AME Church), but unless Gellman has access to better polling data, his premise is way off.
There’s a lot more that’s wrong with Gellman’s column.
Gellman’s argument—that Connecticut Jews somehow ruined Joe Lieberman—ignores two facts: First, 61 percent of Jewish primary voters voted for Lieberman (giving him a higher ratio of votes than any other racial-ethnic-religious group), and second, Jews have been voting ideology over tribe for half a century.
While in the early twentieth century American immigrant groups often gravitated toward candidates from their own communities, since World War II they have demonstrated ethnic voting patterns that are ideological, but not tribal, in nature.
In the fall of 1960 political observers were astonished to learn that the Catholic vote in New York was very much up for grabs, notwithstanding the presence of John F. Kennedy—a third-generation Irish-American—on the
Democratic presidential ticket. “If Jack Kennedy thinks he has the Catholic vote in his back pocket,” said an Irish Catholic political activist from the Bronx, “he’s wrong.”
In a series of interviews with city Catholics, The New York Times found that most shared a deep concern about “communism, both at home and abroad—with most thinking the Republicans are better at opposing it than the Democrats.” Though Kennedy claimed unimpeachable anticommunist credentials, most of the Catholic voters who spoke with The New York Times viewed him as less credible on the issue than Richard Nixon, because they viewed Republicans as better anti-communists.
Indeed, when I was researching my graduate dissertation several years ago, I was astonished to discover the following line in a private survey conducted for New York City Mayor Robert Wagner (a Catholic) in March 1961. Pollster Louis Harris found that “the Catholic vote is not in good shape, and, with the exception of the Italians, now appears ripe for voting Republican in this fall’s election. The Irish, who were also not with Kennedy last fall, now seem ready to leave the Democratic party in droves in this year’s municipal election. The Italians at the moment are evenly split.”
In other words, Kennedy narrowly lost New York City’s Irish Catholic vote in 1960, and Wagner was poised to lose it by an even wider margin in 1961.
Another case in point was New York’s 1956 U.S. Senate election, which pitted the liberal Republican Rep. Jacob Javits (about whom much has already been said on this blog) against Mayor Wagner. Wagner, an outspoken liberal, was the son of the late Sen. Robert Wagner, who was widely revered by city Jews for his sponsorship of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. In 1956 voters in heavily Jewish neighborhoods rejected their co-religionist, Javits, by a wide margin, delivering 81.5 percent of their votes to Wagner. They made the calculation that a liberal Democrat was better than a liberal Republican, no matter what his religion might be.
Facts and history aside, what bothers me about Gellman’s post is the notion that Jews are somehow bound to support other Jews on election day. This argument bothers me as a Jew, and as an American. Gellman writes, “There are and have always been only two kinds of Jews: tribal Jews and cosmopolitan Jews. Tribal Jews love anything Jewish. Cosmopolitan Jews love anything but Jewish. Tribal Jews are not trying to pass, assimilate or deny their tribal roots, their attachment to Israel and their love of other Jews no matter who they are. Cosmopolitan Jews are trying to pass and assimilate and become an undifferentiated member of the majority culture. The problem with tribal Jews is that they have trouble loving non-Jews. The problem with cosmopolitan Jews is that they have trouble loving other Jews.”
The so-called “cosmopolitan” Jews who voted for Ned Lamont last week don’t have a problem “loving other Jews.” They have a problem with the war in Iraq. If Rabbi Gellman doesn’t understand this, he’s hopelessly out of touch with his own community.
August 15, 2006
The Economic Interests of the Rich Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:10 AM EST In “Class Acts and U.S. Politics,” posted yesterday, Fred Smoler wrote, “One way to describe Reagan’s political gift is to note his ability to simultaneously advance the economic interests of the rich while speaking for the moral passions of the working poor.”
Far be it from me to disagree with the idea that one of Ronald Reagan’s greatest political gifts was his ability to give voice to “the moral passions of the working poor.” He connected with the average joe in a way that has made him one of the giants of American history. But the idea that he “advanced the economic interests of the rich” is, at best, a Democratic talking point and an unusually silly one. For necessarily implicit in it is the idea that “Reaganomics” therefore retarded the economic interests of the non-rich. The “working poor,” in other words, loved him despite his having made them poorer by his policies.
In turn, that can only be true if it is also true—and this is a core, though carefully unstated, liberal belief—that the average joe is too stupid to know what’s good for him. He needs to be guided by a liberal elite so that they can protect him from the likes of smooth talkers such as Ronald Reagan. Since I’m a small-D democrat, which fewer and fewer liberals are, I think that’s rubbish. Living creatures have been evolving, and therefore getting better at determining and more capable of pursuing their self-interests, for four billion years. The average joe doesn’t need someone with a summer house in Nantucket to help him do it.
The rich, by definition, are a small minority of the whole body politic, and, in what is incontestably a democracy, pursuing their interests contrary to the interests of the great mass of the people would be political suicide. Either Reaganomics has helped the great majority or it would have died a painful political death. People would have treated it with the same enthusiasm they would show for, say, a tax credit on cars costing over $100,000.
So how can the idea that “Reaganomics”—principally big cuts in marginal income tax rates and monetary restraint to control inflation—is harmful to the poor be so enduring? There are several reasons.
One is that it is certainly bad for the interests of the liberal elite. If everyone gets better off, they won’t have any sheep to be the shepherds of. And the last major power center dominated by the liberal elite is the mainstream media, which never tires of repeating the idea.
But mostly, I think, it is that Reaganomics is very, very good for the rich in both the short and the long term, while its principal benefit to the non-rich is in the long term only. Liberals pretend there is no long term. It is mathematically inescapable that cuts in marginal income tax rates are going to benefit immediately those with large incomes more than those with smaller ones, let alone those with incomes too low to be taxed. If that were all there was to it, then Reaganomics would indeed be merely “tax cuts for the rich.”
But of course that is not all there is to it. Cuts in marginal rates promote economic growth, and that benefits everyone. In the long term it benefits everyone in spectacular fashion. Since this is a history blog, let’s look at the history. Last Saturday, it happens, was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Reagan’s signing of the Economic Recovery Tax Act, which, along with monetary tightening by the Fed, began the great experiment in Reaganomics. The act cut income tax rates 25 percent across the board, indexed rates to inflation, and cut corporate income tax rates in half. What followed has been the most prosperous quarter century in the history of the Republic. GDP has more than doubled in real terms and the standard of living, at nearly all economic levels, has done likewise.
More, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gone from around 800 to over 11,000. (To have that great an increase in the next 25 years, the Dow will have to reach 150,000 by 2031.) Housing values, thanks partly to greatly lowered interests rates, have risen by a factor of 10 in many areas of the country. In the 1930s—about when Rip Van Liberal philosophically nodded off to sleep—that would have been great for the rich only, because most people rented and had no substantial financial assets. Today, over half of all families have investments in stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. Many more are the beneficiaries of pension funds that are invested in them. Almost 70 percent of families now own their own homes.
One test of a good idea, of course, is, Has it spread? The answer is yes. According to last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (available online to paid subscribers only), the average top personal income-tax rate in the developed world in 1980 was 67 percent. Today it’s 43 percent. The average corporate rate was 48 percent and is now 29 percent. France’s top rate in 1980 was 60 percent; it’s now 48 percent. Japan has gone from 75 percent to 50 percent, Canada from 60 to 39, Britain from 83 to 40. Even Sweden, the poster-child for the welfare state, has cut its top rate from 87 percent to 54 percent.
As Reaganomics has spread, so has prosperity. The world is a far richer place today than it was in 1980. And not just for the rich. Everyone seems to understand that, except for the liberal elite, who also can’t understand why no one listens to them anymore.
August 14, 2006
Class Acts and U.S. Politics III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:10 PM EST I am interested by John Steele Gordon’s addendum about class and the importance of authenticity (“genuineness”) in American electoral politics. Much of what he says seems right, but I have some minor caveats: First of all, I am not sure if money gentles your condition all that much faster in the U.S. than in the U.K. I have the impression that over the last generation similar trends have existed in Germany and a number of other European societies, but what follows is restricted to the U.S. and U.K.
In some ways money does age quicker in the U.S., or at least did, since without hereditary titles you can scale the heights in at most two generations, without having to win a fleet action and thus become a viscount. On the other hand, you could become a beer baron with pure cash, and I have the impression that for the last century and more a public school education and accent accompanied by drive and talent has done pretty well for second-generation moneyed Brits. For that matter, in my salad days I had the impression that some nonelective parts of the American government—the CIA and State Department—were still much likelier to be staffed by people from Yale and Brown than by people with less socially prestigious B.A.’s, and this did not seem to be the result of a broad perception of perfectly meritocratic admissions policies at Yale and Brown. Similarly, the white-shoe law firms and more genteel investment banks were also disproportionately staffed by the American equivalent of posh or semi-posh. So one can overstate the picture of social mobility in a snob-free environment for most of the twentieth-century U.S., and understate it in the U.K. But even if money has not aged so much more quickly in the U.S., the broad sense of John Steele Gordon’s view seems right: Traditional inegalitarian views of class and status have always been weaker in the U.S. than in European societies.
What seems very striking is that in both countries cultural democratization has recently been advancing on a very broad front, and faster in Britain, since there was more ground to make up. In the U.K., TV announcers (“presenters”) now proudly display regional accents; an unaffected posh accent can easily make you unemployable in that trade; and the young affect a synthetic pseudo-plebeian accent sometimes called Estuarine. The first time I heard it, out of the mouth of an Oxford undergraduate, I was interested to discover that her father was the head of the Royal Ballet. This is pretty recent. Margaret Thatcher overthrew the Tory grandees in what her enemies revealingly called “the Peasants’ Revolt,” and her cabinet was noted for having more Estonians than Etonians, but it is interesting to reflect on the then-Mrs. Thatcher’s decision to take elocution lessons, and the fact that her accent moved up-market with her rise to power. Maybe Lady Thatcher will prove to be the last British politician to imitate what were once taken to be her betters. The current prime minister wants to be called Tony, just as a recent American President was called Bill. No Democrat, be he ever so democratic, called FDR Frank.
What seems very much worth noting is that in both countries rising cultural egalitarianism has been accompanied by rising economic inequality. If the expanding economic inequality proves lasting, and wealth becomes more heritable (i.e., the estate tax is sharply diminished), I wonder whether the increased cultural egalitarianism will survive, let alone go from strength to strength. Status differences and distinct subcultures do not immediately equate with persistent income inequality, but on past evidence there does seem to be a relationship. Status is almost never the same thing as wealth, but for hundreds of years of Western history, the two do seem to seek equilibrium.
What about John Steele Gordon’s sense that a perception of genuineness nowadays makes Americans forgive upper-class manners in politicians? Maybe, but in terms of faithfulness to social origins, the reasonably inauthentic Bush Sr. beat the reasonably authentic Dukakis. However, I humbly concede the broccoli. John Steele Gordon’s provision of the full context, which I had forgotten, seems decisive.
August 14, 2006
Class Acts and U.S. Politics II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:25 AM EST Just a few addenda to the posts of Fredric Smoler and Alexander Burns.
This country has never had a self-perpetuating upper class such as ruled Britain for centuries. Such families as Cavendish (dukes of Devonshire), Stanley (earls of Derby), Howard (dukes of Norfolk), Cecil (marquesses of Salisbury), and Churchill (dukes of Marlborough) have been rich and politically potent for hundreds of years.
But of the American families who were legendarily rich in the gilded age, a mere hundred years ago, with names such as Gould, Vanderbilt, Astor, Armour, Phipps, and Morgan, only the Rockefellers are on the Forbes 400 List today. Indeed, of those 400 only about 80 came from very rich families. The rest made it themselves. And while great piles of money are a very handy commodity in politics, especially with personal contributions other than one’s own greatly restricted, only with the Kennedys has it led to the White House. The Roosevelts and the Bushes were “well born” (to use a term that went out with my grandmother Steele), but they were only comfortably rich.
