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 Ach |
