November 16, 2007
Movies and History Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:35 PM EST I imagine that doctors tend to dislike movies about doctors, and lawyers movies about lawyers, because they see the inaccuracies that pass unnoticed by those who are not in those professional fields. There are few movies about historians—not a profession, perhaps, that lends itself to drama—but there are plenty about history. I confess to being a sucker for them most of the time. I don’t mind the often necessary time shortening and the introduction of fictional characters. But I wonder why so many of them have quite unnecessary historical solecisms. For instance, last night I watched Amazing Grace about William Wilberforce and his long struggle to get the slave trade abolished in England. I enjoyed it for the most part. But one minor character was named the Duke of Clarence. He spends much time in the House of Commons and at one point in a card game with Wilberforce and out of ready money, he throws his black coachman into the pot (Wilberforce throws down his cards in disgust and storms off). I understand the dramatic needs the character serves. But why call him the Duke of Clarence? There was a real Duke of Clarence at the time. George III gave his third son that title in 1789 (in 1830, much to his surprise and delight, the Duke of Clarence became King William IV). And dukes, of course, don’t sit in the Commons. They sit in the Lords (or they did then; most got the boot in 1999). And in a very famous case in England in 1772, Lord Mansfield declared slavery to be contrary to the common law, making all slaves in England free. So the coachman, however little he might have been in charge of his own destiny, was not property to be wagered at cards. It would have been the work of a moment to give the character a fictional title. Since heirs to higher titles use one of their father’s lesser titles as a courtesy and could sit in the Commons until their father’s death, any title but duke would have done. It would have taken hardly longer to devise a dramatic means of conveying the common attitude of most of the aristocracy toward blacks at the start of Wilberforce’s campaign. I think producers should hire historians to clean up their scripts before shooting starts. It wouldn’t cost much, by Hollywood standards. I, for one, would be willing to work for a whole lot less than your average second-tier movie star. And I mean a WHOLE lot less.
November 15, 2007
Historical Probabilities and Markets II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:15 AM EST I certainly agree with Fredric Smoler that the price of Confederate bonds in Amsterdam was a measure of the speculators’ perception of the probability of Confederate victory, not a measure of the actual probability. Speculators in Europe, at least ten days away from the North American battlefields, could not have had full knowledge of what was going on. And, as Mr. Smoler notes, they were not competent to evaluate the military situation in any event. Then, given the fact that wars can be lost “for want of a nail,” or because of highly improbable chance events that nonetheless occur, the speculation in Confederate bonds was sheer gambling, not reasoned investment. I can think of two other examples off the top of my head of military actions that rational people would not have predicted. I don’t think Macedonian bonds would have sold well in Amsterdam when Alexander the not-yet-Great set out to conquer the Persian Empire. And would speculators have bet on Nimitz instead of Yamamoto before the Battle of Midway, even if they were in on the secret that Nimitz was reading the Japanese naval code? Markets are notorious for over- and underestimating the probability of future events due to “the madness of crowds.” From tulipomania in the early seventeenth century to the dot-com bubble that burst in 2000, the history of markets is filled with what appears, at least in retrospect, to be remarkably irrational behavior. This irrationality is not always to the up side. It’s a commonplace that “the stock market has predicted ten of the last three recessions.” I believe that British government bonds held their value even in Britain’s darkest days in 1940. Of course, there’s a difference here. Everyone knew that Confederate bonds would be worthless in the event of a Confederate defeat, as indeed, they were. But would Britain, even defeated, have repudiated its debt? I doubt it, and, obviously, so did investors. Hitler, after all, wanted peace with Britain and would have cut a deal far short of unconditional surrender. Just by the way, British consols, which are government bonds that never mature, have been the best measure we have of the price of money over the last 250 years, as there is no yield to maturity to factor into the current price. The only other factor is the likelihood of Britain defaulting on the interest. Even in 1940, not many thought that a serious risk. While crowds are no better than individuals in predicting future events that are contingent on many factors, they are very good at one kind of prediction. If you fill a very large jar with, say, jellybeans, and invite people to guess how many beans are in the jar, the individual guesses will be all over the map. But the average of all the guesses will always be spot on. There are now markets on the Internet in which people can bet on the outcome of political races. I believe they do a better job of predicting outcomes than the polls. The reason, perhaps, is that people must put their money where their mouth is in a market, whereas they can tell a pollster anything they feel like. Also, of course, polls are supposed to be of a carefully selected sample of the total electorate, many of whom couldn’t care less. People in a political marketplace betting on outcomes are all interested in that outcome and trying to analyze what will happen. So the jellybean effect is in operation. One poll that has an excellent record of predicting outcomes in presidential races is the polls of the Weekly Reader, which polls school kids in very large numbers. It is not a “scientific poll” in any sense, but it has a very good track record of being right. The reason, perhaps, is that while grownups often tell pollsters what they think they ought to say, the kids just echo what they hear at home. From the mouths of babes . . .