This has always been a country of the nouveau riche, as new fortunes eclipse old ones and old ones get dispersed among heirs. So money gentles your condition in a hurry. As that consummate social snob Ward McAllister explained about the first 400 (a term he coined), “Our catalogue [of the 400] has been prepared with much care, the names having been well sifted and weighed, and only those admitted who are now prominently to the front, who have the means to maintain their position, either by gold, brains or beauty, gold being always the most potent ‘open sesame,’ beauty the next in importance, while brains and ancestors count for very little.”
So it seems to me that genuineness counts for a lot, at least in modern times, when the media will dig out the details regardless. One of the very first pieces of American political ephemera, a handkerchief from the 1840 campaign of William Henry Harrison, showed a picture of his humble birthplace, a log cabin with smoke curling out of the chimney. Of course Harrison, in fact, was born at Berkeley, one of Virginia’s greatest colonial plantation houses, and his father was a governor of Virginia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Some log cabin: The lawn was large enough for the Army of the Potomac to camp on it during the Civil War.
You could never get away with a stunt like that today, so you might as well just be who and what you are. I remember the professor who taught me History of the English Language complaining that FDR’s accent, known to linguists as “Park Avenue Oxford,” was widely imitated, greatly complicating the delineation of American accent patterns. FDR just spoke the way he spoke. Had he been the son of a Hyde Park groundskeeper he’d have been laughed at, not imitated.
George H. W. Bush, to be sure, lacks the common touch (which his son does not) and all too often tried to pretend that he had it. That was his mistake. One can see John Kennedy confronted with something like a bar code scanner and laughing off his unfamiliarity with this everyday technology with a witty remark.
But I disagree with Fred Smoler on the broccoli remark. I think it was Bush senior’s finest unscripted moment. Instead of worrying about the reaction of the United Broccoli Farmers of America lobby, he simply said (as I remember it), “I hate broccoli. When I was young my mother made me eat it. Now I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat broccoli!”
Millions of Americans, remembering their own childhood traumas with a plate of some loathed but good-for-you food, and dessert out of reach until they ate it (or managed to sneak it to the dog so he could eat it), heard the President and thought, “Right on, man!”
August 13, 2006
Class Acts and U.S. Politics Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:00 PM EST I enjoyed Alexander Burns’s meditations on upper-class manners and your chances in modern American politics. Alex notes that below the level of presidential elections, perceived gentility can help rather than hurt. I am also grateful for Alex’s link to Fred Schwarz’s Regular Guy Theory of Elections. Alex’s theory does not actually contradict Fred Schwarz’s, since McCain, predicted by Fred as likely victor over Hillary Clinton in 2008, is the son and grandson of admirals, and not obviously further from the salt than the daughter of a textile executive. Fred’s category—with whom would you rather watch a football game?—does not correlate too well with either realities or perceptions of class, and I doubt Fred intended it to so correlate. In any event, I have known Mississippi plantation owners who were very, very lively when watching broadcasts of professional sport and were not thereby overturning any stereotypes. Nor would anyone be shocked at a Texas oilman’s enthusiasm for a football game. Does this work only for Red State elites? I do not think so. The Kennedys were famously absorbed in football. Well, they were Irish; maybe that makes them not-quite-gentlemen, whose enthusiasm for football betrays their origins. Again, I do not think so. An enthusiasm for sports is part of what defines a regular guy, and in popular imagination gents can be, at least in this sense, regular guys. In older British stereotype, not the same thing as American but not entirely different, patricians and plebeians shared certain tastes, in mutual defiance of middle-class norms. Americans, too, can so imagine the world. In this country, who is imagined to regularly shoot shotguns or deer rifles? If you teach comp lit or practice psychiatry, you are not on that list, but hedge-fund owners and steamfitters share the honors. Okay, on to electoral politics. Being seen to be a gent can have contradictory effects, sometimes for the same politician. George H. W. Bush spent some portion of the latter part of his political career as an imitation plebeian, publicly disdaining broccoli and affecting an improbable enthusiasm for pork rinds. This yokel act was never very persuasive, and in 1992 it failed to persuade. Early in Bush’s career pseudo-plebeians had taken over the Republican party, wresting it from what they took to be East Coast gentlemen, and G. H. W. Bush never quite succeeded in quieting suspicions that Connecticut, the Greenwich Country Day School, Andover, and Yale had left a perdurable mark. It was not always thus. G.H.W.B. won his first election, in Texas, in the afterglow of the Camelot years, and I have read that being a New England gent actually helped Bush win that election. In those days a lot of Texans were besotted by JFK, and wanted a rightist mini-JFK in Congress. When Bush was defeated by Clinton, in 1992, the scene of Bush astounded by a bar-code reader at a supermarket checkout, which suggested that this was not a regular guy, is widely assumed to have hurt him, as did his reply to a waitress’s question about whether he wanted a second cup of coffee—”just a splash”—which sounded gentish. I think the second event hurt him only in conjunction with the first, because In 1992 too many people had a livelier sense of what groceries cost than they wanted to have, and being reminded that Bush had apparently never purchased any made him not so much a gent as a rich guy, which is a different thing. In the immediate aftermath of his inauguration, being seen as a gent had seemed a plus for Bush. There were articles happily depicting the patricians as back in charge, after an interregnum that included at least Carter and Reagan. Things were again in safe hands. That was not a long-lasting tone, but it is interesting that it happened at all. One of the oddities of George W. Bush’s career is that Andover and Yale, which often at least faintly damned the father, were never held against the son. Some of the people who dislike the current President Bush suspect that as a yahoo he’s a fraud, while others fear that he is indeed the real thing. People who like Bush, however, never seem to entertain a suspicion that they are being manipulated by a contrived political persona. That is not meant as a tautology. I think some of the people who liked the occasionally preachy Reagan liked him because of, rather than despite, his failure to attend church. One can apparently very cheerfully vote for a probable hypocrite. What do—or did—people like about gents and/or rich guys as politicians? Nowadays, I am not sure if they like much of anything, but the past was different. As for rich guys, a political slogan is telling: “Vote for Ross Perot: He’s too rich to steal.” In the early nineteenth century, British MPs were not paid salaries on the theory that anyone who needed one would be too easy to bribe. A degree of wealth is still, and tellingly, called “independence,” as in “independently wealthy.” A man who is independent, who need repay no favors, who can afford to be disinterested, is by one theory the very sort you want in politics. Gents are presumably rich enough, but they were once widely assumed to have other virtues as well. They came from a particular subculture, and it was at least hoped that they would be broadly educated, moderate, and honorable. This prejudice makes for what is called a deference culture: People gave their votes to their social superiors because they assumed them in some sense to be their probable moral and intellectual superiors. How dead is that world, and when did it die? In one sense, it died in America very early, with Jacksonian Democracy, or earlier yet; on their deathbeds Adams and Jefferson are sometimes remembered as mourning it. As a cultural ideal, it had its ups and downs, and if it is dead, it died much later: FDR was very much a patrician, and loved as one, and JFK was taken to be a patrician, and loved as one. My favorite American political anecdote concerns JFK during the campaign of 1960 greeting a West Virginian coal miner coming up blinking into the dawn. The miner greeted a horrified JFK with the question, “Senator, is it true that you never worked a day in your life?” Mortified, JFK is said to have stammered incomprehensibly, until the miner reassured him: “Don’t worry about it, Senator. You didn’t miss a God-damned thing.” JFK won that primary, and the election. A closing thought: An electoral revolt against what are seen as entrenched elites, which has marked American politics at least since Carter’s victory, is not the same thing as a revolt against gents. One way to describe Reagan’s political gift is to note his ability to simultaneously advance the economic interests of the rich while speaking for the moral passions of the working poor. George W. Bush has also seemed to have a streak of that gift. In neither case were gents seen as the object of the attacks. In both cases, the imagined oppressive elites targeted by these tribunes were marked by consumption patterns, originally brie and Chablis, nowadays lattes and sushi. Those elites were not imagined to play polo, nor wear top hats. By George H. W. Bush’s account, they might well have gone to Harvard—but a Yale man was still a sane and sage choice.
August 13, 2006
Fortunate Sons Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:55 PM EST I very much like the point Fred Smoler raised about John Lindsay and elites in politics. In the story he relates about his experience in the 1969 Lindsay campaign, Mr. Smoler finds an excellent description for the phenomenon of voters’ attraction to aristocratic candidates: “social deference to a local notable we had mistaken for our natural leader.” Many candidates who come from elite backgrounds, and act like it, seem to have an intangible appeal to their potential constituents. Lindsay is a perfect example of this. And I think the kind of experience Fred Smoler had with Lindsay is not limited to young people and local notables. Much has been made of what Fred Schwarz calls the “Regular Guy Theory of Elections.” As Mr. Schwarz explains it, this theory says that “American presidential races tend to be won by the candidate who does a better job of impersonating someone you’d want to watch a football game with.” This may often be true at the national level. But in contests farther down the ballot there are plenty of examples of just the reverse: candidates whose popularity depends on their distance from the average man. One of the figures from recent history who best exemplifies this is William Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts. In 1991, after being elected governor, Weld courted initially hostile Democrats by putting his own elite background on full display. At an event to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, the patrician Weld joked: “My family has not always had it easy. My ancestors arrived here with nothing but the shirt on their backs and a couple of million pounds of gold.” His enemies were charmed, and by using this kind of charm Weld went on to two full, reasonably successful terms on Beacon Hill. Weld, though, is only one such example. Pennsylvania’s John Heinz, serving in the Senate from 1977 until his death, was another. And while Weld got mileage out of poking fun at his ancestry, Heinz tended to let his behavior and appearance speak for themselves. In his obituary, the Washington Post noted that Heinz was “tall and athletic, with good looks to match,” “enjoyed a good game of tennis or a quick downhill run on skis when he was not politicking,” and had “a particular liking for Dutch and Flemish still-lifes.” With these habits and degrees from Exeter, Yale, and Harvard, Heinz was no “regular guy.” And he didn’t pretend otherwise. The same obituary noted that Heinz was not “especially popular” with his colleagues, but the voters of Pennsylvania found his posh personality and dignified demeanor more appealing. The list of pols like Weld and Heinz, whose public personalities rested on their upper-class manners, goes on, including men like Thomas Kean, Prescott Bush, and, of course, the Kennedys. The phenomenon is not a strictly Northeastern one, either: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist first campaigned for Senate in 1994 as an accomplished surgeon, but also as the dashing and respectable scion of an old Nashville family. That was doubtless part of his appeal. It is, as one might expect, possible to overdo this kind of aristocratic pose. Sheldon Whitehouse, who will be the Democratic nominee for Senate in Rhode Island, fumbled in 2004 when he said he was “basically bred” for public office. This struck some Rhode Islanders as more than a little stuck up, adding new meaning to the term “presumptive nominee.” Fortunately for Whitehouse, his likely opponent, Lincoln Chafee, son of the late Senator John Chafee, is in no position to use the word “patrician” as an insult. Like Fred Smoler, I have had my own John Lindsay experience. In the 2004 presidential cycle, during my first experience in political campaigning, I was perplexed to hear Democratic primary voters using the term “electable” to explain John Kerry’s advantage over candidates like Howard Dean and John Edwards. At the time, I liked the liberal senator from Massachusetts, but that seemed the wrong word to describe him. The term that seemed more appropriate to me, and the word I have since heard used by more than one former Kerry adviser, was “presidential.” I’m still not completely sure how to more precisely define that adjective, but Senator Kerry’s commanding voice, craggy good looks, and, most of all, his aristocratic bearing surely inspired its application to him.
