Scattered Political Thoughts

* When McCain says he served "for patriotism, not for profit," this is a very conservative belief--the warrior, the noble, the aristocratic, the civic republican belief, that has not begun the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century assimilation of commerce and honor, which does underpin Anglo-American (conservative) thought and politics. Frankly, that assimilation is an unnatural beast in many ways--contempt for the merchant is the natural state of affairs. Anglo-America is great precisely because we do assimilate commerce and honor--but it does leave open the possibility for mere lucre to crowd out honor entirely. So while on the whole I am sympathetic to the outraged squeals from the National Reviewniks at McCain's phraseology, I do sometimes think that McCain's values are sometimes a productive corrective to modern America--even to modern conservative America. But it means he ain't a Victorian--he's an Elizabethan! Hmm, Coriolanus displaying his wounds, and unwilling to bend ...

* Who should be McCain's Vice-President--putting the cart before the horse and all. A ticklish question--after all, anybody who would make a good vice-president would also make a good president, so why not vote for him for president? One can make an argument for most of the other contenders for the nomination--Giuliani, Huckabee, Romney, Thompson--and note that whatever disqualifies them from being president also makes them imperfect for vice president. Various swing-state governors--Crist, Pawlenty--are nothing more than that--ways to bag a state. I would rather like Bobby Jindal as he would be four years from now--whip-smart, conservative, with a good record as governor, young, and, gosh, he's Not White, Mabel, Aren't Those Republicans Inclusive? But this is just 2008, alas. I am perhaps tempted by the Hail-Mary play to Huckabee--that is to say, assume the Republicans will be outspent by the Democrats this year, and team up the two Republicans who have done the most with the least money, and have a track record of getting lots of favorable free media. But, of course, this would leave the movement conservatives and the business-class Republicans unenthusiastic at best, unwilling to vote Republican at worst, and almost certainly condemn McCain/Huckabee to a fundraising disadvantage. As I say, a desperate move. Perhaps the best thing to do is punt that bit of punditry down the road? After all, it depends in part on who the Democrat Prez and Veep are--both of which will be known before McCain gets to make his Veep choice, if it is McCain.

The Phantom Menace

John Judis has an article, "The Phantom Menace," in The New Republic. It turns out we shouldn't take opposition to illegal immigration seriously because 1) the people who are most up in arms about illegal immigration don't yet have many illegal immigrants in their neighborhood; and 2) they're really displacing their fears about something else (globalization, dissolving culture, etc.) onto illegal immigrants. To which one might say: 1) Some political wisdom consists in facing problems before they become immediate and unsolveable--one imagines John Judis in 1940 saying that all this fuss about Germany and Japan is just a Phantom Menace, because they haven't attacked us yet; and 2) this is the old liberal trope of psychoanalyzing conservatives (or regular Americans) instead of taking their ideas seriously, refusing to engage in argument because, after all, your opponents really need to spend time with a shrink. Contemptible when Hofstadter engaged in this sort of argument; contemptible now.

Arrivederci, Rudy

Alas, that little Rudy sticker on the left side of the blog is looking pretty forlorn after the results from Florida. Giuliani, while apparently not exactly conceding, is at this moment giving a speech which clearly indicates that a concession (with a possible endorsement of McCain?) may be in the offing. Giuliani's delivery -- smart, funny, informal, gracious -- reminds me of all the reasons I liked him in the first place. He may be less than ideal as a husband, but few politicians today are so willing to show a human face, and few are so obviously intelligent.

Alas, Giuliani's "Florida firewall" was not so obviously intelligent. His refusal to play in the early contests was, in retrospect, too clever by half. At the same time, he didn't deserve the damage he sustained from the grossly misleading stories that he had used (and tried to hide) New York City funds to provide a security detail for his lover -- now wife -- Judith Nathan. Most of what people heard or inferred about that story was wrong, but it didn't really matter: in large measure, it was the distasteful phrase "mistress in the Hamptons" that did him in. (It didn't help, I admit, that Rudy didn't seem to know when and how to hit the "ignore" button on his cell phone, thus calling undue attention to his devotion to the aforementioned Ms. Nath-- er, Ms. Giuliani.)

So it appears we're down, in effect, to McCain and Romney, and of the two I'm inclined to opt for McCain. But I hope I haven't seen the last of Rudy. I saw just enough of New York City before and during his tenure there to believe that he really did accomplish something great and difficult in orchestrating its celebrated turnaround. If Giuliani has had a tendency to campaign on his resume in the last several months, that's at least mitigated by the fact that the major items on that resume were so impressive.

Disappointment from McCain

I gather that McCain did slander (libel?--I can never get these terms straight) Romney over the weekend, by saying that Romney had called for a timetable for withdrawal of our troops for Iraq--that this is an outright falsehood, not an exaggeration. Ugh. To the extent I have any influence as a McCain supporter, I suppose I should say I am still for him, but despite this immoral action, which is, by itself, a reason not to vote for him.

Words for Our Times

Regular readers of this blog will have noted my developing obsession with the public understanding of science. Today I read with a mixture of approval and sadness these words from Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft:

"Corrupted by dogma and myth, current opinion, even when it is least hostile to enlightenment, has lost the very taste for verification. On that day when, having first taken care not to discourage it with useless pedantry, we shall succeed in persuading the public to measure the value of a science in proportion to its willingness to make refutation easy, the forces of reason will achieve one of their most smashing victories."

The words, I think, gain poignancy from the fact that Bloch, a leader of the French Resistance, was shot by the Nazis in the summer of 1944. It was precisely "dogma and myth," and the widespread disinclination to subject certain theories -- eugenic, economic, historical -- to skeptical scrutiny, that made the worst crimes of the Nazis possible.

I've Just Been Polled!

Rasmussen Robots just asked me a detailed series of questions about my view of the economy, and my personal economic situation and expectations. I was hoping for a political poll ... but now I am part of the mass of Anonymous Data. I think a number of my answers were misleading, due to the phrasing of the questions. But anyway, me and my little finger on the touch-tone phone are now about to become, in our obscure way, influential.

Stephen Sondheim, Sunday in the Park with George

Withywindle: Portrait of the Autist as a Young Man.

Goldberry: Like watching paint dry.

**********

Had flickers of good material, largely about the characters Dot and Marie, who actually love other people. Most of it was a plotless meditation on art--apparently art drives you to be an obsessive, self-centered jerk. Which is all well and good for Sondheim telling us about himself, but a psychiatrist gets paid to listen to such things, and we paid for the privilege.

More Christopher Fry

From A Phoenix Too Frequent, Dynameme describing to her maid Doto a dream of her late husband Virilius:

He was the ship. He had such a deck, Doto,
Such a white, scrubbed deck. Such a stern prow,
Such a proud stern, so slim from port to starboard.
If ever you meet a man with such fine masts
Give your life to him, Doto. The figurehead
Bore his own features, so serene in the brow
And hung with a little seaweed. O Virilius,
My husband, you have left a wake in my soul.
You cut the glassy water with a diamond keel.
I must cry again.

Little Nemo in Slumberland

I've been reading it slowly. Yes, visually spectacular, although slow going. A particularly slow bit in the middle has Little Nemo touring the US and Canada, with the artist providing urban landscapes and tourism information ... not just of New York, Boston, and Montreal, but Ottawa, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, even Wheeling, West Virginia! The sequence is historically fascinating, to get a sense of what these cities looked like in 1910, and what was considered notable about them. But history aside ... from Slumberland to Wheeling? Peculiar. The saddest line in the sequence is 'Welcome to Detroit, the most beautiful city in America."

Liberal Fascism: A Long Review

Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism makes a number of different arguments. These are: 1) that modern American conservativism is unjustly called Fascist by various left-wing critics; 2) tu quoque, that American liberalism could as easily, if not more easily, justly be called called Fascist; because 3) American liberalism is vaguely related to Fascism in both its intellectual history and modern character; or 4) more closely related to Fascism—a claim that Goldberg keeps on raising, then saying he doesn’t really mean. These claims are bundled together, in a manner that is polemically effective but does not conduce to clear historical analysis. Some of what he claims is true, but it is so mixed up with the tendentious and the unpersuasive that he tends to discredit his entire line of argument.

The trouble begins with a matter of basic definitions: What exactly is fascism? What exactly is liberalism? What is the relationship between the two of them? Goldberg oscillates between claiming a close relationship, and a more distant one—in the same paragraph he writes that “what we call liberalism—the refurbished edifice of American Progressivism—is in fact a descendant and manifestation of fascism. .... liberalism is the well-intentioned niece of European fascism.” (2) Child or niece?—there’s a rather important distinction. Niece, Goldberg generally (but not universally) says—but the distinction turns on claiming that there is a broader fascism, of which “European fascism” or “the oppression, cruelty, and tyranny of classical fascism” (161) is only one variant. What then is this broader fascism, which encompasses American Progressivism, Fascism, and Nazism?

Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the ‘problem’ and therefore defined as the enemy. (23)

So also his definition of totalitarianism: “The history of totalitarianism is the history of the quest to transcend the human condition and create a society where our deepest meaning and destiny are realized simply by virtue of the fact that we live in it.” (21) But both these overlapping definitions are far too generic. They are, as far as I can tell, recycled Voegelin: “The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy.” The contrast is to conservativism or classical liberalism, which understand “that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect society, the only real utopia, waits for us in the next life.” (14) Goldberg’s definition of fascism corresponds far more closely to utopianism; his critique of fascism is that of the authoritarian—totalitarian—temptation that derives from utopian thought. Fascism is indeed an aspect of utopian thought—so are communism, socialism, and liberalism—but his definition is not exclusively Fascist. What it misses is the institutions and practices that defined Fascism, as much as its aspirations. It is not just nationalist thought, but nationalist policy that defines fascism; not just militaristic rhetoric, but militaristic policy. More to the point, the concrete institutions of a paramilitary party that has taken over the state and claimed an effective monopoly of political activity, the abrogation of the procedures of liberal democracy, the actual militarization of society, the successful penetration of the state into the everyday life of the individual, and a very significant degree of actual state regulatory control over the economy, all ought to be considered part of the definition of fascism. A definition of a political ideology that is dependent solely on ideas, and does not include institutions and practices, has little or no analytic power.

(For a conservative, Goldberg is oddly interested in naked ideas throughout. It is revealing, for example, that he thinks that the fact that Mussolini was “astoundingly well read” argues against the portrayal of him as a “bumbling oaf.” (34) Goldberg ascribes this dichotomy to “the standards of liberal intellectuals” (35), but, not least because he combines this analysis with his dismissive description of (Hitler’s and) FDR’s political talents as instinctive (34), it seems to reflect his own opinion as well. And note also his list of abstractions on p. 176: “deconstruction, existentialism, postmodernism, pragmatism, relativsim.” He takes these to “dissolve the concrete foundations of truth” (176)—but his truth, throughout, is oddly disembodied. Goldberg’s intellectualism is indeed peculiarly like his vaunted antagonists in academia.)

(Note also, that Goldberg’s defense of conservatism is that conservatism—when defined as classic liberalism—has little in common with fascism. But the crux of the critique of conservatism is not that conservatives were particularly fascist in their beliefs, but that in practice they were willing to accommodate themselves to Fascism, and displayed distressingly little attachment to liberal democracy. Goldberg indeed recognizes this fact: “In Germany ...when Hitler demonstrated that he wasn’t going away, these same elites decided it would be wise to put down some insurance money on the upstarts. .... Corporations in Germany, like their counterparts today, tended to be opportunistic, not ideological.” (58-59) Just so—and this practice, not their thought, is what gave conservatives a bad name in the Fascist generation.)

So if we substitute “utopianism” for “fascism,” this thesis is unobjectionable, indeed uninteresting: liberalism and fascism are indeed both utopian ideologies, and liberalism can reasonably be called the utopian niece of fascism, just as Jacobinism is fascism’s utopian grandfather. Radicals right and left are utopian, but the mere fact of their radicalism doesn’t necessarily make them fascist. But Goldberg is also arguing for a tighter tie between fascism and the left—between fascism and socialism—and a greater tie between fascism and American Progressivism. There is something to be said for both theses: Goldberg fairly accurately recounts the intellectual history that argues for an understanding of fascism and Nazism as socialist heresies, that highlights New Deal figures such as Hugh Johnson as unpleasantly sympathetic to fascism, looks at the progressive roots of eugenics and the eugenic roots of the welfare state, recounts the many H. G. Wellses on the Anglo-American left who spoke as favorably of Mussolini as of Lenin or Stalin, and who wrote yearningly, to their dishonor and to our just alarm, of a liberal fascism, highlights the unpleasant power- and state-worship of American progressives, that aligns them particularly with Fascist thought, (Nota Bene: Walter Houghton’s The Victorian Frame of Mind provides the nineteenth-century, Carlylean background for this unpleasant strand in American thought.) and also highlights the rhetorical and intellectual debt modern American liberals owe to these dubious forebears.

But Goldberg also oddly distorts the history—partly to extenuate Italian Fascism, partly to blacken the names of Wilson and the New Deal. These distortions should be addressed in some detail, because they discredit his entire book.

* Goldberg minimizes the racism of the Italian Fascists. No, Italian Fascism was not overwhelmingly anti-Semitic until 1938. But there was anti-Semitism within the Fascist party from the beginning—particularly strongly in the Trieste branch, influenced by Austro-Hungarian anti-Semitism—and Mussolini’s shift toward anti-Semitism in 1938 drew upon existing intellectual resources within Italian Fascism. More to the point, Italian Fascist racism was marked by the near-genocidal suppression of the Senussi in Libya, 1931-33, and the mass-murderous conquest of Ethiopia—which included the use of poison gas. The main targets of Italian Fascist racism were Libyans and Ethiopians; that Jews were not its main target does not absolve Italian Fascism of the charge of racism.

* Goldberg states that “many Fascists were actually impressive, respectable men who earned not only the cooperation of the police but they sympathy of both judges and the common man. In a national contest between two broad factions, the Italian people—workers, peasants, small-business men, and professionals, as well as the well-to-do and wealthy—chose the Fascists over avowed international socialists and communists.” (48-49) To which one must ask—so what? What has this to do with justice, morality, law, liberty, or democracy? Goldberg, the anti-populist (47) should know that these facts have nothing to do with the (de)merits of Fascism.

* “In 1924 he [Mussolini] held reasonably fair elections.” Goldberg has a sunny view of the widespread violence, and threats of violence, that marked the 1924 election.

* “The Austro-Hungarian Empire ... accepted Jews, Czechs, and the rest of the non-Teutonic rabble as equal citizens.” (62) This reflects the odd nostalgia for the Dual Monarchy that comes from reading deeply in certain Austrian theorists of economic and political freedom. The exact phrase is “equal subjects”—and a citizen of the Great Republic ought to know the difference.

* “The “social space” the Nazis were fighting to control was on the left.” (70) It is true that the Nazis and the Communists attracted a good deal of the same sort of bully-boys. But the increase in the Nazi vote in the late 1920s correlates closely with the collapse of the vote for the DNP and DNVP—rightist parties—and the political space they fought to control was on the right. Furthermore, the Socialist vote, and the SPD, remained remarkably cohesive through to 1933—and after 1945, it was the same men, both the leaders and the voters, who resurrected the SPD. The collapse of the rightist parties of Germany under the pressure of Nazism, and the resilience of the Social Democrats, minimizes or contradicts Goldberg’s thesis.

* “If the events that transpired [in America] during and immediately after World War I occurred today in any Western nation, few educated people would fail to recognize it for what it was.” (80) Now, Goldberg deliberately excludes mention of other countries from his study—but this brings the obvious retort that precisely the same catalogue of “fascist” actions he imputes to Wilson in the US could be imputed to Lloyd George in Britain and Clemenceau in France in World War I, and to Churchill in World War II—state regulation of the economy, imprisonment of enemy aliens (in Britain in World War One, including the British wives of resident German men), the alignment of progressivism and militarism, etc. This does not disprove the contention that such actions were Fascist—but it ought to demonstrate that Wilson was no unique devil-figure, but typical among Western politicians in his response to World War One.

* “Wilson arguably did as much if not more violence to civil liberties in his last three years in office than Mussolini did in his first twelve.” Yet Goldberg notes earlier that 2,000 people died in the Fascist takeover of Italy (48). Who died because of Wilson? There is a great difference between 2,000 dead, with all the chilling effects on free expression, on liberty, attendant thereupon, and 2,000 deported—a difference that makes the comparison to Wilson slanderous both to Wilson and to America.