November 14, 2007
Historical Probabilities and Markets Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:55 AM EST A friend sent me a link to a paper given earlier this month at Columbia to a group of economic historians. The paper is by Kim Oosterlinck and Marc D. Weidenmier, titled “Victory or Repudiation? The Probability of the Southern Confederacy Winning the Civil War,” and it begins with an abstract, a summary of the argument and conclusions. In this case the abstract reads: “Historians have long wondered whether the Southern Confederacy had a realistic chance at winning the American Civil War. We provide some quantitative evidence on this question by introducing a new methodology for estimating the probability of winning a civil war or revolution based on financial market[s]. Using a unique dataset of Confederate gold bonds in Amsterdam, we apply this methodology to estimate the probability of a Southern victory from the summer of 1863 until the end of the war. Our results suggest that European investors gave the Confederacy approximately a 42 percent chance of victory prior to the battle[s] of Gettysburg/Vicksburg. News of the severity of the two rebel defeats led to a sell-off in Confederate bonds. By the end of 1863, the probability of a Southern victory fell to about 15 percent. Confederate victory prospects generally decreased for the remainder of the war. The analysis also suggests that McClellan’s possible election as U.S. President on a peace party platform as well as Confederate military victories in 1864 did little to reverse the market’s assessment that the South would probably lose the Civil War.” To my ear, possibly a somewhat prejudiced one, the paper itself contains a remarkable assumption—”First, we assume that the probability of debt reimbursement (for the Southern Confederacy) is equal to the probability of victory.” This seems peculiar, and in some ways close to ridiculous. My intuition is that bond prices tell you a lot about investors’ estimates of probabilities, but in many cases little about the probabilities themselves, not least because investors can be wildly wrong. For example, I’d bet that Spanish bond prices in 1898 would under-predict the chances of a U.S. victory against Spain, because of a European sense that we were bumptious, inept savages, and Spain the land associated with the still-remembered and once-feared tercios, and similarly overestimate German chances against the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, because of a general ignorance of logistics, one that afflicted most observers at that moment. Markets can and do get political risk wrong, and I would imagine that they have no special abilities in assessing military risks. So I think this assumption—that the interest rate in one sense is the probability—may be free-market fundamentalism. Then again, thinking it over, what better method of estimating alternate historical probabilities is there? The defense of taking bond prices as an estimate of a historical probability is that markets are composed of a large number of people with a straightforward interest in assembling all of the relevant information and getting the answer right. They do not have to appeal to an editor or a committee chair; everyone in a market wants to make money and can only hope to do so by accurately weighing risk. Markets are sometimes said to predict the outcome of recent American elections better than do polls or political scientists (I have no idea if this in fact true). On the other hand, in retrospect we sometimes think alternate historical probabilities reflect factors unknown or under-appreciated at the time—to return to the sort of example I gave above, the tyranny of logistics. Rommel needed a given port capacity in Egypt and Libya, which did not exist, to reach Alexandria, if the ground between the sea and the Qattara Depression was defended with modest competence. He did not himself understand this. Why would investors understand this better than did German generals? There is a chance, of course, that they would, although I do not know if they did, and as it happens, I have never looked at British government debt between 1939 and 1941. Maybe I should. Switch from war to politics: investors may or may not understand the stability of Chinese Communist rule and hence over-price or under-price Chinese bonds, but why simply assume that they do or do not get this as right as anyone can? If they do change their estimate of this question next year, and downgrade Chinese debt, does it make any sense to say that the probabilities of a Communist collapse have truly changed, or just the prices? Over the last decade I had the eerie experience, not once but several times, of hearing very intelligent economists say that China cannot fail, then I’ve explained why I thought it could and seen them waver—and I know nothing much about China. Those experiences have made me think that no one knew too much about the stability of the new political economy of China. What seems clear is that intelligent economists repeat the conventional wisdom as readily as do the rest of us, and if they do, what about the much less intelligent myriads in a market for foreign debt? I am curious about what John Steele Gordon thinks about this issue.
