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Javier E

Fighting Al Qaeda To Fight Liberalism - 0 views

andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/...qaeda-to-fight-liberalism.html

liberalism Cold War partisan culture war conservatism

shared by Javier E on 06 May 11 - No Cached
  • the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.
  • the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.
  • the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.
  • the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.
  • the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.
  • the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.
  • I do believe that the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.
  • the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.
  • the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.
  • 9/11 fortuitously provided the American right with the external enemy that allowed it to go back into business demonizing the internal enemy, liberalism.
Javier E

These Truths: A History of the United States (Jill Lepore) - 1 views

DIIGO_FILE_HOME/7ui9/8e26ac21cd7c52b0c30ef317c94b7059

natural rights sovereignty American idea liberty truth democracy equality Founding politics philosophy book notes

shared by Javier E on 06 May 20 - No Cached
  • It was meant to mark the start of a new era, in which the course of history might be made predictable and a government established that would be ruled not by accident and force but by reason and choice. The origins of that idea, and its fate, are the story of American history.
  • It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.6 This was the question of that autumn. And, in a way, it has been the question of every season since,
  • I once came across a book called The Constitution Made Easy.7 The Constitution cannot be made easy. It was never meant to be easy.
  • ...297 more annotations...
  • THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT rests on three political ideas—“these truths,” Thomas Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people.
  • After Benjamin Franklin read Jefferson’s draft, he picked up his quill, scratched out the words “sacred & undeniable,” and suggested that “these truths” were, instead, “self-evident.” This was more than a quibble. Truths that are sacred and undeniable are God-given and divine, the stuff of religion. Truths that are self-evident are laws of nature, empirical and observable, the stuff of science. This divide has nearly rent the Republic apart.
  • The real dispute is between “these truths” and the course of events: Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?
  • The United States rests on a dedication to equality, which is chiefly a moral idea, rooted in Christianity, but it rests, too, on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching. Its founders agreed with the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, who wrote, in 1748, that “Records of Wars, Intrigues, Factions, and Revolutions are so many Collections of Experiments.”9 They believed that truth is to be found in ideas about morality but also in the study of history.
  • understanding history as a form of inquiry—not as something easy or comforting but as something demanding and exhausting—was central to the nation’s founding. This, too, was new.
  • A new kind of historical writing, less memorial and more unsettling, only first emerged in the fourteenth century. “History is a philosophical science,” the North African Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun wrote in 1377, in the prologue to his history of the world, in which he defined history as the study “of the causes and origins of existing things.”11
  • Only by fits and starts did history become not merely a form of memory but also a form of investigation, to be disputed, like philosophy, its premises questioned, its evidence examined, its arguments countered.
  • Declaring independence was itself an argument about the relationship between the present and the past, an argument that required evidence of a very particular kind: historical evidence. That’s why most of the Declaration of Independence is a list of historical claims. “To prove this,” Jefferson wrote, “let facts be submitted to a candid world.”
  • In an attempt to solve this problem, the earliest historians of the United States decided to begin their accounts with Columbus’s voyage, stitching 1776 to 1492. George Bancroft published his History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present in 1834, when the nation was barely more than a half-century old, a fledgling, just hatched. By beginning with Columbus, Bancroft made the United States nearly three centuries older than it was, a many-feathered old bird.
  • In 1787, then, when Alexander Hamilton asked “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force,” that was the kind of question a scientist asks before beginning an experiment. Time alone would tell. But time has passed. The beginning has come to an end. What, then, is the verdict of history?
  • In deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, I’ve confined myself to what, in my view, a people constituted as a nation in the early twenty-first century need to know about their own past, mainly because this book is meant to double as an old-fashioned civics book, an explanation of the origins and ends of democratic institutions, from the town meeting to the party system, from the nominating convention to the secret ballot, from talk radio to Internet polls. This book is chiefly a political
  • Aside from being a brief history of the United States and a civics primer, this book aims to be something else, too: it’s an explanation of the nature of the past. History isn’t only a subject; it’s also a method.
  • The truths on which the nation was founded are not mysteries, articles of faith, never to be questioned, as if the founding were an act of God, but neither are they lies, all facts fictions, as if nothing can be known, in a world without truth.
  • Between reverence and worship, on the one side, and irreverence and contempt, on the other, lies an uneasy path, away from false pieties and petty triumphs over people who lived and died and committed both their acts of courage and their sins and errors long before we committed ours. “We cannot hallow this ground,” Lincoln said at Gettysburg. We are obliged, instead, to walk this ground, dedicating ourselves to both the living and the dead.
  • studying history is like that, looking into one face and seeing, behind it, another, face after face after face. “Know whence you came,” Baldwin told his nephew.17 The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can’t be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.
  • Nature takes one toll, malice another. History is the study of what remains, what’s left behind, which can be almost anything, so long as it survives the ravages of time and war: letters, diaries, DNA, gravestones, coins, television broadcasts, paintings, DVDs, viruses, abandoned Facebook pages, the transcripts of congressional hearings, the ruins of buildings. Some of these things are saved by chance or accident, like the one house that, as if by miracle, still stands after a hurricane razes a town. But most of what historians study survives because it was purposely kept—placed
  • As nation-states emerged, they needed to explain themselves, which they did by telling stories about their origins, tying together ribbons of myths, as if everyone in the “English nation,” for instance, had the same ancestors, when, of course, they did not. Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.15
  • When the United States declared its independence in 1776, plainly, it was a state, but what made it a nation? The fiction that its people shared a common ancestry was absurd on its face; they came from all over, and, having waged a war against England, the very last thing they wanted to celebrate was their Englishness.
  • Facts, knowledge, experience, proof. These words come from the law. Around the seventeenth century, they moved into what was then called “natural history”: astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology. By the eighteenth century they were applied to history and to politics, too. These truths: this was the language of reason, of enlightenment, of inquiry, and of history.
  • Against conquest, slaughter, and slavery came the urgent and abiding question, “By what right?”
  • Yet the origins of the United States date to 1492 for another, more troubling reason: the nation’s founding truths were forged in a crucible of violence, the products of staggering cruelty, conquest and slaughter, the assassination of worlds.
  • Locke, spurred both by a growing commitment to religious toleration and by a desire to distinguish English settlement from Spanish conquest, stressed the lack of cultivation as a better justification for taking the natives’ land than religious difference, an emphasis with lasting consequences.
  • Unlike Polo and Mandeville, Columbus did not make a catalogue of the ways and beliefs of the people he met (only later did he hire Pané to do that). Instead, he decided that the people he met had no ways and beliefs. Every difference he saw as an absence.22 Insisting that they had no faith and no civil government and were therefore infidels and savages who could not rightfully own anything, he claimed possession of their land, by the act of writing. They were a people without truth; he would make his truth theirs. He would tell them where the dead go.
  • It became commonplace, inevitable, even, first among the Spanish, and then, in turn, among the French, the Dutch, and the English, to see their own prosperity and good health and the terrible sicknesses suffered by the natives as signs from God. “Touching these savages, there is a thing that I cannot omit to remark to you,” one French settler wrote: “it appears visibly that God wishes that they yield their place to new peoples.” Death convinced them at once of their right and of the truth of their faith. “The natives, they are all dead of small Poxe,” John Winthrop wrote when he arrived in New England in 1630: “the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess.”
  • In much of New Spain, the mixed-race children of Spanish men and Indian women, known as mestizos, outnumbered Indians; an intricate caste system marked gradations of skin color, mixtures of Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans, as if skin color were like dyes made of plants, the yellow of sassafras, the red of beets, the black of carob. Later, the English would recognize only black and white, a fantasy of stark and impossible difference, of nights without twilight and days without dawns. And yet both regimes of race, a culture of mixing or a culture of pretending not to mix, pressed upon the brows of every person of the least curiosity the question of common humanity: Are all peoples one?
  • Elizabeth’s best defender argued that if God decided “the female should rule and govern,” it didn’t matter that women were “weake in nature, feable in bodie, softe in courage,” because God would make every right ruler strong. In any case, England’s constitution abided by a “rule mixte,” in which the authority of the monarch was checked by the power of Parliament; also, “it is not she that ruleth but the lawes.” Elizabeth herself called on yet another authority: the favor of the people.48 A mixed constitution, the rule of law, the will of the people: these were English ideas that Americans would one day make their own, crying, “Liberty!”
  • In the brutal, bloody century between Columbus’s voyage and John White’s, an idea was born, out of fantasy, out of violence, the idea that there exists in the world a people who live in an actual Garden of Eden, a state of nature, before the giving of laws, before the forming of government. This imagined history of America became an English book of genesis, their new truth. “In the beginning,” the Englishman John Locke would write, “all the world was America.” In America, everything became a beginning.
  • England’s empire would have a different character than that of either Spain or France. Catholics could make converts by the act of baptism, but Protestants were supposed to teach converts to read the Bible; that meant permanent settlements, families, communities, schools, and churches. Also, England’s empire would be maritime—its navy was its greatest strength. It would be commercial. And, of greatest significance for the course of the nation that would grow out of those settlements, its colonists would be free men, not vassals, guaranteed their “English liberties.”
  • Beginning with the Virginia charter, the idea of English liberties for English subjects was planted on American soil and, with it, the king’s claim to dominion, a claim that rested on the idea that people like Powhatan and his people lived in darkness and without government, no matter that the English called their leaders kings.
  • Twenty Englishmen were elected to the House of Burgesses. Twenty Africans were condemned to the house of bondage. Another chapter opened in the American book of genesis: liberty and slavery became the American Abel and Cain.
  • To build his case against the king, Coke dusted off a copy of an ancient and almost entirely forgotten legal document, known as Magna Carta (literally, the “great charter”), in which, in the year 1215, King John had pledged to his barons that he would obey the “law of the land.” Magna Carta wasn’t nearly as important as Coke made it out to be, but by arguing for its importance, he made it important, not only for English history, but for American history, too, tying the political fate of everyone in England’s colonies to the strange doings of a very bad king from the Middle Ages.
  • Magna Carta explains a great deal about how it is that some English colonists would one day come to believe that their king had no right to rule them and why their descendants would come to believe that the United States needed a written constitution. But Magna Carta played one further pivotal role, the role it played in the history of truth—a history that had taken a different course in England than in any other part of Europe.
  • The most crucial right established under Magna Carta was the right to a trial by jury.
  • in 1215, the pope banned trial by ordeal. In Europe, it was replaced by a new system of divine judgment: judicial torture. But in England, where there existed a tradition of convening juries to judge civil disputes—like disagreements over boundaries between neighboring freeholds—trial by ordeal was replaced not by judicial torture but by trial by jury.
  • This turn marked the beginning of a new era in the history of knowledge: it required a new doctrine of evidence and new method of inquiry and eventually led to the idea that an observed or witnessed act or thing—the substance, the matter, of fact—is the basis of truth. A judge decided the law; a jury decided the facts. Mysteries were matters of faith, a different kind of truth, known only to God.
  • The age of mystery began to wane, and, soon, the culture of fact spread from law to government.
  • There would never be very many Africans in New England, but New Englanders would have slave plantations, on the distant shores. Nearly half of colonial New Englanders’ wealth would come from sugar grown by West Indian slaves.
  • One million Europeans migrated to British America between 1600 and 1800 and two and a half million Africans were carried there by force over that same stretch of centuries, on ships that sailed past one another by day and by night.42 Africans died faster, but as a population of migrants, they outnumbered Europeans two and a half to one.
  • In the last twenty-five years of the seventeenth century, English ships, piloted by English sea captains, crewed by English sailors, carried more than a quarter of a million men, women, and children across the ocean, shackled in ships’ holds.44 Theirs was not a ship of state crossing a sea of troubles, another Mayflower, their bond a covenant. Theirs was a ship of slavery, their bonds forged in fire. They whispered and wept; they screamed and sat in silence. They grew ill; they grieved; they died; they endured.
  • By what right did the English hold these people as their slaves?
  • Under Roman law, all men are born free and can only be made slaves by the law of nations, under certain narrow conditions—for instance, when they’re taken as prisoners of war, or when they sell themselves as payment of debt. Aristotle had disagreed with Roman law, insisting that some men are born slaves. Neither of these traditions from antiquity proved to be of much use to English colonists attempting to codify their right to own slaves, because laws governing slavery, like slavery itself, had disappeared from English common law by the fourteenth century. Said one Englishman in Barbados in 1661, there was “no track to guide us where to walk nor any rule sett us how to govern such Slaves.”46
  • With no track or rule to guide them, colonial assemblies adopted new practices and devised new laws with which they attempted to establish a divide between “blacks” and “whites.”
  • Adopting these practices and passing these laws required turning English law upside down, because much in existing English law undermined the claims of owners of people. In 1655, a Virginia woman with an African mother and an English father sued for her freedom by citing English common law, under which children’s status follows that of their father, not their mother. In 1662, Virginia’s House of Burgesses answered doubts about “whether children got by any Englishman upon a Negro woman should be slave or ffree” by reaching back to an archaic Roman rule, partus sequitur ventrem (you are what your mother was). Thereafter, any child born of a woman who was a slave inherited her condition.
  • By giving Americans a more ancient past, he hoped to make America’s founding appear inevitable and its growth inexorable, God-ordained. He also wanted to celebrate the United States, not as an offshoot of England, but instead as a pluralist and cosmopolitan nation, with ancestors all over the world.
  • No book should be censored before publication, Milton argued (though it might be condemned after printing), because truth could only be established if allowed to do battle with lies. “Let her and falsehood grapple,” he urged, since, “whoever knew Truth to be put to the worst in a free and open encounter?” This view depended on an understanding of the capacity of the people to reason. The people, Milton insisted, are not “slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.”52
  • All men, Locke argued, are born equal, with a natural right to life, liberty, and property; to protect those rights, they erect governments by consent. Slavery, for Locke, was no part either of a state of nature or of civil society. Slavery was a matter of the law of nations, “nothing else, but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror and a captive.” To introduce slavery in the Carolinas, then, was to establish, as fundamental to the political order, an institution at variance with everything about how Locke understood civil society.
  • Long before shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, long before George Washington crossed the Delaware, long before American independence was thought of, or even thinkable, a revolutionary tradition was forged, not by the English in America, but by Indians waging wars and slaves waging rebellions. They revolted again and again and again. Their revolutions came in waves that lashed the land. They asked the same question, unrelentingly: By what right are we ruled?
  • Rebellion hardened lines between whites and blacks. Before Bacon and his men burned Jamestown, poor Englishmen had very little political power. As many as three out of every four Englishmen and women who sailed to the colonies were either debtors or convicts or indentured servants; they weren’t slaves, but neither were they free.61 Property requirements for voting meant that not all free white men could vote. Meanwhile, the fact that slaves could be manumitted by their masters meant that it was possible to be both black and free and white and unfree. But after Bacon’s Rebellion, free white men were granted the right to vote, and it became nearly impossible for black men and women to secure their freedom. By 1680, one observer could remark that “these two words, Negro and Slave” had “grown Homogeneous and convertible”: to be black was to be a slave.
  • Benjamin Franklin eventually settled in the tidy Quaker town of Philadelphia and began printing his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, in 1729. In its pages, he fought for freedom of the press. In a Miltonian 1731 “Apology for Printers,” he observed “that the Opinions of Men are almost as various as their Faces” but that “Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”
  • But if the culture of the fact hadn’t yet spread to newspapers, it had spread to history. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes had written that “The register of Knowledge of Fact is called History.”74 One lesson Americans would learn from the facts of their own history had to do with the limits of the freedom of the press, and this was a fact on which they dwelled, and a liberty they grew determined to protect.
  • Slavery does not exist outside of politics. Slavery is a form of politics, and slave rebellion a form of violent political dissent. The Zenger trial and the New York slave conspiracy were much more than a dispute over freedom of the press and a foiled slave rebellion: they were part of a debate about the nature of political opposition, and together they established its limits. Both Cosby’s opponents and Caesar’s followers allegedly plotted to depose the governor. One kind of rebellion was celebrated, the other suppressed—a division that would endure.
  • In American history, the relationship between liberty and slavery is at once deep and dark: the threat of black rebellion gave a license to white political opposition.
  • This, too, represented a kind of revolution: Whitefield emphasized the divinity of ordinary people, at the expense of the authority of their ministers.
  • he wrote in 1751 an essay about the size of the population, called “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.”
  • Franklin guessed the population of the mainland colonies to be about “One Million English Souls,” and his calculations suggested that this number would double every twenty-five years. At that rate, in only a century, “the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on this Side the Water.” Franklin’s numbers were off; his estimates weren’t too high; they were too low. At the time, more than 1.5 million people lived in Britain’s thirteen mainland colonies. Those colonies were far more densely settled than New France or New Spain. Only 60,000 French settlers lived in Canada and 10,000 more in Louisiana. New Spain was even more thinly settled.
  • he wrote about a new race, a people who were “white.” “The Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small,” Franklin began. As he saw it, Africans were “black”; Asians and Native Americans were “tawny”; Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, Swedes, and Germans were “swarthy.” That left very few people, and chiefly the English, as the only “white people” in the world. “I could wish their Numbers were increased,” Franklin said, adding, wonderingly, “But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.”
  • Franklin’s “JOIN, or DIE” did some of that, too: it offered a lesson about the rulers and the ruled, and the nature of political communities. It made a claim about the colonies: they were parts of a whole.
  • When Benjamin Franklin began writing his autobiography, in 1771, he turned the story of his own escape—running away from his apprenticeship to his brother James—into a metaphor for the colonies’ growing resentment of parliamentary rule. James’s “harsh and tyrannical Treatment,” Franklin wrote, had served as “a means of impressing me with that Aversion to arbitrary Power that has stuck to me thro’ my whole Life.”7 But that was also the story of every runaway slave ad, testament after testament to an aversion to arbitrary power.
  • The American Revolution did not begin in 1775 and it didn’t end when the war was over. “The success of Mr. Lay, in sowing the seeds of . . . a revolution in morals, commerce, and government, in the new and in the old world, should teach the benefactors of mankind not to despair, if they do not see the fruits of their benevolent propositions, or undertakings, during their lives,” Philadelphia doctor Benjamin Rush later wrote.
  • There were not one but two American revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century: the struggle for independence from Britain, and the struggle to end slavery. Only one was won.
  • The Revolution was at its most radical in the challenge it presented to the institution of slavery and at its most conservative in its failure to meet that challenge. Still, the institution had begun to break, like a pane of glass streaked with cracks but not yet shattered.
  • “I wish our Poor Distracted State would atend to the many good Lessons” of history, Jane Franklin wrote to her brother, and not “keep always in a Flame.”21
  • After Annapolis, Madison went home to Virginia and resumed his course of study. In April of 1787, he drafted an essay called “Vices of the Political System of the United States.” It took the form of a list of eleven deficiencies,
  • it closed with a list of causes for these vices, which he located primarily “in the people themselves.” By this last he meant the danger that a majority posed to a minority: “In republican Government the majority however composed, ultimately give the law. Whenever therefore an apparent interest or common passion unites a majority what is to restrain them from unjust violations of the rights and interests of the minority, or of individuals?”27 What force restrains good men from doing bad things? Honesty, character, religion—these, history demonstrated, were not to be relied upon. No, the only force that could restrain the tyranny of the people was the force of a well-constructed constitution. It would have to be as finely wrought as an iron gate.
  • At the convention, it proved impossible to set the matter of slavery aside, both because the question of representation turned on it and because any understanding of the nature of tyranny rested on it. When Madison argued about the inevitability of a majority oppressing a minority, he cited ancient history, and told of how the rich oppressed the poor in Greece and Rome. But he cited, too, modern American history. “We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, the ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”40
  • If not for the three-fifths rule, the representatives of free states would have outnumbered representatives of slave states by 57 to 33.44
  • Wilson, half Franklin’s age, read his remarks instead. “Mr. President,” he began, addressing Washington, “I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them.” He suggested that he might, one day, change his mind. “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.” Hoping to pry open the minds of delegates who were closed to the compromise before them, he reminded them of the cost of zealotry. “Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error.” But wasn’t humility the best course, in such circumstances? “Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution,” he closed, “because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best.”
  • Except for the Massachusetts Constitution, in 1780, and the second New Hampshire Constitution, in 1784, no constitution, no written system of government, had ever before been submitted to the people for their approval. “This is a new event in the history of mankind,” said the governor of Connecticut at his state’s ratification convention.
  • Nearly everything Washington did set a precedent. What would have happened if he had decided, before taking that oath of office, to emancipate his slaves? He’d grown disillusioned with slavery; his own slaves, and the greater number of slaves owned by his wife, were, to him, a moral burden, and he understood very well that for all the wealth generated by forced, unpaid labor, the institution of slavery was a moral burden to the nation. There is some evidence—slight though it is—that Washington drafted a statement announcing that he intended to emancipate his slaves before assuming the presidency. (Or maybe that statement, like Washington’s inaugural address, had been written by Hamilton, a member of New York’s Manumission Society.) This, too, Washington understood, would have established a precedent: every president after him would have had to emancipate his slaves. And yet he would not, could not, do it.65 Few of Washington’s decisions would have such lasting and terrible consequences as this one failure to act.
  • In the century and a half between the Connecticut charter and the 1787 meeting of the constitutional convention lies an entire revolution—not just a political revolution but also a religious revolution. So far from establishing a religion, the Constitution doesn’t even mention “God,” except in naming the date (“the year of our Lord . . .”). At a time when all but two states required religious tests for office, the Constitution prohibited them. At a time when all but three states still had an official religion, the Bill of Rights forbade the federal government from establishing one. Most Americans believed, with Madison, that religion can only thrive if it is no part of government, and that a free government can only thrive if it is no part of religion.
  • The replacement of debtors’ prison with bankruptcy protection would change the nature of the American economy, spurring investment, speculation, and the taking of risks.
  • as early as 1791, Madison had begun to revise his thinking. In an essay called “Public Opinion,” he considered a source of instability particular to a large republic: the people might be deceived. “The larger a country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained,” he explained. That is, factions might not, in the end, consist of wise, knowledgeable, and reasonable men. They might consist of passionate, ignorant, and irrational men, who had been led to hold “counterfeit” opinions by persuasive men. (Madison was thinking of Hamilton and his ability to gain public support for his financial plan.)