August 13, 2006
Becoming History II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:30 AM EST More on becoming history, and on history becoming startlingly more immediate: I wrote the other day about the eeriness of seeing what is vivid and immediate in one’s own times become someone else’s “history,” by which I meant decisively and irretrievably the past. A few years ago I had the opposite experience. I was talking to my girlfriend’s father about his boyhood in Western Pennsylvania, and he mentioned seeing Civil War vets marching at the head of the Memorial Day parade, and talking to them around town—he remarked that every small boy had known who they were. I am sure they did. He then added that these men had not been “real veterans,” just militia Lee had brushed aside on the way to Gettysburg. When I later quoted this to Richard Snow, the editor of this magazine, we agreed that this seemed a fairly stringent definition—we both thought people who chose leave a plough or dry goods store to get in the way of the Army of Northern Virginia, however briefly, might reasonably be considered veterans. But this man had been a combat engineer in the Bulge, which may yield a different frame of reference. What startled me about this was the sense of vanishing historical distance. The Civil War was history for me—infinitely moving and instructive, indeed constitutive of what I took to be one of history’s more profound lessons—but it was, in the sense defined above, “history”: something located across an impassible gulf of time. But now I was talking to a man who had talked to men who had fought in it, and it came much closer. This was not exactly a rational process—that gulf of time was still the same almost century and a half—but the sense of absolute otherness had definitely diminished. The experience of coming mysteriously closer to what in retrospect had previously felt like “mere” history was in part thrilling, in part uncanny. When I next saw my father, I happened to mention this, because I was still rather stupidly agog over this uncanniness. I’d met a man who’d seen Civil War vets! My father, born in the same year as my girlfriend’s father, was baffled by my astonishment. As a small boy he’d seen men marching at the head of the Memorial Day parade—my father called it Decoration Day—in Chicago in the 1920s. He’d never bothered to mention it, which made me remember that what any generation takes to be the accessible past becomes much less emotionally accessible history for the next generation. Pondering this, I then thought about something equally obvious: Things become history with different degrees of intensity, because historical distance is not the same thing as chronological distance. In 1961 the Civil War felt a lot closer than the Spanish-American War. The Civil War was particularly resonant history for my generation, because its centenary coincided with a dramatic period of the Civil Rights movement, which in the early 1960s seemed the war’s long-delayed conclusion, and that coincidence itself coincided with my generation’s first becoming conscious of politics. I remember children in the school yard chanting “Whistle while you work/Stevenson’s a jerk/Eisenhower’s got the power/whistle while you work,” although I cannot imagine why we chanted that. all of our parents seemed to be Democrats, and I don’t think that jingle meant a thing to us. The Civil War was different from the Spanish-American War because it illuminated our particular present and made a morally coherent narrative of American history. It didn’t hurt that the centenary came within shouting distance of the liberation of Buchenwald, which came at the end of a war everyone’s father seemed to have fought in. This meant that for part my generation, American armies were on extremely memorable occasions used to free slaves. Many of us would shortly form other views of American armies’ possible uses—Vietnam was around the corner—but for some of us that first sense, once formed, never entirely vanished. For many of my students, the Civil War seems less resonant, and possessed of smaller meanings. For some of their own teachers, also members of my generation, the Spanish-American may be the more resonant affair, for a number of reasons. More on this soon.
August 12, 2006
Mayor Lindsay and Me Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:00 PM EST Like Josh Zeitz, I was startled to learn that John Steele Gordon had been Herman Badillo’s press secretary in 1977, and I was intrigued by both posts. Josh’s post brings back a buried memory, for one of the events he discusses, the 1969 campaign between Lindsay, Procaccino, Marchi, and Mailer, was the only political campaign I’ve ever worked on. I find Josh’s post chastening, although in my defense, I was still a couple of weeks shy of my eighteenth birthday, so perhaps I can plead that I was not yet responsible for my actions. A friend at college in Manhattan had been recruited to work for Lindsay, he recruited me, and we were working for an advertising executive who was running Lindsay’s dirty tricks department. The only such trick I remember was a box of adhesive posters, smaller than bumper stickers but made of the same materials, each with a white letter i on a blue background. These were made to be placed over the letter e in the third word printed on Procaccino’s white-on-blue larger posters, which adorned buses, so after the alteration those posters read “For a Bitter New York for Everyone: Vote for Mario Procaccino.” I do not remember if the people who did this had to break into the city’s bus depots or were let in by a city employee. I somehow suspect the latter. At the age of 17 this struck me as a startlingly witty piece of invaluable political theater. We all “knew” that Mario Procaccino was a racist conservative, and we all “knew” that the handsome, classy Lindsay was a real liberal and the sort of gent you wanted running a city. I have no idea why we thought we knew either of these things, since on the strength of John and Josh, who rarely agree but in this case do, Lindsay had no more gift for being mayor of New York than he would have had for planning the logistics for Overlord. But I was certain enough about what thought I knew to commit what were admittedly petty crimes (conspiracy to commit vandalism?) on John Lindsay’s behalf. This makes me think a bit about politics in general. If in the fall of 1969 you had told me that my support for Lindsay, the son of a lawyer and investment banker, educated at the Buckley School, St. Paul’s, Yale (Scroll and Key) and Yale Law, was to a real degree predicated on the same basis that mid-nineteenth-century French peasants voted for the chap in the chateau—social deference to a local notable we had mistaken for our natural leader—I’d have been first baffled, then enraged, but I wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on. To a greater degree, my contempt for Procaccino was predicated on the same basis on which eighteenth-century Parisian mobs thought that Marie Antoinette was a bisexual whore who controlled the cuckold king in the interests of an enemy state, or pro-Vichy Frenchmen thought that Jews and Freemasons led by the Jew Roosevelt were on a campaign to mongrelize and defile France, which is to say scurrilities spread by rumor, without a scrap of reliable evidence. The difference, I think, is not to my credit. Unlike those eighteenth-century Parisians or twentieth-century Vichy partisans, in 1969 I was both highly literate and able to consult a very free press. Growing up and taking those how-a-bill-becomes-a-law classes in grade school, I got the reassuring impression that democratic politics worked because rational agents consult the available evidence and after mature deliberation reach reasonable conclusions. How much democratic politics works that way seems open to dispute. Every so often I read something by apparently competent political scientists arguing, with some evidence, that very large numbers of citizens make political decisions with the same exhaustive deliberation I displayed in the fall of 1969. Then I banish those arguments, and that evidence, from my mind. They are apparently too disconcerting to happily retain. When I do remember them, I fall back on Churchill’s reflection that electoral democracy is the least defensible system of governance we know about—except for all the others.
August 12, 2006
Big City, Small World II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:20 PM EST I agree with Joshua Zeitz that Herman Badillo’s best chance to be elected mayor of New York was in 1969. And I agree that he would have been had it not been for Norman Mailer. (Badillo agrees with that assessment, by the way.) Mailer’s ego trip masquerading as a political campaign took just enough votes away from Badillo to give Mario Procaccino the edge. Whatever his talents as a novelist, Norman Mailer has a place right next to Bella Abzug in my personal Hall of Human Horror Stories. At least Ms. Abzug never stabbed her spouse or campaigned—successfully, alas—to spring a homicidal sociopath from jail so that he could murder yet again. In 1973 Badillo came in second and forced a run-off with Abe Beame, who won. A card-carrying member of the city political establishment, Beame just continued fiscal business as usual until the banks—intervening like a family with an alcoholic—finally said no more borrowing. I also agree that John Lindsay was as incompetent as he was handsome. However, he at least had the saving grace of wit now and then. When a reporter asked him about a slightly politically embarrassing remark that his wife, Mary, had made, Lindsay just shrugged and said, “Bedfellows make strange politics.” About all I remember of Mario Procaccino is a New Yorker cartoon that summer of 1969 showing two businessmen walking down a Midtown avenue. A few blocks away King Kong is raging through the streets ripping skyscrapers out by the roots. “That does it!,” says one of the businessmen. “I’m voting for Procaccino.”
I didn’t know that he coined the term “limousine liberal.” It was a prescient remark, for that’s about the only kind of liberal left these days. It is interesting that Joe Lieberman took 55 percent of the votes in working class Stamford, while Lamont took 68 percent in superaffluent Greenwich next door. Much of the trouble of modern-day liberalism, I think, is that so many of its adherents live, both intellectually and often physically, in gated communities. They genuinely want to help the poor and the downtrodden; they just don’t care to actually encounter any of them. Spending a summer in the South Bronx, Bed-Stuy, East Harlem, and Corona would be an enlightening experience for them. But, alas, they go to the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, and the Cape instead.
As for my becoming a fabulously wealthy PR man, while I could accept the burdens of being fabulously wealthy with my customary good grace, I prefer writing history to writing press releases. History after all deals with the truth.
August 12, 2006
Big City, Small World Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:00 AM EST It’s a small world, after all. (Who said that?) Until I read his fascinating post on the 1977 New York mayoral election, I had no idea that John Steele Gordon once worked for Rep. Herman Badillo, whose candidacy I completely overlooked in my prior post. Two things worth pointing out: First, not one, but two contributing editors to American Heritage Magazine were working for mayoral candidates in 1977. Mr. Gordon was press secretary to Herman Badillo, and Harold Holzer, the noted Lincoln scholar and frequent contributor to American Heritage, was press secretary to Bella Abzug. In Jonathan Mahler’s book, which I recommended to readers in my earlier post, Holzer is quoted extensively. It’s clear he admired Abzug’s politics, but he pulled few punches in describing her personality. She seems to have been a singularly unpleasant person to deal with. Second point, and I wonder if Mr. Gordon will agree: Herman Badillo’s real moment was in 1969 when, as Bronx borough president, he finished a very close second to city comptroller Mario Procaccino in the Democratic mayoral primary. In a divided, five-way field that also included former Mayor Robert Wagner, Rep. James Scheuer, and the novelist Norman Mailer, Procaccino—a moderate Democrat with very little imagination and even less rhetorical flourish—squeezed out a razor-thin victory. Had 35,000 very foolish, radical-chic Manhattanites voted for the real progressive in the Democratic primary (Badillo), rather than the court jester (Mailer), history would have been different. Had he been nominated, it’s quite likely that Badillo would have defeated the incumbent mayor, John Lindsay, who was exceedingly tall, exceedingly handsome, exceedingly charismatic, and exceedingly bad at being mayor of New York. Though he was well-intentioned and entirely sincere about the cause of racial justice, Lindsay failed at many of the basic jobs a mayor must do—for instance, when his administration famously botched its response to the 1969 winter blizzard, leaving most roads in Queens covered in snow for two weeks. Lindsay managed to win by painting Procaccino as a backlash Democrat in the George Wallace mode. This was a clever ploy to win back the Jewish vote. At the time, Jews composed 25 percent of New York’s population but 30 percent of its electorate. Though city Jews were very liberal, they were also furious with the mayor over his support of black community activists during the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville school controversy; furthermore, large pockets of outer-borough Jews were just as furious as their non-Jewish neighbors with the mayor’s inept management of city services. Lindsay, who ran on the Liberal line, mercilessly portrayed Procaccino as a conservative bigot. In fact, Procaccino was fairly moderate. By national standards, he was probably a liberal. He pledged to establish a cooperative day-care system for welfare mothers and blasted the mayor for opposing a program to help wean drug addicts off heroine by providing free access to methadone. “I’m the same progressive Democrat today that I was 25 years ago when La Guardia appointed me [to city government],” he told members of his party. But Procaccino was born with his foot in his mouth. Editorial writers relished his every rhetorical gaffe, as when he told a hostile audience in Harlem, “My heart is as black as yours.” He also coined the term “limousine liberal,” claiming that the same left-wing Democrats who were deserting him for John Lindsay had forgotten that being progressive and being tough on crime were not mutually exclusive. Lindsay ultimately won reelection because 44 percent of Jewish voters held their noses and voted for him. Had the race been a three-way match-up between Badillo, Lindsay, and the Republican candidate, John Marchi, it’s possible—even likely—that Badillo would have emerged the winner. Lindsay simply would not have been able to scare enough liberal Jewish voters away from the Democratic ticket. Think of all that could have been. New York could have blazed a new trail by electing the first Latino mayor of a major city. The city would have benefited from four, perhaps eight, years of smart, progressive leadership. And Mr. Gordon, after serving a term or two as press secretary to the mayor, would have become either a nationally prominent campaign consultant or a fabulously wealthy New York public relations man. Counterfactual history is sometimes bittersweet.