November 14, 2007
New York Times Columnists and History II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:30 AM EST Just a few observations about the debate concerning Ronald Reagan’s campaign visit to Neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1980. First, the columnists who have been assessing the meaning and importance of Reagan’s remarks have tended to repeat the common claim that the future President kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with this visit. (For what it’s worth, I made the same claim here. In fact, the speech in question, delivered before an audience of 10,000 white residents, was delivered in August 1980, after the Republican National Convention but many months into the campaign season. Technically, it might be correct to claim that the speech launched Reagan’s general election campaign. But he had been an active candidate for the Presidency long before he visited Mississippi. John Steele Gordon weighs in with the following: “Personally, I have not studied this in any depth, but I certainly don’t think Ronald Reagan was a racist. . . . But did he use racist code language in pursuit of Southern votes . . . ? Like Anthony Lewis, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. The phrase ‘states’ rights’ is embedded in a paragraph supporting the traditional meaning of the phrase, and apparently it evoked no particular reaction from the mostly white crowd. It was certainly well buried code language if code language it was.” For what it’s worth, newspaper coverage of the event suggests that the crowd cheered wildly throughout Reagan’s address, though whether they cheered at the offending line is not clear. I agree that it’s folly to ask whether Reagan was a “racist,” per se, though it’s fair to note that his longstanding opposition to civil rights legislation, from the 1965 Voting Rights Act to California’s 1964 Open Housing law, doesn’t speak well to his sense of moral purpose. The man who would defend freedom around the world, often bending domestic and international law to do so, would not support it at home. More fundamentally, I’m not sure that Reagan “buried code language” all that deeply, as Mr. Gordon contends. In 1978 the Carter administration’s IRS Commissioner declared his intention to suspend the tax-exempt status of private Christian academies that failed to integrate their student bodies. Founded in the 1960s and 1970s as a response to the creeping secularization in public education, these institutions also permitted many white Southerners to evade the federal courts’ efforts to enforce Brown through busing and pupil placement schemes. Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian School was typical in this regard. Out of 1,147 students, only 5 were black. The government had already set the bar low. For a school to qualify as integrated, the portion of minorities in its student body needed only be equal to 20 percent of the portion of minorities in the larger community. Thus, if a town were 10 percent black, a school would only need to achieve 2 percent minority enrollment to retain its tax exemption. But for many white Southerners, that standard was intolerably high. When Reagan uttered the terms “states’ rights,” “education,” and “taxes” in the same breath, he was cleverly—but not too cleverly—pushing buttons. Over the past several years, historians, including many liberal historians, have examined Ronald Reagan’s private and public papers and conceded that the former President was a smart man—hardly the empty suit he was long thought to be. Those who insist that we take Reagan seriously can’t have it both ways. He either was or wasn’t a clever man. He either was or wasn’t a master communicator. If he was both, then let’s assume he knew exactly what he was doing.