* “The progressives in Congress actively supported or went along with virtually every major military excursion of the Roosevelt and Taft administrations. .... it fell to the conservatives in Congress to fight expenditures on such things as the ‘big navy.’” (91) It’s one thing to oppose expenditure, another to oppose military expansion as such. Outside Congress, figures such as William Jennings Bryan and Mark Twain were notable opponents of our conquest of the Phillipines, for example—neither, I believe, particularly conservative figures.

* Goldberg provides no weight (106-16) to the fact that America was at war in 1917 and 1918. (This despite his statement that “During wartime this country has historically done whatever it takes to see things through.” (160)) All states behave differently in war than at peacetime—all democracies too—and ought to behave differently. The state is supposed to organize economic resources for winning the war; “dissent” often is treason, and ought to be suppressed and censored; civil liberties are and should be restricted—by legislative consent ideally, by executive authority if not. Now, the United States has preserved civil liberties more and more in each war—William Rehnquist’s All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime covers the subject---but in no war have we preserved all our peacetime civil liberties, and it would have been suicidal and immoral (immoral not least because suicidal) to do so. If we are not to recognize that war makes a difference, why not label Lincoln the first Fascist?—providing an abolitionist politics of meaning as he suspended habeus corpus and conducted the War of Northern Aggression. (A paleo-libertarian, Daniel Larison-esque point of view, toward which Goldberg’s line of argument leads naturally.) Why not Manifest Destiny?—so utopian, so expansionist, so murderous of Indians. Andy Jackson, expelling the Cherokee? Or the American elite, fusing Puritan sermons and revolutionary politics to summon up the mobs to hound 150,000 Loyalists from America? Goldberg can only make Wilson a devil-figure by ignoring the moral exigencies of wartime, and the wartime precedents of America’s earlier history. And note, incidentally, that unlike Lincoln, Truman, Johnson, or Bush, Wilson received from the American Congress a declaration of war on Germany in 1917—a legal fact of great significance.

* And in any case, nothing in Wilson’s America includes party violence to suspend democracy. The American Legion was not affiliated with the Democratic Party. Neither were the Boy Scouts. All sorts of ugly epithets can be applied to Wilson’s administration—authoritarian, statist, illiberal—but fascist is a misnomer.

* “It’s hard to see how [Roosevelt’s claim that his policies possessed] orderliness absolves a policy from the charge of fascism or totalitarianism.” (122) Actually, this is central to the claim of fascism. Utopian radicalism, among other things, subverts all procedure—all law, all bureaucratic order—to an immediate judgment of virtue—utopian radicalism dissolves legality and bureaucratic order. The definition of Fascism is also of a practice of increasing dissolution of rational chains of bureaucratic procedure before charismatic authority. Mussolini’s “bumbling oaf” reputation in good part consists of his very Fascistic insistence on doing everything himself—more than he could possibly handle—thus condemning the Italian state to increasing incoherence. Martin Broszat’s The Hitler State also dissects the increasing incoherence of the German state as a direct result of Nazi ideology. Now, Roosevelt’s administration has also been described as involving overlapping channels of authority, directed by Roosevelt’s charismatic authority—which rather supports the idea of Roosevelt as Fascistic—but the overwhelming adherence of the New Deal to bureaucractic orderliness is in point of fact a very strong argument for its democratic, non-Fascistic character.

* “The problem with this sort of [Rooseveltian, third-way] triangulation is that you end up moving to whatever you believe is the epicenter between two ever-shifting and hard-to-define horizons.” But isn’t much of conservatism similarly, well, pragmatic? What of the idea of Tory men and Whig measures? What of Russell Kirk?:

The conservative, in short, favors reasoned and temperate progress; he is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old. Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism. Just how much change a society requires, and what sort of change, depend upon the circumstances of an age and a nation.

How does this differ from Third Way thinking?—and note the idea of the nation as an organism. Isn’t that terribly fascistic?

* The fact that Mussolini and Hitler called the New Deal Fascistic (147-48) is more illuminating to the history of fascist propaganda than to the history of fascist thought.

* “Mussolini didn’t launch a war until a full sixteen years into his reign.” (150) Does this mean the lapse between 1922 and the invasion of Albania in 1939? This ignores the Spanish Civil War, Ethiopia, the suppression of Libya, saber-rattling in the 1920s—and the fact that Mussolini’s militaristic inclinations had to be deferred while he built up the power of the Fascist party in Italy, and Italy’s armed forces. Normally Goldberg gives more weight to inclination than to practice—this sentence does the reverse, and is in any case factually wrong.

* Roosevelt, in the extraordinary crisis of 1933, may have considered dictatorship (151)—but, again, what matters is what he did, not what he contemplated. As for what he did—the CCC and the WPA (152ff) don’t qualify as paramilitary adjuncts of the Democratic Party taking over the federal government and suspending elections, engaging in street violence with Republicans, etc. Short of that, labeling them “fascist” is highly unpersuasive, and rather slanderous, even after all of Goldberg’s caveats. (“FDR’s sins were nowhere near those of Hitler or Mussolini.” (160))

* “Patriotism is not the same thing as extreme nationalism or fascism.” (197) This sentence undoes much of Goldberg’s critique of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and almost as much of his critique of Wilson. What if the Blue Eagle parades of the 1930s, and the harassment of German-Americans in World War I, were expressions of patriotism, not nationalism or fascism? Then virtually all of the examples that substantiate his thesis can be attributed to something other than fascism.

What else? Goldberg’s classic-liberal standpoint to some extent conflates socialism with the welfare-state. Note, incidentally, that he recapitulates here the attitude of pre-World-War-One liberals in Europe and America, who condemned all the trappings of the welfare state as socialist—and therefore prompted many supporters of a non-revolutionary welfare-state to consider themselves socialists. Socialist policy platforms, before and after the First World War, include a great deal of the welfare state—so therefore do Fascist policy platforms—and the social democratic and Christian democratic welfare states finally consolidated after World War II therefore owe a great deal, in theory, in bureaucratic plan, and in bureaucratic personnel, immediately to the Fascists and more distantly to the Socialists. (But democratic France and Britain between the wars were also throwing up such ideas, not just among Nazis and Socialists, which bore fruit after the war.) Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent is quite good at tracing the continuities between Fascist Europe and putatively democratic post-war Europe—so strong, that any “Fascism” in America pales by comparison, in terms of intellectual and institutional influence, and in terms of moral culpability. (Heck, let’s make the obvious paleolibertarian point: Israel was founded as a far more National Socialist state than America—complete with utopian mission on earth, nationalist ideology, socialist collectivism, and a paramilitary party (Labor, Haganah) heavily intertwined with the state. You think Roosevelt’s a fascist? What about Ben Gurion?) But the continuities also point out that the welfare state is not irredeemably tainted with any particular ideology—it can be socialist, fascist, or democratic, indiscrimately. The only result of calling the welfare state fascist is to abandon it to fascists—or at any rate, to liberals.

Goldberg’s book is a polemic, and one ought not therefore judge it by the standards of a professional work of history—it’s has a different aim from a work of history. Indeed, this is very much a work of “useable history”—little potted history lectures in service of modern political points. But this genre characteristic very severely limits its persuasiveness as a work of history. That is, Goldberg continually interrupts his historical narrative to make comparisons to modern-day events or words, generally liberal. The cult of Mussolini is like the cult of Che Guevara. (33) Sorelian thought is like Al Sharpton’s lies about Tawana Brawley, or “lying for justice.” (37) But the historical point Goldberg is trying to prove is the similarity of liberalism to fascism—and to use all these modern-day liberal examples is to assume the point has already been made. If he wanted to make his argument more strongly—historically, if not polemically—he should have addressed himself first to Mussolini, Hitler, Wilson, etc., and segregated all the modern-day references in the chapters on modern-day liberalism.

A good deal of the book rests on rhetoric. Mussolini promised a “Third Way”—so do modern liberals. (5) (Save when it doesn’t: “Alas, it is difficult to take his [Wilson’s] liberty-loving rhetoric too seriously.” (92) That is, he argues the similarity of language, of imagery, also argues for a similarity of thought, of policy—that to speak of “the moral equivalent of war” is somehow to be fascistic. Besotted as I am with the importance of rhetoric, and of words, Goldberg goes too far. Yes, liberals talked of a War on Poverty—but Gordon Brown also called the fight against poverty "the greatest moral crusade of our times," and this shouldn’t be read as meaning that Brown feels a deep affinity with Catholic theology of the eleventh and twelfth century, plans to liberate the Holy Land, or intends for British armies to commit pogroms against the Jews of Central Europe along the way. Language does matter—but perhaps one shouldn’t read too much into it. Again, actual policy and actions matter as much as the language—the argument by language alone is oddly divorced from reality—an argument from an ivory tower.