August 11, 2006
Flag Pins Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:00 PM EST Josh Zeitz concluded a post (“All the Way With Bill McKay”) with a passage in apparent praise of American-flag lapel pins. I could not tell whether this passage was inflected with ironies, which I suspect is my fault, not Josh’s. My problem is that I do not know quite what I think about American flag lapel pins. Josh noted that Nixon began the vogue for these pins after noticing one in a movie poster for The Candidate. That may be part of my problem. In the Nixon days, the pin seemed to be an implied accusation of a want of patriotism, the subtext being that if you weren’t wearing the flag, you were probably burning it. This is a political tactic about which Josh was notably astringent in an earlier post, when he quoted Pete Hamill on Korean War-era red-baiting of Truman and Acheson. You ought not to have to conspicuously display your patriotism as the price of not having that patriotism doubted, and people who propose the contrary are contemptible. So for some years I was a bit irritated by people who displayed the flag: It seemed less a gesture of love of country than of suspicion of fellow citizens. After the passions of the Vietnam War died down, this was much less obviously the case, and in 2001 I became markedly less sure about the meaning of flag display. At a campus public meeting in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, a colleague very much on the left deplored hostility on the left to the flag. He mused that the right’s usurpation of the flag back in 1968 had been a political disaster for the left, and he pleaded with his colleagues and students “not to let the right take the flag away.” They did not cheer him. There’s one rub: in a small portion of the left, it is (metaphorically speaking) still the fashion to spell America with a k, sometimes with three ks. On a different although still small portion of the left, it is the fashion to deprecate the notion that the nation-state embodies a legitimate political community; it is better to be transnational than national, better to work in an NGO than in a government, at least one’s own government. Maybe this attitude is most common on the academic left, where after 2001 it produced an odd piece of evidence about attitudes toward the flag. There were a lot of flag stickers on cars in the parking lot, but they seemed invariably to be adorning the cars owned by kitchen workers and grounds crew, in whose name some flagless academics spoke with remarkable confidence. In immigrant neighborhoods you also saw a lot of flags. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when I pointed this out to a colleague, I heard the ingenious speculation that those flags were attempts to avoid lynching. Maybe, but I was and remain skeptical. Being attacked from without tends to make people more patriotic. If the shards of my German can be relied upon, the economical word Burgfrieden means the peace within the walls of a besieged town. In any case, I did not feel accused of lacking patriotism when I saw those flags, or flag decals or flag pins. I did not buy one, but I did not disapprove of them. Then my father made a joke that reminded of me of my first response. Near the end of his life, in the immediate aftermath of the Swift boat baiting of John Kerry, my sister, who works in government, won an award. My father went to the ceremony. At that point in his life, on those rare occasions when he wore a sport jacket, he had recently taken to wearing a miniature combat infantry badge as a lapel pin. One interesting thing about wearing a miniature combat infantry badge in your lapel is that if anyone knows what it means, that person is unlikely to be annoyed by it, and anyone likely to be annoyed by it is extremely unlikely to know what it means. A former police detective, now an investigator, noticed it, and commented approvingly. My sister told me that my father grinned in reply and remarked that having never served in the Texas Air National Guard, he’d feared he had no right to wear the flag. So that’s another part of the problem: The flag is again being used to impugn the patriotism of political enemies. Phrases like “the last refuge of a scoundrel” again come to mind, but now we know what that left colleague of mine almost tearfully proclaimed: If you are on the left, you are a fool or worse if you let the right make love of country their unique possession. I am pretty sure my colleague was speaking out of more than narrow tactical calculation. And I remember, alas, that he was met with incomprehension.
August 11, 2006
Lieberman, Lamont, and Jackson Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:45 PM EST I am interested in Josh Zeitz’s and Alex Burns’s exchanges on Scoop Jackson and the wisdom of invoking Jackson as someone whose history might in any way instruct us about Joe Lieberman, and about the current political environment. These are tentative thoughts, and I am prepared to defer a bit to both of them. Josh is a specialist in twentieth-century U.S. history, Alex is studying it now, and I can make neither claim. With those caveats, first Lieberman, and then Jackson, in a slightly different perspective.
Josh quotes Mark Schmitt, who observed that “Scoop Jackson wasn’t ‘repudiated’ or robbed of something legitimately his. He just, like dozens of Senatorial would-be-presidents before and since, simply Didn’t Get Any Votes. He’s not a martyr, just a guy who No One Voted For. A lot like Joe Lieberman in fact.” But as Josh notes in his other posts, Lieberman did get some votes, lots of them—48 percent of the Democrats voting in the primary—and he has a real chance (Josh thinks a better than even chance) of winning the seat in November. If Josh is right, someone holding an increasingly unpopular political position on the war is likely to prevail in one of the bluest of blue states. How do we explain that paradox?
I do not trust my own instincts about this, because Lieberman leaves me cold, for reasons having nothing to do with Iraq; among other things, I profoundly disliked his moralizing about Clinton’s adulteries during the impeachment proceedings, and I dislike his tone when displaying his religiosity. Maybe Lieberman’s bombastic sexual moralizing and general sanctimony are in fact attractive to a large number of voters, and offset his prowar position, but I think the paradox is genuine: People may like something about a Democrat approving a war of which they disapprove.
If so, I’d guess this is because these voters like a lot of things about Democrats but have anxieties about how willing Democrats may be to use military force, and about how likely Democrats are to listen to an unrepresentative (but nonetheless vocal) wing of their party that seems to have antimilitary and reality-avoiding tendencies. In the last presidential election, my guess is that people feared that John Kerry, while unlikely to fight an unnecessary war, might also be unlikely to fight a necessary one. When Kerry vowed to win in Iraq, his polling numbers went up; when Chechen terrorists murdered hundreds of schoolchildren, his numbers went down. The most devastating (and grossly unjust) attack on him was directed at his claim to have demonstrated the military virtues. While a remarkably small number of votes can swing modern elections, and the votes swinging that one were Ohio votes apparently moved by domestic issues, my instinct is that diffuse sentiments about war in general hurt rather than helped Kerry. On this theory, if a Democrat wholeheartedly backs a war the electorate dislikes, he may fail to exploit their antiwar sentiment, but he may simultaneously allay their fears about his character, and allow his generally attractive views on (inter alia) education and economic insecurity to exert greater weight.
If this is right, is the 2004 election a good predictor of 2006 and 2008? The Iraq war is much more unpopular now than it was in 2004, and it seems likely to be yet more unpopular in 2008, if large numbers of Americans are still deployed in Iraq. On the other hand today’s papers remind us that the reality that people suspect Democrats avoid can pop up at any moment. Josh has already made the case that hostility to the war in Iraq has no necessary connection to what I am calling reality avoidance. My case is that a crucial portion of the electorate does not quite accept that case, however just it may be. That is unlikely to be fatal in 2006; I think the Democrats are going to do well this fall. My guess is that antiwar sentiment can win you an election—but not necessarily the next one.
Back to Scoop Jackson. Josh mentions Jackson’s 1972 run at the nomination, which he lost to an antiwar candidate who presided over an absolute rout of my party. Jackson ran again in 1976, on what were then called “social issues”: He was against busing and abortion, keen on “law and order,” and he lost to Jimmy Carter, who defeated a number of liberal opponents as well as Jackson. Carter went to the White House as a fiscal conservative in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saigon, when enthusiasm about war was at a pretty low ebb, and détente at a high, so the willingness to use force, which Carter very conspicuously lacked, was off the agenda. Still, he campaigned as an Annapolis grad and former naval officer, which probably helped him.
Carter’s unwillingness to use military force came to the fore when he was unwilling to use it against Iran, in the face of gross provocation. That unwillingness turned Ronald Reagan from a joke into a President, led to a dozen years of Republican control of the executive, and is probably the source of the reputation for military unreliability Democrats still retain. The reputation may be unfair, but it is still a fact of our political culture. What happened to Jackson may be a good guide to what happens to people seeking my party’s nomination. What happened to Carter, alas, may be a good guide to what can happen to Democrats running for the White House.
I agree with Alex Burns when he notes that Jackson is a durable symbol to the people who remember him because he reminds then that Democrats are not necessarily what I would call Carteresque. Jackson is not remembered for his views of busing or abortion, and his views of the Soviet Union matter only because of the analogy made to Islamic radicalism and to some obnoxious and dangerous non-Islamist regimes. I know Republicans who started life as Democrats and continue to dislike Republican economic and social policy. Those people evoke Jackson, however mistily and imprecisely, as the sort of Democrat they would vote for. I think some of them mean it.
August 11, 2006
New York Since 1977 II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:30 PM EST Joshua Zeitz wrote a most interesting post on New York City in the summer of 1977. As Maurice Chevalier sang in Gigi, “Ah, yes, I remember it well.”
He writes that yesterday was the twenty-ninth anniversary of the day the police nabbed the Son of Sam. That would mean today is the twenty-ninth anniversary of the day I called a press conference for then-Congressman Herman Badillo’s mayoral campaign and no one showed up, not even El Diario, the Spanish-language newspaper so pro-Badillo that it would just translate my press releases into Spanish and publish them verbatim as a news story. The Son of Sam story, not surprisingly, had sucked up all the reportorial resources of the New York media.
I spent that summer as Badillo’s press secretary, visiting just about every one of New York’s enormous number of neighborhoods, hosting a press lunch at an exclusive club on Park Avenue one day, handing out press releases in front of a burned-out tenement in the Bronx the next. I spent the day of the great blackout in the South Bronx, which was his congressional district, going around with Herman to police precincts, firehouses, and just walking the streets in the blistering heat (it was over 100 degrees that day). The utter chaos wasn’t frightening in the least. Indeed, it was like a vast block party, only with looting. “Hey, Herman!” people would shout as they walked out of stores with smashed windows, hauling away television sets and cartons of liquor.
One memory I especially cherish. Herman, like all candidates for mayor, was invited to lunch at The New York Times so that the editors could consider him for an endorsement (which went to Mario Cuomo, who fortunately lost, see below). We went first to the executive floor where we were introduced to Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, the publisher and, with his family, owner of the Times. Sulzberger then led us to the floor where the private dining rooms were located, as was the staff cafeteria. When the elevator doors opened, there were perhaps 50 people waiting to get on, with the usual impatience of New Yorkers. One glimpse of Sulzberger, however, and a corridor opened up instantly as the people moved aside to make room for him. As we made our way to the dining room, Herman leaned over to me and said, “Now I know how Moses felt when he reached the Red Sea.”
The summer of 1977 was perhaps the worst summer in New York’s modern history, the nadir of the great city’s fall, and the base from which to measure its spectacular renaissance. The streets were filthy and dangerous, the subways graffiti-ridden and unreliable (it seemed that maybe one train in four would suddenly go out of service, dumping its passengers at the next station, already crowded). Central Park, that incomparable masterpiece of nineteenth-century landscape design, looked worse than at any time since Robert Moses had cleaned out the Hoovervilles at the end of the Great Depression 40 years earlier.
But while it was a terrible summer for the city I love and where I was born, it was a great summer for me, even though Herman ended up sixth in a field of seven Democratic candidates for mayor.
That was a pity, for I think he would have been a great mayor. That’s why I disagree utterly with Mr. Zeitz’s statement that “three political giants—Bella Abzug, Ed Koch, and Mario Cuomo—fought a historic, knock-down-drag-out fight for City Hall” that year. For one thing, there were seven candidates, including incumbent mayor Abe Beame, who were very much in the race. (I can see him being left out of a list of “giants” however. I encountered Mayor Beame many times in those years and every time the same thought ran through my head: “Gee, he’s short.” He was maybe, just maybe, five two.)
None of the three “giants” were giants at the time. Ed Koch was the congressman for the “Silk Stocking district”—the Upper East Side—and was thought to be a lightweight, perhaps because of his considerable wit. His reputation was made as mayor for the next 12 years, as he led the city back from the brink by making many decisions unpopular with the city’s political establishment.