November 13, 2007
New York Times Columnists and History Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST My friend James Taranto, of OpinionJournal.com, notes that the columnists of The New York Times have been having a historical discussion on what Ronald Reagan said in a speech at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, at the start of the 1980 presidential campaign and, more important, what he meant by it. Philadelphia, of course, is famous for having betrayed its own name when three civil rights workers were murdered there in cold blood in 1964, one of the most terrible events in the long national struggle for civil rights. Here’s the “money quote” from the speech: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.” Paul Krugman has, numerous times, called Reagan’s reference to “states’ rights” flat-out racist code language. Yesterday David Brooks called that a distortion. Today Bob Herbert chimes in with his own interpretation of that moment, reasserting that it was a blatant appeal to white racism. Taranto notes that that interpretation is somewhat ex post facto, as neither the speech nor the phrase “I believe in states’ rights” attracted much criticism at the time. Anthony Lewis, then a liberal Times columnist, whose civil rights credentials are 100 percent in order, wrote about the speech only six weeks later and gave Reagan a considerable benefit of the doubt if not complete exoneration. Personally, I have not studied this in any depth, but I certainly don’t think Ronald Reagan was a racist, and neither, obviously, do the vast majority of the American people who increasingly regard him as one of the giants of twentieth-century American history. But did he use racist code language in pursuit of Southern votes, which would have been certainly cynical but not necessarily racist? Like Anthony Lewis, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. The phrase “states’ rights” is embedded in a paragraph supporting the traditional meaning of the phrase, and apparently it evoked no particular reaction from the mostly white crowd. It was certainly well buried code language if code language it was. So perhaps he meant nothing more than what he said he meant by it: “I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.” As Sigmund Freud is famously supposed to have said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
November 13, 2007
Norman Mailer II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:50 AM EST In his classic film Sleeper, Woody Allen has his character awake from a frozen slumber to learn that he is the sole survivor of a nuclear disaster that annihilated American civilization. Among the material artifacts that his futuristic hosts ask him to interpret is a picture of Norman Mailer. “He was a very great writer,” Allen explains. “He donated his ego to the Harvard Medical School for study.” After reading Mailer’s obituary in The New York Times, I half-suspect he didn’t mind Allen’s quip. Simply put, the man seemed to crave attention. No matter one’s position on his literary achievements, he clearly demanded his due in column space. I’m not sure whether Mailer’s entire career was a study in egomania, but certainly his ill-fated 1969 candidacy for mayor of New York City was. Running in a crowded primary field that included such liberal heavyweights as former Mayor Robert Wagner, Bronx Borough President Herman Badillo, and Rep. James Scheuer, Mailer stole just enough votes from the second-place finisher (Badillo) to hand a victory to City Comptroller Mario Procaccino. Though nowhere near as conservative as his opponents liked to portray him, Procaccino was ill-equipped to take on the incumbent mayor, John Lindsay, and became an unfortunate and unwitting agent of white backlash in the November election. Some time ago, in one of our rare moments of agreement, John Steele Gordon and I wondered whether New York might not have been better off under Herman Badillo’s stewardship than John Lindsay’s. We’ll never know, and for that we can thank Norman Mailer.
November 11, 2007
Max Raabe Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:45 PM EST New York’s Carnegie Hall has organized a festival celebrating Berlin. It is called “Berlin In Lights,” and it opened last week with a concert by a German musician named Max Raabe, who led a dozen other musicians in a band called the Palast Orchester. You can get an idea of what Raabe is like in concert by forking over $267 for a DVD of a live performance, Max Raabe & Palast Orchester: Dance & Film Music of 1920s, and while I have never seen this DVD—until that concert kicking off “Berlin In Lights” I had neithr seen nor heard Max Raabe—I have now sent off for it. You also see footage of their acts on YouTube, or listen to the music on CDs. German friends had raved about Raabe, and now I know why. The material he plays and sings, dance band and other popular music of the 1920s and early 1930s, is witty and charming, sometimes remarkably so, and Raabe’s delivery of his introductions to the music is very droll, very dry, and generally delightful. If you are German, it also seems to have astonishing poignancy. Raabe and the music he has revived reminds my German friends that their country’s twentieth century extends past wars and staggering brutalities into the mass and popular cultures of the Weimar Republic, which is to say into a lively, raucous, intelligent, and playful musical culture. Raabe reminds them that they do not live forever and only in the shadow of Hitler. Visiting one of those friends in late July a few years back, I asked about a military parade going past in the distance, and was told that July 20 is the day volunteers for the German army take their oath of allegiance to the German constitution. It is the day German soldiers came closest to assassinating Hitler, and as my friend sadly remarked, “We do not have too many military traditions of which we can be unreservedly proud.” July 20 is one such. That year I had seen Omaha Beach, Bastogne, and a fair number of U.S. military cemeteries, which made my friend’s observation suddenly and simultaneously obvious and disorienting. He thought every people better off with some history it can proudly commemorate, and while this thought does not seem to have made too much headway among all of the dominant schools of academic history in our country, I suspect he was right. He was also the first person I ever heard listening to the Comedian Harmonists, a musical group not too dissimilar to Raabe’s, three of whose Jewish members Hitler chased into exile. My friend needed a usable past, and he had found one, in a less than obvious place. The music Raabe performs includes American music, too, because a number of the German-Jewish composers who escaped the Third Reich made it to Hollywood and Tin Pan Ally, and we know their music, some of it, anyway, as American music. It appears in the scores of Marx Brothers movies and a lot of other places an American audience recognizes without knowing the German origin of the music. Max Raabe made me reflect on the two-way traffic between German and American popular music. Our musicals owe a lot to their operettas, our émigré composers owed as much to the classical training they received in Germany, while German popular music owes a lot to our blues and jazz, some of which we exported only to see it come home, transmuted abroad and then widely diffused via our mass media, by Germans who brought it with them when they fled the Nazis. American culture had been made, and will be continue to be made, by an intricate and subtle set of exchanges.