An odd note on religion: “while Christianity was being made into a true state religion, its transcendent and theological elements became corrupted.” (87) What is a theological argument doing in this book? Who, precisely, judges what is correct Christian theology, and what is corrupt? Goldberg is not speaking as a Christian—as any sort of religious man—in this book. This is itself a political judgment of religion—a classical liberal one—and for subordinating religion to a political value system, itself corrupting and worthy of condemnation.

Much of the book is a critique of the character of Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, etc. A good deal of this is petty and beside the point. To the extent it is cogent, it argues for what we might call a “Fascist temperament”—which is a very much more diffuse thing than a Fascist ideology. Now, there is some value in throwing up examples of a Fascist temperament, and they should help govern our political choices—but it provides us much less clear political guidance.

Goldberg clearly identifies his brand of conservatism with a Hayekian (139), anti-collectivist, classical liberalism. Among other things, this leads to a certain horizon effect—he is so far from certain political movements, that he cannot distinguish among them. For example, he states that “Since Wilson ended up governing largely as a New Nationalist, the subtler distinctions between his and Roosevelt’s platforms do not matter very much for our purposes.” (93) It is true they don’t matter very much for a Hayekian classical liberal—but this tells us as much about Goldberg as it does about Wilson and Roosevelt. There are real distinctions to be made among the various “collectivist” ideologies, and a book, a man, or an ideology that cannot discriminate among them is of limited utility either for historical understanding or political guidance.

Finally, consider the following statements: “Liberalism is a culture and a dogma much as conservativsm is.” (317) “Alinsky shares with the fascists and pragmatists of yore a bedrock hostility to dogma.” (322) “Ultimately the issue here is that of dogma. We are all dogmatic about something. We all believe that there are some fundamental truths or principles that demarcate the acceptable and the unacceptable, the noble and the venal.” (404) Now consider the following statement from Kirk: “Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. .... Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order. The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata.” I am sure Goldberg could make reference to “an enduring moral order” as a rough synonym to “conservative dogma”—but I think Kirk, at least, would raise an eyebrow.

This book restates certain Hayekian critiques against utopian radicalism—some old talking points, some new intellectual history, the latter of some value. I have not discussed what I find less troubling—but I do not think the value of what is correct makes up for the many problems of this mediocre book.

New Jerusalem

Just saw the David Ives play, New Jerusalem, at the Classic Stage Company on 13th St., about the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza in 1656, by the Amsterdam synagogue, for heresy. So, notes:

1) Good acting by the actor who played Baruch Spinoza--sweet, gentle, unworldly. Richard Easton played the Rabbi, Fyvush Finkel a Parnas--and the contrast between plummy RSC tones and Yinglish was a little odd. Also, Finkel was playing a Portuguese Jew, so his Ashkenazic characterization and accent was a little jarring. The actress playing Spinoza's half-sister ranted.

2) Ives makes Spinoza too much the saintly hero, and doesn't really give sufficient arguments to his antagonists. This removes a great deal of drama from the play--it's more a hagiography of a secular saint than an examination of any real conflict, intellectual or spiritual.

3) Lucid exposition of Spinozistic thought--but too much in the way of speeches, not enough in the way of characterization, to put flesh on the ideas. Compares favorably to Stoppard's Coast of Utopia, but not to Stoppard's Arcadia--much less to Brecht's Galileo, the touchstone for this sort of historical drama about free-thinking heretics.

4) David Ives spoke after the play, and, yes, writing about the free-thinking Spinoza, all for free-speech against a heresy tribunal, is meant loosely to speak to modern times--somehow meant to be a critique of the idea of a war of civilizations of Judaeo-Christianity against Islam--the very idea of such a war is a modern-day dogma, apparently. Strangely enough, the modern-day polemical purpose leaves me cold. And it does lead to the most serious distortion to history in the play--an interpolation that the burghers of Amsterdam, inspired by Calvinist worries, are forcing the Jews to try Spinoza for heresy. The purpose seems to be to insert lines about how the Republic is tolerant, but not infinitely tolerant, etc., etc. The fact that history had to be distorted to include these lines leaves me even colder.

I'm still glad I saw the play, for the subject matter; it had some charms in the writing and the acting; but there's better out there.

Culture Wars, McCain

One of the reasons to be on the conservative side of the culture wars is the thought that it is a necessary part of fighting actual wars--that conservative economic and social values are part of what keeps Americans the support of people actually willing to fight for liberty around the world. I buy this argument seriously enough that I am generally with the movement conservatives on most issues of the culture war. The rap against McCain, therefore, is that by dropping the fight on the economic and cultural wars on home--by dropping the fight on immigration--he might win the current war against our Islamist enemies, but leave an America full of Americans unwilling and unable to fight whatever war emerges in the next generation. A rap to take seriously. But against that--could we make a new generation of muscular centrists and liberals? Recreate the Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy--Scoop Jackson-Lieberman brand of politics that made self-confident pursuit of American goals and interests abroad a bipartisan pursuit? Put the lie to the thesis that liberal domestic values inevitably lead to spineless appeasement? I confess I am skeptical that this can be done--but if anyone could do it, Pres. McCain could. I'm willing to fight the culture wars all my life, but sometimes I dream of a Hail-Mary pass that somehow restores the bipartisan consensus of assertive foreign policy we had until the Vietnam War, and put an end to the foreign policy aspects of the culture war. And the cogency of the culture war arguments at home would lose much of their bite if centrists and liberals could be drawn back into that consensus. So my vote for McCain is also a vote for trying to put one part of the culture wars behind us. By victory for some variation of my brand of muscular American values, of course, which makes this a limited concession. But still, I wouldn't mind putting some of the old fights behind us--and I would make considerable compromises in search of that aim.

Electability

When you say a candidate is electable, you're also saying that you understand that other Americans have different values from your own, that a given candidate appeals to those values, and that you value the preferences and opinions of your fellow Americans enough to defer to them once in a while--in pursuit of the partial fulfillment of your own preferences, to be sure, but that doesn't diminish the act of empathy involved. To value electability is more than just a hollow pursuit of electoral victory.

Mittanyahu

Another parallel ... McCain is Sharon, the bluff warrior who (in the latest phase of his career) is open to startling political readjustments, while still necessary to face down the external menace; while Romney is Bibi Netanyahu--slick, flexible, the darling of the movement conservatives, somehow untrustworthy. I also preferred Sharon to Bibi. Having said that, Bibi also said that withdrawing from Gaza was a terrible mistake, and he may have had a point. I still think Sharon was right to withdraw--and I support McCain in part for his Sharon-esque qualities--but I recollect that Sharon's judgement is open to question. Oh yeah, and Sharon did have a massive stroke while PM, which does reinforce the age-related worries about McCain.

I remember back when the second Intifada started--"Bring on Sharon," I kept on chanting to myself, and to anyone who would listen, and eventually Sharon came. And he won the Second Intifada. No, McCain is quite different--but bring on McCain.

Split Endorsements

Athens & Jerusalem now offers you an inside look into the mixed Republican psyche. That is, a very important dynamic in the next week will be among those Florida Republicans torn between Giuliani and McCain. The McCain supporters will be whispering to the Giuliani supporters, "It's McCain or Mitt--vote for Giuliani, and you risk Mr. Plastic getting the nomination! And don't you like McCain more than Romney?" To which the Giuliani supporters (I presume) say, "Rudy still has a chance, and I'd like to give him a chance. Besides, I'm not as into McCain as you are, and I'm not as opposed to Romney. Mm, lemme think about this a bit."

Another way to put it is that the Alpheus Republicans--those still endorsing Rudy--have now approached their Moment of Destiny. How precisely they vote in Florida will have very large consequences.

Elsewhere, I'm reading Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. I confess it isn't very good, and I've bogged down. I have a long review planned for this blog, but it may be later and shorter than I intended. The short version is, he plays loose with definitions, and the polemic mars the history.

Why not Hunter?

Watching the results for the Nevada caucuses, I see that California congressman Duncan Hunter is still in the Republican race. Who knew?

Here's what I don't get. The Republicans are casting about for the ideal conservative, with impeccable positions (especially on immigration, national security, the economy and cultural issues) and a compelling personal history and a winning demeanor. How is it that this is the one guy they haven't taken a serious look at?

Hunter would seem to have everything: distinguished military record, tough immigration stance, solid record on pro-life issues, strict adherence to small-government/low taxation principles. If anyone in this field is the true heir of Ronald Reagan, it's this guy. And, as anyone who's ever seen him speak or be interviewed knows, he's smart, funny and has an appealing personality.

I can see why's he's stayed in. The Hunter die-hards have every right to ask themselves: why Huckabee? why Thompson? Why not Hunter?

Mandragola

Just saw Machiavelli's comedy Mandragola at the Pearl Repertory Company. It's funny!--and a good production.

Craft Aspects of Professions

As I proofread my primary-sources collection, it occurs to me how much of academic labor is what you might call craft, rather than the Life of the Mind, airily conceived. In research, you have to get your primary-sources right--not just for primary sources, but in all your research, you have to get the words and letters, and the source information, precisely right--accurate transcription matters as much as original synthesis. A good deal of the academic life, therefore, consists of the clerkly skill of accurate copying. Teaching, on the other hand, not only consists of the art of inspiring learning, but the rote skills of grading tests and essays, making sure you've given the right grade to the right student (!!!), the simple math of putting together an A, two A minuses, and a disastrous 72 on the final exam into a final grade for which you will mercifully add some fudge factor for class participation. These craft skills aren't incidental, but essential to the profession--but are they properly valued? Discussed? Taught? Not in my experience. Maybe the latter two aren't necessary--I have been able to pick them up on my own. The first one, value--that's an interesting question. It is drudgery. It isn't the fun part of being an academic. But there is some satisfaction in it.

Other professions have this too. I've seen enough of scientific labs to know that a good scientist (bar the astrophysicists, I suppose) ought to be good technicians--they have a great deal of humdrum work to do as well. Lawyers ought to be able to write a contract, clause by boring clause, and letter perfect. Doctors have to hear about undefined pains from longwinded people, and fill out bureaucratic forms--giving injections must get dull. It's all part of the professional life, all essential I would judge. All, I think, not talked about so much.

Some part of professional pride, I think, consists in emphasizing what makes your work different from all other jobs. A professional is some sort of mind-worker, pattern-maker, very-specialized-skill person--he gets the extra pay partly because his abilities are so rare. So you talk about the parts of the job that require these rare abilities. But the jobs themselves are by no means the rare-mind-work only. Much of the time, perhaps most of it, they resemble any other craft--detailed attention on boring details.

I think these are part of a good professional job, not ultimately a detraction from them. I don't really know what most professionals think. I have a vague suspicion that many professionals, many academics, dislike the boring parts of their jobs, not just for being dull, but for somehow being declasse. But maybe I'm completely off-base.

I wish we'd talked a bit about this in grad school, and when I'm a professor in a Grad Department, I will talk to my students about the subject.

Poem in the New Republic

The latest New Republic [30 January 2008] has a poem by Richard Howard, "Arthur Englander's Back in School," which is very good. No link available without subscription, and too long to transcribe, but I'll put in the first two sentences.

Dear Mrs Masters, as you probably know,
almost half our Fifth Grade Class is Jewish--not
a majority
but lots, without even counting out teacher
Miss Husband, who's getting married (next June) to
a gentile husband!
--that has to change more than her name, doesn't it?
Well, your office records must show who's really
Jewish and who's not,
and for some of us who just happen to be
Jewish, those records might be the only sure
indication of
our race of faith or whatever makes us Jews,
and therefore different from the other kids
(no one really knows).

Nice Things To Say About Mitt

1) He is showing persistence.

2) He has raised his family properly.

3) He's willing to self-fund. Now, I'm a bit ambivalent about multi-millionaires buying their way into office--but, fundamentally, I take the spending of money as a legitimate and moral action in a democracy. Furthermore, in a year where large donors and small donors have been reluctant to commit to spending money for Republicans, his willingness to stake his money does earn my respect.

4) The managerial mindset probably will be useful in getting control of domestic bureaucracies and spending.

5) While I disagree with them at the moment, the endorsement of the National Review and the various conservative talk-radio hosts has some weight in my mind. I trust my own judgement enough to stick with McCain for now, but I trust their judgement enough to think Romney has possibilities.

6) If he sticks with his current set of positions, they're decent enough.

McCain Endorsements

He has endorsements from Henry Kissenger, Tom Coburn, and Joe Lieberman. That really is a remarkable variety of endorsers.

Mitt Wins Michigan

Well, foo. Silly Michiganders.

Last Post on E. P. Thompson!

Finally finished Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class! So, yes, it is wonderful, and I should have read it long ago. A number of thoughts:

1) The largest point is to build up an alternate narrative—a narrative of radical England—simply to argue its existence in the general narrative (social, political, cultural) of England. Along with this, the point is to argue the importance of this radical England for England in general—but this is secondary to proving mere existence. Narrative meaning a continuous, coherent radical tradition, not just isolated radical moments, unconnected with one another. For this, Thompson succeeds magnificently.

2) The importance of radical England?—Thompson argues for it, but obviously you need to read other books, for example on the Whig reforming tradition, to place it in context. It’s important to note here that Thompson clearly doesn’t intend this book to be the only book you read—it’s meant to offer a corrective, a new focus, to an existing historical literature, on Tory, Whig, and Reformist Labor political traditions in England, which he assumes the reader knows. If you were to read only Thompson—which I’m afraid might be true of a certain sort of second-rate radical historian of a later generation—you would get a distorted picture. But that isn’t what Thompson intends you to do.

3) I haven’t read these books, and need to. What I particularly want to read is 1) the evolution of (Whig) middle-class public opinionn, and 2) the making of the English middle class (I think there’s a book out there with that title by now), which Thompson briefly indicates toward the end was formed in parallel with the working class. The inner dynamics of these two issues, I think, are most necessary to provide context. That is, the limits of the police-state repression on the working class movement depended on middle-class opinion, and one therefore needs to get more of a sense of how that worked.

4) Thompson has a very sophisticated sense of widespread Radical sentiment—by dint of police repression, atomized, disorganized, unable to cohere into a national political movement/rebellion. At the same time, it is irrepressible—continuously, increasingly challenging police repression. Radical resistance disrupts traditional authority by refusing to be governed quietly. The Radicals cannot form a government of their own, but their resistances are the essential prerequisite for the Great Reform, because they make traditional England ungovernable. This argument has very great plausibility.

5) Thompson’s narrative argues not only against Whig historiography but also against reformist Labor historiography, both of which apparently downplayed the radical possibilities of early nineteenth century England. (The existence of the reformist Labor historiography is the greatest revelation to me.) He also therefore, and consciously, argues for Conservative historiography—the Conservative justification for repressive measures, after all, was the real danger of revolution. I’ve seen this sort of meeting of Conservative and Radical historians before—but it’s always interesting to read. Related to this argument, Thompson argues not just for the importance of the radical tradition but also that the working classes made the tradition themselves—that it wasn’t done for them by a philanthropic middle class. This also undermines the Whig/reformist Labor historiography. He also emphasizes the thought-out rationality of Radical actions—that Luddism, say, wasn’t mindless machine-breaking, but embedded in a long-term context of political grievances and attempts at legal redress, chosen in extremis and with specific political goals in minds.

6) Thompson also argues, quietly but firmly, against a certain sort of Marxist historiography as well—one excessively tied to theoretical categories and terms—“petit bourgeois”—and to a story of continental/Marxist theoretical influence on later socialism. He obviously recognizes Continental influences, but he argues for an English intellectual tradition, born from English working-class experience, bringing about the constellation of ideas that would later be called Socialist. This is to nativize, Englishize, the story of radicalism, against a Germanocentric story of socialism. Thompson thereby also aligns radicalism with a very English tradition that prides experience over theory, and argues that radicalism is not airy-fairy theory disconnected from the lives of real people, but drawn directly from their particular experiences, and from particular English traditions. A crucial quotation:

[803] And this is where we may gather all the lines of Owenism [early socialism] together: the artisans, with their dreams of short-circuiting the market-economy: the skilled workers, with their thrust towards general unionism: the philanthropic gentry, with their desire for a rational, planned society: the poor, with their dream of land or of Zion: the weavers, with their hopes of self-employment: and all of these, with their image of an equitable brotherly community, in which mutual aid would replace aggression and competition. .... [804] There was nothing irrational or messianic in their offering a critique of capitalism as a system, or in projecting ‘utopian’ ideas of an alternative and more rational system. .... These men knew from their experience that Owen was sane when he said [various socialist ideas].