Mario Cuomo had only been a failed candidate for lieutenant governor (a powerless job, unless something happens to the governor) and secretary of state, an appointive office and basically a glorified clerk’s job. It was only in 1982, when he was elected governor of New York, that Cuomo came into national prominence. He was, in fact, a terrible governor. In three terms (12 years) he did nothing, absolutely nothing, to reverse the state’s continuing decline. He didn’t even try. Instead he presided over it, allowing the state’s political establishment to continue business as usual—using accounting tricks that had gotten the city in so much trouble and that would have gotten a corporate CEO thrown in jail—in order to avoid any reform whatsoever. Cuomo is a very gifted orator and made great speeches—in Terre Haute and San Francisco—but never attempted to rally the people to begin making the fundamental reforms New York State still has not begun. He was the very model of the modern major liberal: all talk, all establishment, no change.
Now Bella Abzug. She was a darling of the media, especially television, because she was colorful—all those big hats—and could always be counted on for a great sound bite, thanks to having the loudest mouth in a city of loudmouths. It was only in the nuts and bolts of politics that she was no good, mainly because she was no good. She espoused every liberal cause—and I have no problem with that, even if I disagree with the cause—but was hypocritical in fact. She was all in favor of gay rights, for instance, but routinely described individual gays behind their backs with words that have no place on this blog (or in the hearts of decent people). She treated her staff like dirt.
Her personal qualities, especially her unbounded ego, total self-centeredness, and utter disregard for anyone’s feelings but her own, made her completely ineffective in Congress. Worst of all was the fact that her word was no good. Politics is a dirty, backstabbing business. As Harry Truman explained, “If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.” But as in all businesses, from banking to the Mafia, there is a law in politics that must not be ignored: a deal is a deal. You support me on X and I’ll support you on Y. Break many of those deals, and no one will give you the time of day. Abzug routinely double-crossed other congressmen and, in fact, no one did give her the time of day, except the news media.
In 1976, when Abzug gave up her seat in the House to run for the Democratic nomination for Senate, she approached Herman Badillo, whose ambition to run for mayor the next year was no secret (he had run in 1969, when he nearly won, and 1973, when he had done far better than anyone thought possible). She offered a deal: Help me win the Senate nomination and I’ll help you win the mayoral nomination. Herman accepted and worked his (and my) tail off in every Hispanic neighborhood in New York, where Abzug’s name was not well known. In the result it was, thank God, not quite enough. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (now there’s a real giant—a towering figure both intellectually and politically) narrowly defeated her and went on to four very distinguished terms in the Senate. Had it not been for Herman’s efforts, Abzug would have been clobbered, for she did much better than expected in the Hispanic neighborhoods, where Badillo’s endorsement was political gold.
The next year, as the mayor’s race was beginning to crank up, Herman had lunch with Abzug. He asked her how she thought she might best contribute to his campaign. She replied, with not even a wisp of embarrassment, “Oh, I’ve decided to run for mayor myself.” When Herman pointed out that they had a deal, she simply said, “The people want me to run.”
No they didn’t, she finished fourth, even behind the discredited Abe Beame, and never held political office again.
If Bella Abzug was a giant, I vote for more pigmies in politics.
August 11, 2006
All the Way With Bill McKay Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:30 PM EST Those AmericanHeritage.com readers who are not Jimmy Stewart or Robert Redford fans may not have immediately recognized the dry humor behind the title of Alexander Burns’s last post (“Jefferson Smith or Bill McKay?”). For those not in the know, Jefferson Smith was Jimmy Stewart’s character in the 1939 Frank Capra film Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, and Bill McKay was Robert Redford’s character in the 1972 film The Candidate. Whereas Jefferson Smith is a political naif whom the political bosses try—unsuccessfully—to corrupt, Bill McKay is a liberal’s liberal who ultimately succumbs to the shallow demands of politics. Both men wind up in the Senate, but only one keeps his integrity.
Taken in context, both films were perfect specimens of their times. Capra’s film celebrated the fundamental decency of the common man, a central theme in popular front era literature (think The Grapes of Wrath), art (think Ben Shahn), and music (think Woody Guthrie). While no popular-fronter, Frank Capra was a fan of Franklin Roosevelt and heartened by the New Deal’s successful political incorporation of certain groups—namely, industrial workers and immigrants—who had once been kept (or kept themselves) at arm’s length from the electoral process.
By contrast The Candidate took a dim view of the political process. Following closely on the heels of Joe McGinniss’s book The Selling of the President—a journalistic exposé of the intense P.R. and advertising effort behind Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign—the film portrayed politics as an image game. The Candidate implicitly argued that the only way for an honest person to participate in politics was to stay clear of it. Bill McKay originally enters the California Senate race intending to make some important speeches and lose the election. But he gets ambitious and lets his handlers package him with glossy advertisements and canned television commercials. No wonder that in the film’s famous closing line, the victorious candidate turns to his campaign manager and asks, “What do we do now?” He has lost his moral compass.
I’ve been doing some research on Richard Nixon for my book-in-progress on 1970s America. Along the way, I’ve learned that Nixon and his political aides were enamored of the promotional posters for The Candidate, some of which showed McKay/Redford wearing an American-flag lapel pin. 1972 being an election year, Nixon instructed his staff to procure flag pins and to wear them at all times. Thus a new vogue in American politics was born. In Washington, D.C., you’re not somebody if you’re not wearing the flag.
I know there are some who say that this exercise in audacious patriotism is an empty gesture. They’ll argue that wearing the flag on your lapel is marginally less tacky than wearing your heart on your sleeve. But I for one am always heartened to see my congressman wearing a lapel flag. It assures me that he is on the side of freedom, and not on the side of the terrorists. In these uncertain times, and without this visual aid, how could I be sure?
August 11, 2006
Joe Lieberman’s Scare Campaign Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:00 AM EST Yesterday Joe Lieberman, who is fighting for his political life as an independent, warned that “if we just pick up [from Iraq] like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England. It will strengthen them and they will strike again.” Even for a man with such a tremendous sense of self-importance, Lieberman has gone off the deep end. A vote for Ned Lamont, he suggests, will embolden the terrorists.
Perhaps Lieberman is taking cues from his new allies at the White House. Shortly after Tuesday’s Connecticut primary, Vice President Dick Cheney worried aloud that Lamont’s victory might embolden “Al Qaeda types.” “It’s an unfortunate development,” Cheney said, “. . . from the standpoint of the Democratic Party, to see a man like Lieberman pushed aside because of his willingness to support an aggressive posture in terms of our national security strategy.”
Not to be outdone, Martin Peretz, the neoconnish publisher of The New Republic, suggests that “Lieberman will probably be helped by the case of the would-be airplane terrorists arrested in Britain. This episode shows that Islamofascism is a real threat to civilized life and that it must be fought severely and wholeheartedly. I don’t know if Ned Lamont has thought seriously about this.”
What utter nonsense. No doubt Ned Lamont will drive home a simple point (one that a majority of Americans—but not Messrs. Lieberman, Cheney and Peretz—understand), to wit that 9/11 and Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with each other; that our presence in Iraq has only inflamed global hostility toward the United States; that we have accomplished nothing in Iraq but destabilize the region and aid Iran in its construction of a dangerous radical Shiite alignment throughout the Middle East; that the war has stretched our military and financial resources hopelessly thin; and that when it comes to the real war on terror, the Bush administration is asleep at the wheel.
Need evidence? Today’s New York Times reports that the Transportation Security Administration (part of the Department of Homeland Security) shifted half of its $110 million research budget to paying for airport screeners, which accounts for the inexcusable delay in finding ways to test for the kind of liquid explosives that the British terror cell was planning to use on trans-Atlantic passenger flights. We’re pinching pennies in the real war on terror in order to finance a war that has nothing to do with Al Qaeda.
From a historical point of view, the hyped-up rhetorical offensive against war critics is reminiscent of the 1940s. As early as 1944, GOP standard-bearers revealed a cynical desperation to come out of the political wilderness to which they had been consigned since FDR’s victory in the 1932 presidential election. That year New York Gov. Tom Dewey, the Republican presidential nominee, called Franklin Roosevelt an “indispensable” ally to American Communist leader Earl Browder and claimed that “in Russia, a communist is a man who supports his Government. In America a communist supports the fourth term so our form of government may more easily be changed.”
The attacks didn’t stick. But that didn’t stop Republicans from using them again in 1946. That year GOP Congressman Carroll Reece spoke for many of his colleagues when he likened the upcoming election to a struggle “between communism and republicanism” and asserted that “alien-minded radicals” were in control of the Democratic party. House Minority Leader Joe Martin concurred, assailing the Democrats for enabling a “boring from within by subversionists high up in government.”
All over the country, conservatives plied the same strategy. California Senate candidate William F. Knowland claimed that communist operatives were fighting like hell to defeat him at the polls. Governor Edward Martin spoke dimly of “the threat of a Soviet Pennsylvania.” Rep. Claude Bakewell of Missouri cast his opponent as a “Moscow-inspired” communist stooge.
Fast forward to the Korean War, which many arch-conservatives opposed, even as they hammered away at Cold War liberals. Recalling the mood at his very conservative Catholic high school in September 1950, Pete Hamill wrote: “Almost everybody thought that communism had to be stopped. At the same time, they were attacking Truman and Acheson, blaming them for the war. I tried to make sense of this. If it was important to be fighting the communists, and Truman and Acheson were fighting them, why were they wrong?”
Today, Joe Lieberman and his allies claim that a victory for a liberal Democrat is tantamount to a victory for the terrorists. It’s a nice way to escape accountability for their failure to fight a common-sense, nuts-and-bolts campaign against terror. But it won’t make America safer, and it won’t hold up historically.
August 11, 2006
Jefferson Smith or Bill McKay? Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:45 AM EST I am glad that Joshua Zeitz has continued the discussion of Connecticut, and expanded it to address the Lieberman-Jackson comparison. I do not think, though, that our assessments of Ned Lamont’s political views differ as widely as he believes. If I gave the impression that I think Lamont is too radical for Connecticut, allow me to correct that impression. Ned Lamont’s positions are well within the liberal mainstream, and akin to those of other major figures in Connecticut’s Democratic establishment. Furthermore, I share Mr. Zeitz’s belief in many of these positions. The similarities I see between Lamont and real radicals like Cynthia McKinney have more to do with the depth of their thinking (not deep) and the political company they keep (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, etc.). As I wrote before, though, I still think Lieberman is a better match for the broader Connecticut electorate. And in spite of his all-too-intransigent support for the Iraq war, I remain convinced that Lieberman was an asset to the national Democratic party, and an appealing figure to Americans usually distrustful of liberalism.
I do disagree about Lamont’s qualifications. While there are superficial similarities between Lamont’s business background and Jon Corzine’s, the latter’s career required him to make decisions of national and international significance. By taking Goldman Sachs public, Corzine probably had a bigger impact on American business than any of President Bush’s treasury secretaries (although Hank Paulson may have greater things in store). Ned Lamont’s business, if I’m not mistaken, involved providing cable television service, frequently to gated communities. This is hardly an analogous achievement.
Joshua Zeitz is surely correct that less qualified men have served in the Senate. I’m not terribly familiar with Glen Taylor’s career, but I’d probably put George Murphy in the less-qualified-than-Ned-Lamont category. I wouldn’t have cast my ballot for him, either. I would also agree that Paul Wellstone’s qualifications for public office were slim, but I think it’s pretty clear that Wellstone was exceptional across the board. He was also helped by the fact that in 1990 no Minnesota Democrat of any stature wanted to face off against incumbent Senator Rudy Boschwitz. Ned Lamont, from what I have seen, is no Paul Wellstone.
