Do You Remember Walter?

It's been a while and I am going to try to get back to semi-regular posting in these historic times but I wanted to draw attention to Harold Meyerson's love letter in the Washington Post to the United Auto Workers union and in particular the era of Walter Reuther. As friends know, I'm kind of obsessed with Reuther as one of the great heroes of U.S. progressivism who's been somewhat forgotten. Suffice it to say that from the 1930s through the 1960s if there was a progressive cause that needed fighting for, the UAW was involved in one way or another.

For those who want to know more, check out Kevin Boyle's appropriately titled,The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968.

More soon....

Monday Music: Bastille Day Special

Today is Bastille Day and in honor of that occasion it seems appropriate to put up one of the best scenes from one of the great movies of all time:

Her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom

Well, according to a lot of conservatives, my thinking that Phil Ochs' song "The Power and the Glory" is a great patriotic American song is pretty problematic, what with it calling Americans to live by their ideals. I will grant that I'm a little behind the times in posting this now, but I just ran across this live performance by Ochs on the TV show "The Midnight Special" from 1974 and couldn't resist. Oh, and that's Curtis Mayfield introducing Ochs which makes me kind of giddy:

A Word of Caution

Gallup today put out a very helpful article comparing polling numbers in July to outcomes in November, further breaking down the data by focusing on what they define as "competitive" races. These data points should breed further caution into any Dems who are feeling triumphal as of late. Especially to us younger folks there are some pretty surprising figures; Jimmy Carter for example had a 33 point lead in July of 1976 against Gerald Ford but ended up winning by only two points at the end of the day. More recently John Kerry around this time had a seven point lead over George W. Bush in the polls.

What does this all mean for Barack and John? Who knows! There are a lot of dynamics working in this campaign that will be hard to predict ranging from the fact that we haven't had an African-American candidate before to figuring out whether we're at a 1968-esque re-aligning election in which one political order (the Nixon-Reagan-Bush one) will give way to a resurgent liberalism (a topic I'll try to have thoughts on before November).

And there’s so much you could learn but you don’t want to know

There was some attention recently to a story told by Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran about John McCain's temper. Apparently during a 1987 trip to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandinista leadership McCain, according to Cochran:

"reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever. I don't know what he was telling him but I thought, good grief, everybody around here has got guns and we were there on a diplomatic mission.

Now, this story has been referenced by pundits mainly to wax on the political importance (or lack thereof) of McCain's temper as an issue. What I haven't seen commented on is this story's relevance to the Obama-McCain argument over talking and negotiating with enemies. After all, the story takes place in Nicaragua while the Sandinista regime was in power. At that time, the Sandinistas were considered one of America's main enemies because of their alliance (although not a particularly close one) with the Soviet Union, their actual closeness with Castro and their support of guerrillas in El Salvador. It's hard to remember now, but at the time Central America was the "Middle East" of its day, with then UN Secretary Jeanne Kirkpatrick describing it as the "most important place in the world" for U.S. foreign policy. The Reagan administration and its friends spread many a story about how a growing Sandinista military or future Soviet military bases could prove to be a direct threat to the U.S. homeland. Here's how President Reagan described what a failure to confront the Sandinista regime could lead to:

We will have to confront the reality of a Soviet military beachhead inside our defense perimeters, about 500 miles from Mexico. A future President and Congress will then face nothing but bad choices, followed by worse choices. My friends in the House, for over 200 years the security of the United States has depended on the safety of unthreatened borders, north and south. Do we want to be the first elected leaders in U.S. history to put our borders at risk?

Yet, despite the seemingly grave threat posed by the Sandinista regime Senator McCain, accompanied by a number of other Republican Senators including Bob Dole, saw fit in 1987 to visit Nicaragua and speak to the leadership of the Sandinista regime. Of course McCain also strongly supported U.S. intervention in Central America, including leading a successful filibuster of an amendment by Senators Dodd and Leahy (aw, don't you love the ever-changing cast of characters) to cut aid to the Salvadoran regime. Still, I'd be interested for some Democratic surrogate to bring up this point next time they get a lecture on the naivety of meeting with ones' foes.

Chi-Coms, Guantanamo and More!

Sometimes one has to wonder whether a primary thrust of the Bush administration all along has been the complete and utter destruction of the very concept of irony. Our latest example comes from the revelation that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay have been basing some of their techniques on those employed by the Chinese Communists on captured U.S. personnel during the Korean War! And not just that, but specifically those the Chinese used to illicit false confessions! As The New York Times reports:

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

I mean, it seems somewhat appropriate right? We hold these folks on a U.S. military base in one of the world's last communist countries and so we use techniques from another communist nation to interrogate folks. If the camp were in the south of Spain we'd use old Francoist methods I assume. Anyhow, the full Air Force document is available here and is an intriguing read. In fairness, the study was not of practices involving physical torture, however it really should go without saying that copying the methods of Maoist China is a bit . . . unseemly. Or that's what namby-pamby liberals might say. Tough real Americans will immediately recognize that this is a brilliant plot as surely we now have a "Guantanamo Candidate" within al Qaeda who will rise to power and then destroy the organization from the inside. Or did until the New York Times lost another war for the good ol' USA!

The final proof of Obama's red sympathies

Apparently an upcoming Rolling Stone article has Barack Obama citing For Whom the Bell Tolls as one of his favorite works of fiction! Ah ha, we finally got him! Citing this novel I believe gives us a clear insight into the dangerous leftist politics of Senator Obama. After all, this is a novel written by a man who consorted with known communists and the book itself details the story of a man participating in a known communist front group, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, fighting for a totalitarian communist state as oppossed to the softer, cuddlier tyranny represented by Franco and the fascists. Seems like perfect Jonah Goldberg material to me!

Of course, the article says the novel is also one of McCain's favorites, but that just shows what a true maverick he is.

RIP George Carlin

Rather than posting music, in honor of George Carlin I thought I'd post this bit of him doing a riff on his original "Filthy Words" routine, which is of course historic in its own right:

How can you fight a war of ideas when you don't have any?

Today's Washington Post carries an article on the failure of Al-Hurrah, the U.S. backed television station that was supposed to spread American ideals into the Arab world. This part stuck out to me:

According to critics, the U.S. government miscalculated in assuming that al-Hurra could repeat the success of Radio Free Europe during the Cold War, when information-starved listeners behind the Iron Curtain tuned in on their shortwave radios.

Al-Hurra, by contrast, faces cutthroat competition. About 200 other stations beam Arabic-language programming to satellite dishes reaching even the poorest neighborhoods in the Middle East and North Africa. The BBC launched an Arabic-language news channel this year, and more rivals loom.

Of course during the Cold War days there was no internet and except into the 1980s no cable television, so there were many fewer sources of news, especially regarding news from the rest of the world outside of whichever Iron Curtain nation one was living. Today, the options are a little more expansive. Also, Radio Free Europe gained traction because people living in the Soviet empire for the most part not only didn't like communism, they also were angry about being under foreign rule, which is not the case in the Middle East (with exceptions).

Have you ever had a dream so real...

Having different interpretations or emphasizing different elements of history is one thing. It's quite another to just pretend large chunks of history don't exist. Which is exactly what Andrew McCarthy does in this NRO article about how the "law enforcement" approach to combating al Qaeda is the sole province of sissy men. The article commences with one of the most awesome opening paragraphs I've read:

This is June 2008. That means it marks the ten-year anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s indictment . . . So it’s fair to ask: How is that strategy of prosecuting him in the criminal-justice system working out? That’s a question Sen. John McCain ought to be putting to Sen. Barack Obama every day.

I thought we'd snapped out of the "September 10th" mentality a long time ago, say around eight years ago? Or maybe those years didn't happen? If only. . .

Monday Music

As a public service I think I'll just regularly post Tom Lehrer videos, 'cause why not? Here's John McCain's personal anthem:

Count your blemishes you can't they're all gone

There's a small cottage industry among conservatives of placing much of the culpability for societal and government enforced racism in U.S. history on the shoulders of the American left. The latest is Daniel Flynn's article, "America's Racist Left" in The National Review which argues that racism "stains the history of homegrown radicals just as it stains the history of the nation which those radicals sought to change so radically." While it would be easy to just scoff at such an assertion, Flynn has some important points to make. However, by ignoring the role of the American left's role in combating racism, Flynn presents a history that is both overly static and highly selective.

First of all, let's give Flynn's assertions credit where it is due. Racism is an American problem that has seeped into almost all American political ideologies, including the left in the U.S. Nor has this been an accident or an oddity in left-wing thought, but rather an important strand (although one that has diminished with time). For example, Flynn is right to point to the anti-abolition views of antebellum American leftists; this was an issue for example among the labor movement of the time. Important labor leaders and allies such as New York politician Michael Walsh held to the view that calls for abolition represented one more method that the ruling class used to suppress the common (read white) folk. As Michael McGerr, Gwndolyn Mink and other scholars have discussed, the Progressive Movement of the late nineteenth century were by no means allies of struggling African-Americans and many Southern Progressives tacitly and even vehemently supported segregation (see George Packer's wonderful memoir Blood of the Liberals for more on this specific topic).

That said, Flynn picks his representatives of the various stages of the American left carefully to avoid dealing with some of the more heartening spots of the white American left's history. Take Flynn's history of the Communist Party in the United States. He cites the party's support of "separatism" as evidence of white on black racism, yet this position arose from a national liberation strain of thought, making it a stretch to label it as "racist." Noticeably absent is a mention of the Communist Party as one of the first white civil society organizations that fully integrated itself or more importantly the history of the Party combating racism actively (remember the Scottsboro Boys?) Don't like the Communists? Well, how about the Socialists? Perhaps one of the most important figures in the black freedom movement before Martin Luther King, Jr. was A. Philip Randolph (whose idea the March on Washington was). Randolph was an African-American, a union organizer, and a socialist.

Flynn's post-war history is also somewhat absurd. While conservatives like to harp on the racism of the Democratic Party this is always based on ignoring the virtual civil war within the party between (mostly) Southern reactionaries and the progressive parts of the party. One should remind Flynn of the words of former House majority leader and far-left Congressman Newt Gingrich who noted that "it was the liberal wing of the Democratic Party that ended segregation." Looking to the left social movements of the 1960s Flynn seems to think he has a "gotchya" moment in pointing to the lack of black "officers" in Students for a Democratic Society. Except that SDS was intended, in part, as a counterpoint to the already existing Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) which was of course majority African-American. References to SDS of course also beg the question of how many black officers there were in its conservative equivalent, Young Americans for Freedom?

Furthermore, there is the issue of Flynn's attitude which assumes that the left is unwilling to criticize its own on such issues. Of course, any good lefty knows that a core aspect of being on this side of the divide is loving to criticize others. "Moderates" attack radicals, radicals attack moderates, radicals call other radicals too moderate, and so forth. On the issue of American communism and race, Flynn's views were echoed, among other places, in one of the great pieces of American literature Richard Wright's Native Son which holds a skeptical view of the intentions of American communists. McGerr and Mink's books are also highly critical of the white left for its positions and actions regarding race relations. In fact, this was all a core undercurrent of the whole new social history movement of the 1970s and 1980s. History is fluid and one of the chief roles many left-wing academics see themselves in is keeping their activist sisters and brothers honest about the past. But you wouldn't know that reading Professor Flynn's piece.

MSM Talks about Banalogies

Ok, so Newsweek's Jonathan Alter doesn't mention me specifically, but it's always nice seeing people giving thoughtful discussions of the pluses and minuses of banalogies.

Oh, and a major American political party is on the precipice of nominating an African-American to be president of the United States. No matter how cynical one might be, that has to raise at least a bit of a smile.

Don't You Know You Can Count Me Out (In)

Stanley Kurtz over at The National Review has been writing article after article portraying Barack Obama as a secret leftist who, if elected, will institute some sort of vaguely defined radical social and economic change which you should be afraid of. In Kurtz's latest article (which synthesizes previous works) he brings up an important point about how social change happens, even as he uses it mainly to bludgeon Obama further.

Near the close of the piece Kurtz directs our attention to an essay Obama wrote almost twenty years ago for a book entitled, After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois. Kurtz finds particularly revealing a passage in Obama's text criticizing "the false dichotomy between radicalism and moderation." Kurtz obviously believes he has flushed out the true Obama: a far-left radical whose moderate image is just a pose to rise to power. This is not a totally crazy idea, after all, a certain Texas governor recently pulled that trick. However, more importantly, the relationship between moderates and radicals is a more nuanced one than Kurtz gives credit for, something which can be clearly seen in the post-war rise of conservatism here in the United States.

The recent upsurge in scholarship on the modern American Right (and remember, "recent" means something different in academia than other places) has been an incredibly valuable addition to our understanding of American history and American politics. For conservatives, it has meant that older historians who dismissed the American right as "status obsessed" or their beliefs as some psychological anomaly have been replaced by serious studies of the historical context, ideas, and movements which define American conservatism. For liberals and progressives, this bevy of new works has forced us to take a harder look at conservatism, as well as providing inspiration for rebuilding a progressive counterpoint in the U.S.