  • The way out of this political maze was the newspaper. “A circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people,” he explained, “is equivalent to a contraction of territorial limits.” Newspapers would make the country, effectively, smaller.90 It was an ingenious idea. It would be revisited by each passing generation of exasperated advocates of republicanism. The newspaper would hold the Republic together; the telegraph would hold the Republic together; the radio would hold the Republic together; the Internet would hold the Republic together. Each time, this assertion would be both right and terribly wrong.
  • Newspapers in the early republic weren’t incidentally or inadvertently partisan; they were entirely and enthusiastically partisan. They weren’t especially interested in establishing facts; they were interested in staging a battle of opinions. “Professions of impartiality I shall make none,” wrote a Federalist printer. “They are always useless, and are besides perfect nonsense.”92
  • Washington’s Farewell Address consists of a series of warnings about the danger of disunion. The North and the South, the East and the West, ought not to consider their interests separate or competing, Washington urged: “your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty.” Parties, he warned, were the “worst enemy” of every government, agitating “the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms,” kindling “the animosity of one part against another,” and even fomenting “riot and insurrection.”
  • As to the size of the Republic, “Is there a doubt whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere? Let experience solve it.” The American experiment must go on. But it could only thrive if the citizens were supported by religion and morality, and if they were well educated. “Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge,” he urged. “In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”95
  • “Passion” or variants of the word appear seven times in the Farewell; it is the source of every problem; reason is its only remedy. Passion is a river. There would be no changing its course.
  • Adams and Jefferson lived in an age of quantification. It began with the measurement of time. Time used to be a wheel that turned, and turned again; during the scientific revolution, time became a line. Time, the easiest quantity to measure, became the engine of every empirical inquiry: an axis, an arrow. This new use and understanding of time contributed to the idea of progress—if time is a line instead of a circle, things can get better and even better, instead of forever rising and falling in endless cycles, like the seasons. The idea of progress animated American independence and animated, too, the advance of capitalism.
  • The quantification of time led to the quantification of everything else: the counting of people, the measurement of their labor, and the calculation of profit as a function of time. Keeping time and accumulating wealth earned a certain equivalency. “Time is money,” Benjamin Franklin used to say.
  • The two-party system turned out to be essential to the strength of the Republic. A stable party system organizes dissent. It turns discontent into a public good. And it insures the peaceful transfer of power, in which the losing party willingly, and without hesitation, surrenders its power to the winning party.
  • Behind Madison’s remarks about “lessening the proportion of slaves to the free people,” behind Jefferson’s tortured calculations about how many generations would have to pass before his own children could pass for “white,” lay this hard truth: none of these men could imagine living with descendants of Africans as political equals.
  • If the battle between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had determined whether aristocracy or republicanism would prevail (and, with Jefferson, republicanism won), the battle between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams would determine whether republicanism or democracy would prevail (and, with Jackson, democracy would, eventually, win). Jackson’s rise to power marked the birth of American populism. The argument of populism is that the best government is that most closely directed by a popular majority.
  • He was provincial, and poorly educated. (Later, when Harvard gave Jackson an honorary doctorate, John Quincy Adams refused to attend the ceremony, calling him “a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.”)68 He had a well-earned reputation for being ferocious, ill-humored, and murderous, on the battlefield and off. When he ran for president, he had served less than a year in the Senate. Of his bid for the White House Jefferson declared, “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place.”69 Jackson made a devilishly shrewd decision. He would make his lack of certain qualities—judiciousness, education, political experience—into strengths.
  • Eaton, who ran Jackson’s campaign, shrewdly revised his Life of Andrew Jackson, deleting or dismissing everything in Jackson’s past that looked bad and lavishing attention on anything that looked good and turning into strengths what earlier had been considered weaknesses: Eaton’s Jackson wasn’t uneducated; he was self-taught. He wasn’t ill-bred; he was “self-made.”
  • Watching the rise of American democracy, an aging political elite despaired, and feared that the Republic could not survive the rule of the people. Wrote John Randolph of Virginia, “The country is ruined past redemption.”
  • “The first principle of our system,” Jackson said, “is that the majority is to govern.” He bowed to the people. Then, all at once, the people nearly crushed him with their affection.
  • The democratization of American politics was hastened by revivalists like Stewart who believed in the salvation of the individual through good works and in the equality of all people in the eyes of God. Against that belief stood the stark and brutal realities of an industrializing age, the grinding of souls.
  • The great debates of the middle decades of the nineteenth century had to do with the soul and the machine. One debate merged religion and politics. What were the political consequences of the idea of the equality of souls? Could the soul of America be redeemed from the nation’s original sin, the Constitution’s sanctioning of slavery?
  • Another debate merged politics and technology. Could the nation’s new democratic traditions survive in the age of the factory, the railroad, and the telegraph? If all events in time can be explained by earlier events in time, if history is a line, and not a circle, then the course of events—change over time—is governed by a set of laws, like the laws of physics, and driven by a force, like gravity. What is that force? Is change driven by God, by people, or by machines? Is progress the progress of Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s 1678 allegory—the journey of a Christian from sin to salvation? Is progress the extension of suffrage, the spread of democracy? Or is progress invention, the invention of new machines?
  • A distinctively American idea of progress involved geography as destiny, picturing improvement as change not only over time but also over space.
  • If the sincerity of converts was often dubious, another kind of faith was taking deeper root in the 1820s, an evangelical faith in technological progress, an unquestioning conviction that each new machine was making the world better. That faith had a special place in the United States, as if machines had a distinctive destiny on the American continent. In prints and paintings, “Progress” appeared as a steam-powered locomotive, chugging across the continent, unstoppable. Writers celebrated inventors as “Men of Progress” and “Conquerors of Nature” and lauded their machines as far worthier than poetry. The triumph of the sciences over the arts meant the defeat of the ancients by the moderns. The genius of Eli Whitney, hero of modernity, was said to rival that of Shakespeare; the head of the U.S. Patent Office declared the steamboat “a mightier epic” than the Iliad.18
  • To Jackson’s supporters, his election marked not degeneration but a new stage in the history of progress. Nowhere was this argument made more forcefully, or more influentially, than in George Bancroft’s History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present. The book itself, reviewers noted, voted for Jackson. The spread of evangelical Christianity, the invention of new machines, and the rise of American democracy convinced Bancroft that “humanism is steady advancing,” and that “the advance of liberty and justice is certain.” That advance, men like Bancroft and Jackson believed, required Americans to march across the continent, to carry these improvements from east to west, the way Jefferson had pictured it. Democracy, John O’Sullivan, a New York lawyer and Democratic editor, argued in 1839, is nothing more or less than “Christianity in its earthly aspect.” O’Sullivan would later coin the term “manifest destiny” to describe this set of beliefs, the idea that the people of the United States were fated “to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given for the development of the great experiment of liberty.”23
  • To evangelical Democrats, Democracy, Christianity, and technology were levers of the same machine. And yet, all along, there were critics and dissenters and objectors who saw, in the soul of the people, in the march of progress, in the unending chain of machines, in the seeming forward movement of history, little but violence and backwardness and a great crushing of men, women, and children. “Oh, America, America,” Maria Stewart cried, “foul and indelible is thy stain!”24
  • The self-evident, secular truths of the Declaration of Independence became, to evangelical Americans, the truths of revealed religion. To say that this marked a turn away from the spirit of the nation’s founding is to wildly understate the case. The United States was founded during the most secular era in American history, either before or since. In the late eighteenth century, church membership was low, and anticlerical feeling was high.
  • The United States was not founded as a Christian nation. The Constitution prohibits religious tests for officeholders. The Bill of Rights forbids the federal government from establishing a religion, James Madison having argued that to establish
  • The separation of church and state allowed religion to thrive; that was one of its intentions. Lacking an established state religion, Americans founded new sects, from Shakers to Mormons, and rival Protestant denominations sprung up in town after town. Increasingly, the only unifying, national religion was a civil religion, a belief in the American creed. This faith bound the nation together, and provided extraordinary political stability in an era of astonishing change,
  • Slavery wasn’t an aberration in an industrializing economy; slavery was its engine. Factories had mechanical slaves; plantations had human slaves. The power of machines was measured by horsepower, the power of slaves by hand power. A healthy man counted as “two hands,” a nursing woman as a “half-hand,” a child as a “quarter-hand.”
  • With Walker, the antislavery argument for gradual emancipation, with compensation for slave owners, became untenable. Abolitionists began arguing for immediate emancipation. And southern antislavery societies shut their doors. As late as 1827, the number of antislavery groups in the South had outnumbered those in the North by more than four to one. Southern antislavery activists were usually supporters of colonization, not of emancipation. Walker’s Appeal ended the antislavery movement in the South and radicalized it in the North.
  • The rebellion rippled across the Union. The Virginia legislature debated the possibility of emancipating its slaves, fearing “a Nat Turner might be in every family.” Quakers submitted a petition to the state legislature calling for abolition. The petition was referred to a committee, headed by Thomas Jefferson’s thirty-nine-year-old grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who proposed a scheme of gradual emancipation. Instead, the legislature passed new laws banning the teaching of slaves to read and write, and prohibiting, too, teaching slaves about the Bible.43 In a nation founded on a written Declaration, made sacred by evangelicals during a religious revival, reading about equality became a crime.
  • One consequence of the rise of Jacksonian democracy and the Second Great Awakening was the participation of women in the reformation of American politics by way of American morals. When suffrage was stripped of all property qualifications, women’s lack of political power became starkly obvious. For women who wished to exercise power, the only source of power seemingly left to them was their role as mothers, which, they suggested, rendered them morally superior to men—more loving, more caring, and more responsive to the cries of the weak.
  • Purporting to act less as citizens than as mothers, cultivating the notion of “republican motherhood,” women formed temperance societies, charitable aid societies, peace societies, vegetarian societies, and abolition societies. The first Female Anti-Slavery Society was founded in Boston in 1833; by 1837, 139 Female Anti-Slavery Societies had been founded across the country,
  • After 1835, she never again spoke in public. As Catherine Beecher argued in 1837, in An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females, “If the female advocate chooses to come upon a stage, and expose her person, dress, and elocution to public criticism, it is right to express disgust.”
  • Jacksonian democracy distributed political power to the many, but industrialization consolidated economic power in the hands of a few. In Boston, the top 1 percent of the population controlled 10 percent of wealth in 1689, 16 percent in 1771, 33 percent in 1833, and 37 percent in 1848, while the lowest 80 percent of the population controlled 39 percent of the wealth in 1689, 29 percent in 1771, 14 percent in 1833, and a mere 4 percent in 1848.
  • In New York, the top 1 percent of the population controlled 40 percent of the wealth in 1828 and 50 percent in 1845; the top 4 percent of the population controlled 63 percent of the wealth in 1828 and 80 percent in 1845.49
  • While two and a half million Europeans had migrated to all of the Americas between 1500 and 1800, the same number—two and a half million—arrived specifically in the United States between 1845 and 1854 alone. As a proportion of the U.S. population, European immigrants grew from 1.6 percent in the 1820s to 11.2 percent in 1860. Writing in 1837, one Michigan reformer called the nation’s rate of immigration “the boldest experiment upon the stability of government ever made in the annals of time.”51 The largest
  • Critics of Jackson—himself the son of Irish immigrants—had blamed his election on the rising population of poor, newly enfranchised Irishmen. “Everything in the shape of an Irishman was drummed to the polls,” one newspaper editor wrote in 1828.52 By 1860, more than one in eight Americans were born in Europe, including 1.6 million Irish and 1.2 million Germans, the majority of whom were Catholic. As the flood of immigrants swelled, the force of nativism gained strength, as did hostility toward Catholics, fueled by the animus of evangelical Protestants.
  • The insularity of both Irish and German communities contributed to a growing movement to establish tax-supported public elementary schools, known as “common schools,” meant to provide a common academic and civic education to all classes of Americans. Like the extension of suffrage to all white men, this element of the American experiment propelled the United States ahead of European nations. Much of the movement’s strength came from the fervor of revivalists. They hoped that these new schools would assimilate a diverse population of native-born and foreign-born citizens by introducing them to the traditions of American culture and government, so that boys, once men, would vote wisely, and girls, once women, would raise virtuous children. “It is our duty to make men moral,” read one popular teachers’ manual, published in 1830. Other advocates hoped that a shared education would diminish partisanship. Whatever the motives of its advocates, the common school movement emerged out of, and nurtured, a strong civic culture.56
  • With free schools, literacy spread, and the number of newspapers rose, a change that was tied to the rise of a new party system. Parties come and go, but a party system—a stable pair of parties—has characterized American politics since the ratification debates. In American history the change from one party system to another has nearly always been associated with a revolution in communications that allows the people to shake loose of the control of parties. In the 1790s, during the rise of the first party system, which pitted Federalists against Republicans, the number of newspapers had swelled. During the shift to the second party system, which, beginning in 1833, pitted Democrats against the newly founded Whig Party, not only did the number of newspapers rise, but their prices plummeted.
  • The newspapers of the first party system, which were also known as “commercial advertisers,” had consisted chiefly of partisan commentary and ads, and generally sold for six cents an issue. The new papers cost only one cent, and were far more widely read. The rise of the so-called penny press also marked the beginning of the triumph of “facts” over “opinion” in American journalism, mainly because the penny press aimed at a different, broader, and less exclusively partisan, audience. The New York Sun appeared in 1833. “It shines for all” was its common-man motto. “The object of this paper is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of everyone, ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY,” it boasted. It dispensed with subscriptions and instead was circulated at newsstands, where it was sold for cash, to anyone who had a ready penny. Its front page was filled not with advertising but with news. The penny press was a “free press,” as James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald put it, because it wasn’t beholden to parties. (Bennett, born in Scotland, had immigrated to the United States after reading Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.) Since the paper was sold at newsstands, rather than mailed to subscribers, he explained, its editors and writers were “entirely ignorant who are its readers and who are not.” They couldn’t favor their readers’ politics because they didn’t know them. “We shall support no party,” Bennett insisted. “We shall endeavor to record facts.”
  • During the days of the penny press, Tocqueville observed that Americans had a decided preference for weighing the facts of a matter themselves: They mistrust systems; they adhere closely to facts and study facts with their own senses. As they do not easily defer to the mere name of any fellow man, they are never inclined to rest upon any man’s authority; but, on the contrary, they are unremitting in their efforts to find out the weaker points of their neighbor’s doctrine.60
  • For centuries, Europeans had based their claims to lands in the New World on arguments that native peoples had no right to the land they inhabited, no sovereignty over it, because they had no religion, or because they had no government, or because they had no system of writing. The Cherokees, with deliberation and purpose, challenged each of these arguments.
  • Britain, Calhoun argued that if a state were to decide that a law passed by Congress was unconstitutional, the Constitution would have to be amended, and if such an amendment were not ratified—if it didn’t earn the necessary approval of three-quarters of the states—the objecting state would have the right to secede from the Union. The states had been sovereign before the Constitution was ever written, or even thought of, Calhoun argued, and they remained sovereign. Calhoun also therefore argued against majority rule; nullification is fundamentally anti-majoritarian. If states can secede, the majority does not rule.78 The nullification crisis was
  • New York abolished debtors’ prison in 1831, and in 1841, Congress passed a federal law offering bankruptcy protection to everyone. Within two years, 41,000 Americans had filed for bankruptcy. Two years later, the law was repealed, but state laws continued to offer bankruptcy protection and, still more significantly, debtors’ prisons were gone for good. In Britain and all of Europe except Portugal, offenders were still being thrown in debtors’ prison (a plot that animated many a nineteenth-century novel); in the United States, debtors could declare bankruptcy and begin again.
  • A nation of debtors, Americans came to see that most people who fall into debt are victims of the business cycle and not of fate or divine retribution or the wheel of fortune. The nation’s bankruptcy laws, even as they came and went again, made taking risks less risky for everyone, which meant that everyone took more risks.
  • the geographical vastness of the United States meant that the anxiety about the machinery of industrial capitalism took the form not of Marxism, with its argument that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” but instead of a romance with nature, and with the land, and with all things rustic. Against the factory, Americans posed not a socialist utopia but the log cabin.
  • Were all these vast designs and rapid strides worth it? Thoreau thought not. He came to this truth: “They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”112
  • Expansion, even more than abolition, pressed upon the public the question of the constitutionality of slavery. How or even whether this crisis would be resolved was difficult to see not only because of the nature of the dispute but also because there existed very little agreement about who might resolve it: Who was to decide whether a federal law was unconstitutional?
  • In the midst of all this clamoring among the thundering white-haired patriarchs of American politics, there emerged the idea that the authority to interpret the Constitution rests with the people themselves. Or, at least, this became a rather fashionable thing to say. “It is, Sir, the people’s Constitution, the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people,” Daniel Webster roared from the floor of Congress.14 Every man could read and understand the Constitution, Webster insisted.
  • The Notes, it appeared, could be read as variously as the Constitution itself. As one shrewd observer remarked, “The Constitution threatens to be a subject of infinite sects, like the Bible.” And, as with many sects, those politicians who most strenuously staked their arguments on the Constitution often appeared the least acquainted with it. Remarked New York governor Silas Wright, “No one familiar with the affairs of our government, can have failed to notice how large a proportion of our statesmen appear never to have read the Constitution of the United States with a careful reference to its precise language and exact provisions, but rather, as occasion presents, seem to exercise their ingenuity . . . to stretch both to the line of what they, at the moment, consider expedient.”22
  • A NATION HAS borders but the edges of an empire are frayed.23 While abolitionists damned the annexation of Texas as an extension of the slave power, more critics called it an act of imperialism, inconsistent with a republican form of government. “We have a republic, gentlemen, of vast extent and unequalled natural advantages,” Daniel Webster pointed out. “Instead of aiming to enlarge its boundaries, let us seek, rather, to strengthen its union.”24 Webster lost that argument, and, in the end, it was the American reach for empire that, by sundering the Union, brought about the collapse of slavery.
  • Although hardly ever reported in the press, the years between 1830 and 1860 saw more than one hundred incidents of violence between congressmen, from melees in the aisles to mass brawls on the floor, from fistfights and duels to street fights. “It is the game of these men, and of their profligate organs,” Dickens wrote, “to make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so destructive of all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded persons shall be kept aloof, and they, and such as they, be left to battle out their selfish views unchecked.”
  • They spat venom. They pulled guns. They unsheathed knives. Divisions of party were abandoned; the splinter in Congress was sectional. Before heading to the Capitol every morning, southern congressmen strapped bowie knives to their belts and tucked pistols into their pockets. Northerners, on principle, came unarmed. When northerners talked about the slave power, they meant that literally.32
  • If the United States were to acquire territory from Mexico, and if this territory were to enter the Union, would Mexicans become American citizens? Calhoun, now in the Senate, vehemently opposed this idea. “I protest against the incorporation of such a people,” he declared. “Ours is the government of the white man.”
  • And yet, as different as were Wilmot’s interests from Calhoun’s, they were both interested in the rights of white men, as Wilmot made plain. “I plead the cause of the rights of white freemen,” he said. “I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”
  • If the problem was the size of the Republic, the sprawl of its borders, the frayed edges of empire, couldn’t railroads, and especially the telegraph, tie the Republic together? “Doubt has been entertained by many patriotic minds how far the rapid, full, and thorough intercommunication of thought and intelligence, so necessary to the people living under a common representative republic, could be expected to take place throughout such immense bounds,” said one House member in 1845, but “that doubt can no longer exist.”45
  • even Americans with an unflinching faith in machine-driven progress understood that a pulse along a wire could not stop the slow but steady dissolution of the Union.
  • the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, under which the top half of Mexico became the bottom third of the United States. The gain to the United States was as great as the loss to Mexico. In 1820, the United States of America had spanned 1.8 million square miles, with a population of 9.6 million people; Mexico had spanned 1.7 million square miles, with a population of 6.5 million people. By 1850, the United States had acquired one million square miles of Mexico, and its population had grown to 23.2 million; Mexico’s population was 7.5 million.49
  • The Louisiana Purchase had doubled the size of the United States. In gaining territory from Mexico, the United States grew by 64 percent.
  • the territory comprising the United States had grown to “nearly ten times as large as the whole of France and Great Britain combined; three times as large as the whole of France, Britain, Austria, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, and Denmark, together; one-and-a-half times as large as the Russian empire in Europe; one-sixth less only than the area covered by the fifty-nine or sixty empires, states, and Republics of Europe; of equal extent with the Roman Empire or that of Alexander, neither of which is said to have exceeded 3,000,000 square miles.”50
  • Sentiment was not Fuller’s way; debate was her way. She was a scourge of lesser intellects. Edgar Allan Poe, whose work she did not admire, described her as wearing a perpetual sneer. In “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women,” Fuller argued that the democratization of American politics had cast light on the tyranny of men over women: “As men become aware that all men have not had their fair chance,” she observed, women had become willing to say “that no women have had a fair chance.”
  • In 1845, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller argued for fundamental and complete equality: “We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man.”56 The book was wildly successful, and Greeley, who had taken to greeting Fuller with one of her catchphrases about women’s capacity—“Let them be sea-captains, if you will”—sent her to Europe to become his newspaper’s foreign correspondent.
  • Reeling from those revolutions, the king of Bavaria asked the historian Leopold von Ranke to explain why his people had rebelled against monarchial rule, as had so many peoples in Europe that year. “Ideas spread most rapidly when they have found adequate concrete expression,” Ranke told the king, and the United States had “introduced a new force in the world,” the idea that “the nation should govern itself,” an idea that would determine “the course of the modern world”: free speech, spread by wire, would make the whole world free.61
  • Unlike Thoreau, who cursed the railroads, Free-Soilers believed in improvement, improvement through the hard work of the laboring man, his power, his energy. “Our paupers to-day, thanks to free labor, are our yeoman and merchants of tomorrow,” the New York Times boasted. “Why, who are the laboring people of the North?” Daniel Webster asked. “They are the whole North. They are the people who till their own farms with their own hands, freeholders, educated men, independent men.”
  • This attack by northerners led southerners to greater exertions in defending their way of life. They battled on several fronts. They described northern “wage slavery” as a far more exploitative system of labor than slavery. They celebrated slavery as fundamental to American prosperity. Slavery “has grown with our growth, and strengthened with our strength,” Calhoun said. And they elaborated an increasingly virulent ideology of racial difference, arguing against the very idea of equality embodied in the American creed.
  • Conservative Virginian George Fitzhugh, himself inspired by ethnological thinking, dismissed the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence as utter nonsense. “Men are not born physically, morally, or intellectually equal,” he wrote. “It would be far nearer the truth to say, ‘that some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them,’—and the riding does them good.”
  • For Fitzhugh, the error had begun in the imaginations of the philosophes of the Enlightenment and in their denial of the reality of history. Life and liberty are not “inalienable rights,” Fitzhugh argued: instead, people “have been sold in all countries, and in all ages, and must be sold so long as human nature lasts.” Equality means calamity: “Subordination, difference of caste and classes, difference of sex, age, and slavery beget peace and good will.”
  • Progress is an illusion: “the world has not improved in the last two thousand, probably four thousand years.” Perfection is to be found in the past, not in the future.66 As for the economic systems of the North and the South, “Free laborers have not a thousandth part of the rights and liberties of negro slaves,” Fitzhugh insisted. “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.”67
  • HISTORY TEEMS WITH mishaps and might-have-beens: explosions on the Potomac, storms not far from port, narrowly contested elections, court cases lost and won, political visionaries drowned. But over the United States in the 1850s, a sense of inevitability fell, as if there were a fate, a dismal dismantlement, that no series of events or accidents could thwart.
  • over the United States in the 1850s, a sense of inevitability fell, as if there were a fate, a dismal dismantlement, that no series of events or accidents could thwart.
  • Douglas promoted the idea of popular sovereignty, proclaiming, “If there is any one principle dearer and more sacred than all others in free governments, it is that which asserts the exclusive right of a free people to form and adopt their own fundamental law.”75 Unfree people, within Stephen Douglas’s understanding, had no such rights.
  • the Fugitive Slave Law, required citizens to turn in runaway slaves and denied fugitives the right to a jury trial. The law, said Harriet Jacobs, a fugitive slave living in New York, marked “the beginning of a reign of terror to the colored population.”76 Bounty hunters and slave catchers hunted down and captured former slaves and returned them to their owners for a fee. Little stopped them from seizing men, women, and children who had been born free, or who had been legally emancipated, and selling them to the South, too. Nothing so brutally exposed the fragility of freedom or the rapaciousness of slavery.
  • February 1854, at their convention in Philadelphia, northern Know-Nothings proposed a platform plank calling for the reinstatement of the Missouri Compromise. When that motion was rejected, some fifty delegates from eight northern states bolted: they left the convention, and the party, to set up their own party, the short-lived North American Party. Nativism would endure as a force in American politics, but, meanwhile, nativists split over slavery.
  • Lincoln’s was the language of free soil, free speech, and free labor. He grounded his argument against slavery in his understanding of American history, in the language of Frederick Douglass, and in his reading of the Constitution. “Let no one be deceived,” he said. “The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms.”
  • As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
  • “That negroes, whether slave or free, that is, men of the African race, are not citizens of the United States by the Constitution.” The implications of the ruling stunned his readers. Even Americans who held no strong views on the question of slavery—and they were rare enough—were nonetheless shocked by the court’s exercise of the authority to determine the unconstitutionality of the law.
  • “A large meeting of colored people” was held in Philadelphia in April, at which it was resolved that “the only duty the colored man owes to a Constitution under which he is declared to be an inferior and degraded being, having no rights which white men are bound to respect, is to denounce and repudiate it, and to do what he can by all proper means to bring it into contempt.”
  • “You may close your Supreme Court against the black man’s cry for justice, but you cannot, thank God, close against him the ear of a sympathising world, nor shut up the Court of Heaven.” Taney’s interpretation of the Constitution would be ignored, Douglass predicted. “Slavery lives in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people.”102
  • APHOTOGRAPH STOPS TIME, TRAPPING IT LIKE A BUTTERFLY in a jar.
  • No other kind of historical evidence has this quality of instantaneity, of an impression taken in a moment, in a flicker, an eye opened and then shut. Photographs also capture the ordinary, the humble, the speechless. The camera discriminates between light and dark but not between the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the noisy and the quiet.
  • portraits were also closely associated with death, with being trapped in time, on glass, for eternity, and, even more poignantly, with equality.3 With photography, Walt Whitman predicted, “Art will be democratized.”
  • Morse had long predicted that the telegraph would usher in an age of world peace. “I trust that one of its effects will be to bind man to his fellow-man in such bonds of amity as to put an end to war,” he insisted.8 War was a failure of technology, Morse argued, a shortcoming of communication that could be remedied by way of a machine. Endowing his work with the grandest of purposes, he believed that the laying of telegraph wires across the American continent would bind the nation together into one people, and that the laying of cable across the ocean would bind Europe to the Americas, ushering in the dawn of an age of global harmony.
  • But war isn’t a failure of technology; it’s a failure of politics.
  • Debate is to war what trial by jury is to trial by combat: a way to settle a dispute without coming to blows. The form and its rules had been established over centuries. They derived from rules used in the courts and in Parliament, and even from the rules of rhetoric used in the writing of poetry. Since the Middle Ages and the founding of the first universities, debate had been the foundation of a liberal arts education.
  • (Etymologically and historically, the artes liberales are the arts acquired by people who are free, or liber.)10 In the eighteenth century, debate was understood as the foundation of civil society. In 1787, delegates to the constitutional convention had agreed to “to argue without asperity, and to endeavor to convince the judgment without hurting the feelings of each other.”
  • Some twelve thousand people showed up for their first debate, at two o’clock in the afternoon on August 21, in Ottawa, Illinois. There were no seats; the audience stood, without relief, for three hours.
  • They’d agreed to strict rules: the first speaker would speak for an hour and the second for an hour and a half, whereupon the first speaker would offer a thirty-minute rebuttal.
  • And, as to the wrongness of slavery, he called it tyranny, and the idea of its naturalness as much an error as a belief in the divine right of kings. The question wasn’t sectionalism or nationalism, the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. The question was right against wrong. “That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent,” Lincoln said.16
  • The price of slaves grew so high that a sizable number of white southerners urged the reopening of the African slave trade. In the 1850s, legislatures in several states, including South Carolina, proposed reopening the trade. Adopting this measure would have violated federal law. Some “reopeners” believed that the federal ban on the trade was unconstitutional; others were keen to nullify it, in a dress rehearsal for secession.
  • “If it is right to buy slaves in Virginia and carry them to New Orleans, why is it not right to buy them in Cuba, Brazil, or Africa and carry them there?”21 Proslavery southerners made these arguments under the banner of “free trade,” their rhetorical answer to “free labor.”
  • To George Fitzhugh, all societies were “at all times and places, regulated by laws as universal and as similar as those which control the affairs of bees,” and trade itself, including the slave trade, was “as old, as natural, and irresistible as the tides of the ocean.”
  • In 1855, David Christy, the author of Cotton Is King, wrote about the vital importance of “the doctrine of Free Trade,” which included abolishing the tariffs that made imported English goods more expensive than manufactured goods produced in the North. As one southerner put it, “Free trade, unshackled industry, is the motto of the South.”23
  • Darwin’s Origin of Species would have a vast and lingering influence on the world of ideas. Most immediately, it refuted the racial arguments of ethnologists like Louis Agassiz. And, in the months immediately following the book’s publication—the last, unsettling months before the beginning of the Civil War—abolitionists took it as evidence of the common humanity of man.30
  • The truths of the Confederacy disavowed the truths of the Union. The Confederacy’s newly elected vice president, a frail Georgian named Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in Savannah in which he made those differences starkly clear. The ideas that lie behind the Constitution “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races,” Stephens said, but
  • “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea: its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and moral condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”52 It would become politically expedient, after the war, for ex-Confederates to insist that the Confederacy was founded on states’ rights. But the Confederacy was founded on white supremacy.
  • Opposition to free speech had long been the position of slave owners, a position taken at the constitutional convention and extended through the gag rule, antiliteracy laws, bans on the mails, and the suppression of speakers. An aversion to political debate also structured the Confederacy, which had both a distinctive character and a lasting influence on Americans’ ideas about federal authority as against popular sovereignty.
  • Secessionists were attempting to build a modern, proslavery, antidemocratic state. In order to wage a war, the leaders of this fundamentally antidemocratic state needed popular support. Such support was difficult to gain and impossible to maintain. The Confederacy therefore suppressed dissent.55
  • By May of 1861, the Confederacy comprised fifteen states stretching over 900,000 square miles and containing 12 million people, including 4 million slaves, and 4 million white women who were disenfranchised. It rested on the foundational belief that a minority governs a majority. “The condition of slavery is with us nothing but a form of civil government for a class of people not fit to govern themselves,” said Jefferson Davis.
  • There would be those, after the war ended, who said that it had been fought over states’ rights or to preserve the Union or for a thousand other reasons and causes. Soldiers, North and South, knew better. “The fact that slavery is the sole undeniable cause of this infamous rebellion, that it is a war of, by, and for Slavery, is as plain as the noon-day sun,” a soldier writing for his Wisconsin regimental newspaper explained in 1862. “Any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks,” a soldier writing for his Confederate brigade’s newspaper wrote that same year, “is either a fool or a liar.”
  • Lincoln would remain a man trapped in time, in the click of a shutter and by the trigger of a gun. In mourning him, in sepia and yellow, in black and white, beneath plates of glinting glass, Americans deferred a different grief, a vaster and more dire reckoning with centuries of suffering and loss, not captured by any camera, not settled by any amendment, the injuries wrought on the bodies of millions of men, women, and children, stolen, shackled, hunted, whipped, branded, raped, starved, and buried in unmarked graves.
  • No president consecrated their cemeteries or delivered their Gettysburg address; no committee of arrangements built monuments to their memory. With Lincoln’s death, it was as if millions of people had been crammed into his tomb, trapped in a vault that could not hold them.
  • People running for Congress didn’t have to meet property requirements; they didn’t have to have been born in the United States; and they couldn’t be subjected to religious tests. This same logic applied to citizenship, and for the same reason: the framers of the Constitution understood these sorts of requirements as forms of political oppression. The door to the United States was meant to be open.
  • Before the 1880s, no federal law restricted immigration. And, despite periods of fervent nativism, especially in the 1840s, the United States welcomed immigrants into citizenship, and valued them. After the Civil War, the U.S. Treasury estimated the worth of each immigrant as equal to an $800 contribution to the nation’s economy,
  • Nineteenth-century politicians and political theorists interpreted American citizenship within the context of an emerging set of ideas about human rights and the authority of the state, holding dear the conviction that a good government guarantees everyone eligible for citizenship the same set of political rights, equal and irrevocable.
  • The Civil War raised fundamental questions not only about the relationship between the states and the federal government but also about citizenship itself and about the very notion of a nation-state. What is a citizen? What powers can a state exert over its citizens? Is suffrage a right of citizenship, or a special right, available only to certain citizens? Are women citizens? And if women are citizens, why aren’t they voters? What about Chinese immigrants, pouring into the West? They were free. Were they, under American law, “free white persons” or “free persons of color” or some other sort of persons?
  • In 1866, Congress searched in vain for a well-documented definition of the word “citizen.” Over the next thirty years, that definition would become clear, and it would narrow.
  • In 1896, the U.S. passport office, in the Department of State, which had grown to thousands of clerks, began processing applications according to new “Rules Governing the Application of Passports,” which required evidence of identity, including a close physical description Lew Wa Ho worked at a dry goods shop in St. Louis; the photograph was included in his Immigration Service case file as evidence of employment. Age, _____ years; stature, _____ feet _____ inches (English measure); forehead, _____; eyes, _____; nose, _____; mouth, _____; chin, _____; hair, _____; complexion, _____; face, _____ as well as affidavits, signatures, witnesses, an oath of loyalty, and, by way of an application fee, one dollar.12
  • The Fourteenth Amendment, drafted by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, marked the signal constitutional achievement of a century of debate and war, of suffering and struggle. It proposed a definition of citizenship guaranteeing its privileges and immunities, and insuring equal protection and due process to all citizens. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,”
  • “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”20
  • During the drafting of the amendment, the committee betrayed the national phalanx of women who for decades had fought for abolition and for black civil rights by proposing to insert, into the amendment’s second section, a provision that any state that denied the right to vote “to any of the male inhabitants of such state” would lose representation in Congress. “Male” had never before appeared in any part of the Constitution. “If that word ‘male’ be inserted,” Stanton warned, “it will take us a century at least to get it out.”21 She was not far wrong.
  • Women protested. “Can any one tell us why the great advocates of Human Equality . . . forget that when they were a weak party and needed all the womanly strength of the nation to help them on, they always united the words ‘without regard to sex, race, or color’?” asked Ohio-born reformer Frances Gage. Charles Sumner offered this answer: “We know how the Negro will vote, but are not so sure of the women.” How women would vote was impossible to know. Would black women vote the way black men voted? Would white women vote like black women? Republicans decided they’d rather not find out.
  • In the federal census of 1860, 24,282 out of 34,935 Chinese toiled in mines. Although some Chinese immigrants left mining—and some were forced out—many continued to mine well into the 1880s, often working in sites abandoned by other miners.
  • An 1867 government report noted that in Montana, “the diggings now fall into the hands of the Chinese, who patiently glean the fields abandoned by the whites.” Chinese workers began settling in Boise in 1865 and only five years later constituted a third of Idaho’s settlers and nearly 60 percent of its miners. In 1870, Chinese immigrants and their children made up nearly 9 percent of the population of California, and one-quarter of the state’s wage earners.
  • Their rights, under state constitutions and statutes, were markedly limited. Oregon’s 1857 constitution barred “Chinamen” from owning real estate, while California barred Chinese immigrants from testifying in court, a provision upheld in an 1854 state supreme court opinion, People v. Hall, which described the Chinese as “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and who are incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point, as their history has shown.”29
  • And what about the voting rights of U.S.-born Chinese Americans? Much turned on the Fifteenth Amendment, proposed early in 1869. While the aim of the amendment was to guarantee African Americans the right to vote and hold office, its language inevitably raised the question of Chinese citizenship and suffrage. Opponents of the amendment found its entire premise scandalous. Garrett Davis, a Democratic senator from Kentucky, fumed, “I want no negro government; I want no Mongolian government; I want the government of the white man which our fathers incorporated.”33
  • Douglass spoke about what he called a “composite nation,” a strikingly original and generative idea, about a citizenry made better, and stronger, not in spite of its many elements, but because of them: “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.”36
  • Tilden won the nomination anyway and, in the general election, he won the popular vote against Hayes. Unwilling to accept the result of the election, Republicans disputed the returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina.
  • Eventually, the decision was thrown to an electoral commission that brokered a nefarious compromise: Democrats agreed to throw their support behind the man ever after known as Rutherfraud B. Hayes, so that he could become president, in exchange for a promise from Republicans to end the military occupation of the South. For a minor and petty political win over the Democratic Party, Republicans first committed electoral fraud and then, in brokering a compromise, abandoned a century-long fight for civil rights.
  • As soon as federal troops withdrew, white Democrats, calling themselves the “Redeemers,” took control of state governments of the South, and the era of black men’s enfranchisement came to a violent and terrible end. The Klan terrorized the countryside, burning homes and hunting, torturing, and killing people. (Between 1882 and 1930, murderers lynched more than three thousand black men and women.)
  • Black politicians elected to office were thrown out. And all-white legislatures began passing a new set of black codes, known as Jim Crow laws, that segregated blacks from whites in every conceivable public place, down to the last street corner. Tennessee passed the first Jim Crow law, in 1881, mandating the separation of blacks and whites in railroad cars. Georgia became the first state to demand separate seating for whites and blacks in streetcars, in 1891.
  • “Capital buys and sells to-day the very heart-beats of humanity,” she said. Democracy itself had been corrupted by it: “the speculators, the land-robbers, the pirates and gamblers of this Nation have knocked unceasingly at the doors of Congress, and Congress has in every case acceded to their demands.”44 The capitalists, she said, had subverted the will of the people.
  • In the late nineteenth century, a curious reversal took place. Electoral politics, the politics men engaged in, became domesticated, the office work of education and advertising—even voting moved indoors. Meanwhile, women’s political expression moved to the streets. And there, at marches, rallies, and parades, women deployed the tools of the nineteenth-century religious revival: the sermon, the appeal, the conversion.45
  • 1862 alone, in addition to the Homestead Act, the Republican Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act (chartering railroad companies to build the line from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California) and the National Bank Act (to issue paper money to pay for it all). After the war, political power moved from the states to the federal government and as the political influence of the South waned, the importance of the West rose. Congress not only sent to the states amendments to the Constitution that defined citizenship and guaranteed voting rights but also passed landmark legislation involving the management of western land, the control of native populations, the growth and development of large corporations, and the construction of a national transportation infrastructure.
  • The independent farmer—the lingering ideal of the Jeffersonian yeoman—remained the watchword of the West, but in truth, the family farming for subsistence, free of government interference, was far less common than a federally subsidized, capitalist model of farming and cattle raising for a national or even an international market. The small family farm—Jefferson’s republican dream—was in many parts of the arid West an environmental impossibility.
  • Much of the property distributed under the terms of the Homestead Act, primarily in the Great Basin, was semi-arid, the kind of land on which few farmers could manage a productive farm with only 160 acres. Instead, Congress typically granted the best land to railroads, and allowed other, bigger interests to step in, buying up large swaths for agricultural business or stock raising and fencing it in, especially after the patenting of barbed wire in 1874.46
  • In 1885, an American economist tried to reckon the extraordinary transformation wrought by what was now 200,000 miles of railroad, more than in all of Europe. It was possible to move one ton of freight one mile for less than seven-tenths of one cent, “a sum so small,” he wrote, “that outside of China it would be difficult to find a coin of equivalent value to give a boy as a reward for carrying an ounce package across a street.”48
  • instability contributed to a broader set of political concerns that became Mary Lease’s obsession, concerns known as “the money question,” and traceable all the way back to Hamilton’s economic plan: Should the federal government control banking and industry?
  • No group of native-born Americans was more determined to end Chinese immigration than factory workers. The 1876 platform of the Workingmen’s Party of California declared that “to an American death is preferable to life on par with a Chinaman.”55 In 1882, spurred by the nativism of populists, Congress passed its first-ever immigration law, the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred immigrants from China from entering the United States and, determining that the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to people of Chinese ancestry, decreed that Chinese people already in the United States were permanent aliens who could never become citizens.
  • Populists, whether farmers or factory workers, for all their invocation of “the people,” tended to take a narrow view of citizenship. United in their opposition to the “money power,” members of the alliance, like members of the Knights of Labor, were also nearly united in their opposition to the political claims of Chinese immigrants, and of black people. The Farmers’ Alliance excluded African Americans, who formed their own association, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. Nor did populists count Native Americans within the body of “the people.”
  • In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, under whose terms the U.S. government offered native peoples a path to citizenship in a nation whose reach had extended across the lands of their ancestors. The Dawes Act granted to the federal government the authority to divide Indian lands into allotments and guaranteed U.S. citizenship to Indians who agreed to live on those allotments and renounce tribal membership.
  • In proposing the allotment plan, Massachusetts senator Henry Laurens Dawes argued that the time had come for Indians to choose between “extermination or civilization” and insisted that the law offered Americans the opportunity to “wipe out the disgrace of our past treatment” and instead lift Indians up “into citizenship and manhood.”58
  • But in truth the Dawes Act understood native peoples neither as citizens nor as “persons of color,” and led to nothing so much as forced assimilation and the continued takeover of native lands. In 1887 Indians held 138 million acres; by 1900, they held only half of that territory.
  • In 1877, railroad workers protesting wage cuts went on strike in cities across the country. President Hayes sent in federal troops to end the strikes, marking the first use of the power of the federal government to support business against labor. The strikes continued, with little success in improving working conditions. Between 1881 and 1894, there was, on average, one major railroad strike a week. Labor was, generally and literally, crushed: in a single year, of some 700,000 men working on the railroads, more than 20,000 were injured on the job and nearly 2,000 killed.59
  • In 1882, Roscoe Conkling represented the Southern Pacific Railroad Company’s challenge to a California tax rule. He told the U.S. Supreme Court, “I come now to say that the Southern Pacific Railroad Company and its creditors and stockholders are among the ‘persons’ protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
  • In offering an argument about the meaning and original intention of the word “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment, Conkling enjoyed a singular authority: he’d served on the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that had drafted the amendment and by 1882 was the lone member of that committee still living. With no one alive to contradict him, Conkling assured the court that the committee had specifically rejected the word “citizen” in favor of “person” in order to include corporations. (A
  • Much evidence suggests, however, that Conkling was lying. The record of the deliberations of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction does not support his argument regarding the committee’s original intentions, nor is it plausible that between 1866 and 1882, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment had kept mysteriously hidden their secret intention to guarantee equal protection and due process to corporations. But
  • in 1886, when another railroad case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, reached the Supreme Court, the court’s official recorder implied that the court had accepted the doctrine that “corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.”62 After that, the Fourteenth Amendment, written and ratified to guarantee freed slaves equal protection and due process of law, became the chief means by which corporations freed themselves from government regulation.
  • In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that, over the course of fifty years, “only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half of the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.”63 Rights guaranteed to the people were proffered, instead, to corporations.
  • He devised an economic plan that involved abolishing taxes on labor and instead imposing a single tax on land. Tocqueville had argued that democracy in America is made possible by economic equality; people with equal estates will eventually fight for, and win, equal political rights. George agreed. But, like Mary Lease, he thought that financial capitalism was destroying democracy by making economic equality impossible. He saw himself as defending “the Republicanism of Jefferson and the Democracy of Jackson.”72
  • Between 1889 and 1893, the mortgages on so many farms were foreclosed that 90 percent of farmland fell into the hands of bankers. The richest 1 percent of Americans owned 51 percent of the nation’s wealth, and the poorest 44 percent owned less than 2 percent.
  • For all its passionate embrace of political equality and human rights and its energetic championing of suffrage, the People’s Party rested on a deep and abiding commitment to exclude from full citizenship anyone from or descended from anyone from Africa or Asia.
  • Many of the reforms proposed by populists had the effect of diminishing the political power of blacks and immigrants. Chief among them was the Australian ballot, more usually known as the secret ballot, which, by serving as a de facto literacy test, disenfranchised both black men in the rural South and new immigrants in northern cities.
  • to deliberate at length over the secret ballot. Quickest to adopt the reform were the states of the former Confederacy, where the reform appealed to legislatures eager to find legal ways to keep black men from voting. In 1890, Mississippi held a constitutional
  • Both by law and by brute force, southern legislators, state by state, and poll workers, precinct by precinct, denied black men the right to vote. In Louisiana, black voter registration dropped from 130,000 in 1898 to 5,300 in 1908, and to 730 in 1910. In 1893, Arkansas Democrats celebrated their electoral advantage by singing,         The Australian ballot works like a charm         It makes them think and scratch         And when a Negro gets a ballot         He has certainly met his match.82
  • One Republican said, “I felt that Bryan was the first politician I had ever heard speak the truth and nothing but the truth,” even though in every case, when he read a transcript of the speech in the newspaper the next day, he “disagreed with almost all of it.”85
  • In 1894, Bryan tacked an income tax amendment to a tariff bill, which managed to pass. But the populist victory—a 2 percent federal income tax that applied only to Americans who earned more than $4,000—didn’t last long. The next year, in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the tax was a direct tax, and therefore unconstitutional, one justice calling the tax the first campaign in “a war of the poor against the rich.”
  • POPULISM ENTERED AMERICAN politics at the end of the nineteenth century, and it never left. It pitted “the people,” meaning everyone but the rich, against corporations, which fought back in the courts by defining themselves as “persons”; and it pitted “the people,” meaning white people, against nonwhite people who were fighting for citizenship and whose ability to fight back in the courts was far more limited, since those fights require well-paid lawyers.
  • After 1859, and the Origin of Species, the rise of Darwinism contributed to the secularization of the university, as did the influence of the German educational model, in which universities were divided into disciplines and departments, each with a claim to secular, and especially scientific, expertise. These social sciences—political science, economics, sociology, and anthropology—used the methods of science, and especially of quantification, to study history, government, the economy, society, and culture.96
  • For Wilson’s generation of political scientists, the study of the state replaced the study of the people. The erection of the state became, in their view, the greatest achievement of civilization. The state also provided a bulwark against populism. In the first decades of the twentieth century, populism would yield to progressivism as urban reformers applied the new social sciences to the study of political problems, to be remedied by the intervention of the state.
  • The rise of populism and the social sciences reshaped the press, too. In the 1790s, the weekly partisan newspaper produced the two-party system. The penny press of the 1830s produced the popular politics of Jacksonian democracy. And in the 1880s and 1890s the spirit of populism and the empiricism of the social sciences drove American newspapers to a newfound obsession with facts.
  • The newspapers of the 1880s and 1890s were full of stunts and scandals and crusades, even as they defended their accuracy. “Facts, facts piled up to the point of dry certitude was what the American people really wanted,” wrote the reporter Ray Stannard Baker. Julius Chambers said that writing for the New York Herald involved “Facts; facts; nothing but facts. So many peas at so much a peck; so much molasses at so much a quart.”
  • Ballot reform, far from keeping money out of elections, had ushered more money into elections, along with a new political style: using piles of money to sell a candidate’s personality, borrowing from the methods of business by using mass advertising and education, slogans and billboards. McKinley ran a new-style campaign; Bryan ran an old-style campaign. Bryan barnstormed all over the country: he gave some six hundred speeches to five million people in twenty-seven states and traveled nearly twenty thousand miles.
  • But McKinley’s campaign coffers were fuller: Republicans spent $7 million; Democrats, $300,000. John D. Rockefeller alone provided the GOP with a quarter of a million dollars. McKinley’s campaign manager, Cleveland businessman Mark Hanna, was nearly buried in donations from fellow businessmen. He used that money to print 120 million pieces of campaign literature. He hired fourteen hundred speakers to stump for McKinley; dubbing the populists Popocrats, they agitated voters to a state of panic.108 As Mary Lease liked to say, money elected McKinley.
  • Turner, born in Wisconsin in 1861, was one of the first Americans to receive a doctorate in history. At the exposition, he delivered his remarks before the American Historical Association, an organization that had been founded in 1884 and incorporated by an act of Congress in 1889 “for the promotion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical manuscripts and for kindred purposes in the interest of American history and of history in America.”110
  • like journalists, historians borrowed from the emerging social sciences, relying on quantitative analysis to understand how change happens. Where George Bancroft, in his History of the United States, had looked for explanations in the hand of providence, Frederick Jackson Turner looked to the census.
  • The difference between Turner’s methods and Bancroft’s signaled a profound shift in the organization of knowledge, one that would have lasting consequences for the relationship between the people and the state and for civil society itself. Like Darwinism, the rise of the social sciences involved the abdication of other ways of knowing, and, indirectly, contributed to the rise of fundamentalism.
  • Across newly defined academic disciplines, scholars abandoned the idea of mystery—the idea that there are things known only by God—in favor of the claim to objectivity, a development sometimes called “the disenchantment of the world.”111 When universities grew more secular, religious instruction became confined to divinity schools and theological seminaries.
  • theologian at the University of Chicago’s divinity school defined modernism as “the use of scientific, historical, and social methods in understanding and applying evangelical Christianity to the needs of living persons.”112 Increasingly, this is exactly what evangelicals who eventually identified themselves as fundamentalists found objectionable.
  • Influenced by both Jefferson and Darwin, Turner saw the American frontier as the site of political evolution, beginning with the “savages” of a “wilderness,” proceeding to the arrival of European traders, and continuing through various forms of settlement, through the establishment of cities and factories, “the evolution of each into a higher stage,” and culminating in the final stage of civilization: capitalism and democracy.114
  • “American democracy is fundamentally the outcome of the experiences of the American people in dealing with the West,” by which he meant the experience of European immigrants to the United States in defeating its native peoples, taking possession of their homelands, and erecting there a civilization of their own. This, for Turner, was the story of America and the lesson of American history: evolution.116
  • Douglass, who, as the former U.S. ambassador to Haiti, had represented the nation of Haiti at the Haitian pavilion, was the only eminent African American with a role at the fair, whose program had been planned by a board of 208 commissioners, all white.117 There were, however, black people at the fair: on display. In the Hall of Agriculture, old men and women, former slaves, sold miniature bales of cotton, souvenirs, while, in a series of exhibits intended to display the Turnerian progress of humankind from savagery to civilization, black Americans were posed in a fake African village. “As if to shame the Negro,” Douglass wrote, they “exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage.”118
  • “A ship at anchor, with halliards broken, sails mildewed, hull empty, her bottom covered with sea-weed and barnacles, meets no resistance,” Douglass said that day, turning the idea of a ship of state to the problem of Jim Crow. “But when she spread her canvas to the breeze and sets out on her voyage, turns prow to the open sea, the higher shall be her speed, the greater shall be her resistance. And so it is with the colored man.”
  • He paused to allow his listeners to conjure the scene, and its meaning, of a people struggling against the sea. “My dear young friends,” Douglass closed. “Accept the inspiration of hope. Imitate the example of the brave mariner, who, amid clouds and darkness, amid hail, rain and storm bolts, battles his way against all that the sea opposes to his progress and you will reach the goal of your noble ambition in safety.”124
  • The majority in Plessy v. Ferguson asserted that separation and equality were wholly separate ideas. “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” The resulting legal principle—that public accommodations could be “separate but equal”—would last for more than half a century.
  • The sole dissenter, John Marshall Harlan, objecting to the establishment of separate classes of citizens, insisted that the achievement of the United States had been the establishment, by amendment, of a Constitution that was blind to race. “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” Harlan wrote, and it is therefore a plain violation of the Constitution “for a state to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race.”
  • What all these laws had in common, Harlan argued, was that they were based on race. And yet a war had been fought and won to establish that laws in the United States could not be based on race; nor could citizenship be restricted by race. The court’s opinion in Plessy, Harlan warned, was so dreadfully in error as to constitutional principles that “the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case.”128 This prediction proved true.
  • Four centuries had passed since continents, separated by oceans, had met again. A century had passed since Jefferson had declared all men equal. Three decades had passed since the Fourteenth Amendment had declared all persons born or naturalized in the United States to be citizens.
  • And now the Supreme Court ruled that those who would set aside equality in favor of separation had not violated the nation’s founding truths. In one of the most wrenching tragedies in American history—a chronicle not lacking for tragedy—the Confederacy had lost the war, but it had won the peace.
  • Lippmann started out as a socialist, when even mentioning the masses hinted at socialism; The Masses was the name of a socialist monthly, published in New York, and, especially after the Russian Revolution of 1917, which brought the Bolshevists to power (“bol’shinstvo” means “the majority”), “the masses” sounded decidedly Red.
  • But Lippmann soon began to write about the masses as “the bewildered herd,” unthinking and instinctual, and as dangerous as an impending stampede. For Lippmann, and for an entire generation of intellectuals, politicians, journalists, and bureaucrats who styled themselves Progressives—the term dates to 1910—the masses posed a threat to American democracy.
  • This change was wrought in the upheaval of the age. In the years following the realigning election of 1896, everything seemed, suddenly, bigger than before, more crowded, and more anonymous: looming and teeming. Even buildings were bigger: big office buildings, big factories, big mansions, big museums. Quantification became the only measure of value: how big, how much, how many.
  • To fight monopolies, protect the people, and conserve the land, the federal government grew bigger, too; dozens of new federal agencies were founded in this era,
  • “Mass” came to mean anything that involved a giant and possibly terrifying quantity, on a scale so great that it overwhelmed existing arrangements—including democracy. “Mass production” was coined in the 1890s, when factories got bigger and faster, when the number of people who worked in them skyrocketed, and when the men who owned them got staggeringly rich.
  • “Mass migration” dates to 1901, when nearly a million immigrants were entering the United States every year, “mass consumption” to 1905, “mass consciousness” to 1912. “Mass hysteria” had been defined by 1925 and “mass communication” by 1927, when the New York Times described the radio as “a system of mass communication with a mass audience.”3
  • And the masses themselves? They formed a mass audience for mass communication and had a tendency, psychologists believed, to mass hysteria—the political stampede—posing a political problem unanticipated by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson,
  • To meet that challenge in what came to be called the Progressive Era, activists, intellectuals, and politicians campaigned for and secured far-reaching reforms that included municipal, state, and federal legislation.
  • Their most powerful weapon was the journalistic exposé. Their biggest obstacle was the courts, which they attempted to hurdle by way of constitutional amendments. Out of these campaigns came the federal income tax, the Federal Reserve Bank, the direct election of U.S. senators, presidential primaries, minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws, women’s suffrage, and Prohibition.
  • And all of what Progressives accomplished in the management of mass democracy was vulnerable to the force that so worried the unrelenting Walter Lippmann: the malleability of public opinion, into mass delusion.
  • Progressives championed the same causes as Populists, and took their side in railing against big business, but while Populists generally wanted less government, Progressives wanted more, seeking solutions in reform legislation and in the establishment of bureaucracies, especially government agencies.6
  • Populists believed that the system was broken; Progressives believed that the government could fix it. Conservatives, who happened to dominate the Supreme Court, didn’t believe that there was anything to fix but believed that, if there was, the market would fix it. Notwithstanding conservatives’ influence in the judiciary, Progressivism spanned both parties.
  • Woodrow Wilson himself admitted, “When I sit down and compare my views with those of a Progressive Republican I can’t see what the difference is.”7
  • Much that was vital in Progressivism grew out of Protestantism, and especially out of a movement known as the Social Gospel, adopted by almost all theological liberals and by a large number of theological conservatives,
  • The Social Gospel movement was led by seminary professors—academic theologians who accepted the theory of evolution, seeing it as entirely consistent with the Bible and evidence of a divinely directed, purposeful universe; at the same time, they fiercely rejected the social Darwinism of writers like Herbert Spencer, the English natural scientist who coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest” and used the theory of evolution to defend all manner of force, violence, and oppression.
  • argued that fighting inequality produced by industrialism was an obligation of Christians: “We must make men believe that Christianity has a right to rule this kingdom of industry, as well as all the other kingdoms of this world.”9 Social Gospelers brought the zeal of abolitionism to the problem of industrialism.
  • In 1908, Methodists wrote a Social Creed and pledged to fight to end child labor and to promote a living wage. It was soon adopted by the thirty-three-member Federal Council of Churches, which proceeded to investigate a steelworkers’ strike in Bethlehem, ultimately taking the side of the strikers.10
  • Washington, in the debate over the annexation of the Philippines, Americans revisited unsettled questions about expansion that had rent the nation during the War with Mexico and unsettled questions about citizenship that remained the unfinished business of Reconstruction. The debate also marked the limits of the Progressive vision: both sides in this debate availed themselves, at one time or another, of the rhetoric of white supremacy. Eight million people of color in the Pacific and the Caribbean, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico, were now part of the United States, a nation that already, in practice, denied the right to vote to millions of its own people because of the color of their skin.
  • “You are undertaking to annex and make a component part of this Government islands inhabited by ten millions of the colored race, one-half or more of whom are barbarians of the lowest type,” said Ben Tillman, a one-eyed South Carolina Democrat who’d boasted of having killed black men and expressed his support for lynch mobs. “It is to the injection into the body politic of the United States of that vitiated blood, that debased and ignorant people, that we object.”
  • Tillman reminded Republicans that they had not so long ago freed slaves and then “forced on the white men of the South, at the point of the bayonet, the rule and domination of those ex-slaves. Why the difference? Why the change? Do you acknowledge that you were wrong in 1868?”14
  • The war that began in Cuba in 1898 and was declared over in the Philippines in 1902 dramatically worsened conditions for people of color in the United States, who faced, at home, a campaign of terrorism. Pro-war rhetoric, filled with racist venom, only further incited American racial hatreds. “If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched,” the governor of Mississippi pledged in 1903.
  • By one estimate, someone in the South was hanged or burned alive every four days. The court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson meant that there was no legal recourse to fight segregation, which grew more brutal with each passing year.
  • Nor was discrimination confined to the South. Cities and counties in the North and West passed racial zoning laws, banning blacks from the middle-class communities. In 1890, in Montana, blacks lived in all fifty-six counties in the state; by 1930, they’d been confined to just eleven. In Baltimore, blacks couldn’t buy houses on blocks where whites were a majority.
  • In 1917, in Buchanan v. Warley, the Supreme Court availed itself of the Fourteenth Amendment not to guarantee equal protection for blacks but to guarantee what the court had come to understand as the “liberty of contract”—the liberty of businesses to discriminate.16
  • A generation earlier, he’d have become a preacher, like his father, but instead he became a professor of political science.23 In the academy and later in the White House, he dedicated himself to the problem of adapting a Constitution written in the age of the cotton gin to the age of the automobile.
  • “We have grown more and more inclined from generation to generation to look to the President as the unifying force in our complex system, the leader both of his party and of the nation. To do so is not inconsistent with the actual provisions of the Constitution; it is only inconsistent with a very mechanical theory of its meaning and intention.” A president’s power, Wilson concluded, is virtually limitless: “His office is anything he has the sagacity and force to make it.”24
  • the U.S. Supreme Court overruled much Progressive labor legislation. The most important of these decisions came in 1905. In a 5–4 decision in Lochner v. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court voided a state law establishing that bakers could work no longer than ten hours a day, six days a week, on the ground that the law violated a business owner’s liberty of contract, the freedom to forge agreements with his workers, something the court’s majority said was protected under the Fourteenth Amendment.
  • The laissez-faire conservatism of the court was informed, in part, by social Darwinism, which suggested that the parties in disputes should be left to battle it out, and if one side had an advantage, even so great an advantage as a business owner has over its employees, then it should win.
  • In a dissenting opinion in Lochner, Oliver Wendell Holmes accused the court of violating the will of the people. “This case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain,” he began. The court, he said, had also wildly overreached its authority and had carried social Darwinism into the Constitution. “A Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory,” Holmes wrote. “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”
  • Wilson pointed out that the Constitution, written before mass industrialization, couldn’t be expected to have anticipated it, and couldn’t solve the problems industrialization had created, unless the Constitution were treated like a living thing that, like an organism, evolved.
  • Critics further to the left argued that the courts had become an instrument of business interests. Unions, in fact, often failed to support labor reform legislation, partly because they expected it to be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional, and partly because they wanted unions to provide benefits to their members, which would be an argument for organizing.
  • conservatives insisted that the courts were right to protect the interests of business and that either market forces would find a way to care for sick, injured, and old workers, or (for social Darwinists) the weakest, who were not meant to thrive, would wither and die.
  • “No other social movement in modern economic development is so pregnant with benefit to the public,” wrote the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. “At present the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation without compulsory health insurance,” the Yale economist Irving Fisher pointed out in 1916.36 It would maintain that unenviable distinction for a century.
  • In California, the legislature passed a constitutional amendment providing for universal health insurance. But when it was put on the ballot for ratification, a federation of insurance companies took out an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle warning that it “would spell social ruin in the United States.” Every voter in the state received in the mail a pamphlet with a picture of the kaiser and the words “Born in Germany. Do you want it in California?” The measure was defeated. Opponents called universal health insurance “UnAmerican, Unsafe, Uneconomic, Unscientific, Unfair and Unscrupulous.”
  • “Scientific management has no place for a bird that can sing and won’t sing,” answered Taylor. “We are not . . . dealing with horses nor singing birds,” Wilson told Taylor. “We are dealing with men who are a part of society and for whose benefit society is organized.
  • Jim Crow thrived because, after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, reformers who had earlier fought for the cause of civil rights abandoned it for the sake of forging a reunion between the states and the federal government and between the North and the South. This wasn’t Wilson’s doing; this was the work of his generation, the work of the generation that came before him, and the work of the generation that would follow him, an abdication of struggle, an abandonment of justice.
  • War steered the course of American politics like a gale-force wind. The specter of slaughter undercut Progressivism, suppressed socialism, and produced anticolonialism. And, by illustrating the enduring wickedness of humanity and appearing to fulfill prophecies of apocalypse as a punishment for the moral travesty of modernism, the war fueled fundamentalism.
  • Bryan’s difficulty was that he saw no difference between Darwinism and social Darwinism, but it was social Darwinism that he attacked, the brutality of a political philosophy that seemed to believe in nothing more than the survival of the fittest, or what Bryan called “the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill the weak.”77
  • Germany was the enemy, the same Germany whose model of education had secularized American colleges and universities, which were now teaching eugenics, sometimes known as the science of human betterment, calling for the elimination from the human race of people deemed unfit to reproduce on the basis of their intelligence, criminality, or background.
  • Nor was this academic research without consequence. Beginning in 1907, with Indiana, two-thirds of American states passed forced sterilization laws.
  • In 1916, Madison Grant, the president of the Museum of Natural History in New York, who had degrees from Yale and Columbia, published The Passing of the Great Race; Or, the Racial Basis of European History, a “hereditary history” of the human race, in which he identified northern Europeans (the “blue-eyed, fair-haired peoples of the north of Europe” that he called the “Nordic race”) as genetically superior to southern Europeans (the “dark-haired, dark-eyed” people he called “the Alpine race”) and lamented the presence of “swarms of Jews” and “half-breeds.” In the United States, Grant argued, the Alpine race was overwhelming the Nordic race, threatening the American republic, since “democracy is fatal to progress when two races of unequal value live side by side.”79
  • fundamentalists were, of course, making an intellectual argument, if one that not many academics wanted to hear. In 1917, William B. Riley, who, like J. Frank Norris, had trained at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, published a book called The Menace of Modernism, whose attack on evolution included a broader attack on the predominance in public debate of liberal faculty housed at secular universities—and the silencing of conservative opinion.
  • The horror of the war fueled the movement, convincing many evangelicals that the growing secularization of society was responsible for this grotesque parade of inhumanity: mass slaughter. “The new theology has led Germany into barbarism,” one fundamentalist argued in 1918, “and it will lead any nation into the same demoralization.”
  • “If my re-election as President depends upon my getting into war, I don’t want to be President,” Wilson said privately. “He kept us out of war” became his campaign slogan, and when Theodore Roosevelt called that an “ignoble shirking of responsibility,” Wilson countered, “I am an American, but I do not believe that any of us loves a blustering nationality.”
  • Wilson had in fact pledged not to make the world democratic, or even to support the establishment of democratic institutions everywhere, but instead to establish the conditions of stability in which democracy was possible.
  • nearly five million were called to serve. How were they to be persuaded of the war’s cause? In a speech to new recruits, Wilson’s new secretary of state, Robert Lansing, ventured an explanation. “Were every people on earth able to express their will, there would be no wars of aggression and, if there were no wars of aggression, then there would be no wars, and lasting peace would come to this earth,” Lansing said, stringing one conditional clause after another. “The only way that a people can express their will is through democratic institutions,” Lansing went on. “Therefore, when the world is made safe for democracy . . . universal peace will be an accomplished fact.”88
  • Wilson, the political scientist, tried to earn the support of the American people with an intricate theory of the relationship between democracy and peace. It didn’t work. To recast his war message and shore up popular support, he established a propaganda department,
  • Social scientists called the effect produced by wartime propaganda “herd psychology”; the philosopher John Dewey called it the “conscription of thought.”89
  • To suppress dissent, Congress passed a Sedition Act in 1918. Not since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 had Congress so brazenly defied the First Amendment. Fewer than two dozen people had been arrested under the 1798 Sedition Act. During the First World War, the Justice Department charged more than two thousand Americans with sedition and convicted half of them. Appeals that went to the Supreme Court failed.
  • “If we want real peace,” Du Bois wrote, “we must extend the democratic ideal to the yellow, brown, and black peoples.” But after the United States entered the war, Creel called thirty-one black editors and publishers to a conference in Washington and warned them about “Negro subversion.”
  • Du Bois asked black men who could not vote in the United States to give their lives to make the world “safe for democracy” and asked black people to hold off on fighting against lynchings, whose numbers kept rising.91
  • Wilson signed a tax bill, raising taxes on incomes, doubling a tax on corporate earnings, eliminating an exemption for dividend income, and introducing an estate tax and a tax on excess profits. Rates for the wealthiest Americans rose from 2 percent to 77, but most people paid no tax at all (80 percent of the revenue was drawn from the income of the wealthiest 1 percent of American families).
  • Wars, as ever, expanded the powers of the state. It rearranged the relationship between the federal government and business, establishing new forms of cooperation, oversight, and regulation that amounted to erecting a welfare state for business owners.
  • As the war drew to a close, the reckoning began. American losses were almost trivial compared to the staggering losses in European nations. Against America’s 116,000 casualties, France lost 1.6 million lives, Britain 800,000, and Germany 1.8 million. Cities across Europe lay in ashes; America was untouched. Europe, composed of seventeen countries before the war, had splintered into twenty-six, all of them deeply in debt, and chiefly to Americans.
  • Before the war, Americans owed $3.7 billion to foreigners; after the war, foreigners owed $12.6 billion to Americans. Even the terrifying influenza epidemic of 1918, which took 21 million lives worldwide, claimed the lives of only 675,000 Americans. The war left European economies in ruins, America’s thriving. In the United States, steel production rose by a quarter between 1913 and 1920; everywhere else, it fell by a third.98 The Armistice came on November
  • Wilson left a lasting legacy: his rhetoric of self-determination contributed to a wave of popular protests in the Middle East and Asia, including a revolution in Egypt in 1919; made the nation-state the goal of stateless societies; and lies behind the emergence and force of anticolonial nationalism.100
  • Thirty black men were lynched in 1917, twice as many the next year, and in 1919, seventy-six, including ten veterans, some still wearing their uniforms, having fought, some people thought, the wrong war.101
  • IN 1922, when Walter Lippmann turned thirty-two, he wrote a book called Public Opinion, in which he concluded that in a modern democracy the masses, asked to make decisions about matters far removed from their direct knowledge, had been asked to do too much. “Decisions in a modern state tend to be made by the interaction, not of Congress and the executive, but of public opinion and the executive,” he’d once observed.108 Mass democracy can’t work, Lippmann argued, because the new tools of mass persuasion—especially mass advertising—meant that a tiny minority could very easily persuade the majority to believe whatever it wished them to believe.
  • The best hope for mass democracy might have seemed to be the scrupulously and unfailingly honest reporting of news, but this, Lippmann thought, was doomed to fall short, because of the gap between facts and truth.
  • Reporters chronicle events, offering facts, but “they cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions,” he said.109 To govern, the people need truth, sense out of the whole, but people can’t read enough in the morning paper or hear enough on the evening news to turn facts into truth when they’re driven like dray horses all day.
Javier E

Opinion | The Two Crises of Conservatism - The New York Times - 0 views

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conservatism gop despair goals disillusionment politics US Culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 25 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • the strange condition of American conservatism, in which two crises, one normal and one existential, are happening at once.
  • The normal crisis is a party crisis, the sort that afflicts all political coalitions. The Republican Party 40 years ago coalesced around a set of appeals that enabled its leaders to win large presidential majorities and set the national agenda.
  • beneath this party crisis there is the deeper one, having to do with what conservatism under a liberal order exists to actually conserve.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • At a certain point the issue landscape changed, so did the country’s demographics, and the G.O.P. has struggled to adapt — cycling through compassionate conservatism, Tea Party conservatism and Trumpist populism without reproducing Ronald Reagan’s success.
  • One powerful answer is that conservatism-under-liberalism should defend human goods that are threatened by liberal ideas taken to extremes
  • the fights have given conservatives a clear stake in the liberal order, a reason to be invested in its institutions and controversies
  • what happens when the reasons for that investment weaken, when the things the right imagines itself conserving seem to slip away?
  • What does it mean to conserve the family in an era when not just the two-parent household but childbearing and sex itself are in eclipse?
  • What does it mean to defend traditional religion in a country where institutional faith is either bunkered or rapidly declining?
  • How do you defend localism when the internet seems to nationalize every political and cultural debate?
  • What does the conservation of the West’s humanistic traditions mean when pop repetition rules the culture, and the great universities are increasingly hostile to even the Democratic-voting sort of cultural conservative?
  • defend the heroic entrepreneur, say the libertarians — except that the last great surge of business creativity swiftly congealed into the stultifying monopolies of Silicon Valley,
  • What are we actually conserving anymore? is the question,
  • the answers range from the antiquarian (the Electoral College!) to the toxic (a white-identitarian conception of America) to the crudely partisan (the right to gerrymander) to the most basic and satisfying: Whatever the libs are against, we’re for.
  • In the end, conservatives need to believe the things they love can flourish within the liberal order, and it isn’t irrational to turn reactionary if things you thought you were conserving fall away.
  • the weakness of conservatism makes it hard to imagine a successful right-wing insurrection or coup against the liberal order.
  • But weakness has rippling consequences too, and a conservatism defined by despair and disillusionment could remain central to liberalism’s crises for many years to come.
Javier E

Opinion | What Will Happen to the Republican Party if Trump Loses in 2020? - The New Yo... - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 08 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • the history of the modern Republican Party is the history of paradigm shifts.
  • If you came of age with conservative values and around Republican politics in the 1980s and 1990s, you lived within a certain Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher paradigm. It was about limiting government, spreading democracy abroad, building dynamic free markets at home and cultivating people with vigorous virtues — people who are energetic, upright, entrepreneurial, independent-minded, loyal to friends and strong against foes.
  • For decades conservatives were happy to live in that paradigm. But as years went by many came to see its limits.
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  • National Greatness Conservatism. We argued that the G.O.P. had become too anti-government. “How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?” we asked. Only a return to the robust American nationalism of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay and Theodore Roosevelt would do: ambitious national projects, infrastructure, federal programs to increase social mobility.
  • George W. Bush, who made his own leap, to Compassionate Conservatism. (You know somebody has made a paradigm leap when he or she starts adding some modifying word or phrase before “Conservatism.”) This was an attempt to meld Catholic social teaching to conservatism.
  • am’s Club Republicans, led by Reihan Salam and my Times colleague Ross Douthat, pointed a way to link the G.O.P. to working-class concerns
  • Front Porch Republicans celebrated small towns and local communities.
  • The Reformicons tried to use government to build strong families and neighborhoods
  • The Niskanen Center is an entire think tank for people who have leapt from libertarianism.
  • Most actual Republican politicians rejected all of this. They stuck, mostly through dumb inertia, to an anti-government zombie Reaganism long after Reagan was dead and even though the nation’s problems were utterly different from what they were when he was alive
  • Donald Trump and Bannon took a low-rent strand of conservatism — class-based ethnic nationalism — that had always been locked away in the basement of the American right, and overturned the Reagan paradigm.
  • Bannon and Trump got the emotions right. They understood that Republican voters were no longer motivated by a sense of hope and opportunity; they were motivated by a sense of menace, resentment and fear. At base, many Republicans felt they were being purged from their own country — by the educated elite, by multiculturalism, by militant secularism.
  • During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump and Bannon discarded the Republican orthodoxy — entitlement reform, fiscal restraint, free trade, comprehensive immigration reform. They embraced a European-style blood-and-soil conservatism. Close off immigration. Close trade. We have nothing to offer the world and should protect ourselves from its dangers.
  • Over the last three years, it’s been interesting to watch a series of Republican officeholders break free from old orthodoxies and begin to think afresh.
  • future is embodied by a small group of Republican senators in their 40s, including Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse.
  • they start with certain common Trumpian premises:
  • Everything is not OK. The free market is not working well. Wages are stagnant. Too much power is in the hands of the corporate elites. Middle America is getting screwed. Finance capitalism is unbalanced. American society is in abject decline. If Reaganism was “Let’s be free,” the new mood is “Take control.
  • Economic libertarianism is not the answer. Free markets alone won’t solve our problems
  • We need policies to shore up the conservative units of society — family, neighborhood, faith, nation. We need policies that build solidarity, not just liberty.
  • The working class is the heart of the Republican Party. Once, businesspeople and entrepreneurs were at the center of the Republican imagination. Now it’s clear that the party needs to stop catering to the corporate class and start focusing on the shop owners, the plumbers, the salaried workers
  • China changes everything. The rise of a 1.4-billion-person authoritarian superpower means that free trade no longer works because the Chinese are not playing by the same rules
  • The managerial class betrays America. Many of the post-Reagan positions seem like steps to the left. But these Republicans combine a greater willingness to use government with a greater hostility to the managerial class.
  • From these common premises the four senators go off in different directions.
  • Hawley is the most populist of the group. His core belief is that middle-class Americans have been betrayed by elites on every level — political elites, cultural elites, financial elites
  • The modern leadership class has one set of values — globalization, cosmopolitanism — and the Middle Americans have another set — family, home, rootedness, nation
  • Cotton has a less developed political vision but a more developed attitude: hawkishness.
  • Sasse is the most sociological of the crew. He is a Tocquevillian localist, who notes that most normal Americans go days without thinking of national politics. His vision is centered on the small associations — neighborhood groups, high school football teams, churches and community centers — where people find their greatest joys, satisfactions and supports.
  • over the long term, some version of Working-Class Republicanism will redefine the G.O.P. In the first place, that’s where Republican voters are
  • Government’s job, he says, is to “create a framework of ordered liberty” so that people can make their family and neighborhood the center of their lives.
  • Levin thinks the prevailing post-Trump viewpoints define the problem too much in economic terms. The crucial problem, he argues, is not economic; it’s social: alienation. Millions of Americans don’t feel part of anything they can trust. They feel no one is looking out for them.
  • “What’s needed,” Levin says, “is not just to expand economic conservatism beyond growth to also prioritize family, community and nation, but also to expand social conservatism beyond sexual ethics and religious liberty to prioritize family, community and nation
  • The Republican Party looks completely brain-dead at every spot Trump directly reaches. Off in the corners, though, there’s a lot of intellectual ferment on the right.
  • The Wall Street Journal editorial page stands as a vigilant guardian of the corpse, eager to rebut all dissenters. The former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania are staunch defenders of Minimal-Government Conservatism
  • there’s also the possibility that Republicans will abandon any positive vision and revert to being a simple anti-government party — a party of opposition to whatever Biden is doing.
  • Behind these public figures there is a posse of policy wonks and commentators supporting a new Working-Class Republicanism,
  • Second, the working-class emphasis is the only way out of the demographic doom loop. If the party sticks with its old white high school-educated base, it will die. They just aren’t making enough old white men.
  • None of this works unless Republicans can deracialize their appeal — by which I mean they must stop pandering to the racists in the party and stop presenting themselves and seeing themselves as the party of white people
Javier E

Opinion | Will DeSantis Destroy Conservatism as We Know It? - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 26 May 23 - No Cached
  • What is a conservative? It’s a hard question to answer, and it gets harder each day.
  • Since the second half of the 20th century, conservatism as an ideology has been largely synonymous with something called “fusionism,” an alliance between social conservatives and economic libertarians. In the Cold War era, the additional commitment to a strong national defense resulted in what was often called the “th
  • Under this formulation, the G.O.P. perceived itself as a party united more by ideology than by identity
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  • Trump, by contrast, correctly perceived that the party was not — or was no longer — primarily an ideological party. It was more clearly defined by what it was against than what it was for.
  • the ideological definition of Trumpism became something else entirely: a full-spectrum political and cultural opposition to the left, however it might be defined.
  • This transformation was also tied to a change in the way that Republicans perceive government. Fusionists such as me read the Declaration of Independence and reaffirm that governments are instituted for the purpose of securing our “unalienable rights.” Thus, the protection of liberty is an indispensable aspect of American government.
  • whom DeSantis attacks is ultimately less important than how he does it. Republicans, after all, have long fought the left, but DeSantis does it differently, in part by abandoning fusionist commitments to free speech and limited government.
  • the obvious alarm. Any government strong enough to reward friends and punish enemies is also strong enough to do the reverse,
  • the nationalist conservative movement that Trump has helped bring center stage has different priorities. In its view, the right should — to cite the words of David Azerrad, a professor at Hillsdale College — use the power of government to “reward friends and punish enemies (within the confines of the rule of law).”
  • There’s at least one key difference. Trump fights for himself above all else. His political impulses are selfish, sub-ideological and subject to revision at a moment’s notice
  • DeSantis is likewise ambitious, but his political commitments have an underlying consistency that extends beyond that ambition: He fights the left. When you understand that distinction between the two men, you understand the course of the race so far and its likely shape going forward.
  • DeSantis, a keynote speaker at the 2022 National Conservatism Conference and the ultimate example of fight club conservatism. His primary victory would signal that the transformation of conservatism since 2016 wasn’t a mere interruption of Republican ideology — one in which Republicans would return to fusionism once Trump leaves the scene — but rather the harbinger of more permanent change.
  • Why the flip-flops? Because support for vaccines and for Ukraine are now seen in populist right circles as “coding left” or — equally unacceptable — as positions of the “regime” or the “uniparty” or the “establishment.”
  • , I disagree with DeSantis on many things, but I see Trump as an entirely different order of threat — one who is demonstrably willing to help precipitate mob violence to sustain his hold on power. So should someone like me quiet his critique of DeSantis in the interest of defeating Trump?
  • I say no. I believe we can walk and chew gum at the same time, opposing Trump while upholding a vision of state power that limits its ability to “reward friends and punish enemies” so that all Americans enjoy the same rights to speak, regardless of their view of the government.
  • Moreover, suspicion of state power should extend beyond the protection of civil liberties. Conservatives have long raised proper concerns about the ability of the government to achieve the economic or cultural outcomes it desires when it institutes sweeping, large-scale government programs. And this concern is not exclusive to conservatives.
Javier E