To look beyond 2006, however, I find Mr. Zeitz’s argument regarding Jackson and Lieberman quite persuasive. Henry Jackson’s legacy has been inflated in the last few years, principally by neoconservatives like William Kristol and Democrats of Lieberman’s stripe. As Mark Schmitt details, their lionization of Jackson overlooks a lot of history. This revisionist portrayal of Jackson has gained currency, though, beyond the personal solace it gives to hardcore Lieberman loyalists. It is also a useful and appealing myth for a larger group of Democrats who long for what William Safire called, in one of his final op-ed columns, a party returned “to ideological consistency: interventionist at home and abroad.” Many of these Democrats must be aware of Jackson’s problematic character, but by mythologizing his career they hope to make their party somewhat more comfortable with the use of military force.
The comparison between Lamont and McGovern is, in my view, more objectionable. I think it’s unfair to George McGovern. McGovern failed to produce a comprehensive and effective vision for U.S. foreign relations. But on the central issue of the day, Vietnam, he had an unambiguous position. Lamont similarly seems not to grasp the full range of challenges facing America. His ideas about Iran and North Korea seem inchoate at best. Perhaps worse, though, has been his prolonged vagueness on Iraq. If you’re setting out to challenge an incumbent senator for his war position, you really ought to know whether you’re for the Kerry-Feingold plan or the Reed-Levin proposal. It is this kind of unserious campaigning that makes me most wary of Lamont, and most skeptical of his capacity for service.
Jefferson Smith was a naif, but Ned Lamont strikes me as more of a dilettante. It is possible that I am judging him too harshly. But in general, I’ll take a flawed, but decent career politician like Scoop over that kind of candidate.
August 10, 2006
Scoop Jackson’s Ghost? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:45 PM EST I enjoyed Alexander Burns’s post on Ned Lamont. It’s very well-reasoned (and I’m glad to learn that I’m not the only AmericanHeritage.com contributor with an inexplicably keen interest in Connecticut politics). I’m not sure I agree with his argument, though.
The twin premise that Ned Lamont is too underqualified and too radical to represent Connecticut in the Senate seems off base to me.
Take the second point first. Lamont’s candidacy rested largely on his opposition to the Iraq war, a position shared by 60 percent of the American electorate. A brief glance at his campaign website reveals that he supports standard liberal positions: funding for early childhood education; unfettered access to reproductive services (including over-the-counter access to Plan B); state-sponsored health insurance for all uncovered children, and more federal subsidies for employer-based coverage; civil unions for gays and lesbians (and, if I understand his website correctly, gay marriage); and a fast track to citizenship for the roughly 11 million immigrants who have entered the United States illegally. I’m not arguing that Lamont’s positions are “right,” per se (though, in fact, I believe they are). Only that they are not substantially different from Chris Dodd’s, or Rosa DeLauro’s, or John Larson’s.
As for qualifications, Lamont is a successful businessman who, to his credit, could have rested comfortably on his family fortune but instead raised bank loans to start a successful business. Whether that prepares one for the U.S. Senate, I don’t know. But it certainly doesn’t make him less prepared than, say, Jon Corzine, the former Goldman Sachs executive who vaulted straight from Wall Street to the Senate, or Paul Wellstone, who traveled overnight from the Carleton College political science department to the U.S. Capitol, or—let’s reach back a little further—George Murphy, the song-and-dance man turned Republican Senator from California, or, going back further still, Glenn Taylor, the country-western singer who represented Idaho in the U.S. Senate in the 1940s. Some of these men proved better senators than others (in my mind, Wellstone ranks among the recent greats), and none managed to ruin the republic in the space of six years.
Certain Beltway elites have been constructing an odd metaphor over the past few days, and it goes something like this: Joe Lieberman is to Scoop Jackson as Ned Lamont is to George McGovern. In other words, Lieberman is a latter-day version of Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the ardent Cold War liberal from Washington State who made a valiant run for the Presidency in 1972 only to be thwarted by effete New Left forces aligned with Sen. George McGovern. Like Jackson before him, Lieberman knows the value of being strong on defense and progressive on domestic issues. Like McGovern, Lamont does not recognize that America faces an existential threat—instead of 1970s Communism, twenty-first century Islamo-fascism.
The problem with this metaphor is that its prime champions view both Jackson and Lieberman as martyrs. But Scoop Jackson was no martyr, and neither is Joe Lieberman. As Mark Schmitt writes at TPMcafe.com, “Scoop Jackson wasn’t ‘repudiated’ or robbed of something legitimately his. He just, like dozens of Senatorial would-be-presidents before and since, simply Didn’t Get Any Votes. He’s not a martyr, just a guy who No One Voted For. A lot like Joe Lieberman in fact.”
Where Lieberman and Jackson are alike is in their failure to evolve intellectually and politically. By 1972 Scoop Jackson was one of only a handful of Democrats who didn’t understand the urgency behind leaving South Vietnam; neither did he appreciate the folly of his support for the war throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Today Lieberman is one of only a small number of Democrats who do not appreciate the strategic folly and cost of the Iraq war.
I still think Lieberman is the favorite in November. But I disagree with Mr. Burns’s dim assessment of Ned Lamont’s qualifications and politics. And I disagree with those (Mr. Burns isn’t among them) who would see in Joe Lieberman’s defeat the second act of Scoop Jackson’s 1972 defeat.
August 10, 2006
New York Since 1977 Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:35 PM EST Twenty-nine years ago today, David Berkowitz, a 24-year-old postal worker from Yonkers, New York, was arrested and charged with the so-called “Son of Sam” killings, a murder spree that claimed six lives between the summers of 1976 and 1977. On its own, it’s a story without terrific long-term significance, except for those families who lost loved ones to Berkowitz’s deranged, homicidal project. But in the context of urban history, it’s a story worth remembering.
Recently I read Jonathan Mahler’s engaging book Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City, which chronicles New York City’s tumultuous struggle for survival in the late 1970s. Facing municipal bankruptcy, skyrocketing crime rates, racial unrest, deteriorating city schools, and a decaying infrastructure, New Yorkers found the year 1977 holding out special challenges and opportunities.
1977 was the year that Reggie Jackson helped lead the Yankees to a World Series victory; the year that three political giants—Bella Abzug, Ed Koch, and Mario Cuomo—fought a historic, knock-down-drag-out fight for City Hall; the year of the famous citywide blackout, which saw more than a few neighborhoods fall to extreme violence and looting. And it was the year of the summer of the Son of Sam. The mortal fear that Berkowitz inspired in ordinary New Yorkers ultimately morphed into a fear of the very city in which these several million people lived.
Fast forward 29 years, and New York is in substantially better shape. Its municipal finances are always tangled, but the city is by and large solvent. The streets are safe. Whole neighborhoods that fell prey in the 1970s to arson and blight are on the rebound. Hundreds of thousands of new immigrants and migrants have kept the city’s population level steady. Mass transit ridership has risen. The city’s parks are safer and more accessible than they were in 1977.
But the story is one of qualified success. Just as Mahler’s book is a superb summer read, especially for those who live in, lived in, or love New York, Joel Kotkin’s book The City: A Global History is essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of places like New York. Kotkin’s argument is complex, but in his sweeping survey of urban history, from ancient to modern times, he essentially finds that no urban center survived that was not “sacred, safe, and busy.” In today’s context, that means that cities must emphasize basic infrastructure—good public schools, accessible public transportation, better delivery of municipal services—and de-emphasize stadiums and enormous multiuse shopping centers, if they are to attract and hold the middle-class and working-class populations that keep these same cities vibrant. Otherwise our urban centers become daytime business parks that bleed suburban commuters at the end of each day, or amusement parks for young, affluent college graduates who spend their 20s enjoying urban living but take their lives (and their tax dollars) to the exurbs when it comes time to marry and start families.
New York may be doing a better job at attending to the basic needs of its citizens than, say, Cleveland, but the city has a long way to go. Middle-class residents are being priced out by rising housing costs and a still-deficient public school system that is grossly underfunded by the state, and to which many upwardly mobile families simply cannot fathom consigning their kids. Likewise, the recent power outages in Queens—and the mayor’s stubborn refusal to take the city’s main electric utility company, Con Edison, to task—suggests why so many middle-class residents flee at the first opportunity.
New York has traveled a long road since the summer of 1977, but Kotkin’s argument is a good warning against complacency.
August 10, 2006
More Thoughts on Connecticut Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:55 PM EST I hesitate to insert myself into a conversation between Joshua Zeitz and John Steele Gordon, but I followed the Connecticut primary obsessively, and I can’t help myself. I wish I could agree with Messrs. Zeitz and Gordon that Lamont’s general election chances are slim. John Steele Gordon is, I think, putting it too kindly when he says that Lamont is “painfully unready for prime time.” And it’s certainly true that his primary supporters represent a fairly slim, affluent, unrepresentative portion of the electorate.
I fear, though, that Connecticut Democrats will continue to react against Lieberman’s announcement of an independent candidacy. Lamont’s final margin of victory in the primary was small, and it is easy to argue that Lieberman would have prevailed had he not announced in advance his intention to disregard the outcome. I expect that even more former Lieberman supporters will find themselves gravitating toward his more liberal opponent once Joe hits the campaign trail as a man without a party. Joshua Zeitz says that “Democrats who voted for [Lieberman] yesterday should be insulted by his tone and message.” I think they very well might be.
Furthermore, in the general election Lieberman will not have the support of surrogates like Bill Clinton and Chris Dodd—although Martin Peretz argues that Clinton’s support may have been toxic. Democratic presidential hopefuls from Feingold and Kerry to Bayh and Clinton may find themselves under pressure to campaign for Lamont, whose message is clearly appealing to the wing of the party that dominates the Iowa caucus. Lieberman may have the support of liberal moderates like Ken Salazar and Michael Bloomberg, but in the surrogate speaker department he will be terribly outgunned.
Of course Joshua Zeitz is right that an effective “coalition of disaffected GOP voters, independents, and conservative Democratic supporters” would return Lieberman to the Senate under ordinary circumstances. But what’s clear from Tuesday’s results is that the left is charged up. Turnout topped 43 percent for an August primary, which is very rare. One can only imagine the kind of turnout numbers we’ll see for Lamont’s Greenwich friends in the general election. Unless Lieberman starts conducting his campaign more effectively, I worry that his supporters will continue to drift away while Lamont’s get more and more worked up.
I am certainly not saying that Lieberman is a doomed man. Far from it. He’s clearly more fit to serve in the Senate than his opponent, he’s a better ideological match for most voters in his state, and he’ll have all the money he needs for his campaign. And as John Steele Gordon points out, some Democrats, like those of the Georgia Fourth, have a way of getting tired of shallow, divisive, Lamont-style politicians. But, unfortunately for those of us who’d like to read about other elections, for a change, this race is going to be a nail-biter all the way down the line.
One final note. I’m not sure I buy the argument that Lieberman’s independent candidacy will sabotage Democratic efforts to bump off Representatives Shays, Simmons, and Johnson. Lamont will turn out the left of the party. Lieberman will turn out the center. In the end, I think that ends up as a net gain for challengers Diane Farrell, Joe Courtney, and Chris Murphy. Some of these voters may end up casting a ballot for a Lieberman-allied Republican, but more of them will vote for the only Democrat running for the House. If I were Chris Shays, living in deep Lamont territory, I would be particularly nervous today.
August 10, 2006
Gene McCarthy, Ned Lamont, and Jefferson Smith Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:35 PM EST In his post on the Lieberman-Lamont race, John Steele Gordon argued that Ned Lamont already “has the looney-left vote sewed up,” and that appearing on stage with the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson is “no way to appeal to the moderate center votes he so desperately needs to pull an upset.” I agree entirely with the second part of this statement. I was as baffled as Mr. Gordon (and probably a little more disappointed than he was) to see Sharpton and Jackson on such prominent display yesterday evening.
I understand that both men were loyal to Lamont. But if Jackson and Sharpton are the hard-nosed political actors they’ve long fancied themselves to be, they should have volunteered to stay in the background. Lamont is going to need the financial and electoral support of Connecticut’s (very liberal) Jewish community. Sharing the stage with the man who once called New York “hymie-town” is not the best way to secure that support.
I disagree with Mr. Gordon in his seeming dismissal of Lamont’s supporters as the “looney-left.” According to a recent CNN poll, 60 percent of all Americans now oppose the Iraq war, while 57 percent support a timetable for withdrawal. By definition, 60 percent of the population cannot be on the political fringes. Increasingly, it is Joe Lieberman—an unapologetic supporter of the Iraq War—who occupies the marginal position in American politics. His refusal to acknowledge that America went to war on a false premise, and his stubborn resistance to addressing the hard realities of the American occupation, make his position extreme.
The Lamont race brings to mind a superb political biography entitled Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism, by Dominic Sandbrook. The book reveals in stark detail the amateurism that marked Gene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign. While Sandbrook ultimately determines that neither McCarthy nor Robert Kennedy could have defeated LBJ (or, subsequently, Hubert Humphrey) for the Democratic presidential nomination—these were the days when very few delegates were selected in primaries; most were chosen by party bosses, who were loyal to Johnson and Humphrey—he marvels at McCarthy’s whimsical, slapdash approach to his insurgent campaign. In effect, McCarthy was more interested in trading verses with Robert Lowell and impressing the press pool with his irreverent witticisms than in the hard business of campaigning. In this sense, he did the antiwar cause a great disservice. If he wasn’t serious about running, he should have bowed out after New Hampshire, in favor of a more disciplined candidate.
Despite a few initial missteps, Lamont does not strike me as a latter-day Gene McCarthy. He’s an unseasoned candidate, to be sure. But he seems less arrogant, more adaptable, and hungrier, than the senator from Minnesota. I still say the smart money is on Lieberman, but as one who believes this war has been a strategic catastrophe and a human disaster, I hope that Lamont avoids the pitfalls of the 1968 McCarthy campaign.
Finally, while I appreciate Mr. Gordon’s fear that Ned Lamont is unprepared to address the weighty issues that will fall before the U.S. Senate over the next six years, I would remind him of his own post dated April 3, in which he wrote: “I would rather be ruled, in William F. Buckley’s famous remark, by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. The former are a lot smarter about running a country than the latter.”
At least Ned Lamont has the wisdom to oppose a bad war when he sees one. Anyway, I’m all for electing novices to Congress. It keeps the system honest. And, I have a weakness for Frank Capra movies.
August 10, 2006
Slashers Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:15 PM EST Josh Zeitz writes of his suspicions that 1970s slasher films were a response to rising violence in the 1960s. Could be, but here’s another theory I heard at the time: Slasher movies almost invariably punish sexually active teens, especially the ones who are unashamed of their own sexual knowledge and experience, and tend to spare the more sexually modest girl, who becomes the heroine. This suggests that the history to which slasher films respond is not 1960s crime but the 1960s sexual revolution: 1970s teens may have by been, by the standards of the recent past, sexually hyperactive, but they still suspected that the codes recently overturned had significant moral weight. In the slasher movies, the old morality was brutally enforced, which means that characters got what teen viewers may have subliminally suspected was coming to them. This theory eventually made its way into a knowing, ironical 1996 post-slasher film Scream, where the film-literate characters predict their fates of their by referencing the conventions of the genre.
Josh is admirably agnostic about possible links between the debatable meaning of works of popular culture and the larger historical trends that popular culture is too easily assumed to reflect. Social scientists, by contrast, tend to be less modest than historians when proffering explanations, and seem to more easily assume a close correlation between the representation of violence and the fact of violence. There is a lively tradition that assumes not merely a reflection thesis, but a causal mechanism: representations of violence are asserted to precede and produce violence (this is the reverse of the Zeitz theory).
I wrote an essay about this a few years ago, assessing the assertion that violent video games have produced an ever-more violent American population. I was (and remain) convinced that the theory ran afoul of a simple fact: Rates of violent crime in this country have been falling for most of the last decade, precisely the period in which video game use had exploded. The broader argument (that the representation of violence causes imitative violence, possibly through disinhibition) ran afoul of the fact that some of the cultures least exposed to violent visual images—medieval England, for example—had horrific levels of personal violence, while cultures immersed in staggeringly violent visual imagery—for example, 1970s Japan, where popular theaters featuring sadomasochistic burlesque did a land-office business, had some of the lowest rates of personal violence recorded by modern societies.
You could make a case that exposure to massive quantities of violent visual imagery is inversely correlated with the propensity to commit actual violence. The Taliban, who looked at no representational images of any kind, can be compared with male Italian teenagers, who assimilate significant quantities of sadomasochistic fumetti but are nonetheless relatively shy about murdering women, or one another. The American frat boys of my childhood, raised on relatively decorous horse opera, fought in bars, broke the hands of thieves, and were generally a great deal more violent than are my own undergraduate students, who live in a culture suffused with representations of violence. By way of contrast, the armies that conducted the Thirty Years War were not copiously exposed to pictorial violence, unless one counts representations of the crucifixion. The contemporary American middle class, less violent than most populations recorded in all of history, is surely the most immersed in representations of violence, of any recorded culture.
I am not sure that they are even particularly fearful of violence, at least violence inflicted by other Americans. In the wake of 9/11, they may be more fearful of violence inflicted by foreigners—but with the exception of 24 and Sleeper Cell, dramas about terrorists are still few and far between, and it has been five years. 24 is in fact a fascinating piece of mixed evidence: The apparent danger is terrorism from without, but over the course of each season those abetting it have a remarkable tendency to be members of the administration, aiming at world empire—and this on the Fox network. At first blush, it seems unlikely that significant numbers of Fox-viewing Americans secretly fear a coup by domestic fascists, and that 24 is somehow on to this, but you never know. On second thought, it seems more than possible that populist paranoia, and suspicion of the elected authorities, is as prevalent in the Fox audience as it is on the left. In any case, the links between violence, fear of violence and the representation of violence look pretty tricky.
August 10, 2006
Becoming History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:15 AM EST I’ve been watching a lot of TV over the last couple of weeks, and am struck by the eerie experience of watching a portion of one’s own times become history, meaning become something imagined to be irretrievably the past. Two of the shows I’ve been watching, Showtime’s Brotherhood and HBO’s rebroadcast of the first seasons of The Wire, are more or less noir dramas set in the present, but take a little time to explore the destruction of the blue-collar political economy and physical environment that long dominated large portions of most East Coast cities. In the decades following the Second World War, union jobs paid a living wage and a pension, and what were then called white ethnics often lived, self-segregated, in very tightly demarcated urban neighborhoods; in the Chicago and New York my father and uncles grew up in, you risked a beating when you crossed a street that marked an border. The jobs and neighborhoods were protected, for both good and ill, by the New Deal social compact and the political power of big city machines. People went to college and got out of those trades and neighborhoods—this was America—but staying in them did not seem like an impossible ambition. Now, these shows suggest, it is an impossible ambition—the stevedores of Baltimore, in The Wire, and the people in sewing plants in Providence, in Brotherhood, are all living on borrowed time.
Neither show is grossly sentimental about the death of these ways of life, but both make reference to things that were in part impressive and admirable. In The Wire, there is a scene at a bar where old stevedores mock young ones, and are mocked in turn, about memories of unloading grain ships with wooden shovels. It took me a minute to work that one out—these shows trust you to do that. You probably unloaded a grain ship with a wooden shovel because a spark might set off an explosion—the finest particles of grain are potentially as explosive as nitroglycerine. This was not a gentle way to live—it shortened people’s lives when it didn’t kill them young—but what interested me is the experience of television serial drama recording the disappearance of a world I long assumed to be eternal. In Brotherhood, an aging woman, a shop steward, assumes there is something you can do when the plant manager announces a large number of layoffs of longtime employees. There isn’t, not in this vision of the present, and she is herself fired for her pains. I remember being told in 1972 to be ready for a wildcat strike when it was rumored that the police had beaten and capriciously arrested a fellow ambulance technician in Brooklyn, then being told that the police had backed down. I wonder whether anyone in Local 420 would try that today.
In these shows, the old neighborhoods are disappearing, becoming loft condos for the much richer people who today live in the hearts of great American and European cities. I grew up aware that a world my parents took as normal—for example, one where the street of New York were washed clean every night, you fearlessly changed subway trains at 2:30 in the morning at 145th Street, and you cut school to hear Ella Fitzgerald and Benny Goodman playing in Times Square theaters in the middle of the day—seemed impossibly distant. Now a world I thought normal looks very dated to people writing for premium cable.
This came home in a more diffuse way while watching another cable series, BBC America’s Life on Mars, where a Manchester police detective is mysteriously transported back to the Dark Ages of 1973. I was supposed to graduate from college in 1973—it actually took me a bit longer—and Life on Mars made me realize that I still imagine 1973 as the apex of modernity. It is very, very odd to see it imagined as not only impossibly but ludicrously distant, even if that distance is mostly established superficially—a world where people with goofy haircuts somehow live without cell phones while playing LPs. Life on Mars does toy with more serious differences—attitudes toward women, and the nature of authority in a work place—but it doesn’t work those themes very hard. It remains disconcerting to see the popular and material culture of your salad days depicted as, well, history.
This came home to me more piercingly last night, waiting for the trailers in a movie theater to finally end. My uncle died earlier this week. When I was growing up, he was the only Republican in the family, and one of the few people I knew with an M.B.A.—his father had been raised in the mountains of West Virginia, at a time when the Republican Party was still locally famous for crushing the rebellion, freeing the slaves, and creating West Virginia. My grandfather remembered the Blizzard of ’88, which meant the Civil War was still within shouting distance. Having a Republican in a New Deal Democrat extended family was noteworthy, and caused periodic comment.
Less than a decade ago, I discovered that my uncle had another distinction—he was the only member of the family to have shot down a Messerschmitt. This came out only in response to a direct question from one of his children, which had been answered quietly and untheatrically—he’d been credited with a partial kill, and he explained that when a large formation of B24s was attacked, it was pretty hard to tell who’d hit what. In any case, I sat in that theater, thinking that it must be something to say that you’d shot down a Messerschmitt, rolling that plangent noun around in my mind, until I realized that it was unlikely that “Messerschmitt” was still a plangent word to my undergraduates, or in most cases, a recognizable one. In the mid-1950s, of course, most small American boys knew what a Messerschmitt was—we drew crayon pictures of them in school, probably fewer than of MiG-17s, but some. They were part of our present, but for my students, they are, at best, history, and in most cases not even that. If I told my undergraduates that my uncle had shot down a pterodactyl, they wouldn’t believe me, but at least they’d know what I was talking about. Becoming history is a disconcerting business.
It occurs to me that the process can also go into reverse: discovering that you know someone who knew someone who was physically present at an historical event makes that event less “historical”: the distance closes down. One can also “become history” at the hands of younger professionals, reading academic history of one’s own times, and suddenly suspect that historical perspective is sometimes the time it takes to get something decisively wrong. More on this soon.
August 9, 2006
Property Taxes IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:30 PM EST Fred Smoler writes, “What was the subject at hand?” The subject at hand is property taxes and the funding of local government. I admit I made a mistake in bringing in the extraneous point that local governments, like all others, should not enjoy rapidly increasing real tax revenue without taking the political onus of voting to raise taxes. But I will explain why I think so in another post. On property taxes, I will merely point out, once more, that they are grossly unfair, inefficient, arbitrary, pernicious, and productive of any number of undesired side effects. If that isn’t a sufficient list of reasons to change the system, I can’t imagine what would be. Perhaps middle-class homeowners showing up in front of state capitols with pitchforks and length of ropes with which to work summary justice from the nearest lamppost. Just consider: A member of the Forbes 400 List, living in a 20,000-square-foot house with indoor and outdoor swimming pools, wine cellar, screening room, 10-car garage, 12-stall barn, riding ring, and nine-hole golf course, might well pay one-tenth of one percent of his income to fund local government. Meanwhile, the guy who fixes his plumbing and lives three miles away in a three-bedroom house on half an acre pays 8 percent of his income. That would not be a fluke. It is probably true a dozen times over just in the town where I live, which, I’m happy to say, has citizens ranging from the economically modest to the comfortably middle class to the affluent to the super rich. Liberals have been fighting hard to have the rich pay their fair share of taxes for well over a hundred years. Yet when it comes to funding local government through this obscenely regressive tax, they are strangely silent. I wonder why.