Among other points addressed in this scholarship has been the fact that modern American conservatism's opening salvos were often launched by radical groups. As historians like Lisa McGirr point out, organizations such as the John Birch Society were absolutely fundamental in building the American conservative movement. Her book describes how John Birch Society members played a crucial role in the conservative takeover of the California Republican Assembly and helped to ensure Barry Goldwater's primary victory in that state, and thus, his nomination as the Republican standard bearer in 1964. As McGirr describes them, the "John Birch Society was the most vital organized grassroots conservative force of the era." Yet, McGirr also understands the nuances of these relationships that are lost in Kurtz's "guilt by association" attacks on Obama. As she further argues, "it is misleading to equate the whole movement with the [John Birch] society." Conservatives like Ronald Reagan or William F. Buckley, Jr. were not secret Birchers, but rather shared some similar views on some issues, while holding sharp disagreements on others. They appreciated the Birchers' organizing abilities, but pushed them out of the movement when they became a liability.

Moderates (broadly defined) have almost always needed radicals. It is usually the radicals who first identify a problem and begin organizing to fix it. Radicals often provide the passion and organizing expertise (just look at the Communist Party's role in the CIO) required to start building movements for change. More moderate elements come in not necessarily to co-opt radical passions, but also because they usually have the knowledge and access to major power centers that allow for reforms to actually be carried out. There is no simple formula to understand the radical-moderate relationship; sometimes moderates really do just co-opt and weaken important causes (after all, not everyone who was anti-slavery was an abolitionist). At the same time, radicals can also help destroy movements by launching internecine conflicts and by, well, being stupid (thanks Weather Underground!) And my guess is, this will be how it is for the foreseeable future, at least until humanity makes some really big mistake.

Monday Music

The past week's been pretty busy and I've been working on a longer post which has been taking a while. In the meantime, here's Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions singing one of the great hopeful social justice songs, "People Get Ready":

Tuesday is the New Monday

Last week some conservative blogs caused a bit of a stir by trying to downplay the 75,000 person Obama rally in Portland claiming that people actually came to see Portland based indie rock band The Decemberists (a fantastic band to listen to, especially for the historically minded). Of course it didn't take long before they discovered that The Decemberists also hate America, because, well, they have a song critical of the war in Iraq.

But do conservatives realize that The Decemberists have also sung anti-French songs? Would that change their opinion? Probably not, since that song, "Legionnaire's Lament," is actually criticizing French imperialism in North Africa, which is probably one of the few things that American conservatives do like about France.

Turn Your Back on Their Framing

It's always worrisome when a trope on the right-wing blogs enters the mainstream and today we have a fine example with Nathan Thrall and Jesse Wilkin's op-ed in The New York Times entitled, "Kennedy Talked, Khrushchev Triumphed." The two argue that Kennedy rushed into the Vienna Summit in July 1961 too quickly and, to quote Kennedy himself, the result was that Khrushchev "just beat the hell out of me." This historical example is then analogized to Obama's current stance on negotiating with U.S. opponents, with the authors ending their piece by warning that "sometimes there is good reason to fear to negotiate."

Historians generally concur that the Vienna Summit was not a high point for the Kennedy administration and that he came across as weak before an assertive Nikita Khrushchev. However, a closer examination of this history reveals that Kennedy's weakness derived less from his desire to talk and more from the baggage he brought to Vienna in the form of a failed U.S. intervention two months prior.

Recent scholarship on the Kennedy administration by scholars such as Timothy Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko in their authoritative One Hell of a Gamble argue that Kennedy, upon coming into office, hoped to ratchet down Cold War tensions. Part of Kennedy's plan involved holding a summit with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, preparations of which went forward with the two sides agreeing on a June meeting in Vienna. However, in April of 1961 the administration (in a move that could hardly be called diplomatic) authorized the CIA, in conjunction with an army of exiles, to launch an ill-fated invasion of Cuba in hopes of overthrowing the still young Castro regime. As we know the subsequent Bay of Pigs landings proved an utter failure, mainly succeeding in tightening Castro's grip on the island.

While Kennedy and Khrushchev had agreed to a meeting in Vienna before the Bay of Pigs, it was in the aftermath of this catastrophe that the Soviets pushed harder to ensure the summit would go forward. As described by historian Peter Luňák in a 2003 article for Cold War History one direct result of the Bay of Pigs intervention was that Khrushchev "must have thought that he was facing exactly what he had been striving for a year earlier in Paris - a weakened American president." At the summit itself Khrushchev hammered Kennedy on any number of issues and a number of historians trace Khrushchev's assertiveness afterwards on Berlin and even his decision to move forward with placing nuclear weapons in Cuba as linked to his perception of Kennedy's weakness.