The Conservative Intellectual Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 28 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • I feel very lucky to have entered the conservative movement when I did, back in the 1980s and 1990s. I was working at National Review, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. The role models in front of us were people like Bill Buckley, Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson, Russell Kirk and Midge Decter.
  • These people wrote about politics, but they also wrote about a lot of other things: history, literature, sociology, theology and life in general. There was a sharp distinction then between being conservative, which was admired, and being a Republican, which was considered sort of cheesy.
  • The Buckley-era establishment self-confidently enforced intellectual and moral standards. It rebuffed the nativists like the John Birch Society, the apocalyptic polemicists who popped up with the New Right, and they exiled conspiracy-mongers and anti-Semites
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • The older writers knew that being cultured and urbane wasn’t a sign of elitism. Culture was the tool they used for social mobility. T.S. Eliot was cheap and sophisticated argument was free.
  • Hillary Clinton is therefore now winning among white college graduates by 52 to 36 percent.
  • First, talk radio, cable TV and the internet have turned conservative opinion into a mass-market enterprise
  • Today’s dominant conservative voices try to appeal to people by the millions. You win attention in the mass media through perpetual hysteria and simple-minded polemics and by exploiting social resentment.
  • conservatism has done its best to make itself offensive to people who value education and disdain made-for-TV rage.
  • an intellectual tendency that champions free markets was ruined by the forces of commercialism
  • Conservatism went down-market in search of revenue. It got swallowed by its own anti-intellectual media-politico complex — from Beck to Palin to Trump.
  • The conservative intellectual landscape has changed in three important ways since then, paving the way for the ruination of the Republican Party.
  • Second, conservative opinion-meisters began to value politics over everything else.
  • The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are pre-political: conscience, faith, culture, family and community.
  • This is a sad story. But I confess I’m insanely optimistic about a conservative rebound.
  • Among social conservatives, for example, faith sometimes seems to come in second behind politics
  • Today, most white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory.
  • As conservatism has become a propagandistic, partisan movement it has become less vibrant, less creative and less effective.
  • That leads to the third big change. Blinkered by the Republican Party’s rigid anti-government rhetoric, conservatives were slow to acknowledge and even slower to address the central social problems of our time.
  • For years, middle- and working-class Americans have been suffering from stagnant wages, meager opportunity, social isolation and household fragmentation. Shrouded in obsolete ideas from the Reagan years, conservatism had nothing to offer these people because it didn’t believe in using government as a tool for social good
  • Trump demagogy filled the void.
  • recently conservatism has become more the talking arm of the Republican Party.
  • Conservatism is now being led astray by its seniors, but its young people are pretty great
  • It’s hard to find a young evangelical who likes Donald Trump. Most young conservatives are comfortable with ethnic diversity and are weary of the Fox News media-politico complex.
  • Conservatism’s best ideas are coming from youngish reformicons who have crafted an ambitious governing agenda (completely ignored by Trump).
  • A Trump defeat could cleanse a lot of bad structures and open ground for new growth.
  • It was good to be a young conservative back in my day. It’s great to be one right now.
Javier E

The GOP is at its peak, but conservatism has hit rock bottom - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-8bee-54e800ef2a63_story.html

conservatism gop fascism authoritarian trump crisis

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • It is one of fate’s cruel jokes that conservatism should be at its modern nadir just as the Republican Party is at its zenith — if conservatism is defined as embracing limited government, displaying a rational, skeptical and moderate temperament and believing in the priority of the moral order.
  • All these principles are related, and under attack
  • Conservatives believe that human beings are fallible and prone to ambition, passion and selfishness
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • It is the particular genius of the American system to balance ambition with ambition through a divided government (executive, legislative and judicial)
  • Conservatives believe that finite and fallen creatures are often wrong. We know that many of our attitudes and beliefs are the brain’s justification for pre-rational tendencies and desires
  • All of us have things to learn, even from our political opponents. The truth is out there, but it is generally broken into pieces and scattered across the human experience. We only reassemble it through listening and civil communication.
  • And conservatives believe that a just society depends on the moral striving of finite and fallen creatures who treat each other with a respect and decency that laws can encourage but not enforce.
  • no serious constitutional recourse seems to remain. While open to other options, I see none. It will now fall to citizens and institutions to (1) defend the legislature and judiciary from any encroachment, (2) defend every group of people from organized oppression, including Muslims and refugees, (3) expand and defend the institutions — from think tanks to civil liberty organizations — that make the case for a politics that honors human dignity. And pray for the grass to grow.
  • this type of conservatism — a conservatism of intellectual humility and moral aspiration — also has the advantage of being organic. It grows with tenacity in hidden places, eventually breaking down the cement and asphalt of our modern life.
  • This is not the political force that has recently taken over the Republican Party
  • That has been the result of extreme polarization, not a turn toward enduring values. The movement is authoritarian in theory, apocalyptic in mood, prone to conspiracy theories and personal abuse, and dismissive of ethical standards. The president-elect seems to offer equal chances of constitutional crisis and utter, debilitating incompetence.
  • The plausible case that Russian espionage materially contributed to the election of an American president has been an additional invitation to anger. Now, not only the quality but also the legitimacy of our democracy is at stake.
  • But what is the proper conservative response? It is to live within the boundaries of law and reality
  • In the midst of all our justified skepticism, we can never be skeptical of this: that the reason for politics is to honor the equal value of every life, beginning with the weakest and most vulnerable. No bad goal — say, racial purity or communist ideology — outweighs this commitment. And no good goal — the efficiency of markets or the pursuit of greater equality — does either.
  • The GOP is at its peak, but conservatism has hit rock bottom
  • Michael Gerson Opinion
Javier E

I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ght-trump-proved-me-wrong.html

conservatism right alt-right nativism fascism populism US history

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  • Stephen H. Norwood, one of the few historians who did study the Black Legion, also mined another rich seam of neglected history in which far-right vigilantism and outright fascism routinely infiltrated the mainstream of American life
  • In fact, the “far right” was never that far from the American mainstream. The historian Richard Steigmann-Gall, writing in the journal Social History, points out that “scholars of American history are by and large in agreement that, in spite of a welter of fringe radical groups on the right in the United States between the wars, fascism never ‘took’ here.”
  • Nevertheless, Steigmann-Gall continues, “fascism had a very real presence in the U.S.A., comparable to that on continental Europe.” He cites no less mainstream an organization than the American Legion, whose “National Commander” Alvin Owsley proclaimed in 1922, “the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.”
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  • Anti-Semitism in America declined after World War II. But as Leo Ribuffo points out, the underlying narrative — of a diabolical transnational cabal of aliens plotting to undermine the very foundations of Christian civilization — survived in the anti-Communist diatribes of Joseph McCarthy. The alien narrative continues today in the work of National Review writers like Andrew McCarthy (“How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda”) and Lisa Schiffren
  • When Trump vowed on the campaign trail to Make America Great Again, he was generally unclear about when exactly it stopped being great. The Vanderbilt University historian Jefferson Cowie tells a story that points to a possible answer.
  • In his book “The Great Exception,” he suggests that what historians considered the main event in 20th century American political development — the rise and consolidation of the “New Deal order” — was in fact an anomaly, made politically possible by a convergence of political factors. One of those was immigration. At the beginning of the 20th century, millions of impoverished immigrants, mostly Catholic and Jewish, entered an overwhelmingly Protestant country. It was only when that demographic transformation was suspended by the 1924 Immigration Act that majorities of Americans proved willing to vote for many liberal policies.
  • Future historians won’t find all that much of a foundation for Trumpism in the grim essays of William F. Buckley, the scrupulous constitutionalist principles of Barry Goldwater or the bright-eyed optimism of Ronald Reagan. They’ll need instead to study conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage.
  • In their 1987 book, “Right Turn,” the political scientists Joel Rogers and Thomas Ferguson presented public-opinion data demonstrating that Reagan’s crusade against activist government, which was widely understood to be the source of his popularity, was not, in fact, particularly popular. For example, when Reagan was re-elected in 1984, only 35 percent of voters favored significant cuts in social programs to reduce the deficit
  • Much excellent scholarship, well worth revisiting in the age of Trump, suggests an explanation for Reagan’s subsequent success at cutting back social programs in the face of hostile public opinion: It was business leaders, not the general public, who moved to the right, and they became increasingly aggressive and skilled in manipulating the political process behind the scenes.
  • another answer hides in plain sight. The often-cynical negotiation between populist electioneering and plutocratic governance on the right has long been not so much a matter of policy as it has been a matter of show business.
  • It is a short leap from advertising and reality TV to darker forms of manipulation. Consider the parallels since the 1970s between conservative activism and the traditional techniques of con men. Direct-mail pioneers like Richard Viguerie created hair-on-fire campaign-fund-raising letters about civilization on the verge of collapse.
  • In 1965, Congress once more allowed large-scale immigration to the United States — and it is no accident that this date coincides with the increasing conservative backlash against liberalism itself, now that its spoils would be more widely distributed among nonwhites.
  • Why Is There So Much Scholarship on ‘Conservatism,’ and Why Has It Left the Historical Profession So Obtuse About Trumpism?” One reason, as Ribuffo argues, is the conceptual error of identifying a discrete “modern conservative movement” in the first place. Another reason, though, is that historians of conservatism, like historians in general, tend to be liberal, and are prone to liberalism’s traditions of politesse. It’s no surprise that we are attracted to polite subjects like “colorblind conservatism” or William F. Buckley.
  • Ribuffo argued that America’s anti-liberal traditions were far more deeply rooted in the past, and far angrier, than most historians would acknowledge, citing a long list of examples from “regional suspicions of various metropolitan centers and the snobs who lived there” to “white racism institutionalized in slavery and segregation.”
  • Until the 1990s, the most influential writer on the subject of the American right was Richard Hofstadter, a colleague of Trilling’s at Columbia University in the postwar years. Hofstadter was the leader of the “consensus” school of historians; the “consensus” being Americans’ supposed agreement upon moderate liberalism as the nation’s natural governing philosophy.
  • He didn’t take the self-identified conservatives of his own time at all seriously. He called them “pseudoconservatives” and described, for instance, followers of the red-baiting Republican senator Joseph McCarthy as cranks who salved their “status anxiety” with conspiracy theories and bizarre panaceas. He named this attitude “the paranoid style in American politics”
  • in 1994, the scholar Alan Brinkley published an essay called “The Problem of American Conservatism” in The American Historical Review. American conservatism, Brinkley argued, “had been something of an orphan in historical scholarship,” and that was “coming to seem an ever-more-curious omission.” The article inaugurated the boom in scholarship that brought us the story, now widely accepted, of conservatism’s triumphant rise
  • American historians’ relationship to conservatism itself has a troubled history. Even after Ronald Reagan’s electoral-college landslide in 1980, we paid little attention to the right: The central narrative of America’s political development was still believed to be the rise of the liberal state.
  • If Donald Trump is the latest chapter of conservatism’s story, might historians have been telling that story wrong?
  • The professional guardians of America’s past, in short, had made a mistake. We advanced a narrative of the American right that was far too constricted to anticipate the rise of a man like Trump
  • But if Hofstadter was overly dismissive of how conservatives understood themselves, the new breed of historians at times proved too credulous. McGirr diligently played down the sheer bloodcurdling hysteria of conservatives during the period she was studyin
  • Lisa McGirr, now of Harvard University, whose 2001 book, “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right,” became a cornerstone of the new literature. Instead of pronouncing upon conservatism from on high, as Hofstadter had, McGirr, a social historian, studied it from the ground up, attending respectfully to what activists understood themselves to be doing. What she found was “a highly educated and thoroughly modern group of men and women,” normal participants in the “bureaucratized world of post-World War II America.” They built a “vibrant and remarkable political mobilization,
  • I sometimes made the same mistake. Writing about the movement that led to Goldwater’s 1964 Republican nomination, for instance, it never occurred to me to pay much attention to McCarthyism, even though McCarthy helped Goldwater win his Senate seat in 1952, and Goldwater supported McCarthy to the end. (As did William F. Buckley.) I was writing about the modern conservative movement, the one that led to Reagan, not about the brutish relics of a more gothic, ill-formed and supposedly incoherent reactionary era that preceded it.
  • A few historians have provocatively followed a different intellectual path, avoiding both the bloodlessness of the new social historians and the psychologizing condescension of the old Hofstadter school. Foremost among them is Leo Ribuffo, a professor at George Washington University.
Javier E

The Scary Future of the American Right - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...620746

right-wing conservatism gop radical politics history crisis Culture trump

shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • The movement has three distinctive strains. First, the people over 50 who have been hanging around conservative circles for decades but who have recently been radicalized by the current left.
  • The second strain is made up of mid-career politicians and operatives who are learning to adapt to the age of populist rage:
  • people like Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard), J. D. Vance (Yale Law), and Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale).
  • ...44 more annotations...
  • The third and largest strain is the young. They grew up in the era of Facebook and MSNBC and identity politics. They went to colleges smothered by progressive sermonizing. And they reacted by running in the other direction
  • I couldn’t quite suppress the disturbing voice in my head saying, “If you were 22, maybe you’d be here too.”
  • Conservatives have always inveighed against the cultural elite—the media, the universities, Hollywood. But in the Information Age, the purveyors of culture are now corporate titans.
  • The national conservatives thus describe a world in which the corporate elite, the media elite, the political elite, and the academic elite have all coagulated into one axis of evil, dominating every institution and controlling the channels of thought.
  • At the heart of this blue oligarchy are the great masters of surveillance capitalism, the Big Tech czars who decide in secret what ideas get promoted, what stories get suppressed
  • In the NatCon worldview, the profiteers of surveillance capitalism see all and control all
  • “Big Business is not our ally,” Marco Rubio argued. “They are eager culture warriors who use the language of wokeness to cover free-market capitalism.”
  • The “entire phalanx of Big Business has gone hard left,” Cruz said. “We’ve seen Big Business, the Fortune 500, becoming the economic enforcers of the hard left. Name five Fortune 500 CEOs who are even remotely right of center.”
  • The idea that the left controls absolutely everything—from your smartphone to the money supply to your third grader’s curriculum—explains the apocalyptic tone
  • “We are confronted now by a systematic effort to dismantle our society, our traditions, our economy, and our way of life,” said Rubio.
  • The first great project of the national conservatives is to man the barricades in the culture war. These people have certainly done their homework when it comes to cultural Marxism—how the left has learned to dominate culture and how the right now needs to copy their techniques
  • The first interesting debate among the NatCons is philosophical: Should we fight to preserve the classical-liberal order or is it necessary to abandon it?
  • Some of the speakers at the conference were in fact classical liberals, who believe in free speech, intellectual debate, and neutral government
  • Glenn Loury gave an impassioned speech against cancel culture, the illiberal left, and the hyper-racialized group consciousness that divides people into opposing racial camps.
  • But others argued that this sort of liberalism is a luxury we cannot afford. The country is under assault from a Marxist oligarchy that wants to impose its own pseudo-religious doctrine.
  • If you try to repulse that with pallid liberalism, with weak calls for free speech and tolerance, you’ll end up getting run over by those who possess fanatical zeal, economic power, and cultural might.
  • Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere.
  • If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.
  • Another Israeli political philosopher at the conference, Ofir Haivry, argued that Americans shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious order—a collective cultural identity.
  • For his part, Hazony argued that the American cultural identity is Christian—and has to be if it is not going to succumb to the woke onslaught. If 80 percent of Americans are Christian, Hazony reasoned, then Christian values should dominate.
  • The problem in America, Hazony continued, is that LGBTQ activists today, like American Jews in the 1950s, are trying to expel Christianity from the public square.
  • Hazony said. “Above all else we’ve got to get God and scripture back in the schools.”
  • Another interesting debate among the NatCons is political and economic.
  • Conservatives have got the culture-war act down. Trump was a culture-war president with almost no policy arm attached. The question conservatives at the conference were asking was how to move beyond owning the libs to effecting actual change.
  • Christopher Rufo, the architect of this year’s school-board-meeting protests against critical race theory, argued that conservatives had erred when they tried to slowly gain power in elite cultural institutions.
  • Instead, Rufo argued, they should rally the masses to get state legislatures to pass laws embracing their values. That’s essentially what’s now happening across red America.
  • My old friend Rod Dreher of The American Conservative argued that because the left controls the commanding heights of the culture and the economy, the only institution the right has a shot at influencing is the state.
  • “We need to quit being satisfied with owning the libs, and save our country,” Dreher said. “We need to unapologetically embrace the use of state power.”
  • The culture war merges with the economic-class war—and a new right emerges in which an intellectual cadre, the national conservatives, rallies the proletarian masses against the cultural/corporate elites.
  • This is national conservatism pursued to its logical conclusion: using state power to break up and humble the big corporations and to push back against coastal cultural values.
  • Orbán, in Dreher’s view, understands the civilizational stakes of the culture war; he has, for instance, used the power of the state to limit how much transgenderism can be taught to children in schools. “Our team talks incessantly about how horrible wokeness is,” Dreher said at the conference. “Orbán actually does something about it.”
  • Trump’s devastation of the old order produced a grand struggle on the right to build a new one on Trumpian populist lines.
  • They are wrong, too, to think there is a wokeist Anschluss taking over all the institutions of American life.
  • Furthermore, if Hazony thinks America is about to return to Christian dominance, he’s living in 1956.
  • there is something extremely off-putting about the NatCon public pose. In person, as I say, I find many of them charming, warm, and friendly. But their public posture is dominated by the psychology of threat and menace. If there was one expression of sympathy, kindness, or grace uttered from the podium in Orlando, I did not hear it. But I did hear callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality.
  • One big thing the NatCons are right about is that in the Information Age, the cultural and corporate elites have merged.
  • Right-wing parties around the world are gradually becoming working-class parties that stand against the economic interests and cultural preferences of the highly educated.
  • Left-wing parties are now rooted in the rich metro areas and are more and more becoming an unsteady alliance between young AOC left-populists and Google.
  • NatCons are also probably right that conservatism is going to get a lot more statist.
  • Marco Rubio countered by, in effect, arguing that you can’t rally cultural populists if you are not also going to do something for them economically. Cultural populism leads to economic populism.
  • Over the past few decades there have been various efforts to replace the Reagan Paradigm: the national-greatness conservatism of John McCain; the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush; the Reformicon conservatism of the D.C. think tanks in the 21st century
  • the Trumpian onslaught succeeded where these movements have so far fizzled because Trump understood better than they did the coalescence of the new American cultural/corporate elite and the potency of populist anger against it.
  • the alarming future of the American right: the fusing of the culture war and the class war into one epic Marxist Götterdämmerung.
  • the disconcerting reality is that America’s rarified NatCon World is just one piece of a larger illiberal populist revolt that is strong and rising.
Javier E

It's time to say last rites over American conservatism - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-92c9-376b4fe57ff7_story.html

extremism gop far right crisis trump history

shared by Javier E on 26 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • After years of drifting steadily toward extreme positions, conservatism is dead, replaced by a far right that has the Republican Party under its thumb.
  • Conservatism is a complex creed, some of it less than appealing and some of it noble.
  • The less-attractive kind involves an ideology whose main purpose is to defend existing distributions of power and wealth, and to resist reforms that might redress the grievances of those facing discrimination and marginalization.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The enticing brand of conservatism is rooted in an affection for a particular place and its way of life.
  • . Conservatism’s positive function is to warn against measures designed to fix things that are wrong, but whose main effects are to undermine institutions that are widely valued
  • at its best — conservatism is supposed to be resistant to extremism precisely because it is, in principle, the antithesis of a revolutionary creed
  • for two decades, the tweedy sort of conservatism has been giving ground to the extremists who want not simply to defeat their adversaries but to crush them; who traffic in conspiracy theories rather than in respect for facts and history; and who are willing to destroy the very institutions they claim to be trying to save
  • thanks to Trump, European-style ethno-nationalism has become so much a part of the movement that Maréchal-Le Pen’s visit seemed almost natural.
  • the National Rifle Association is one of the most powerful forces within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. It uses paranoid rhetoric and incendiary attacks on its foes to justify riotously permissive firearms policies that no other democratic republic would dream of adopting.
  • What should worry us is that the radicalism of the NRA is not exceptional on the American right. It is what the right is all about.
  • The Post’s Dave Weigel reported on an otherwise little-noticed CPAC speech by White House Counsel Donald McGahn linking Trump’s judicial appointments to his dismantling of regulation.
  • “There is a coherent plan here where the judicial selection and the deregulation effort are really the flip side of the same coin,”
  • Remember when conservatives criticized the politicization of the judiciary? McGahn is describing a judicial branch that is little more than an instrument of right-wing executive power.
Javier E