This line of argument, I think, is meant to argue for an English sort of socialism for its own sake, but also to disarm a particular critique of socialism as not only hooey, but unEnglish hooey.

7) Thompson’s argument feels a little hasty toward the end—the 1820s and early 1830s—as he argues for the drawing together of all the strands of experience toward socialist theory and radical—collectivist—unionist action. I’m most suspicious of the conclusion, of course—but I do think that his narrative is shallower there. Now, should an 800 page book really by 1,000 pages? Perhaps not. But I did get a strong sense that he was skating on thin ice here.

8) Thompson ends with a sense of sadness that radicalism got defanged in 1832, with the great reform act—that England came “within an ace of revolution”, but didn’t quite go over the edge. He concludes by saying the radical history is worthwhile on its own terms, even if it didn’t bear fruit. But of course this is also an argument to the future, for more radicalism. He is, among other things, pointing out that the radical past of the current Labor Party, and thereby clearly enough encouraging a switch from a reformist mode to a radical-revolutionary one. Never stated explicitly, but an elegant implicit argument.

9) Thompson does say at the end that he could have cited a great many more sources, but did not for fear of overloading the book, and seeming pretentious. Points taken. Nevertheless, although his selections are magisterial, they remain selections—and heavily dependent on printed material. The sparseness of his notes on any particular area do invite further research, to explore, and perhaps correct, his argument in detail.

I may think up a few more things to say about the book—but I hope that covers the main areas! Again, it deserves all the accolades.

The Great Debaters

I expected it to be a second-rate, uplifting movie; it didn't even meet expectations. But aside from its general aesthetic flaws: I came in hoping for a movie that would at least pay proper homage to words--to rhetoric. It doesn't. Our Heroic Black Team always gives the Good Arguments--never argues for segregation, against civil disobedience, etc. Now, I recognize that rhetoric theory is divided as to whether eloquence naturally aligns with virtue (Quintilian) or not (Plato, Machiavelli), but a movie about a debate team ought to at least acknowledge distantly the idea that being trained to speak properly includes arguing both sides of the issue, with equal fervor. Then, too, it ends with a speech saying "we have the right to resist, by violence or non-violence--and you should pray we choose non-violence." Instantly applauded by all them Harvard white boys, but it is of course a threat, and not a particularly veiled one--and a threat which belies all value of words in themselves, and makes them handmaidens of brute force. (Which describes another sort of rhetoric--but still, I do think the rhetoric we should value eschews violence.) Then, on a minor note, our debate team in essence relies almost exclusively on black preaching rhetoric--and no debate team should rely so heavily on any one rhetoric. Alright, so the movie is preaching to a modern-day (black) audience, and isn't meant to be a how-to manual for debate and rhetoric. Still, disappointing.

More on Why McCain

Because he put himself on the line all this last year for the surge, even when it was political poison. Every other Republican candidate at best mumbled i'mforthesurgenowletstalkaboutsomethingelseforseveralmonths--not McCain. And I wouldn't say I was a Heroic Voter--I was willing to consider voting for Giuliani or Romney precisely because they weren't so associated with the surge, and because McCain's association with it made him so politically toxic. So when I say the other Republican candidates fell short of how they should have behaved, I say that as a Republican voter hardly covered with glory. But McCain did stick with the surge, day after day, week after week, knowing it could well be political suicide--I remember that. And the chips fell his way, and his judgment was proven gloriously correct.

The comparison, of course, is with Churchill--who was too old as prime minister during World War II, often low on energy, often wrong on the issues. But he was gloriously right in 1940, when he chose not to surrender, when he kept British morale up, when he reinforced the army in Egypt, and those three things were absolutely vital for winning the war. Who knows how many 1940 moments will come up in the next four years? Flaws and all, I want McCain in the White House when those moments come.

ReBaathification

I've never been overwhelmed with the need to reBaathify Iraq--like reNazifying Germany after 1948, an unpleasant necessity at best, and certainly too dangerous to do in Iraq until the Baathists were defeated as a live political force. (Which I trust they have been by now!) But if you're going to do it at all, the current law seems to provide an intelligent winkle. Saith AP:

The draft law approved Saturday is not a blanket approval for all former Baathists to take government jobs.

The law will allow low-ranking Baathists not involved in past crimes against Iraqis to go back to their jobs. High-ranking Baathists will be sent to compulsory retirement and those involved in crimes will stand trial, though their families will still have the right to pension.

The Baathists who were members in Saddam's security agencies must retire — except for members of Fidayeen Saddam, a feared militia formed by Saddam's eldest son, Oday. They will be entitled to nothing.

This seems about right--pay off the most dangerous Baathists, save the really vile Fedayeen, to make sure they don't go into active rebellion--but make the payoff a pension rather than a government job, so that they don't have their fingers on the levers of power. This seems like an intelligent compromise--whoever came up with it, Iraqi, American, or other, ought to be commended.

Primary Sources, Genealogy

Now that I've finished copy-editing, back to proofing my primary source edition. For which, a self-serving moral spiel, which I do believe in. To wit: I think all historians ought to edit primary sources--make sources easily available to other historians--and not just churn out monographs, articles, etc. Partly this is what I think of professional ethics--that your courtesy to, and responsibility toward, fellow historians, living and yet to come, includes giving them the materials to conduct work of their own. Certainly my own work couldn't have been done if I hadn't been able to use printed editions of primary sources made by previous (often 19th-century historians). My own edition is actually of printed materials, on Early English Books Online, so this is not quite so professionally ethicaliferous as editing a manuscript. Nevertheless, these are materials that hardly anyone but me has ever looked at, or would know to look at, or thought to read against each other--so I think I am doing a real service, to students and to scholars, by getting the edition out. Partly, I also think historians ought to be in love with the facts of history as much as with their own interpretations of them--ought to care scrupulously about their transcription and their publication, value them for themselves and not just as they serve potted theses. Some sort of Rankean love for the facts is in order. So publishing primary sources serves this love of facts-of-themselves that we ought to have.

Now, when I say historians ought to do this, I also know that there is no/little tenure incentive to do so--you get credit in this sad world for monographs and syntheses, not for primary source editions. Silly world! When I Run The Zoo, we will make tenure dependent on publishing primary source materials. As Academic Zookeeper, I will also further emphasize what is already happening--publications of primary sources on the web. Indeed, I ultimately think there ought to be some sort of centralized database, a Wiki-Primary-Sources, perhaps, to which all professors should post their editions. This would also be a good place to dump down all the scattered transcriptions we've made of other primary sources over our careers--a place to put our notes, for the use of future scholars. Frankly, this would be the most horrendous attic full of Random Cr*p--but I still think it would be worth doing.

*********************

Speaking of sources, genealogy, another passion of mine, where getting the raw information is a wonderful delight--frankly, I'm much more into the archive for my genealogy than for my latest articles, which are syntheses, analyses, not so much archival research. But why genealogy? This selfish love of family, of no interest to anyone else? Well, you're finding out about people who are of no interest to anyone anymore--resurrecting their lives as best you can, caring about them. We all get forgotten in the end--but why not fight back against it a little. So what if the selection criterion is selfish, family-oriented? At least I know who these people are, a little--a little light of attention, of care, of love, before the darkness falls forever. (In this world, anyway.) That matters, I am sure.

Simplifying History

Someday soon, someone will look back and tell us how obvious it was that X would win the Democratic nomination, Y would win the Republican nomination, and X/Y would win the general election. And I will laugh.

"The Fallacy of Gray"

I often have to restrain myself from creating posts on Athens & Jerusalem that simply link to what strike me as brilliant posts over at my second-favorite blog, Overcoming Bias. But in this case, I just can't refrain. "The Fallacy of Gray" is one of the most transparently stupid yet ubiquitous barriers to rational thought, and now there's a name for it!

The Academic Job Market: Clintons and Obamas

The annual conference of classicists and archaeologists has now been over for a couple of days, and my bad mood has lightened considerably. But on the basis of several conversations I had there with participants in the academic job market -- both interviewers and interviewed, neither of which I was -- I find myself pondering a question: why do search committees looking to fill junior tenure-track positions seem to favor untried candidates straight out of grad school over proven people who are a few years post-Ph.D?

The obvious reason would be that people a few years out who haven't found tenure track jobs yet simply have something wrong with them that consistently prevents their being hired. And in some cases, no doubt, that's true.

But it's also true that in many cases people in temporary jobs have managed to accumulate good reviews of their teaching, good recommendations from department chairs, and a respectable record of publications -- all while living with uncertainty, moving from place to place, and generally working in less-than-ideal conditions. Yet they continue to be passed over in favor of untried, newly-minted pre-professors. Even younger candidates who have managed to land TT-jobs (but haven't gotten tenure) and are trying for some reason to move to another job seem to be at a disadvantage relative to the fresh-faced folks whose dissertations haven't even been sent to the bindery -- or written! (Note that none of what I'm saying applies to senior positions, or to people who have already established imposing reputations within a particular field.)

A good friend suggests that the contrast between these types is analogous to the contrast between Clinton and Obama in the democratic primary race, with Hope tending to triumph over Experience. Perhaps to an even greater extent in academia than in elections, youth and freshness and promise simply are more attractive than any solid record of accomplisment that could be amassed in three or four or five years.

But this doesn't quite answer the question of why. Is it simply human nature to prefer the potential to the actual, the young to the old? Did many academics become academics because they want to associate preferentially with the youngest cohort of the adult population? Do senior faculty tend to want juniors whom they can mold in their own images? I've heard various versions of these explanations, but none completely satisfy me.

Joy in the Old Forest

Withywindle supports McCain; Goldberry supports Clinton; double victory!

For those of us in favor of nailbiting drama, clearly the best possible result.

I think a bit better than Alpheus does of McCain's margin--because it exceeds expectations of the last day, which were for a bare McCain victory. Also, it looks like (wait for confirmation) that McCain also won among registered Republicans. If so, quite significant.

Boy, all the media got it wrong about the Obama landslide.

I listened to Hilary's victory speech from the bath, didn't see it. It sounded robotic. Maybe the visuals helped.

New Hampshire Results

I was afraid it would be tasteless to title this post after a certain Elton John hit (and I'm not talking about "Daniel's Song"). In any case, the big news is that Hillary Clinton has repeated her husband's New Hampshire miracle of 1992. McCain's apparent victory is a small blow to Romney, but on the whole seems less notable than the Democratic dog that didn't bar[ac]k.

I suspect, however, that Clinton's victory may be less about the love of the Granite Staters than because the voters of New Hampshire -- particularly the independents who seem to have flocked to the Republican primary and McCain -- didn't want to be responsible for virtually guaranteeing Obama the nomination. Appealing as the man is, he's a cipher: a square white box with the word "CHANGE" on it in plain black capitals. On some level, even those who love him must know this. So I think the Clinton win may represent, more than anything else, a desire to defer a decision and keep the Democratic nomination race going a bit longer. Perversely, all those political obituaries of Hillary -- highlighted by her own emotional moment yesterday -- probably helped keep her campaign alive.

UPDATE: Obama's speech earlier this evening was a perfectly decent effort. But the speech Hillary is now giving is a masterpiece. She's poaching the rhetoric of Obama and -- especially --Edwards in a way that doesn't threaten to alienate independents. I don't like the woman at all, but even I think that this is one of the best campaign orations I've ever heard. And she sounds passionate and energized.

Making of the English Working Class: The Saga Continues

1) Workers, until fairly late in the game, were really small businessmen--providing their own supplies, buying them (from the grand merchant or manufacturer), providing more than just labor. Industrialization didn't just deskill workers--it debusnifyed them, separated them from business practice and, presumably, a business frame of mind. The lack of sympathy the working classes have for business is a historical development, industrial and later. Which perhaps I could have vaguely said earlier, but I don't think I ever read it articulated so concisely.

2) Thompson argues that the birth of working-class consciousness in England comes by a particularly circuitous path. First, an explosion of Radical, Tom-Paine thought in the early 1790s. Then, and immediate pulverization of Radicalism by the Tory government, where political Radicalism is made illegal, infiltrated by spies, and atomized. But the government can't quite infiltrate the working classes--the communities are too tight, too closed to outsiders/spies--and a rump Radicalism survives among them, localized, transmuted toward an economic agenda. This transformed attitude becomes working class consciousness--akin to the political Radicalism that will revive in the 1820s and beyond, but distinct. Thompson necessarily argues from some silence--illegal radicals in the 1800s weren't leaving many documents--but it's a plausible genealogy.

3) Thompson agrees with the conservatives of the time as to the real danger posed by a revolutionary movement at the time. He acknowledges the uncertainty and bias of his sources--but it's worth recollecting that Thompson's is a maximalist case, and that a more minimalist interpretation, downplaying revolutionary strength in industrial England, is also plausible.

Huckabee for VP?

A comment I remember: Romney's strategy for the Iowa caucus was predicated on a low turnout; Huckabee's on a high one. All in all, I'd rather have the ticket include someone who plans on winning by bringing voters to the polls.

Obama vs. McCain

It is rather fitting that McCain's win in New Hampshire depends on a tussle with Obama for independent voters--it is, after all, a (the?) major rationale of his candidacy that he can reach out to independents. So if McCain loses to Romney due to the Obama tidal wave--well, better we know about his lack of appeal to the middle now than in November.

It will be fascinating if both Obama and McCain lose among registered party members but win thanks to New Hampshire's open-to-independents primary system.

Kashmiri Art Exhibit

At the Asia Society, in NYC. Last day today. Some very nice 19th century, intricately designed shawls. Then, a series of art (largely sculpture), Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim, over the last two millennia. Some political silences. "Buddhist art largely does not survive. What does survive is small, portable, and largely in places like Tibet, where Kashmiri art had great influence on Tibetan art." [Who knew?] Now, what could explain this curious statement? Could it be the brutal Muslim invasion of northern India which involved the mass murder of Buddhists and the pulverization of all Buddhist art the Muslims could find? But art museums don't tend to provide little details like that ... there isn't much in common between the art traditions of the different religions. The fact that they're all in one show has a sort of implicit thesis that there's a Kashmiri art tradition that survives the different religious irruptions, but what we have here is art from Kashmir, nothing more. This, by free association, reminds me of the debate between Claudio Sanchez Albornoz and Americo Castro as to whether some sort of essential Spanish identity unites the different religious inhabitants of Spain, or if pagan, Muslim, Jew, and Christian in Spain have more in common with their co-religionists than with each other.

No conclusion follows. Just rambling.

Debates

* Goldberry thought Mitt came across as a snob. She thought McCain, Paul, and Thompson came across as too old. She doesn't like Giuliani from his years as mayor. That leaves Huckabee--whom she thought was a good communicator saying good things.

* Boy, the Republican debate was vicious! - largely from slamming Romney and Paul. McCain, in particular, came across as a mean bully--but Romney came across as so much the effete wimp that one guiltily sympathized with the bully. Ichabod Crane syndrome.

* Obama had the mean bully moment too. Hillary: I think I'm pretty likable. Obama: You're likable enough. OUCH!

* I'd be glad to have either Thompson or Huckabee as McCain's vice-president. Huckabee is a very good speaker.

* McCain is wrong on illegal immigration, but he made Romney get into parsing his attack ads--Mormon Miscue.

* Paul really cares about foreign policy ... and paper money (that would be all that stuff about inflation) ... and the welfare state ... oh, Paul, you libertarian loon, you ...

* Hillary and Obama largely stuck to their old messages. If you like experience, Hillary. If you like hope, Obama.

* Obama is an effective speaker. Major kudos for saying he was switching between watching the Republicans and watching football. I thought he got the better of Hillary on what he said about his health care plan, and I liked (the rhetoric of) his plan better - no universal mandate.

* Obama was strong on the power of words. Dude - us rhetoricians are with him.

* Richardson wants us to jawbone with the Soviet Union. Umm ... sorry, no one of that name is at this address.

* Good questions! Including a lot that were rather tough on the Democrats.

* Every time the Democrats were asked a national security question, they failed. (Hillary was a half-exception.) After a city is nuked, what will you think you should have done differently. EMBRACED BUSH'S PRE-EMPTION DOCTRINE! But they can't say that.

* And also a question vaguely intimating that raising taxes might not necessarily be a good thing. Fancy that.

Fruitless Professors

Oh, Brethren, what are we doing! There is death in the pot. The plague is begun. Wrath is gone forth against fruitless professors. The slumbers of sin are upon us....

Rev. James Wood, An Address to the Members of the Methodist Societies (1799), cited in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 409.

Gazing at Alpheus' Navel

Actually, the most depressing bit about Alpheus' indigonous mood is that he's talking about classicists, of whom I have romantic notions myself. As a rule of thumb, I take the number of languages you know, and the difficulty of the languages you learn, as a proxy for intellectual seriousness. (I am a historian of Britain--I am acutely aware of the springs of Anglophone laziness in my soul.) If even the classicists, lovers of Latin and Greek, are decayed, what hope for the rest of us?

Navel-Gazing: The APA Annual Meetings (Mood Indigo)

Let Withywindle handle the weighty political and intellectuals matters, I say. When I make one of my increasingly occasional appearances on this blog, it's to vent my spleen.

And so much spleen there is to be vented, for I'm posting from Chicago, site of the 139th annual meeting of the venerable American Philological Association, the professional association for classicists and related professions. (For some time now, the APA has held its annual meeting jointly with that of Archaeological Institute of America.)

If you bothered to click the link to the APA annual meeting website, you saw the APA's official seal with its lofty motto in ancient Greek: Literature is the Physician of the Soul. I don't know what that means, exactly, but by the end of this weekend I'm almost certainly going to need a literal (as opposed to literatural: some classicist out there will note the possibilities for interlinguistic word play in this context between grammata and litterae) doctor. Every time I'm exposed to large numbers of my fellow classicists, my blood pressure spikes unpleasantly. In addition to which, every time I'm exposed to large numbers of fellow classicists I come a little bit closer to starting a fist fight. So, come to think of it, I may soon need a not-of-the-soul-lawyer as well.

Why am I so hostile? And given that I am so hostile, why do I come? Both good questions. The second one is easier to answer: I come because my hostility does not extend to each and every member of my profession: there are friends here, and close friends, and acquaintances I don't loathe. In particular, there's one very special member of the philological profession who's also a very special member of the opposite sex, and from whom I'm usually separated by the vagaries of the academic job market.

There are also occasionally good papers being given, amid all the dreck that probably characterizes the professional conferences of most of the humanities. I'm tempted, for example, by tomorrow morning's panel on "Graduate Training for the Ancient Historian," though I see it conflicts with another panel titled "Gladiatrix! Fighting Women of the Screen," which is also tempting, but for different reasons. (I note that an interesting looking-paper is even being presented Saturday afternoon by an astute reader of this very blog!)

In addition to the foregoing, Chicago is one of my favorite cities -- even in the bleak midwinter. A stroll down Michigan Avenue earlier this afternoon was quite pleasant. And finally, the APA meeting is an excellent place to browse the bookstalls of the various classical publishers and pick up discounted copies.

So there's all that by way of silver linings. Nonetheless, my spirit at these events remains buried in dark clouds of malevolence. The simple fact is, I just don't like the majority academics. And -- perhaps for not unrelated reasons -- a substantial number of academics just don't seem to like me. There's some visceral incompatibility there that I've never quite been able to account for.

And this, I suppose brings me to the real point of my post. I want to like most of these people. Presumably they love -- as I do -- the legacy bequeathed to us by Greco-Roman civilization. Presumably they believe -- as I do -- in the value of sustaining and passing on the glories of Hellenic and Latin culture. Presumably they cherish, too, the ancient ideal of the university and the form of literary education pioneered by in Athens by Isocrates and which Cicero baptized with the extraordinary designation humanitas.

But I have real trouble getting along with these folks. Chalk some of it up to my generally misanthropic personality (as I suspect Withywindle will do) but that can't be all of it. Some of them really take a fairly strong dislike to me even before I have a chance to develop a list of reasons for disliking them. More of it may simply be the notorious pettiness and social awkwardness of scholars: insecure, eager to take offense (I'm including myself in all this), liable to miss, or to fail to provide, the appropriate social cues. But not everyone -- I think -- hates these flockings-together of academics with such a passion. Not everyone is immediately looking for the back entrance of the hotel and trying to calculate the times when the elevators are least likely to be crammed with his own kind.

So why do I feel so unhappy among academics? I do think that part of my discomfort must be the fact that academia is, in some sense, a social class -- and one to which I have never really belonged, or wanted to belong. I can belong, of course, by fulfilling the requirements of my profession -- passing through approved courses of study, teaching, publishing, etc. But I can never help feeling that there is really, in the end, so much more to it than that. It is also a matter of how one speaks, how one dresses, what opinions one holds about things (such as politics) that lie far beyond the ostensible frontiers of one's discipline. All this is really quite pervasive and, for those not either born to the gown (by having academics for parents) or inclined by nature to the academic personality, a bit off-putting.

Most earnest applicants to the social milieu that is academia end up adopting, to one degree or another, the academic style of manners and speech and thought. I've seen the transformation occur; indeed, the production of this transformation of non-academic to academic seems to be one of the things that graduate school is for. But personally, I've resisted assimilating. Or rather, since that last sentence gives me far too much credit, I've proven incapable of assimilating. I am, in many ways, still startlingly proletarian. Even my intellectualism is of a proletarian sort: over-earnest, insufficiently playful, too prone to romanticize the life of the mind and therefore too prone to criticize the real arrangements and institutions that attempt in a necessarily imperfect fashion to make this life possible. This is only a partial list. But all this and more is, I think, rather immediately if dimly obvious to those whom I encounter. And it interferes, I think, with my ability to get along with many members of the academic class.

Again, this is not to say I hate all my fellow academics. Far from it. But I do find such events as the APA annual meeting alienating on some level. I do feel, to a certain extent, like the cab driver who brought me from the airport and the waitress who served me lunch are more "my kind of people" than the men and women now gathered on the shores of Lake Michigan to reaffirm their commitment to the study of antiquity.

Academia is a class, in a way that, say, lawyering or medicine or commerce are not. You can often pick a professor out of a crowd, and perhaps, in the end, it's not a bad thing. But I'm going to wish several times in the next few days that I didn't feel like the odd man out, surrounded by crowds of professors!

Muted Endorsement for John McCain

So, just before the Iowa caucuses, I'll make it official: all you Iowa caucusers, Withywindle endorses John McCain!

It's not an overwhelmingly enthusiastic endorsement. I disagree with him on a number of issues, and consider his position on amnestying illegal immigrants (hedgingly recanted at best) absolutely disastrous. Furthermore, his nasty tone toward conservatives on many occasions is most unpleasant, and is a disturbing omen for a possible presidency. But ... he is rock-solid on the war in Iraq and the war on terror; he is equally solid on spending (if not on taxes); he has a good record on judges and abortion; his Gang of 14 Compromise on judges seems increasingly well-taken in hindsight; and I confess I can't help liking the man. And for what it's worth, I think he will be a very strong general election candidate, in a difficult election year, and that has to weigh in the scales. So, McCain.

For the others, in order of preference ... I would take Thompson on the issues--he's the only one decent on illegal immigration--but he does seem to be an underwhelming presence. Giuliani's virtues are lesser versions of McCain's, but his character is worse, his attempt to seize a third term as mayor in 2001 is still disquieting, and he is pro-choice. Acceptable, but undesirable. Mitt Romney is apparently the secret love-child of Neville Chamberlain and John Kerry--a compromising manager, banal, a compromise among the factions, efficient but with no ideological ballast--he might pleasantly surprise me as president, but I'm not staying up nights. Huckabee--I have a soft spot for evangelicals, and prefer a Republican coalition that tilts toward evangelicals over one that tilts toward businessmen and libertarians, but he doesn't seem ready for prime time.

I would probably vote Democratic if Ron Paul won the nomination. Charles Lindbergh come again as Mr. Magoo? No thanks.

E. P. Thompson: The Anti-Methodist Polemic

Boy, he doesn't like early nineteenth century Methodism! -- I seem to recollect hearing that Thompson was born Methodist himself, or some other sort of Nonconformist. Methodism is soul-killing, psychic masturbation it seems, repressing the healthy instincts of the working class--sexual and political. A bit over the top, even as polemic. Two thoughts: 1) What's the Matter with Kansas? has a parallel structure--seeking to explain the "problem" of people not seeking their proper class interest by reference to religion, hence reducing religion to nothing more than an explanation for something of greater interest; and 2) the bloody and sexual imagery Thompson thinks is solely Methodist is more broadly Christian--I think he isn't familiar enough with, say, medieval religious poetry.

Iowa Caucuses

Why are we supposed to object to them? They weed out the casual voters, reward the organized special interests and the party regulars, put a premium on grueling retail politics across the rural heartland of America, focus on religious, blue-collar voters, and weed out any politicians who find enduring an Iowa winter not worth the presidency. These all strike me as good things.

Similar arguments apply to the New Hampshire primaries, although they're less effective at weeding out casual voters and apparently have less religious voters.