November 11, 2007
Norman Mailer Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:15 PM EST Charles McGrath’s obituary of Norman Mailer in The New York Times notes that “Mr. Mailer saw little combat in the war and finished his military career as a cook in occupied Japan. But his wartime experience, and in particular a single patrol he made on the island of Leyte, became the raw material for The Naked and the Dead.” I am trying to decide if this is a slightly malicious sentence; it certainly risks bad taste to refer, apparently slightingly, to how “little” combat Mailer saw. Is the bit about winding up a cook in occupied Japan intended to diminish any moral authority that might otherwise flow from “a single patrol” on Leyte? My father fought in the Ardennes and subsequently commanded a company of laundrymen during the occupation of Germany. Had he subsequently become one of the most famous of American writers, would Mr. McGrath note that he’d seen only a few months of combat, and wound up commanding a laundry company? My guess is that Mr. McGrath’s motives, if they are hostile, include irritation at Mailer’s lifelong interest in violence and possibly at his particular self-assumed role in confidently explaining violent men—Americans from Texas and other rustic places—to allegedly more epicene Americans from Brooklyn and Harvard, two places Mailer lived before he made that combat patrol on Leyte. One of the books where Mailer does that, in the context of an imagined hunting trip in Alaska—Why Are We In Vietnam?—is a book I have taught. It is in some respects dated, frequently grossly obscene, at times hilarious, contains many of the things that enrage Mailer-phobes, and vexes some students while fascinating others. People who dislike Mailer are prone to say that he glamorized violence and rustics for people who knew nothing about either, since people who did know were said to have no desperate interest in those subjects. So it may be relevant that the last time I taught Why Are We In Vietnam? the student who was most impressed by the book hailed from Texas, knew soldiers, and had himself hunted bear in Alaska. My father, who did not admire The Naked and the Dead, nonetheless gave little evidence of being deeply bored by all depictions of war, despite having seen for those few months a fair share of it. I once taught Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, which also comes in for some abuse in one of the obituaries. Rereading it for the first time since 1970, I was at first appalled by what looked like preening, screeching narcissism; I had loved the book when it came out, as had all of my friends. It was being taught to one of them (at Amherst) within a year or two of its publication, and I recall my friend quoting his teacher rhapsodizing about it. Having assigned it before rereading it, I plowed on through, and, happily, my opinion changed by the time the book itself altered its pitch and register. In the 1970s and ’80s I read through a lot of Mailer, at which time he seemed to combine startling strengths and glaring weaknesses. In the early 1970s one of my teachers regretfully remarked that Mailer’s writing was marred by his decision to become a whore to what both men called the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age; it tended to make Mailer’s writing and thinking breathless and frantic. From this distance, it may also make him an invaluable guide to the style and imagination of an age that is suddenly very far from us and not too easy to know from his epigones. It seems as easy to carelessly sneer Mailer into clownish insignificance as to breathlessly overvalue him. He did some odious things, was capable of appalling misjudgments, and said a lot of silly things. What fascinates is his ability to fascinate, despite an unseemly compulsion to do so. So determined to dazzle, he ought by all rights to have failed, and he didn’t. The country suddenly seems smaller with Mailer under it rather than strutting on the surface of things.
November 11, 2007
The Politics of National Security III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:45 PM EST Alexander Burns’s response to Senator Lieberman’s speech is to quote the “centrist Democrat” Ed Kilgore. I haven’t the faintest idea how centrist Mr. Kilgore is, although even a centrist Democrat is pretty far left these days, especially with presidential primaries coming up and given the need to appeal to the Moveon.org tail that now so wags the Democratic dog. But the website on which he posted (The Democratic Strategist) is an explicitly partisan Democratic one. “The Democratic Strategist will be clearly focused on developing political strategies for promoting Democratic candidates and issues.” Therefore his job was to criticize Senator Lieberman, not to consider the worth of his argument. He proceeds to criticize in the usual fashion of partisan Democrats: We’re right, everyone else is wrong. Q.E.D. Mr. Burns quotes him as follows: “You’d never know from Lieberman’s speech that the Democratic tradition he’s pretending to uniquely defend had a lot to do with multilateralism, collective security, international institutions, diplomacy, non-military means, human rights, bipartisanship, and the rule of law—all parts of the tradition that Bush and contemporary Republicans have aggressively rejected, and that today’s Democrats explicitly support.” I must have been napping. When exactly did the Republicans aggressively reject the rule of law, human rights, and bipartisanship? Was it at the same time they were aggressively rejecting Mom and apple pie?
November 10, 2007
The Politics of National Security II Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:40 PM EST Thanks to John Steele Gordon for linking to Sen. Joe Lieberman’s speech “The Politics of National Security.” I’m not really sure where to begin responding to it, except to say it is a good example of why I find Lieberman a very sad public figure. There have always been aspects of Lieberman’s politics that I’ve found problematic, but I used to be a fan of his. I considered him a decent man and, even when I disagreed with him, an unusually honest politician. But as the centrist Democrat Ed Kilgore writes, the Connecticut senator’s latest speech “seemed designed to validate everything [Lieberman’s] Democratic critics have said about him over the last few years, and to humiliate Democrats who have defended him.” I do not think I can critique Lieberman’s address more effectively than Kilgore already has, so forgive me for quoting liberally. The heart of Kilgore’s argument is that Lieberman’s speech “provides an exceptionally simplistic and mechanical history of partisanship and foreign policy. Democrats were ‘good’ from World War II until Vietnam, and Republicans tended to be ‘bad.’ Democrats were ‘bad’ from Vietnam to the First Gulf War, and Republicans were ‘good’”—and so on. Kilgore continues: “These judgments appear to be based on an interpretation of the ‘muscular’ Democratic foreign policy tradition that’s all about the willingness to use military force, and a rhetorical commitment to democracy-promotion and tyranny-denouncing. You’d never know from Lieberman’s speech that the Democratic tradition he’s pretending to uniquely defend had a lot to do with multilateralism, collective security, international institutions, diplomacy, non-military means, human rights, bipartisanship, and the rule of law—all parts of the tradition that Bush and contemporary Republicans have aggressively rejected, and that today’s Democrats explicitly support.” To Kilgore’s observations I’ll only add that Lieberman’s speech totally misses the present political reality in the United States. In Lieberman’s view, the source of antiwar opinion in this country is the “politically paranoid, hyper-partisan sentiment in the Democratic base.” According to a brand-new poll, 68 percent of Americans oppose our continuing commitment in Iraq. That is a new high. If Joe Lieberman still supports the war that’s his right, but someone should disabuse him of the notion that he’s the voice of a beleaguered and sensible quiet majority.
November 9, 2007
The Politics of National Security Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:30 AM EST Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Independent Democrat of Connecticut, gave a very interesting speech at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University yesterday called “The Politics of National Security” that seems to me to have been underreported (neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times covered it). It looks at the history of these politics since World War II, and I think it is well worth reading. It can be found here. I would be interested in the comments of my fellow bloggers.
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