August 9, 2006
After the Fall Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:00 PM EST I agree with Joshua Zeitz (yet again!) that Ned Lamont does not have bright prospects in November. He won only narrowly and I don’t see much upside potential. He will take his own primary vote, of course, and the yellow-dog Democrats who voted for Lieberman in the primary, but who else? With only two other candidates, one with 100 percent name recognition and one so obscure I’d have to Google to find out what his name is, Lamont is not likely to gain a plurality, barring some event that transforms everything. His biggest problem, of course, is that he is a Johnny-one-note candidate, and such candidates rarely get elected except in a wide-open field. He is against the Iraq war but has no articulated alternative to the current course. Instead he has only the liberal belief in the infinite power of schmooze—just negotiate well enough and long enough and the devil himself will come around to modeling his political behavior on Thomas Jefferson. And on the many other issues that will confront a United States senator in the next six years, Ned Lamont is painfully unready for prime time. Even the nuts and bolts of everyday politics seem unmastered. What on earth was he doing at his victory party allowing Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to be so prominently on display? He has the looney-left vote sewed up, and that is no way to appeal to the moderate center votes he so desperately needs to pull an upset. On a brighter note, the good people of the Fourth District of Georgia not only rejected Cynthia McKinney, they threw her out the door and her hat after her, going for her opponent 59 to 41 percent. It is very rare these days for incumbent congressmen to lose primaries. Ms McKinney has now managed that feat twice in the last three elections, which might be a record.
August 9, 2006
What Scares Us Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:20 PM EST In the course of some background reading for a new book I’m writing on America in the 1970s, I realized that 37 years ago today, followers of Charles Manson murdered the actress Sharon Tate and four others, in a brutal crime that would inspire countless articles, books, and films.
From a historical perspective, what interests me is the close correlation between rising violence in the 1960s and the birth in the 1970s of a new and increasingly popular genre in American film—the slasher film. Within a few years of Tate’s murder, filmmakers like Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper began attracting large audiences to low-budget productions like The Last House on the Left (Craven, 1972), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974), and The Hills Have Eyes (Craven, 1977). Also popular were tales of serial killers who superficially resembled human beings but were endowed with superhuman strength or endurance—e.g., John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th.
What lent this new genre such popularity is open to debate, but I think it had something to do with the frightening and dispiriting level of violence in American life after 1965. Urban riots, political assassinations (John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy), Vietnam and all its attendant bloodshed, rising street crime—all contributed to a sense that America had spiraled out of control. Whereas horror films in the 1950s had tended to focus on the potential effects of nuclear war, by the 1970s what Americans most feared were real people—even their own neighbors.
All of which leads me to wonder how subsequent commentators will understand a current vogue. From M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) and David Koepp’s Stir of Echoes (1999), to Sam Raimi’s The Gift (2000) and Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002), there is a new fascination with movies in
which the murdered dead somehow return from the grave to communicate to the living the terrible circumstances of their slayings. I’m certainly not an expert on horror films, but having grown up in the 1970s and 1980s I’ve seen my share of them, and this strikes me as a new twist in an old genre.
If the substance of our collective fears says something about who we are, what does the popularity of these films tell us? My first guess is to relate this phenomenon to the religious awakening that some scholars claim America is currently undergoing. As in the mid-seventeenth, early eighteenth, and early twentieth centuries, today there seems to be a rising level of religious commitment among certain social constituencies. As in earlier periods, this new religious commitment is by no means incompatible with ideas of the occult. On the other hand, while some Americans have intensified their religious commitment, others have moved toward a more strident secularism. Perhaps these films are most frightening (and thus more marketable) to those who have rejected the idea of an ever-present deity who watches over our earthly moves. The scare factor behind these movies, after all, is the knowledge that we’re apparently still accountable for our actions, even if there is no God keeping watch.
This is the problem with film history. Much of the genre’s meaning is in the eye of the beholder, and it’s not always easy to access his or her vantage point.
August 9, 2006
Regarding Property Taxes III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:15 PM EST John Steele Gordon claims that he has made “a modest proposal regarding a way to fund the cost of local government that would be fairer, simpler, cheaper, and better than the present system,” whereas I have gone “off on half a dozen tangents having nothing to do with the subject at hand: referendums, school taxes, wealth taxes, public school governance, his mother’s long, distinguished career in public service, etc.” Oddly enough, we see this differently.
What was the subject at hand? I agree that it was not my mother, and I am sure that John Steele Gordon is far too courteous an interlocutor to bring the other fellow’s mother into the argument. Public school governance and school taxes are relevant because of John Steele Gordon’s explicit proposal to “put the towns, school districts, etc., on a short spending leash, which is exactly what government should always be on.” My mother’s modest career in town government was my example of what the elected officials who run school districts actually do, and why we should not invariably attempt to keep them on a particularly short lease, nor strip them of the power to increase taxes, unless authorized by referenda. Do referenda have nothing to do with the subject at hand? Mr. Gordon’s “modest proposal”—to overturn centuries of Anglo-American tax policy—concluded with this sentence: “If a jurisdiction wanted to institute a new program that required more tax revenue, it would have to get the people to agree to it in a referendum.” Do wealth taxes have nothing to do with the subject at hand? In John Steele Gordon’s first post on this subject, he attacked property taxes for a number of reasons, one being that they are a wealth tax. He did not use those words—neither did I, until now—but I am pretty sure that is part of what he meant, when he shrewdly noted that property is taxed on an assumption which is no longer true, which is that it generates most of one’s income.
John Steele Gordon objects to my observation that “financing local government via taxing property has worked well enough for hundreds of years” and notes that “of course, slavery worked well enough for thousands of years, except for the slaves.” This is his third comparison of property taxes to slavery. In his first post, he wrote that “like slavery, the property tax is a relic of the colonial era” and stirringly concluded that essay by demanding “It should be abolished, like slavery, tar-and-feathering, and witch hunts.” My sense is that, whatever the merits of financing local government via real estate taxes, the practice is not usefully compared to forcing people to work without pay for the whole of their lives, under threat of being tortured to death. Comparisons to tar-and-feathering and witch hunts also seems strained.
Is it any defense of a practice to note that it “worked well enough for hundreds of years”? It is never a sufficient defense, but it is always worth considering the fact. While it may well be a “a dyed-in-the-wool conservative statement,” Herbert Hoover is not usually credited with originating this line of thought; it is more commonly associated with Edmund Burke, who became celebrated on the strength of his development of it. By the way, Mr. Gordon’s Tom Paine posture, like my Burkean moment, seems to me to vindicate my remark that not all of our political traditions point in the same direction.
We do agree about some things. When John Steele Gordon notes that “middle-class families have far more of their total assets tied up in real estate than do the rich, so thanks to the property tax they pay a far higher percentage of their incomes in local taxes,” he is echoing a point I made in my first post on this topic, responding to his first post. When he notes that “renters, of course, don’t get a free ride; they pay property taxes as part of their rent,” he is again echoing a point I made in that same post. So we agree that the existing system is not the expression of perfect justice. Systems of taxation, like all human contrivances, are never the expression of perfect justice. Burke noted that seeking perfect justice can sometimes make things worse. He was right.
August 9, 2006
After the Fall Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:10 PM EST A few thoughts on Ned Lamont’s historic victory over incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman in yesterday’s Connecticut Democratic primary.
Though my political sympathies are entirely with Ned Lamont, I don’t see how he can cobble together a working plurality in the general election. His margin of victory was slim. Assuming that Joe Lieberman can carry most of his primary support and also a significant portion of the state’s independent and Republican voters, his independent candidacy is unstoppable. That the Republicans have nominated a weak, unknown candidate makes it all the more likely that Lieberman will assemble a new center-right coalition of disaffected GOP voters, independents, and conservative Democratic supporters.
Connecticut voters have a history of treating third-party candidates kindly. In 1980 the maverick Rep. John Anderson (R-IL) won 12.2 percent of the state’s popular vote in his independent bid for the Presidency, compared with a much more modest 6.2 percent of the vote nationally. In 1992 Ross Perot, the eccentric Texas billionaire, won 22 percent of Connecticut’s popular vote in his own quest for the White House, compared with 19 percent of the national vote. Neither Anderson nor Perot could reasonably have been expected to win pluralities, so a better example is Lowell Weicker, the three-term U.S. Senator who Joe Lieberman unseated in 1988. Weicker, a liberal Republican, ran for governor in 1990 as an independent and won. Like Lieberman, he was a fixture in state politics. Connecticut voters, already more comfortable than most with independent candidacies, were happy to give him a second chance.
Last evening, Lieberman delivered an aggressive “concession” speech that seemed to acknowledge his new center-right strategy. He repeatedly decried the “partisan” tone of the primary campaign (which is laughable; by definition, a campaign for a party nomination is a partisan affair) and took every available opportunity to tout his bipartisan, third-way approach to politics. I understand what Lieberman was doing. He was talking to independent and Republican voters, who will make up the bulk of his support in the fall. But Democrats who voted for him yesterday should be insulted by his tone and his message.
Lieberman’s statement—“For the sake of our state, our country, and my party, I cannot, I will not let this result stand”—will give no comfort to those who find him self-absorbed and self-righteous. Neither does his statement suggest that the senator has come to grips with the moral and intellectual force behind the antiwar argument.
For Democrats, Lieberman is now something more than a headache. Not only do national party leaders face the unpleasant task of opposing one of their own in the November election; Lieberman’s candidacy also endangers the party’s efforts to defeat three moderate Republican congressmen—Rob Simmons, Nancy Johnson, and Chris Shays. All three are endangered. But they now enjoy the opportunity to ally themselves with Lieberman and emphasize their independence from the Republican party.
Interesting times in Connecticut.
August 9, 2006
Property Taxes III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:25 AM EST Wow. I make a modest proposal regarding a way to fund the cost of local government that would be fairer, simpler, cheaper, and better than the present system, and Fred Smoler goes off on half a dozen tangents having nothing to do with the subject at hand: referendums, school taxes, wealth taxes, public school governance, his mother’s long, distinguished career in public service, etc.
I’ll take up some of his other points in future posts, for they are interesting.
But let me take up a few of his points regarding the subject at hand. Fred writes, “In hindsight, financing local government via taxing property has worked well enough for hundreds of years . . .” What a dyed-in-the-wool conservative statement! Hoover Republicans would be proud. The property tax worked at the dawn of the Republic and hasn’t caused the end of civilization, so let’s leave it alone. Of course, slavery worked well enough for thousands of years, except for the slaves. Property taxes are great for those rich enough to avoid paying their fair share, thanks to a tax that is, in today’s world, deeply regressive. Middle-class families have far more of their total assets tied up in real estate than do the rich, so thanks to the property tax they pay a far higher percentage of their incomes in local taxes. And as for the property owners who are forced to sell places they love because the value of the real estate, but not their income, has gone through the roof? Fred Smoler’s answer seems to be, “Not my problem, I rent.”
He writes, “If the inequity of giving renters a free ride is too offensive to natural justice, we can probably figure out a way to tax people who use local services without owning real estate.” Renters, of course, don’t get a free ride; they pay property taxes as part of their rent. If the property tax were abolished, landlords, being human, would try to hang on to that portion for themselves, which is why they would have to be required to lower rents accordingly.
That, of course, assumes there is a free market in rental housing. Where such markets have been blighted by rent controls—as in New York City—that favor incumbent tenants over landlords and people looking for a place to live, all bets are off. When government puts a fat thumb on the scale to help politicians get reelected (there are many more tenants than landlords, and people looking for an apartment don’t vote), then economic analysis becomes impossible. That, of course, suits the politicians just fine.
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