Jennifer Rubin, Charles Cooke, and the Future of Conservatism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...548738

conservatism white supremacy culture politics partisan polarization gop

shared by Javier E on 19 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • In the spring of 2016, National Review published its “Against Trump” issue. Twenty-one prominent conservatives signed individual statements of opposition to Trump’s candidacy. Of those 21, only six continue to speak publicly against his actions. Almost as many have become passionate defenders of the Trump presidency
  • As a survival strategy, this is viable enough in the short term. But let’s understand what is driving it.
  • The conservative intellectual world is whipsawed between distaste for President Trump and fear of its own audience. The conservative base has become ever more committed to Trump—and ever less tolerant of any deviation. Those conservative talkers most susceptible to market pressure—radio and TV hosts—have made the most-spectacular conversions and submissions: Mark Levin, Tucker Carlson.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The same day that Cooke launched himself into Jennifer Rubin, another contributor to the National Review special issue, Erick W. Erickson, announced that he had lost his Fox News contract. Erickson had precisely followed Cooke’s advice, conscientiously seeking opportunities to praise Trump where he could. That halfway support did not suffice for his producers.
  • Researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center have quantified how dramatically far-right media sources such as Breitbart News have overtaken and displaced traditional conservative outlets such as National Review. By tallying links, citations, and other indicators of influence, they found:
  • The center-left and the far right are the principal poles of the media landscape. The center of gravity of the overall landscape is the center-left. Partisan media sources on the left are integrated into this landscape and are of lesser importance than the major media outlets of the center-left. The center of attention and influence for conservative media is on the far right. The center-right is of minor importance and is the least represented portion of the media spectrum.
  • Rubin stands on that embattled center-right. She is not quite alone. Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations stands there, as does the true-hearted remainder of the National Review 21: Mona Charen, Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz.
  • You’ll find others at the Niskanen Center (Jerry Taylor, Brink Lindsey), and holding the faith from the Evan McMullin–Mindy Finn independent presidential ticket. A few brave the adverse comments on social media: Tom Nichols from the academic world; Seth Mandel at the New York Post’s editorial page. Joe Scarborough keeps the faith on morning TV.
  • The urgency to defend Trump will accelerate should Republicans lose one or both chambers of Congress in November 2018. At that point, Trump’s veto and executive orders will become the chief political resource that conservatives have. They would not dare risk losing it.
  • Charles Cooke arraigned Jennifer Rubin for being dragged to new political positions by her resistance to Trump. She is not alone. Bill Kristol quipped on Twitter: “The GOP tax bill's bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal. WHAT IS HAPPENING?”
  • The most revealing thought in Cooke’s essay is his explanation for why he feels it is safe to go with the Trumpian flow: “Conservatism in this country long predated Trump; for now, it is tied up with Trump; soon, it will have survived Trump.”
  • Good question, and here’s the answer: What is happening is the revelation that politics is dynamic, that new facts call forth new responses.
  • This is something many conservatives tell themselves, but it’s not even slightly true. Trump is changing conservatism into something different. We can all observe that. Will it snap back afterward?
  • Just as many anti-Trump conservatives find themselves pulled in new directions by their revulsion against Trump’s corruption and abuse of power, so too is the conservative mainstream being altered by its determination to remain on terms with Trump and his supporters.
  • You can believe this only if you imagine that ideologies exist independently of the human beings who espouse them—and that they can continue unchanged and unchanging despite fluctuations in their adherents.
  • This is simply not true. Ideas are not artifacts, especially the kind of collective ideas we know as ideologies. Conservatives in 1964 opposed civil-rights laws. Conservatives in 1974 opposed tax cuts unless paid for by spending cuts. Conservatives in 1984 opposed same-sex marriage. Conservatives in 1994 opposed trade protectionism. Conservatives in 2004 opposed people who equated the FBI and Soviet Union’s KGB. All those statements of conservative ideology have gone by the boards, and one could easily write a similar list of amended views for liberals.
  • Conservatism is what conservatives think, say, and do. As conservatives change—as much through the harsh fact of death and birth as by the fluctuations of opinion—so does what it means to be a conservative.
  • The Trump presidency is a huge political fact. He may not be the leader of American conservatism, but he is its most spectacular and vulnerable asset. The project of defending him against his coming political travails—or at least of assailing those who doubt and oppose him—is already changing what it means to be a conservative.
  • The word conservative will of course continue in use. But its meaning is being rewritten each day by the actions of those who lay claim to the word. It is their commitment to Trump that etches Trumpism into them. And while Trump may indeed pass, that self-etching will not soon be effaced.
Javier E

Opinion | Trump's Goodbye to Principled Conservatism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...donald-trump-conservatism.html

conservatism gop politics trump Culture history liberalism

shared by Javier E on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • This form of politics — not as a complement to statecraft, but as the outpouring of resentment — is what has come to define the conservative movement in the age of Trump.
  • Conservatives used to admire Edmund Burke. Not anymore, insofar as Burke stood for the importance of manners and morals to the health of the state.
  • Conservatives used to admire Milton Friedman. Not anymore, insofar as Friedman stood for free trade, sound money and a balanced budget.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Conservatives used to admire Scoop Jackson. Not anymore, insofar as the Washington state Democrat was a champion of the idea that human rights should stand at the center of U.S. foreign policy.
  • Conservatives used to admire Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Not anymore, insofar as both Reagan and Bush believed in humane immigration reform, international coalition building, standing up to Russian tyrants and, when possible, making deals with Democrats.
  • In place of all this, what today’s debased conservatism now boils down to is anti-liberalism
  • But anti-liberalism is not conservatism. At its principled best, conservatism holds that liberal ends — the right of the individual to enjoy the maximum degree of freedom compatible with the right of his neighbor to do the same — are best secured by conservative means.
  • Ultimately, the goal of conservative politics is to produce competent citizens capable of responsible self-government.
  • Anti-liberalism, by contrast, seeks self-serving ends through illiberal means
  • The ends are the benefits that accrue from the possession of political power, ethnic dominance, or economic advantage. The means are the demonization of competitors for power and the delegitimization of people, laws, and norms that stand for the ideals of an open society
  • As for the Republican Party, Trump’s re-election would make it the most potent force for anti-liberalism in the Western world today. Anyone — liberals included — who believes that every democracy needs the anchor of a principled conservatism should pray for his defeat.
Javier E

Opinion | Rush Limbaugh and the Petrification of Conservatism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ush-limbaugh-conservatism.html

conservatism gop history politics crisis culture trump US media

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • his political legacy feels like the result of an unfortunate encounter between a 1980s young Republican and a tempting monkey’s paw.
  • I wish there was a conservative media infrastructure to compete with the mainstream media! our youthful conservative wished. I wish the right had a bigger footprint in the culture than just George Will columns and National Review! I wish my movement was rich and powerful, a veritable universe unto itself!
  • Thanks in no small part to Limbaugh, all of that has come to pass. The price, alas, is that in the world outside the right’s infrastructure, the conservatism of our young Reaganite has suffered a long run of political disasters and cultural defeats.
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  • in the long arc of the Limbaugh era, you can see pretty clearly how success and self-marginalization can be effectively combined.
  • Reaganite conservatism in ’80s America was a 55 percent proposition, popular with younger voters, with only a mild version of today’s yawning gender gap.
  • But you don’t need 55 percent of the country to build a huge talk-radio audience or an incredibly successful cable news network or a vast online ecosystem. You need a passionate audience, a committed audience, a church of Dittoheads.That was what Limbaugh built for himself
  • then everyone else on the right went in the same direction: First, Limbaugh’s talk radio imitators, then Roger Ailes with Fox News, and then — disastrously — a great many Republican politicians, who realized that an intense ideological fan base was enough to win them elections in safe districts and might make them media celebrities in the bargain.
  • This pattern created problems that compounded one another. As Conservatism Inc. became more of a world unto itself, it sealed out bad news for conservative governance, contributing to debacles that doomed Republican presidents — Iraq for George W. Bush, Covid for Donald Trump
  • These debacles helped make conservatism less popular, closer to a 45 percent than a 55 percent proposition in presidential races, a blocking coalition but not a governing one.
  • In its place today is a fantasy politics, a dreampolitik, that’s fed by a deep feeling of grievance and dispossession.
  • Such a system, predictably, was terrible at generating the kind of outward-facing, evangelistic conservatives who had made the Reagan revolution possible
  • to go back and watch Reagan and Buckley is to see an entirely different approach to politics — missionary and confident, with a gentlemanly comportment that has altogether vanished.
  • And this in turn made the right’s passionate core feel more culturally besieged, more desperate for “safe spaces” where liberal perfidy was taken for granted and the most important reasons for conservative defeats were never entertained.
  • the right’s infotainment complex is itself a major reason for that consolidation. Conservatives have lost real-world territory by building dream palaces, and ceded votes by talking primarily to themselves.
  • Dan McLaughlin, in an instructive piece for National Review, counts Limbaugh as one of the right’s five most important 1990s-era figures, along with Ailes, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and Antonin Scalia
  • as they grew old within the right’s infrastructure, Limbaugh and Ailes and Newt and Rudy all seemed to cede their individuality and converge into a single character, a single noisy voice.
  • Which were the media impresarios and which were the political leaders? Which one was married four times, which ones only three, which was the office predator? Which one was most likely to say something indefensible in defense of Donald Trump?
  • Only Scalia, secure from certain temptations in his lifetime judicial appointment, retained both his individuality and his outward-facing influence to the end.
  • For the rest, for Limbaugh especially, we can say that their gifts were ample, their ascent remarkable, their influence enduring — and yet their most important legacy has been ashes and defeat.
Javier E

"Conservatism Is True." - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views

andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/...conservatism-is-true.html

conservatism Republican

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • the core argument for conservatism was indeed that it was truer to humankind's crooked timber; that it was more closely tethered to earth rather  than heaven; that it accepted the nature of fallen man and did not try to permanently correct it, but to mitigate our worst instincts and encourage the best, with as light a touch as possible. Religion was for bishops, not presidents. Utopias were for liberals; progress was not inevitable; history did not lead in one obvious direction; we are all limited by epistemological failure and cultural bias.
  • So on taxes today, a conservative would ask: what have we learned about the impact of lower rates over the last two decades - now the lowest as a percentage of GDP since the 1950s? In healthcare, what have we learned about the largely private system the GOP wants to preserve? A conservative would look at home and abroad for empirical answers, acknowledging no ultimate solution but the need for constant reform because society is always changing. On gay rights, a classic social change, he'd ask what a society should do in integrating the emergence of so many openly gay people, couples and families. On foreign policy, he'd move on a case by case basis, not by way of a "doctrine."
  • On these terms, today's GOP could not be less conservative. I'd insist it's less conservative than Obama. It does not present reality-based reform for emergent problems. It simply reiterates dogma and ruthlessly polices dissent or debate.
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  • Back in the 1980s, conservatism was a thrilling empirical, reality-based challenge to overweening government power and omniscient liberal utopianism. Today, alas, it has become a victim of its own success, reliving past glories rather than tackling current problems. It is part secular dogma - no taxes, no debt, more war - and part religious dogma - no Muslims need apply; amend the federal constitution to keep gays in their place; no abortions even for rape and incest; more settlements on the West Bank to prepare for the End-Times.
  • Now it's Levin-land: either total freedom or complete slavery and a rhetorical war based entirely on that binary ideological spectrum. In other words, ideological performance art: brain-dead, unaware of history, uninterested in policy detail, bored by empiricism, motivated primarily by sophistry, Manicheanism, and factional hatred.
  • today's unconservative "conservatism" is a movement held together by cultural resentment and xenophobic panic.
Javier E

Why Conservatives Must Abandon Trumpocracy - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...550685

conservatism gop trump politics boomers party

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • it will require much more than Republican congressional defeats in 2018 to halt Trumpocracy. Indeed, such defeats may well perversely strengthen President Trump. Congressional defeats will weaken alternative power centers within the Republican Party. If they lose the House or the Senate or many governorships—or some combination of those defeats—then Republicans may feel all the more compelled to defend their president. The party faithful may interpret any internal criticism of Trump as a treasonable surrender to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
  • The more isolated Trump becomes within the American political system as a whole, the more he will dominate whatever remains of the conservative portion of that system. He will devour his party from within.
  • If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.
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  • That means slowing the pace of immigration so that the existing population of the country does not feel it is being displaced and replaced. Economists will argue that a country with a slow-growing population needs more immigrants to sustain the growth of its labor force. But a population is a citizenry as well as a labor force, and when it grows slowly, it can less easily assimilate newcomers. Immigration is to natural population increase as wine is to food: a good complement, a bad substitute.
  • In the most immediate sense, that means accepting that the Affordable Care Act is here to stay, and to work to reform it so that it costs less and protects middle-class families more
  • The stability of American society depends on conservatives’ ability to find a way forward from the Trump dead end, toward a conservatism that cannot only win elections but also govern responsibly, a conservatism that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible, that upholds markets at home and U.S. leadership internationally.
  • Then struck the financial crisis, followed by the presidency of Barack Obama. The proportion of baby boomers who called themselves “angry with government” surged from 15 percent before 2008 to 26 percent the next year. By 2011, 42 percent of baby boomers were labeling themselves “conservative,” the same percentage as the next generation up.
  • Here’s what those right-leaning boomers did mean by “conservatism.” If read a list of scally liberal statements like, “It is the responsibility of government to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves,” boomers became increasingly likely to deliver a stern no over the 20 years between the 1990s and the 2010s. In fact, by 2010, they had become the age cohort most likely to answer no, more so than either their elders or juniors.
  • They were the cohort most likely to attribute individual economic troubles to those individuals’ own personal failings, rather than to ill fortune, racism, or any other systemic cause.
  • The boomers had faced more competition for everything, from jobs to housing, and now faced an ominous retirement environment. If they acted like shipwreck survivors in an already overcrowded lifeboat … well, the boat really was jammed awfully tight.
  • Americans
  • “Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts,” reported Teresa Ghilarducci of The New York Times. They would need their federal retirement benefits much more than they had anticipated back when they were younger and more liberal.
  • As when they had resisted the draft in the 1960s, so now when they refused changes to Medicare, the politics of the baby boom generation were the politics of generational self-defense.
  • “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients.” Tea Partiers differentiated between those who worked (or who had worked) and those who sought something for nothing—in other words, between people as they imagined themselves and the people they imagined competing against them.
  • In a multiethnic society, economic redistribution inescapably implies ethnic redistribution.
  • Of the U.S. residents who lacked health insurance prior to the 2008 financial crisis, 27 percent were foreign born. As the Obama administration squeezed Medicare to fund the Affordable Care Act, it’s not surprising that many white boomers perceived Obamacare as a transfer of health care resources from “us” to “them”—by a president who identified with “them” and not with “us.”
  • The social scientist Robert Putnam observed with dismay in 2007 that “new evidence from the U.S. suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.” Projects of social and economic reform crash into the reality that human beings most willingly cooperate when they feel common identity. In a society undergoing rapid demographic change, loyalties narrow.
  • Republican politicians since the 1980s had spoken a language of “hope” and “opportunity.”
  • “Believe in America!” “A new American century!” What are they talking about? wondered voters battered and bruised by the previous American century.
  • the political language of the 1980s had lost its power. The most common age for white Americans in 2015 was 55. These older white voters were more eager to protect what they had than to hustle for more. They wanted less change, not more. They cared about security, not opportunity. Protection of the status quo was what candidate Trump offered.
  • One poll found that nearly half of all white working-class voters agreed with the statement, “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” As America has become more diverse, tribalism has intensified. The Left’s hopes for a social democratic politics founded on class without regard to race look only slightly less moribund than the think-tank conservatism of low taxes and open borders.
  • Perhaps the very darkness of the Trump experience can summon the nation to its senses and jolt Americans to a new politics of commonalit
  • Trump appealed to what was mean and cruel and shameful. The power of that appeal should never be underestimated. But once its power fades, even those who have succumbed will feel regret.
  • Those who have expressed regret will need some kind of exit from Trumpocracy, some reintegration into a politics again founded on decency.
Javier E

Opinion | Bill Barr, the Man From 1980 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bill-barr-federalist.html

conservatism gop reagan culture politics

shared by Javier E on 19 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • The first speech, a defense of religious liberty and religious conservatism, attacked the “growing ascendancy of secularism and the doctrine of moral relativism” and decried the “immense suffering, wreckage and misery” unleashed in “the new secular age.”
  • In two recent speeches, one at Notre Dame and the other before the Federalist Society, Attorney General Bill Barr infuriated people already infuriated with him by issuing extended attacks on contemporary liberalism.
  • from the perspective of their intended audience, conservative elites, they’re mostly striking as exercises in reassurance. The Trump era has been understood, reasonably, as a moment of discontinuity for the American right — a moment when the expiration of Reaganism became apparent, when the alienation of movement conservatism from its voters was exposed, when the diagnoses and prescriptions of 1980 were decisively rejected even if no new synthesis was yet apparent.
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  • What Barr’s speeches presuppose, basically, is what if it wasn’t? What if everything you believed before Trump, you can still believe today?
  • In the Notre Dame speech, this reassurance manifests itself in a restatement of the assumptions that have guided organized religious conservatism since the 1960s: that the chief threat to religious faith comes from secularizing elites
  • Many of these broad analytic strokes still apply to the contemporary scene. The hostility of elite cultural institutions to traditional Christianity is an enduring fact of American life. Barr’s account of liberal-led legal harassment of conservative religious institutions is accurate. The connection he draws between the weakening of religious practice and the working class’s social crisis is contestable but entirely plausible.
  • But there’s no attempt in the speech to address the recent trends that complicate religious conservatism’s ’70s-era vision
  • For instance, there’s no mention of the extent to which conservative lawyers already won a series of battles against the harder sort of secularism
  • There’s no mention of how much of that erosion has happened under administrations friendly to conservative Christianity, and therefore probably reflects internal weakness, division and scandal more than pressure from outside
  • and it didn’t matter much to the cultural erosion of their faith.
  • There’s no reckoning with the tension between the G.O.P.’s religious and libertarian wings, the clear support of many religious conservatives for the welfare state that official conservatism decries
  • And there’s no acknowledgment that a familiar tag like “moral relativism” may be a poor fit for a woke progressivism whose moral fervor is increasingly the opposite of relativist
  • a similar accounting of trends in presidential power makes the thesis of his Federalist Society speech look totally implausible.
  • There are two ways to read Barr’s inaccurate-but-ideologically-reassuring portraits of our politics — these twin attempts, as Damon Linker puts it, to achieve the “full assimilation” of the Trump presidency into “the conservative movement and the story it tells itself” about the world
  • If conservatives believe that even today’s presidency is much too constrained and that secular elites can be blamed for all our problems, then we should fear an authoritarian cascade on the right
  • A conservatism that constantly reconverts itself to the worldview of the Reagan era isn’t poised to claim sweeping, authoritarian power, in the service of religious revolution or any other cause. It’s poised for repetition, gridlock and failure
Javier E

Opinion | Conservatism After Christianity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vatism-after-christianity.html

conservatism christianity trump white identity

shared by Javier E on 16 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • The trend was consistent: The more often a Trump voter attended church, the less white-identitarian they appeared, the more they expressed favorable views of racial minorities, and the less they agreed with populist arguments on trade and immigration.
  • The differences were particularly striking on race. For instance, a quarter of Trump voters who never attend church describe being white as “very important” to their identity; for the most frequent churchgoers voters, it was 9 percent. Among non-churchgoing Trump voters, only 48 percent had warm feelings toward black people, compared to 71 percent of weekly churchgoers; the same sort of pattern held for views of Hispanics, Asians and Jews.
  • their views of Muslims, interestingly, seemed to have been influenced by Trump’s own rhetoric, becoming more hostile between 2016 and 2017.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • in general, churchgoing Republicans look more like the party many elite conservatives wanted to believe existed before Trump came along — more racially-tolerant, more accepting of multiculturalism and globalization, and also more consistently libertarian on economics.
  • Secularized Trump voters look more like the party as Trump has tried to remake it, blending an inchoate economic populism with strong racial resentments.
  • The irreligious are less likely to have college degrees, less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced; they’re also less civically engaged, less satisfied with their neighborhoods and communities, and less trusting and optimistic in general.
  • Such a bet might be understandable as an act of desperation. But it’s hard to see how it can reverse de-Christianization, and easy to see how it might accelerate it
  • only about a third of Trump’s 2016 voters are in church on a typical Sunday, and almost half attend seldom or not at all.
  • Despite their resistance to that toxicity, the churchgoers in this survey did vote for him, making a pragmatic bet that his policies on abortion and religious liberty were worth living with his Caligulan personal life and racial demagoguery. To defend that bet, some historically-inclined believers have cited past cases where Christians accepted bargains with a not-particularly moral leaders — including the way the early church accepted the patronage of Roman emperors, from Constantine onward, whose personal piety was limited at best.
  • But the Constantinian bet involved a rising religion allying with a worldly power to accelerate its growth and gains. The bet under Trump involves the reverse sort of situation: A Christian community trying to make the best of its decline, and allying with a leader whose core appeal depends upon and possibly furthers the de-Christianization of conservatism.
  • This seems to support the argument, advanced by Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner among others, that support for populism correlates with a kind of communal breakdown, in which secularization is one variable among many leaving people feeling isolated and angry, and drawing them to the ersatz solidarity of white identity politics.
  • e his ascent was intimately connected to the secularization of conservatism, and his style gives us a taste of what to expect from a post-religious right.
Javier E

Why conservative magazines are more important than ever - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...s-are-more-important-than-ever

conservative magazines conservatism right discourse trump culture ideas

shared by Javier E on 27 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • political magazines, of any persuasion, can be at their worst when ideological team spirit is strongest.
  • For conservative magazines, the years after Sept. 11, 2001, when patriotism seemed to demand loyalty to the White House, were such a time. “We did allow ourselves to become house organs for the Republican Party and the conservative movement,” says American Conservative blogger Rod Dreher, who worked at National Review from 2002 to 2003. “I would have denied it at the time, but that really happened.”
  • This also made many conservatives reluctant to confront the flaws of George W. Bush, even years after his presidency. “What did we think about compassionate conservatism? About No Child Left Behind? About the Iraq War? The truth is a lot of conservatives thought they were basically a mistake and badly considered,”
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  • I think that was something the right had failed to wrestle with. They hadn’t had those conversations.”
  • right-of-center magazines have been debating and reassessing the soul of their political philosophy. Trumpism has torn down the conservative house and broken it up for parts. Conservative magazines are working to bring a plausible intellectual order to this new reality — and figure out what comes next.
  • “I’ve been a big critic of mainstream-media ideological blinders and biases, and I still am,” he said. “But we also have a president who lies aggressively, who lies casually, who lies about things that matter in huge ways and about things that don’t matter at all.”
  • Goldberg and writers Jay Nordlinger and Kevin D. Williamson are perhaps the most conspicuous members of National Review’s anti-Trump camp.
  • Hayes hopes that when a reader of the liberal magazine the Nation or a watcher of MSNBC seeks out an “intellectually honest conservative take,” that person will go to the Weekly Standard.
  • Kristol said he was reluctant to assess the present-day magazine as a whole, but he agreed that such a change was possible. “I feel now like I was unconsciously constraining the ways I was thinking,” he said. “You had friends. You had allies. You didn’t want to look too closely at the less savory parts of them.”
  • While the Weekly Standard has generally reflected a conventionally hawkish Republican worldview, it has also been willing to entertain varying political outlooks, with its writers landing in different places on Trump and many other matters. Labash, for instance, never hid his opposition to the war in Iraq. “It’s a magazine, not a cult,” he says. “You’re free to think freely.”
  • Goldberg told me that he had been spared any pressure from his employers to line up with the White House — “not a peep from a soul” at AEI or National Review — but that other employers were less tolerant. “One of the things I have much less respect for is Conservatism Inc.,” he said. “When the real histories of this period are done, one of the more important points is that institutions, both in the media and the think- tank universe, that are dependent on really large donor bases, they were among the first to give way.”
  • In response, Hayes has increased the magazine’s focus on reporting, he said, less for the purpose of winning debates than to rescue a sense of shared premises. “We thought it was important to focus on reporting and facts and try to determine what the facts are, so that we can have a big debate about policies we should pursue as a country based on a common understanding of those facts,”
  • Krein seemed more sanguine than most conservative intellectuals I met, viewing the changed policy discourse as a good in itself. “We have an honest question — what the role of the nation-state is,” Krein said. “This is a world of nation-states, but we no longer have any positive rationale for them. Those questions need to be worked out.”
  • Most of the magazine’s writers are somewhere in between. “We have a number of writers who are vehemently anti-Trump; I’m one of them,” says National Review Online editor Charles C.W. Cooke. “That doesn’t mean he can’t do anything right. That would be to throw my brain away.”
  • “One of the giant ironies of this whole phenomenon for us is that Trump represents a cartoonish, often exaggerated, version of the direction we wanted to see the party go in,” Lowry said. “Trump was in a very different place on regulation and trade, but we had been widening the lens of mainstream conservatism and arguing that the party needed to be more populist.”
  • “National Review has absolutely become more interesting,” says Helen Andrews, an essayist who has written for nearly all of the publications mentioned in this article. “When Trump won, I thought that’s it. National Review is done. There’s no way they can bounce back. But it turns out that all the folks over there that I thought were peacetime consiglieres were actually ready to seize the moment.”
  • Other contributors, like Dennis Prager and Victor Davis Hanson, reliably line up behind Trump, arguing he’s the only defense against an overpowering left.
  • Merry’s hope, in the face of what he feels are increasingly unfavorable odds, is that Trump will fulfill some of his promises. Assessing that will be one of the main goals of the magazine in the coming years. “We’re interested in the Trump constituency,” Merry says. “The question for us is whether Trump is proving worthy of his voters.”
  • One curse of the American Conservative, starting with Iraq, has been to serve as an unheeded voice in the face of indifferent or hostile elite opinion. In 2011, Larison was sounding repeated warnings against intervening in Libya, and for several years, before more famous names took notice, he was a lonely voice against the Saudi war in Yemen.
  • Back in June 2016, the magazine ran a cover story by McConnell, “Why Trump Wins,” which argued that globalism vs. nationalism was the new defining issue in our politics and that GOP elites would be unable to “put the lid on the aspirations Trump has unleashed.”
  • A sense of the political power of cultural conversations likewise inspired former Senate staffer Ben Domenech, now 36, to launch the Federalist in the fall of 2013
  • Each of them is playing a distinct role on the right.
  • Modern Age, founded by conservative luminary Russell Kirk in 1957 and operated by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, takes what may be the most high-toned approach to politics, with many academic contributors, and McCarthy hopes to see its pages synthesizing ideas from different strains of conservatism.
  • The National Interest, co-founded in 1985 by the late Irving Kristol, father of Bill, remains devoted to foreign-policy realism, offering thoughtful articles on what role the United States should play on a changed world stage.
  • National Affairs, founded by former George W. Bush policy staffer Yuval Levin in 2009 as a venue in which conservative policy could be considered more deeply, spent the Obama years offering broad philosophical articles along with wonkier explorations of policymaking, from housing to public broadcasting. This continues, but after the rise of Trump, the journal has become even more introspective, running articles with titles like “Redeeming Ourselves” and “Is the Party Over?”
  • These publications are highly unlikely to affect the course of Trump, but, by making plausible sense of this moment sooner rather than later, they may affect the course of his successors.
  • Two surprising stars of the Trump era have been the Claremont Review of Books and the religious journal First Things. It was in the normally restrained Claremont Review of Books that someone going by the name “Publius Decius Mus” (later revealed to be Michael Anton) published “The Flight 93 Election,” an influential essay arguing that the election of Trump, however extreme the risks, was the only hope of preventing a complete surrender to the cultural left.
  • The trajectory of First Things, a journal of religion and public life founded in 1990, has been even more striking. Its editor, R.R. Reno, contributed to the “Against Trump” issue of National Review but became increasingly frustrated by what he felt was the failure of his fellow conservatives to understand the nature of the rebellion taking place. Eventually, Reno wound up signing on to a “Statement of Unity” in support of Trump by a group called Scholars & Writers for America. First Things is now devoting itself to understanding the altered political and cultural landscape. “The conservative intellectual infrastructure is like a city after the neutron bomb goes off,” says Reno. “There’s a whole network of ideas, and it turns out there are no voters for those ideas.”
  • The monthly conservative magazine the New Criterion, edited by Roger Kimball, may devote the bulk of its pages to reviews of things like symphonies or art exhibits, but it was also among the first journals to take Trump seriously and understand, as contributor James Bowman put it in October 2015, that Trump spoke for “those whom the progressives have sought to shut out of decent society, which encompasses a much larger universe than that of the movement conservatives.”
  • Commentary, founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee — from which it separated in 2007, becoming a stand-alone nonprofit — has always balanced its forays into politics with grander musings on Western civilization, Judaism and high culture. This seems to be a successful combination in the Trump era, because the circulation, according to Podhoretz, has risen by over 20 percent since the 2016 election. Podhoretz, who has edited the magazine since 2009 (his father, Norman Podhoretz, edited it from 1960 to 1995), is known for a prickly and combative approach to public life
  • “It may be that Commentary is uniquely suited to the weirdness of this position because it has been a countercultural publication for close to 50 years. It is a Jewish publication on the right. It is a conservative publication in a liberal Jewish community. It remains a journal with literary, cultural and intellectual interests, which makes it a minority in the world of conservative opinion, which tends not to focus on the life of the cultural mind.”
  • Commentary has had several high-profile articles in the past year. In February 2017, it published “Our Miserable 21st Century,” by Nicholas N. Eberstadt, who argued that the economic insecurity of Americans spiked after 2000 and never recovered.
  • Many of the smallest conservative journals are unadorned and low in circulation. But, in keeping with the rule that what’s in the wilderness today can be most influential tomorrow, they too are awash in fresh ideas. “There’s still a pretty substantial community that relies on these publications as a channel of communications within the conservative neural network,” observes Daniel McCarthy, editor of one such journal, Modern Age. “They’re even more relevant today than they were in 2012.”
  • Domenech told me he started to envision a new kind of conservative opinion site after observing that more and more areas of our culture — movies, talk shows, sports — were becoming politicized.
  • The staff of the Federalist is majority female, half millennial, and a quarter minority, according to Domenech, and youthfulness was reflected in the publication’s design
  • By engaging in pop-culture debates, going on television, and focusing on engagement with writers and voices outside the conservative sphere, the Federalist hopes to reach audiences that might normally be dismissive
  • Conservative magazines, Domenech said, had been mistaken to think they spoke for voters on the right. “This battle was not over whether we’re going to have a Chamber of Commerce agenda or a constitutionalist agenda,” Domenech said. “It left out this huge swath of people who weren’t interested in either of those things.”
  • As much as their contributors may differ in opinion or even dislike one another, what unites these magazines — and distinguishes them from right-wing outlets like Breitbart — is an almost quaint belief in debate as an instrument of enlightenment rather than as a mere tool of political warfare.
  • “There’s an argument on part of the right that the left is utterly remorseless and we need to be like that,” says Lowry. “That’s the way you lose your soul and you have no standards.”
  • “You want to be a revolutionary on the right?” asks Labash. “Tell the truth. Call honest balls and strikes. That’s become pretty revolutionary behavior in these hopelessly tribal times.”
  • With so many Americans today engaged in partisan war, any publication with a commitment to honesty in argument becomes a potential peacemaker. It also becomes an indispensable forum for working out which ideas merit a fight in the first place. This is what, in their best moments, the conservative magazines are now doing.
Javier E

Trump Has Broken the Republican Party-and Conservatism-for Good - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/arty-and-conservatism-for-good

gop trump conservatism

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • FDR replaced his sitting vice president, Henry Wallace, on the ticket with the senator from Missouri in 1944. Why Truman? Because he had come to national attention as head of the Truman Committee, formally known as the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program.
  • This was a bipartisan special committee that investigated—with considerable vigor and publicity—problems of waste, inefficiency, and profiteering in our war-production effort.
  • Once upon a time, Congress was not afraid of doing its job of oversight and legislation.
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  • Once upon a time, members of Congress of the same party as the president were not terrified to criticize him—even though he was popular with his base and the nation was at war.
  • Once upon a time, the institutions of a free government and a constitutional republic worked.
  • the Republican party was able to recover after Nixon, or Gingrich, or Bush, because—whatever one thought of particular policies or the new leaders—it had not sold its soul to those individuals.
  • In that world, conservatism could survive failures, ranging from moral to political to strategic, because as a movement it had a standing superior to and somewhat independent of any of particular actor.
  • No longer. It’s Trump, all the way down.
  • We have now reached the terminus of craven loyalty and pathetic apologetics. I don’t see how either the political institution of the Republican party or the intellectual movement of conservatism recovers from what we have seen over the last three years—but especially the last three months.
Javier E

What Makes a True Conservative - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...594889

conservative columnist culture politics

shared by Javier E on 29 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • The Conservative Sensibility, a thoughtful, elegant reflection on American conservatism and the Founders’ political thought.
  • By “sensibility,” Will has in mind less than an agenda but more than an attitude. A sensibility is, he argues, a way of seeing.
  • how to think through complex social problems.
  • ...45 more annotations...
  • Will’s 1983 book, Statecraft as Soulcraft, had a significant intellectual impact on me. He questioned the Founders’ faith that moral balance and national cohesiveness will be supplied by the government’s doing little more than encouraging the free operation of “opposite and rival interests.”
  • when a political regime establishes, through laws and courts and customs and other matters, a particular political economy, it is establishing, it is choosing the kind of people that would live under that regime,”
  • The Conservative Sensibility suggests something else: that we should be attending more to the machinery of government and that government should be far less concerned about inculcating virtue in the citizenr
  • “It turns out that Madison was smarter than I am.” When he argued that America was ill-founded because insufficient attention was given to soulcraft, he explained, he hadn’t fully appreciated that the Founders were indeed arguing about statecraft as soulcraft—that a government really can inculcate virtue.
  • America was “ill-founded,” he wrote, because there was not enough attention to what he termed “the sociology of virtue.” Government needed to take a greater role in shaping the moral character of its citizens
  • He argues in The Conservative Sensibility that capitalism doesn't just make us better off; it makes us better by enforcing such virtues as thrift, industriousness, and the deferral of gratification.
  • long story short: I did not appreciate the extent to which Madisonian liberty with Hamiltonian energy is soulcraft.”
  • Will has claimed that Trump has done more lasting damage than Richard Nixon did during the Watergate scandal because, in Will’s words, “you can't un-ring the bell. You can't unsay what he has now said is acceptable discourse in the United States.
  • he hoped Trump supporters are right—but he’s pretty sure they are wrong when they say that what Trump is doing to our culture, our politics and our civic discourse is ephemeral.
  • Will argues that Trump’s agenda, to the degree it pleases conservatives, is what any Republican president would have done. “So the question is what does Trump bring that's distinctive?” Will said. “And it's all vulgarity, coarsening, semi-criminality.
  • asking about the concrete, tangible harm of Trump’s conduct.“The answer is in the terms themselves,” Will replied. “The norms, that is, what are normal and what are normative, cease to be normal. And cease to be normative.
  • “It’s amazing to me how fast, and we saw this in the 20th century in a number of ways, how fast something could go from unthinkable to thinkable to action,”
  • “And it doesn’t seem to me it’s going to be easy to just snap back as if this didn’t happen. It happened. And he got away with it. And he became president. And there will be emulators.”
  • Those who may have forgotten are now being reminded that government has a vital role in the cultivation and sustenance—or in the degradation and destruction—of political cultures. Which brings us back to Statecraft as Soulcraft.
  • “mankind is not just matter, not just a machine with an appetitive ghost in it. We are not what we eat. We are, to some extent, what we and our leaders—the emblematic figures of our polity—say we are.”
  • “What I’d like progressives to take away from the book is a reconsideration of their dilemma,
  • in 1964, when I cast my first presidential vote for Barry Goldwater, to whose memory the book is dedicated, 77 percent of the American people said they trusted the government to do the right thing all the time or almost all the time. Today it's 17 percent—and that 60-point evaporation of government prestige has accompanied a 60-fold increase in government pretensions.
  • their entire agenda depends on strong government and strong government depends on public confidence in the government.”
  • “What I'd like conservatives to take away from this book,” Will added, “is the sense of the enormous intellectual pedigree behind conservatism from Madison to Lincoln to Hayek and the rest.” Will said conservatives need to answer the question: What does conservatism want to conservative?
  • The most important of all revolutions, Edmund Burke said, is a “revolution in sentiment, manners and moral opinion.”
  • what we think Trump supporters either don’t understand or deny, is the destructive revolution in manners and mores that Donald Trump is ushering in, the enormous cultural and social blast radius of his presidency. Through his promiscuous lying and assault on demonstrable truths, his cruelty and crudity, his coarseness, bullying and dehumanization of his opponents, and his lawlessness and conspiracy-mongering—the whole corrupt, packaged deal—he has brought us into dark new realms.
  • Will, who earned his Ph.D. in politics at Princeton and later taught political philosophy
  • hen I probed Will on what has gone wrong with the American right, he mentioned the anti-intellectualism that inevitably comes with populism, which he called “the obverse of conservatism.”
  • “Populism is a direct translation of popular passions into governments through a strong executive. Someone who might say something like, ‘Only I can fix it.
  • Will argued that James Madison understood the need to “filter and refine and deflect and slow public opinion through institutions. To make it more refined, to produce what Madison called, in one of his phrases that I’m particularly fond of, ‘mitigated democracy.’
  • what would most concern the Founders about contemporary politics. “Political leaders today seem to feel that their vocation is to arouse passions,” he told me, “not to temper and deflect and moderate them.
  • Will has claimed that Trump has done more lasting damage than Richard Nixon did during the Watergate scandal because, in Will’s words, “you can’t un-ring the bell. You can’t unsay what he has now said is acceptable discourse in the United States.”
  • Will replied that he hoped Trump supporters are right—but he’s pretty sure they are wrong when they say that what Trump is doing to our culture, our politics, and our civic discourse is ephemeral.
  • Will argues that Trump’s agenda, to the degree it pleases conservatives, is what any Republican president would have done. “So the question is, What does Trump bring that’s distinctive?” Will said. “And it’s all vulgarity, coarsening, semi-criminality.”
  • Trump’s supporters on the right “misunderstand the importance of culture, the viscosity of culture, and I think they are not conservatives, because they don’t understand this,”
  • Donald Trump promised when he ran for president that he would overturn our norms, Will has said, and that’s one promise he’s kept.
  • All of us, including Will, have to deal with the fact that we are now confronted with a head of government who is systematically assaulting our ideals and virtues
  • “To revitalize politics and strengthen government, we need to talk about talk. We need a new, respectful rhetoric—respectful, that is, of the better angels of mankind’s nature.
  • And their dilemma is this: In 1964, when I cast my first presidential vote for Barry Goldwater, to whose memory the book is dedicated, 77 percent of the American people said they trusted the government to do the right thing all the time or almost all the time. Today, it’s 17 percent—and that 60-point evaporation of government prestige has accompanied a 60-fold increase in government pretensions.
  • I would think my progressive friends would be alarmed by this, because their entire agenda depends on strong government, and strong government depends on public confidence in the government.”
  • Will said conservatives need to answer the question, What does conservatism want to conserve?
  • For Will, the answer is the American founding, by which he has in mind three things: the doctrine of natural rights, understood as rights essential to the flourishing of creatures with our natures; a belief in human nature, meaning we are more than creatures who absorb whatever culture we’re situated in; and a government architecture, principally the separation of powers, that is essential to making good on what he refers to as the most crucial verb in the Declaration of Independence.
  • What conservatives like Will and me believe, and what we think Trump supporters either don’t understand or deny, is the destructive revolution in manners and mores that Donald Trump is ushering in
  • Through his promiscuous lying and assault on demonstrable truths, his cruelty and crudity, his coarseness, bullying ,and dehumanization of his opponents, and his lawlessness and conspiracy-mongering—the whole corrupt, packaged deal—he has brought us into dark new realms.
  • There was a time when Republicans and conservatives more generally insisted that culture was upstream of politics and in many respects more important than politics; that leaders needed to take great care in cultivating and validating standards of decency, honor, and integrity; and that a president who destroyed rather than defended cultural norms and high standards would do grave injury to America.
  • now Republicans are willing to sacrifice soul and culture for the sake of promised policy victories.
  • “If the great columnists got a single sentence in the history books,” I asked Will, “what would you want to say about your contribution?”
  • “It would be to convince people that politics is both fun and dignifies—that it has a great and stately jurisdiction, because and to the extent that it is a politics of ideas. Period.
  • “The American nation’s finest political career derived from Lincoln’s refusal to allow his country to be seduced into thinking of itself in an unworthy way,”
  • the civic virtues that Madison and the other Founders believed were essential for a free republic to survive “must be willed. It is folly to will an end but neglect to will the means to the end. The presuppositions of our polity must be supplied, politically.”
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