History Readings

Mitt Romney is in trouble. Not because of a boring convention or a bloodless speech or a grossly inappropriate press conference, but rather because the man refuses to stick his neck out and take a stand on the critical issues of our time.

Mitt Romney refuses to lay out a plan to balance the budget before 2040. He doesn’t specify cuts, he doesn’t propose eliminating agencies and he doesn’t explain how his tax cuts will be offset. When it comes to balancing the budget, Mr. Romney has no plan.

Medicare benefits have to be cut over the next generation. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

In Paul Tough’s essential book, “How Children Succeed,” he describes what’s going on. Childhood stress can have long lasting neural effects, making it harder to exercise self-control, focus attention, delay gratification and do many of the other things that contribute to a happy life.

more recently, attention has shifted to the psychological reactions that impede learning — the ones that flow from insecure relationships, constant movement and economic anxiety.

KIPP discovered that three-quarters of its graduates were not making it through college. It wasn’t the students with the lower high school grades that were dropping out most. It was the ones with the weakest resilience and social skills. It was the pessimists.

A sense of proportion, once the conservative virtue, is considered treasonous on the right today

how large a stake conservatives have in convincing themselves and voters that Reagan failed. Think about it: if they conceded ideological victory they would have to confront the more prosaic reasons that entitlements, deficits and regulations continue to grow in Republican and Democratic administrations alike. They would be forced to devise a new, forward-looking agenda to benefit even their own constituencies, like ensuring that American business can draw on an educated, healthy work force; can rely on modern public infrastructure; and can count on stable, transparent financial markets. And they would have to articulate a conservative vision for those welfare state programs that are likely to remain with us, like disability insurance, food stamps and Head Start.

Conservatives have always been great storytellers; it is their fatal weakness. They love casting their eyes back to the past to avoid seeing what lies right under their noses. The story always involves some expulsion from Eden, whether by the hippies of the 1960s, or the suffragists, or the wretched refuse of the shtetls, or the French Revolution, or the Enlightenment, or Luther, or Machiavelli or the sack of Rome.

The problem here is that Romney wants tax cuts for the rich and he wants credit for being a deficit hawk. But as Jed Lewison notes, Romney simply can’t keep all his promises. What makes this even more untenable is the unshakable reality that cutting taxes deeply on the rich is very unpopular. Romney claims he would cut everyone’s taxes. But he can’t do that and also reduce the deficit, unless those tax cuts are offset by policy choices that would turn the middle class’s tax cut into an effective tax hike. And so his tax cuts for the rich would be even more unpopular if Romney leveled with voters on how they would have to be paid for

shouldn’t it puzzle us that Romney is so “incompetent” (also from Noonan), given his deserved reputation for, well, competence? He founded one of this country’s most successful financial firms, turned around the flailing Salt Lake City Olympics and was a successful governor. How did he get so clumsy so fast?

the problem is not Romney but the new Republican Party. Given the direction in which it has moved and the pressures from its most extreme — yet most powerful — elements, any nominee would face the same challenge: Can you be a serious candidate for the general election while not outraging the Republican base?

Why won’t Romney, an intelligent man, fluent in economics, explain his economic policy? Because any sensible answer would cause a firestorm in his party.

two competing horror-show narratives that increasingly dominate political discourse in this country

The basic right-wing story line evokes zombie apocalypse: The shambling, diseased living dead — Obama Zombies — are threatening human civilization.

A forthcoming book by Nicholas Eberstadt is titled “A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic.” Charles Sykes contends that we have become “A Nation of Moochers.”

the conservative movement itself, was a fusion of two different mentalities.

The two conservative tendencies lived in tension. But together they embodied a truth that was put into words by the child psychologist John Bowlby, that life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.

the traditional conservative, intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and Catholic social teaching. This sort of conservative didn’t see society as a battleground between government and the private sector. Instead, the traditionalist wanted to preserve a society that functioned as a harmonious ecosystem, in which the different layers were nestled upon each other: individual, family, company, neighborhood, religion, city government and national government.

the British, during their late Victorian heyday, believed theirs was the exceptional Land of Hope and Glory, a vanguard of progress and model for all nations.[3] Can it be—O scary thought—that the same faith in Special Providence that inspires energy, ingenuity, resilience, and civic virtue in a nation, may also tempt a people into complacency, arrogance, self-indulgence, and civic vice?

what Americans believe about their past is always a powerful influence on their present behavior and future prospects. No wonder we have “culture wars” in which the representation of history is a principal stake.

my study of European international relations naturally inclined me to think about foreign policy in terms of Realpolitik, balance of power, geography, contingency, tragedy, irony, folly, unintended consequences, and systemic interaction—all of which are foreign if not repugnant to Americans.

The problem with Mitt Romney’s comments about the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay taxes isn’t just that they are highly misleading and damaging politically. They also severely misstate and undermine conservative principles

in Reagan’s view, ordinary people were capable of greatness. There was Lenny Skutnik, who plunged from obscurity into the icy waters of the Potomac to save passengers from a downed flight. There were ordinary GI Joes whose courage on the beaches of Normandy (or, today, in the valleys of Afghanistan) protect civilization.