Given all of this, it seems the lesson from Vienna is less that summits and negotiations inherently display weakness, and more that the U.S. should think through and not launch disastrous interventions in other nations which weaken our standing in the world and reveal the limits of U.S. power.

King the Confrontational

Eugene Robinson and Salon.com both point to the brewing fight over the U.S. Fine Art Commission's concern that a proposed design for a statue commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr. The commission seems to think the statue would portray King as too "confrontational." Ugh. As lots of people have pointed out it's absurd to maintain this sanitized view of King as "safe," cause he wasn't. And with that in mind, listen to this speech he gave before 1199, the New York City union that eventually merged into SEIU. Warning: may contain moments of confrontation.

Hey Mr. Tough/Don't you think we've suffered enough?

Oy, Yosef, please, just stop. The neocon from CT is back with a Wall Street Journal op-ed giving the same old "Democrats used to be cool but now they're totally lame" pitch. You've heard the argument before: Democrats such as Roosevelt and Kennedy were tough and principled and fought our enemies while Democrats today are weak and relativist and want to have afternoon tea with dictators. Personally, this type of argument leaves me with two main thoughts: 1) that scholars who describe foreign policy through a gendered perspective are on to something; and 2) pundits should have to footnote their articles in the interest of providing some nutritional value.

Let's concede that the three presidents he lists, Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy, were pretty "tough." FDR saw the threat of fascism and led the nation in combating the threat, Truman set up the framework that helped the U.S. maneuver through the Cold War, and Kennedy navigated us through some dire crises. However, these presidents were not guided only by a tough stance that made them "unafraid to make moral judgments." They made choices that evinced an understanding of the strengths and limits of U.S. power and, in their best moments, a realization of the complexities and ambiguities of the world.

Even as Franklin Roosevelt commanded the U.S. through its' most epic conflict, he also recognized the limits of American power and did things that belie a simplistic idea of always standing up to "evil." Roosevelt did nothing to prevent Spain's fall to fascism and until fairly late hoped the U.S. would not have to be directly involved in the war, but rather that it could support England and other nations. Then, of course, there's Yalta, where the U.S. proved unable to stop Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. While many right-wingers of yesterday and today still see Yalta as an unforgivable sign of weakness (appeasement anyone?) as Robert Dallek writes in his magisterial chronicle of Roosevelt and foreign policy, Yalta reflected a recognition of reality: "The price for Soviet defeat of Nazi armies, diplomat and historian George F. Kennan has said, was their control of Eastern Europe."

As for Truman, it is certainly true that he and Acheson took a tough line with the Soviets, up to and including the war in Korea. Yet, they also understood the world's complexities. Acheson may have warned, as Lieberman quotes, that "no people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies." However, a look at, for example, his handling of the Iran crises after World War II shows that such a belief did not cancel out an appreciation for diplomacy and nuance. While the British believed that military intervention was needed to prevent President Mossadeq from destabilizing the region, Acheson managed to help stave off this course, realizing that although intervention could potentially "solve" the problem of a government challenging U.S. economic and strategic interests, such a move carried a greater risk of "driv[ing] Iran to a Communist coup d'etat" and that Mossadeq was someone to be negotiated with.

As for John Kennedy, while his inaugural address was certainly "tough" it's also not the only speech he gave. In June 1963, after having been through disasters and great successes in his conduct of foreign policy, Kennedy gave a speech at American University showing a new tone in his thinking about foreign policy. While the speech contained many a "hard-headed" line about combating the Soviets, it also demonstrated a real nuance regarding our seemingly implacable foes (who, after all, had promised to "bury us.") In describing how Soviet leaders perceived the U.S. as a dangerous imperialist power bent on destroying the Soviet Union, Kennedy warned (in a statement reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's concerns over an "inordinate fear of communism," a line Lieberman makes fun of in his column) that:

[I]t is sad to read these Soviet statements, to realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also a warning, a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.

Lieberman makes a number of other points of minimal historical insight, such as confusing the views of the 1960s New Left with the Democratic Party. The main point however is the one made by Kennedy above: foreign policy is not morally simplistic undertaking and leaders who history has judged kindly are usually the ones who realize that.

Patriotism and History

I spotted via TAPPED this David Frum column on progressivism, patriotism, and the Obama campaign through a discussion of Todd Gitlin's book, The Intellectuals and the Flag. Frum is (surprise) skeptical of Obama's understanding of patriotism, stating that Obama:

[T]ries to distinguish between the fearfully flawed United States as it is - and the reformed country into which the United States might evolve. It is the latter, hypothetical, country that deserves patriotic affection. But there is this one problem: that hypothetical country does not as yet exist. This is not patriotism - it is a wish fantasy.

Frum's comments reveal a somewhat baffling lack of historical context. While he may label Obama's patriotism as "without content and without qualities" one need look any farther than Obama's "Yes We Can" speech to comprehend how Obama understands patriotism. Doing so reveals a historically minded view of this issue and makes a mockery of those who would question Obama's love of country.

For Obama, patriotism centers on a devotion to the ideals of freedom and democracy that the United States was founded upon; this was the "creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation." That seems a pretty standard idea which certain presidents have reaffirmed in recent years. However, as anyone with any knowledge of American history knows, the actual social and political conditions of the United States upon its' creation did not match these ideals (see for example, slavery). To secure these blessing required (and continues to), centuries of struggle by political leaders and ordinary citizens. In Obama's speech those who embraced this patriotic mission were the ones making this ideal of America a reality: from the abolitionists to women's rights activists to union organizers. To Frum however it would seem these Americans were merely "shrinking from realities," while embracing a "wish fantasy." That is how Frum describes Obama, Gitlin, and other modern day progressives who he derides as attempting to sell a "whole new approach to patriotism." Yet, last I checked, the "realities" in America include women having the right to vote and slavery being abolished, among other changes since 1776. Thus, Obama is not pining for a fantasy America, he is rather situating his campaign and its' goals within this larger narrative of history.

Of course, Obama's reading of patriotism and history is nothing new. In fact, based on his remarks, one can imagine David Frum dismissing as "without content" and merely "hypothetical" the sentiments of a short piece of rhetoric delivered in a small town in Pennsylvania one June afternoon in 1863. It is in a way unfortunate that the Gettysburg Address is so famous as it gives us an excuse to avoid pondering its meaning, which Obama is very much attempting to emulate. Lincoln ascribed to a conception of patriotism emphasizing ideals, particularly "the proposition that all men are created equal." For him at that juncture, the Civil War did not just mean preserving a union and an old America, but rather redefining American ideals to be more expansive, to create in that worn but meaningful phrase a "new birth of freedom."

Of course there are a million more things to say about how the meaning and experience of freedom has been contested throughout American history. For the moment however, I'll leave by hopefully appealing to Mr. Frum from another angle and remind him of Rabbi Tarfon's old saying: "It is not your responsibility to finish the work [of perfecting the world], but you are not free to desist from it either."

Monday Music

I haven't always been a big fan of Seth MacFarlane's shows (Family Guy and American Dad) but this musical rendition of the history of the Iran-contra affair from a recent episode of American Dad is hilarious:

Diplomatic Weakness through Intervention

Dean Barnett over at the Weekly Standard blog has a posting attacking Obama for not understanding the history of past negotiations between U.S. presidents and enemy leaders. He cites a recent Obama statement (although the article he links to for the quote doesn't actually contain it) in which Obama noted that, "This whole notion of not talking to people . . . It didn't hold in the '60s, it didn't hold in the '70s ... When Kennedy met with (Soviet leader Nikita) Khrushchev, we were on the brink of nuclear war."

Barnett turns this into a specific discussion of the Vienna Summit in June 1961 between Kennedy and Khrushchev, ignoring the larger historic scope Obama was discussing. But let's run with it. Barnett states that "many historians" believe that Kennedy's weakness at the Vienna Summit made Khrushchev feel assertive enough to move nuclear weapons into Cuba. Thus, according to Barnett, Vienna represents a "cautionary tale regarding the inherent risks of diplomacy with malevolent regimes."Now, that's a point of dispute but let's accept his contention that Kennedy was in a weak position when he met Khrushchev. Why would that be?

Two months earlier the administration had conducted a disastrous attempted intervention at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. To Barnett's credit he mentions the Bay of Pigs, but his point remains that the U.S. is weaker for engaging in negotiations. Yet, this is a case where U.S. weakness on the international scene derived not from talking to the enemy, but from the failures of a poorly planned covert intervention in another nation's affairs. U.S. power is not complete and as in a game of poker, sometimes it's best not to show your full hand (ie., use military force). Does any of this sound familiar?

Appeasement Alert

Wooo boy, the banalogies are just flying around today. RedState posted this awesome video which segue ways from Bush's remarks yesterday, to Chamberlain's statement at Munich (though they at least avoid the most cliched moment of Chamberlain saying "We shall have peace in our time") to Obama saying he'd meet with leaders we don't like. Of course, one could make a similar video with the final footage showing Reagan meeting, negotiating, and coming to deals with Gorbachev and the Soviets! Who then subsequently invaded Western Europe (as the neocons feared) because of all that appeasement.

As Matthews pointed out, the difference between Chamberlain and Obama is that the Munich Pact saw Britain and France concede to Hitler half of Czechoslovakia, not that he talked to Hitler at all.

Godwin's Law

It's annoying, but also highly appropriate, that my first real post regards our president making a facile comparison between today's Middle East problems and World War II. There's an amusing social science idea, "Godwin's Law" which states that as any "discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." I would propose a corollary to that, the "Munich Metaphor Law" which states that as any conservative continues to speak or write about U.S. foreign policy, the probability of them referencing Munich approaches one.

Historical analogies to World War II are among the most commonly and least accurately employed by pundits and politicians, so it's no surprise that Bush resorted to one in his speech to the Israeli Knesset today:

Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

The main question here is how the historical context of World War II helps us understand today's conditions. A significant segment of Americans and politicians (especially conservatives, btw) did call for the U.S. to stay out of European and Asian affairs. Who are their equivalents today? As far as dealing with al Qaeda, last I checked most everyone in "mainstream" political dialogue is saying the U.S. needs to defeat al Qaeda, not negotiate with them, differing mainly on the best strategy for carrying this out.

How about Iran, surely Achmedinejad is like the new Hitler! Well, no, most likely not. Let's review: Hitler wanted to militarily conquer the world. Does Achmedinejad want to do that? I haven't really heard anyone suggest that. How about just invading a few of Iran's neighbors? No one's really saying that either and the main nation he might target already is tilting more pro-Iranian everyday, thanks to, well, us. How about a pre-meditated nuclear strike on Israel? For that to be a worry, someone needs to convince me that Achmedinejad is far crazier than Hitler and does not care one bit about turning his nation into a nuclear waste heap. 'Cause that is exactly what will happen; Israel has the capacity to attack Iran with nuclear weapons delivered by land, sea, and air , leaving a 0% chance of Iran escaping undestroyed.

So, there's not much "there" there. To sum up my thoughts on such analogies here are some apropos words from the great Stephen Colbert: "That's a stupid thing to say and you're a stupid person for saying it."

UPDATE: People smarter than me weigh in. And guess what Joe Lieberman thinks of Bush's speech?

UPDATE 2: If we're doing World War II analogies, this Chris Matthews interview is kind of like the Marianas Turkey Shoot. I'm not always a fan of Matthews but the way he rips this right-wing radio host to shreds is worth watching.

Music Monday

When I was growing up our family road trips were usually accompanied by the music of Tom Lehrer. One of the great American satirists, Tom Lehrer was a sort of child prodigy, graduating from Harvard when he was 18. Lehrer has spent much of his life as a math and political science professor bouncing between Harvard, MIT, and Wellesley. He is also a songwriter and in the early and mid-1960s he composed a number of biting and hilarious songs satirizing the Cold War, segregation, and innumerable other topics.

Given all the the political hand wringing and fighting over the racial and gender divides that the Democratic nomination fight is forcing into plain view, it seems particularly appropriate to share his song "National Brotherhood Week" from his 1965 record, That Was the Year That Was:



PS: Real blogging begins soon...just one more paper!

Dept. of Non-Banalogies

The inimitable Rick Perlstein gives a nice run down of historic voting trends in Louisiana's sixth district where the Democrats scored a surprise victory on Saturday in a special House election.

It Was Forty Years Ago Today...

Dissent Magazine has a nice collection of essays from various left-leaning academics about the meaning of 1968. Rather than recite the litany of events we all have committed to memory, the essays give some context and help us see why we still can't stop talking about 1968 (hint: it's because none of the issues that arose then have been resolved).

Monday Music

I thought a nice way to start off Mondays would be to post a song, preferably one with some relevant lyrics or that has historical significance in itself.

And what better way to begin than with The Kinks! This is "Victoria" the title track from their 1969 record Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire. As you might guess the album has some historical content. "Victoria" in specific is Ray Davies' ode to the late nineteenth century glory days of the British Empire. Though, as with many Kinks' songs, the lyrics are overflowing with sarcasm and it's pretty hard to see it as anything other than an attack on the pretensions and arrogance of the British Empire. Which is why I'm dedicating "Victoria" to Doug Feith, Max Boot, and all of their friends who spend their time daydreaming about being T.E. Lawrence.

McCain v. Goldwater

Former White House Counsel John Dean has a solid (if somewhat overly sentimental) look at why John McCain is not a principled conservative in the mold of Barry Goldwater.

Happy May Day

Today is May 1st or May Day. While there are a number of different holidays and celebrations associated with May Day, among these includes International Worker's Day. Unfortunately, May Day in this context has became synonymous with septagenerian Soviet General Secretaries politely waving to rows of deadly Red Army divisions poised to strike Western Europe. Fortunately, the U.S. embarked on the path advocated by the John McCain's of the era and U.S. forces currently are enjoying their fifty-third year of peaceful occupation and borscht eating.

As for the origins of May Day, they actually lie right here in the good ol' US of A! May Day grew out of the struggle for a shorter working day, one which can be traced in the U.S. at least as far back as the (appropriately enough) named "Ten Hour Movement" of antebellum times. May Day itself traces back to October 7, 1884 when the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU), the immediate predecessor to the American Federation of Labor (AFL), passed a resolution demanding the legislative approval of an eight hour day by May 1, 1886.

Sadly, the eight-hour day was not implemented in 1886, leading unions across the nation to commence a major strike wave, including in Chicago. Those protests ended in a sordid tale called the "Haymarket Affair" in which seven police officers were killed by a bomb (culprit unknown), leading to the trials and executions of five anarchists in a trial most scholars describe as embodying all the impartiality and thoroughness one could expect in say, the North Korean justice system. Among other repercussions of the Haymarket affair was that May Day became an international day of remembrance for the "martyrs" of Haymarket and thus became the international celebration of today.

In honor of May Day, I thought it'd be good to post a video reminding us of why we have needed, still need, and will need in the future a thriving labor movement:

How Is This Gilded Age Different from All Others?

I'll just be throwing up links for a bit until the semester's over. Steve Fraser, who's the editor at large of New Labor Forum and author of an epic biography of Sidney Hillman has a thoughtful article in Salon.com comparing the late nineteenth century Gilded Age to the one we seem stuck in today. It's a well-worn topic but he has some fresh things to say.

In what will surely be a regular feature...

...sometimes you just have to love Fox News

Lincoln v. Russert

Tim Russert: Do you know a man by the name of Frederick Douglass?

Abraham Lincoln: I do believe I've met him on one occasion.

Russert: Mr. Douglass has indicated that he feels positively about your candidacy. Are you aware that between 1845 and 1847 Mr. Douglass traveled through England and Scotland where he regularly denounced the United States on foreign soil?

Lincoln: Well, I do not follow Mr. Douglass' every move, but I believe his complaints were regarding the enslavement of his peo---

Russert: Yes, but many Americans feel that denouncing our nation on foreign soil is an unpatriotic act.

Lincoln: Well, I don't quite---

Russert: Next question: you opposed the recent Mexico war?

Lincoln: Yes, I felt that the President did not provide a convincing justification---

Russert: Yet, you have stated your willingness to use force to maintain national unity if the South were to secede. Can you explain this contradiction?

Welcome to Banalogies

"History is past politics, and Politics present history." So said the nineteenth-century American historian Herbert Baxter Adams, who helped establish the field of modern political history through his seminars at Johns Hopkins. Read the media (whether mainstream, conservative or liberal) or listen to politicians' speeches and you'll see that Adams' observation is as vital today as it was almost a century ago. Historical examples, comparisons, and analogies abound, shaping our understandings of today and informing plans for the future. As well they should.

However, there are dangers in using history in such ways. These do not arise because the past has nothing to tell us about the present, but rather because pundits and politicians often employ history poorly. Especially when it comes to the use of comparisons and analogies, historical examples can distort as easily as they clarify. In his 1973 book on this topic, 'Lessons' of the Past, diplomatic historian Ernest May described these risks better than I ever could:

[P]olicy-makers ordinarily use history badly. When resorting to an analogy, they tend to seize upon the first that comes to mind. They do not search more widely. Nor do they pause to analyze the case, test its fitness, or even ask in what ways it might be misleading. Seeing a trend running toward the present, they tend to assume that it will continue into the future, not stopping to consider what produced it or why a linear projection might prove to be mistaken.

And thus, we reach Banalogies. I hope to use this blog to take a critical look at the use of historical comparisons and analogies by the media and politicians, adding nuance, context when I can and just pointing out when some historical comparisons don't make sense. I also have a slightly more "political" agenda and in my case I plan to promote progressive values, something I believe a thoughtful reading of history can do. I should also say that I will certainly make my own bad comparisons and poor uses of history and I intend this as a learning experience as much as a teaching one. We'll see. In the meantime, enjoy!