It wasn’t so long ago that mainstream conservatism represented these values. We indexed income brackets and personal exemptions to inflation in the early 1980s to protect middle- and low-income families. Conservatives created the child tax credit in 1997 and expanded it in 2001 to reduce the tax burden for parents. In the past decade, we championed a flat tax that contained a generous exemption for a family of four, precisely so those least able to pay would not be forced to.

Thinking some more on Mitt Romney's high-handed claim that one in two Americans will vote for Obama simply to better ensure their own sloth, I was reminded of Lee Atwater's famous explanation of the Southern Strategy:You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

as tactics aimed at suppressing black citizenship become more abstract, they also have the side-effect of enveloping non-blacks. Atwater's point that the policies of the Southern Strategy hurt blacks more than whites is well taken. But some whites were hurt too. This is different than the explicit racism of slavery and segregation. During slavery white Southerners never worried about disenfranchising blacks. After slavery they needed poll taxes and the force of white terrorism. After white terrorism was routed and the poll tax outlawed, they targeted the voting process itself. But at each level what you see is more non-black people being swept into the pool of victims and the pool expanding.

You can paint a similar history of the welfare state, which was first secured by assuring racist white Democrats that the pariah of black America would be cut out of it. When such machinations became untenable, the strategy became to claim the welfare state mainly benefited blacks. And as that has become untenable, the strategy has become to target the welfare state itself, with no obvious mention of color. At each interval the ostensible pariah grows, until one in two Americans are members of the pariah class.

In 1980, about 30 percent of Americans received some form of government benefits. Today, as Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute has pointed out, about 49 percent do.

Americans haven’t become childlike worshipers of big government. On the contrary, trust in government has declined. The number of people who think government spending promotes social mobility has fallen.

Romney, who criticizes President Obama for dividing the nation, divided the nation into two groups: the makers and the moochers. Forty-seven percent of the country, he said, are people “who are dependent upon government, who believe they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to take care of them, who believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”

swearing is ubiquitous: “we say taboo words as soon as we speak and we continue to swear into old age even through dementia and senile decline.” And we do so at a rate of about one taboo word per 200 words. This rate, however, differs dramatically among age groups (swearing peaks in adolescence), between genders (men swear more often and more offensively), and most importantly and perhaps obviously of all, from one individual to the next.

we know that by the time said toddler is old enough for college, his memory for taboo words in psychology experiments is excellent. Taboo words tend to be emotional words, and emotional things attract our attention and keep it

Some researchers have even suggested—and here things get more controversial—that taboo words have a hold on us that goes beyond their emotional impact or distinctiveness, that we evolved to use and attend to taboo words as a survival strategy.

real negotiations are often the very antithesis of thoughtful, systematic, rational and intellectually honest exercises. In fact, they’re driven and shaped by factors, such as luck, politics and personality, that are hard to quantify and more experiential than analytical.

Timing is Critical: Woody Allen was wrong. Ninety percent of life isn’t just showing up; it’s showing up at the right time. Ownership just doesn’t ripen like an orange on a tree; it’s driven by a sense of urgency, and that means the presence of sufficient pain and gain to change the locals’ calculations.

What you do try to do is to take each side’s unreasonableness and try to convert it to some common ground by showing both sides they might be able to have their needs met through this bridging idea or that. And if it works, objectivity—whatever that means—is not the relevant factor in any event; the sides’ owning the bridging mechanism and being able to sell it, is.

between 1971 and 2008, real income declined for the bottom 90%. All the growth went to the top 10%, and more than half went to the top percentile.

The remarkable gains of the (broadly-defined) "middle class" in the middle of this century stopped cold in the last quarter of the 1900s.

change is still the issue, and the focus of his solid but not extraordinary speech was incremental improvement. The next president has to do three big things, which are in tension with one another: increase growth, reduce debt and increase social equity. President Obama has the intelligence, the dexterity and the sense of balance to navigate these crosscutting challenges. But he apparently lacks the creativity to break out of the partisan categories, the trench warfare gridlock. Thursday night's speech showed the character and his potential. It didn't show audacity and the fulfillment of that potential.

reporters at Bloomberg examined Clinton's arresting claim about employment growth under Republican and Democratic administrations--since 1961, 24 million jobs added under Republican presidents, 42 million under Democrats--and found it to be true.

it's obvious that performance follows policy with a lag. You wouldn't think Democrats would need reminding of this. As they rightly point out, it's ridiculous to blame Obama for the collapsing economy he inherited. If you're going to make even a semi-serious attempt to work out whether Democratic or Republican presidents are better for employment, you have to take account of the conditions presidents acquire from their predecessors.

In 2008 Larry Bartels's book Unequal Democracy tried to do this and did in fact find that growth, employment and economic equality all saw bigger improvements under Democratic administrations. Bartels considered the effect of lags. But he didn't do it very well, according to James Campbell, who critiqued that work last year: