Remembering Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Andrew Bacevich reviews the new biography of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. by Richard Aldous in Schlesinger and the Decline of Liberalism Boston Review 10/10/2017.

Schlesinger is particularly known for his biographical works on Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and of John and Bobby Kennedy. I was expecting him to focus on Schlesinger's advocacy for a hawkish Cold War foreign policy. He does note that in the 1960s, "With the Vietnam War now in full swing, he dashed off a blistering critique of Lyndon Johnson’s policy, titled The Bitter Heritage (1967), insisting that had [John] Kennedy lived he would have avoided war."

Instead, Bacevich focuses on the vision of domestic politics that Schlesinger advocated, promoted and celebrated, a view New Left critics in the 1960s called "Cold War liberalism," a term I still use myself, actually. Schlesinger was a relatively early opponent of the Vietnam War and supported Bobby Kennedy's antiwar efforts. He was not entirely hostile to more nuanced views of the early Cold War when he wrote in 1967 (Origins of the Cold War Foreign Affairs 46:1 [Oct]):

As the Cold War has begun to lose its purity of definition, as the moral absolutes of the fifties become the moralistic clichés of the sixties, some have be gun to ask whether the appalling risks which humanity ran during the Cold War were, after all, necessary and inevitable; whether more restrained and rational policies might not have guided the energies of man from the perils of conflict into the potentialities of collaboration. The fact that such questions are in their nature unanswerable does not mean that it is not right and useful to raise them. Nor does it mean that our sons and daughters are not entitled to an accounting from the generation of Russians and Americans who produced the Cold War.

This was more a barbed but polite expression of condescension to left historians' critiques of American Cold War policies prior to the mid-sixties. In the same spirit, in a footnote referring to D.F. Fleming, David Horowitz, William Appleman Williams and Gar Alperowitz, he says rather caustically, "The fact that in some aspects the revisionist thesis parallels the official Soviet argument must not, of course, prevent consideration of the case on its merits, nor raise questions about the motives of the writers, all of whom, so far as I know, are independent-minded scholars." Which was 1967 academic-speak for, "Yeah, they sound like Commies but we need to take what they're saying at least a little seriously."

And, yes, he was referring to that David Horowitz, who had a few years of a career as a leftie writer significant enough to be cited by Arthur Schlesinger but later pursued a career in the far-right ditch. His current online Frontpage Mag (which my gag reflex won't allow me to link) features one of his tweets saying, "Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out." I don't know whether he means that as a slur on Mean Libruls or as an autobiographical comment. Let me say that the fact that in some aspects of his current polemics thesis parallel Putinist Russian propaganda of the kind we've heard so much about lately, must not, of course, prevent consideration of the case on its merits, nor raise questions about the motives of the writer, who is, so far as I know, an independent-minded flaming rightwinger.

Yet even though Schlesinger wasn't much impressed by leading New left "revisionist" history, a term he uses as mostly pejorative, his 1967 sketch of the origins of the Cold War are notably different from the Cold War triumphalism with came with the "end of history" circa 1990.

He stresses that leaders on both Russia and the Western Allies were doing a lot of improvising. He talks about how the two major competing establishment views, "realists" and "universalists," evaluated the options in light of different assumption about why nations behave the way they do. And he states a chastened-sounding view that common among both Democratic and Republican advocates of nuclear arms control and efforts to dial back the two superpower tensions, as the US and the Soviet Union were called for decades: "The Cold War ... was the product not of a decision but of a dilemma. Each side felt compelled to adopt policies which the other could not but regard as a threat to the principles of the peace. Each then felt compelled to undertake defensive measures."

That approach does tend to minimize any cynical or malicious motive on the part of the US military-industrial complex. Which is still alive and well, by the way: William D. Hartung, The Scandal of Pentagon Spending TomDispatch 10/10/2017.

Bacevich writes of Schlesinger's outlook and influence:

The cause to which he devoted his professional life was the promotion of U.S. liberalism, in his view “the vital center” of U.S. politics.

As a prodigiously gifted historian, Schlesinger celebrated the achievements of those he deemed liberalism’s greatest champions, notably Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the martyred Kennedy brothers. As a skillful polemicist, he inveighed against those he saw as enemies of liberalism, whether on the communist left or the Republican right. As a Democratic operative, he worked behind the scenes, counseling office seekers of a liberal persuasion and drafting speeches for candidates he deemed likely to advance the cause (and perhaps his own fortunes).

Bacevich also notes without being nasty about it that Schlesinger acted as the "court historian" of the Kennedy Administration. Which is true. Hey, every court needs its own historian, including the Court of Camelot.

Schlesinger passed away in 2007. He was very much an opponent of the Iraq War. In this polemical article in the very early days of the Iraq War, Good Foreign Policy a Casualty of War Los Angeles Times 03/23/2003, he still couldn't resist taking a poke at those annoying lefties:

How have we gotten into this tragic fix without searching debate? No war has been more extensively previewed than this one. Despite pro forma disclaimers, President Bush's determination to go to war has been apparent from the start. Why then this absence of dialogue? Why the collapse of the Democratic Party? Why let the opposition movement fall into the hands of infantile leftists? [my emphasis]

He knew that the phrase "infantile leftists" had been made famous by Lenin. But given the intensity of his opposition to the Cheney-Bush war in Iraq, it's not unreasonable to imagine he was thinking those immature lefties wouldn't be nearly effective enough in articulating what a spectacularly bad idea it was:

The choice reflects a fatal turn in U.S. foreign policy, in which the strategic doctrine of containment and deterrence that led us to peaceful victory during the Cold War has been replaced by the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. The president has adopted a policy of "anticipatory self-defense" that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an
earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy. The global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism. Public opinion polls in friendly countries regard George W. Bush as a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein. Demonstrations around the planet, instead of denouncing the vicious rule of the Iraqi president, assail the United States on a daily basis.

Yo! I agreed with him on that in 2003 and if any thing even more so in 2017. He closed that polemic this way:

[Saddam] Hussein is unquestionably a monster. But does that mean we should forcibly remove him from power? "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled," Adams said in the same July 4 speech, "there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." We are now going abroad to destroy a monster. The aftermath -- how America conducts itself in Iraq and the world -- will provide the crucial test as to whether the war can be justified.

America as the world's self-appointed judge, jury and executioner? "We must face the fact," President John F. Kennedy once said, "that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient -- that we are only 6% of the world's population -- that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind -- that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity -- and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."

Yeah, that's a man and a historian worth remembering.

Political violence and "existential politics"

I've posted an essay at SCRIBD.com that I just completed called Herbert Marcuse, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Political Violence and "Existential Politics."

We think of the "culture war" in the United States as largely a product of "the Sixties", which in American political-cultural terms extended to 1972 (the McGovern-Nixon election) or 1973 (the formal end of direct US participation in the Vietnam War).

But there was also a conventional liberal front in the "culture war" which found them partially on the same side as conservatives. On the one hand, the liberals sided with the civil rights movement against the segregationists, and there was a considerable overlap between liberals and the civil rights movement. But liberals were also supportive of the general direction of Cold War policies and, to varying degrees, many were supportive of the Vietnam War although that supported waned with time and military failure there. One of the things that distinguished George McGovern’s position on foreign policy from what McGovern's adherents in 1972 were known to deride as "Cold War liberals" was his straightforward opposition to the Vietnam War and his broader criticism of Cold War assumptions about the special virtue of American power and the external threat of Communism.

As I was reading a 1968 article by historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "Existential Politics and the Cult of Violence", largely devoted to criticizing Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse and the New Left movement with which he was identified, it occurred to me that Schlesinger's argument had an awful lot in common with the more bewildered reactions to the Occupy movement. (Schlesinger's piece appeared in The Phi Delta Kappan 50/1 (Sept 1968), pp. 9-15. The text is based on an address Schlesinger gave on June 5, 1968, the day after Robert Kennedy’s assassination.)

Engaging with Schlesinger's piece led me to compose the essay, which covers several themes of particular concern for me: political violence; the complex relationship of political ideology/philosophy and political practice; the liberal variant of Cold War political ideology in the US; the thought of the Frankfurt School, framed by Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse as "critical theory"; and, in particular, the enduring insights contained in Marcuse's essay "Repressive Tolerance" which Schlesinger attempted to skewer in 1968.

Much of Schlesinger's criticism of Marcuse and his "Repressive Tolerance" essay of 1965 borders on the tendentious, apparently due to an attempt to pigeonhole Marcuse's thought as a familiar Marxism that could be ritually refuted, a Marxism that was defined as part of "that which is not of the Establishment" in the "publicized and administered" language of the day, to use Marcuse's words from "Repressive Tolerance".

Schlesinger's actual discussion of "Repressive Tolerance" doesn't even qualify as a bad caricature either of Marcuse’s thought or specifically of the essay on which he focuses. Schlesinger basically rolled out some of his favorite Cold War, anti-Communist clichés, found passages in "Repressive Tolerance" on which to hang them, and threw in an "evil" here and a "Stalinist" there.

It certainly doesn't rise to the level of Schlesinger’s professional historical work.

And perhaps ironically, Schlesinger shares with Marcuse and the Sen. Jack Kennedy of the famous "Algeria” speech of 1957 a straightforward recognition that political violence in the real world has played and continues to play a real and significant role, even recognizing that (in Schlesinger’s own words) a "limited amount of violence may stimulate the process of democratic change."

Despite his eagerness to brand Marcuse as an instigator of violence, he provides no real solution to the real-life dilemma that, even though, "Violence [and] the irresponsible promotion of insurrections are bad practices in democracy," (Mario Wainfeld, La chispa y las realidades Página/12 23.12.2012) nevertheless a "limited amount of violence may stimulate the process of democratic change" (Schlesinger).

In his caricature of Marcuse's political thought, Schlesinger makes use of a dubious concept of "existentialist politics" which doesn't seem to be founded on a real understanding of either Herbert Marcuse's thinking or of the philosophy of existentialism. In the process, Schlesinger provides a good illustration of what narrow constraints that framework of Cold War liberalism could impose on clear thought.

Tags: arthur schlesinger jr, cold war, existentialism, franz fanon, herbert marcuse, political violence

The Aurora shooting and possible roots of violence in the US

The problem of violence was one much discussed in the 1960s in the United States, often in connection with urban riots, rising violent crime, police brutality, violent police and vigilante actions in the South against civil rights protesters, political assassinations and a rise in militant groups advocating some form of violence or armed self-defense.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., gave an address at Columbia University shortly after the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968. That was an eventful year at Columbia because of the now-legendary student strike and occupation there. It was also the year of urban riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.; if one wants to call those riots a kind of spontaneous uprising, it was the largest of its kind in American history. (The Confederate States of America represented the largest armed rebellion.) It was published in edited form under the title "Existential Politics and the Cult of Violence" in Sept 1968 Phi Delta Kappan.

The world today is asking a terrible question - a question which every citizen of this republic should be putting to himself: What sort of people are we, we Americans?

And the answer which much of the world is bound to return is that we are today the most frightening people on this planet.

We are a frightening people because for three years we have been devastating a small country on the other side of the world in a war which bears no rational relationship to our national security or our national interest.

Those paragraphs are the kind that conservative culture warriors like to call Blame American First talk. And the stigmatizing of such observations has been effective in discouraging many Democrats from pointing to ways in which America's actions as perceived by the rest of the world produce sometimes bad impressions and unpleasant consequences. After the 09/11/2001 terrorist attack, "Why do they hate us?" was a favorite question for many people. Conservatives only wanted to answer that "they hate us for our freedoms."

Popular or not, Schlesinger's advice is still worth remembering: "We can not take the easy course and blame everyone but ourselves for the things we do."

Since the 1968 Presidential campaign, though, Democrats came to consider it toxic for them to talk about any kind of larger sociological causes for any kind of violence. The United States began a long period of treating crime and violence in a "law and order" framework, eventually developing a practice Jonathan Simon describes as "governing through crime," i.e., using the fear of crime as a central organizing principle of daily governance. Simon at his blog (also called Governing Through Crime) posted on President Obama's speech in Aurora after the shootings there earlier this month, Full Force of our Justice System? 07/23/2012. He was struck by the sentences Obama used in a presentation that was otherwise in his Pastor-in-Chief mode, "In the end, after he has felt the full force of our justice system, what will be remembered are the good people who were impacted by this tragedy." Simon characterized that statement this way:

It is an unsettling reminder that even (or especially) at a time of unending national economic woes, retribution and especially capital punishment remain esssential [sic] to our national political culture (for why, see [Simon's book] Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear). The President, after all, has nothing to say legally about what kind of punishment (full force, or otherwise), the killer (if that is who is in custody) will face. He does get to execute people by direct order through drone strikes, of course, as well as deport tens of thousands of others, some to death or worst; and make no mistake, this President has done so with relish and he wants you to know that. While he probably can't do either to James Holmes right now, nobody could miss the parallel with President W's promise to the 9/11 terrorist that they would "hear from you" soon. The President as vengeance-seeker. Why bother with a written Constitution, we should just rule by Icelandic Sagas.

Simon notes, obviously not in approval, that our Nobel Peace Prize President "has never missed an opportunity to dip his robes in the symbolic blood of capital punishment."

Schlesinger's speech in 1968 focused on his criticism of Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse's social theory, and his essay Repressive Tolerance in particular. Maybe I'll deal with Schlesinger's comments on that in a later post. Here I'll just note that he shows a fundamental misunderstanding of Marcuse's viewpoint in calling it a kind of "existential politics" that "springs much more from Sorel than from Kierkegaard." Whatever existential elements may have been in Marcuse's politics, it didn't stem for Sorel or very much from Kierkegaard. Fourier and Hegel would have been closer to the mark.

But what is striking about Schlesinger's discussion of violence is that he straightforwardly names the Vietnam War as a likely source:

The causes of student insurgency vary from college to college, and from country to country. It would seem likely that the primary incitement in our own nation has been the war in Vietnam - a war which has tempted our government into its course of appalling and insensate destruction, a war which, through the draft, has demanded that young Americans kill and die where they can see no rational relationship between personal sacrifice and national interest. But the cause is also more than the Vietnam war. For that war has come for many to prefigure a larger incomprehensibility, a larger absurdity, even a larger wickedness, in our official society. For some it has come to seem, not an aberration, but the inevitable result of the irremediable corruption of the American system.

I cannot share the belief that there was something foreordained and ineluctable about the war in Vietnam - that the nature of American society would have compelled any set of men in Washington to pursue the same course of folly. This really seems determinist nonsense. [Schlesinger is referring there to some of the more simplistic theories of imperialism popular at the time.] One can still understand, though, why the contradictions of our society weigh so heavily on the young - the contradictions between the righteousness of a Secretary of State and the ruthlessness of a B-52; between the notion that violence is fine against simple folk ten thousand miles away and shocking against injustice in our own land; between the equality demanded by our constitutional structure and the equality denied by our social structure; even between the accepted habits of one generation and the emerging habits of the next, as when a parent tipsy on his fourth martini begins a tirade against marijuana. [my emphasis]

As advocates of domestic arms proliferation have been quick to point out since the mass gun murders in Aurora, violent crime has declined in the United States in recent years. Not having looked closely at the statistics lately, I would assume that the aging of the population has been a major factor. If there is any causal relationship between the proliferation of guns and the reduction in violent crime, I haven't seen it documented. There is a correlation, but there's also a correlation between the reduction of violent crime in the US and the growth of population in India. Correlation doesn't equal causation.

But there are violent crimes going on and enough mass murders that our political elites and mass media have essentially accepted them as routine parts of American life, more worthy of coverage than jaywalking or burglary, but not much worthy of special concern.

I've pretty much always been very skeptical about violence in movies, TV or even comic books somehow being a significant cause of real-life violence. (Schlesinger around that time was also pointing to such sources as likely causes.) People over the age of around six can tell the difference between stories and real life.

Military violence, and the mass reverence for it in American society, are very much real life. So is capital punishment. And the fact that it's now considered perfectly acceptable to fantasize out loud about slaughtering military foes, assassinating even American citizens from the air without an indictment much less a trial, and putting convicted criminals to death must be having some kind of real-world effect in changing standards toward violence.

Forensic psychologist Karen Franklin offered some very helpful reminders after the Aurora shooting about jumping to conclusions or looking for simple explanations for such events or easy solutions for the problem, Aurora massacre: To speak or not to speak? In The News 07/22/2012.

In the longer term, though, it's well worth considering what role the psychological militarization of American political discussion, and the long-term effects of the military preparedness rhetoric Cold War which has now morphed into the Long War has on incidents of violence and mass murder in the United States.

Tags: arthur schlesinger jr, aurora shooting, vietnam war

What kind of reformist vision did William Appleman Williams have?

William Appleman Williams (1921-1990)

The Nation in July presents a long essay on the late historian William Appleman Williams by historian Greg Grandin, Off Dead Center: William Appleman Williams 07/01/09 (07/20/09 edition).

Andrew Bacevich in The New American Militarism (2005) gives Williams credit, along with Charles Beard, for focusing attention on internal economic and political factors that affected American foreign policy. Because much of conventional commentary and scholarly analysis of US foreign policy fails to do so. Bacevich certainly didn't make any blanket endorsement of either of their outlooks.

Grandin talks about the fact that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., considered Williams an ideological opponent. But he doesn't discuss Schlesinger's actual critique of Williams' historical work, which raise some substantial scholarly objections to Williams' work, arguing that his mis- or over-interpreted some documents and gave unwarrented significance to some events. But Sclesinger's main criticism of Williams' account of the origins of the Cold War, in particular, was directed against a flaw of islolationist work in general, i.e., that it treated American foreign policy as almost exclusively self-generated and ignored or minimized the signficance of other international actors. (That criticism applies even more emphatically to Charles Beard.)

This apparently admiring description of Williams' self-understanding late in life gives good picture, though probably unintentional on Grandin's part, of the hodge-podge of organizing ideas that plagued his historical narratives:

[His own] self-description makes Williams sound more like a Hegelian than a Spinozian or a Marxist. Indeed, despite his searing indictment of empire, he was openly obsessed with the idea of America as the embodiment of a world spirit. "America," he wrote toward the end of his life, "is the kind of culture that wakes you in the night, the kind of nightmare that may [yet] possibly lead us closer to the truth." Williams was a serious, empirical scholar whose prose could be as dense as any academic's, but he often broke out of form to riff in a style as sprawling as his subject matter. "If we start with reform and go on to modernize, prosperity, improve, uplift," he said of the action words of American expansion, "then we come out with purify, put right, purgation, overtake, and never look back. Finally, we find stewards as policemen, which leads us backward and forwards to benevolence, surveillance, reform, paternalism, and systematic discipline in the name of progress." Intoxicated by the "dialectical tension" of "coming apart at the seams at midnight" and "stitching it back together in a sentence or two at 3 a.m.," Williams, a jazz drummer, increasingly expressed himself with bop rhythm and beat imagery. [?!?!] "Assume the worst," he warned in his last great work, chanting its title with a frequency worthy of Howl's Moloch: "empire as a way of life will lead to nuclear death."

I'm sorry, but I have no idea of just what the [Cheney] the dialectical tension of coming apart at midnight might mean. It sounds depressingly like a Maureen Dowd column to me.

Now, there's a lot that can legitimately be said in criticism of Cold War liberalism. But I don't that this counts:

Well before the publication of The Tragedy of American Diplomacy--Williams's best-known book, it has been reissued this year on its fiftieth anniversary--tragedy had become a favored genre of scholars operating within the "vital center" of American intellectual life. "History is not a redeemer, promising to solve all human problems in time," Arthur Schlesinger cautioned in 1949 in a Partisan Review essay nominally about the Civil War but really a brief for containment; it is rather a "tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration." Other "tough-minded" liberal intellectuals, such as Richard Hofstadter and Reinhold Niebuhr, invoked the force of instinct and passion in mass society as something of a deus ex machina to stress history's tragic dimensions. The notion that evil did not "proceed from a cruel system"--that is, a system that could be engineered to produce ever more virtue--but from man's "dark and tangled aspects," as Schlesinger interpreted Niebuhr, helped transform liberalism from a politics of hope to one of fear. The policy implications were clear: the New Deal was the outer limit of reform, beyond which lay the nether lands of totalitarianism, and the Soviets needed to be confronted with the same resolve with which the Union defeated the Confederacy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt beat the Nazis.

When did Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. ever say that the New Deal was "the outer limit of reform"? In fact, he was very much a supporter of the Kennedy and Johnson brands of domestic liberalism which did go beyond the New Deal. Surely Grandin has heard of Medicare? And both Schlesinger and Niebuhr became opponents of the Vietnam War. In fact, Niebuhr's Christian conception of the tragic element in human history led him and others who followed his thinking to recognize the limits of US power that the country had encountered in the Vietnam War. Schlesinger lived to see the early part of the Iraq War, which he also opposed forthrightly.

Grandin also seems to find some grand and subtle historical insight in the following:

Williams did not believe, as did many progressives of his day, that liberalism was a way station on the road to social democracy; he thought that whatever transformative force the philosophy once held had mutated either into a corrosive, anti-intellectual individualism or a justification for monopoly capitalism, in both cases kept alive only by a constant "fleeing forward." Thus he was free to find traces of a latent socialism in the unlikeliest places, including in the South's culture of defeat and resentment (a "prism-prison" that distorts some truths, leading to racial supremacy and "hawkish bellicosity," but that clarifies a healthy distrust of the state) and in the writings of aristocrats, conservative politicians and businessmen who, even if they still defended hierarchy, candidly confronted the predicaments of capital. His most famous restoration project was Herbert Hoover; it seemed that every time Schlesinger wrote a book about FDR, Williams would counter by finding some new, underappreciated quality in the man New Dealers loved to ridicule.

He continues immediately to say that Williams greatest inspiration was the American civil rights movement. But he doesn't seem to see the screaming contradiction he spells out in that paragraph just quoted: Williams looked to conservatives more than (American-style) liberals for a hopeful future. How could those ideas lead to some kind of "socialism"? Possibly because his idea of "socialism" seemed to be, as Bacevich describes it, something like his picture of peaceful Midwestern farm communities.

Grandin's essay reminds me how the American political vocablulary complicates ideological discussions. Williams drew on the "progressive" tradition to form a vision of a non-imperialist, "socialist" America based on the ideas of reactionary Republicans like Herbert Hoover and a rejection of the brand of liberalism represented by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Many "progressives" thought that "liberalism" would lead to "social democracy": a statement that would make sense if we knew just what he meant by progressives, liberalism and social democracy.

The problem with untangling this is realted to the fact that in the context of European politics of the same period, the relationships among liberals, social democrats, conservatives and Communists could be more easily described because there were actual parties representing those distinct trends. In Europe, liberalism was the basic ideology of "free market" capitalism, with both conservative and liberal trends within that understanding. Social democracy evolved from a reformist opposition to capitalism to a reformist version of support for capitalism. The Communists and the social democrats were both parties of the Left, sharing a broad criticism of capitalist social relations. But no one had trouble telling the two apart most of the times, though their opponents often found it convenient to claim otherwise.

Whereas in America, reformist and conservative-to-reactionary tendencies were present in both major parties. Reformers in the early part of the 20th century tended to call themselves progressives. When Theodore Roosevelt formed a third party to again for President in 1912, it was called the Progressive Party. The model liberal Woodrow Wilson opposed extending the franchise to women. The Democratic Party of Jefferson and Jackson was home to both union workers and militant farmers and to the Ku Klux Klan and reactionary Southern planters. The "liberal" label more-or-less as we know it today in American politics really emerged after the First World War, when pro-labor activists wanted a way to distinguish themselves from "progressives", who were often affluent middle-class reformers whose reforms were partially aimed at restricted the power of unions.

So we wind up today with American liberals being the pro-labor advocates - though many are not nearly as pro-labor as they should be - and conservatives being the more overt advocates of unrestrained corporate power.

How does this relate to a critique like that of Williams or to Grandin's laudatory essay? Because part of the problem in Williams' approach is that he conflates the "liberalism" of the 19th century with that of the 20th, and the "liberalism" of democracy and human rights with that of coporate greed and military expansionism. He then makes the liberals of the 20th century the villains of American history. And from the perspective of his own pastoral, small-town vision of "socialism" - which seems to be more like the vision of the Amish communities or the Shakers than of European Social Democrats or Communists - he looked hard to find positive examples and trends among conservatives and even reactionaries.

Since the American New Left of the 1960s found itself protesting the Vietnam War and other foreign policies of two liberal Democratic administrations, Williams' arguments resonated with many New Left activists and intellectuals, who presumably missed or weren't too concerned about some of the basically reactionary perspectives underlying his analysis. It's surprising that a historian like Williams for whom conservatives are the heroes of American history is still being claimed by Grandin as a figure of the left. But then, if your ideal society is a "socialism" of Midwestern farm towns, maybe Herbert Hoover counts as a leftist.

The complicated but fascinating ideological tangles in Williams' work and its reception shouldn't obscure the important substantive objections that his critics like Schlesinger advanced on his use of historical material.

Grandin tries to dispute that Williams was repelled by the excesses he perceived in the youth movement of the late 1960s. But there does seem to have been some kind of biographical break in his approach at about that time. Bacevich perceives such a break around 1969. As I've noted in other posts on Williams, his work in the 1970s actually endorsed the neo-Confederate position that the North should have just let the Southern states go in peace, because that's all they really wanted. That position is frankly ludicrous on both factual and interpretative grounds. And any approach to American history that gets you to that point has to be seriously flawed.

Tags: arthur schlesinger jr, william appleman williams

The sixties: liberals vs the left

Some of the polemics over Obama and Clinton have tried to cast Obama in the role of the "new politics" activists of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This period is so crucial to the ideology of the "culture war" that Republicans especially and the media drones keep referencing current politics back to that time. But it's a sloppy comparison. I have high hopes that Obama could wind up leading a dramatic reform movement, even though he approched his political career as more of a conciliatory moderate. Happily, he seems to be taking serious account of the fact that today's authoriarian Republican Party has no use for any kind of conciliatory political strategy.

But it's hard for me to cast Hillary Clinton in the role of Hubert Humphrey in 1968 or 1972. And if Obama turns into the leader of a Bobby Kennedy type coalition, it will be because he recognizes the possibilities in the mood of the public and the Democratic base, not because he's approached politics that way so far. On health care and economic issues, Obama seems to be more conservative that Clinton. He had a more emphatically anti-Iraq War position than Clinton. But he's not only joined the Republican chorus that Democrats aren't respectful enough to religious people - although his recent "pastor problems" may have convinced him that dog won't hunt for him. He's even made rhetorical gestures toward the Republicans Social Security privitization scam! In organizational terms, his campaign has some resemblances to McGovern's in 1972 in tapping underutilized sources of funds (direct mail to small contributors then, the Internet now) and in building political networks more independent of the established Party structures. But ideologically and even demographically, comparing the current Party divisions over Obama and Clinton to the 1972 situation that has embedded itself in the minds of the "culture war" ideologists doesn't seem to be a very helpful viewpoint in understanding it.

But we're already entering a period when some people who have criticized the Bush administration for various problems, especially the spectacularly ill-advised invasion of Iraq, are finding Obama even less to their liking than the Republicans' Bush-on-steroids candidate John McCain. The "paleo-conservatives" like Pat Buchanan who have applied isolationist criticisms against Bush's foreign policy will, if Buchanan himself is any measure, find the Democratic Presidential candidate far more distressing than McCain. And since come next January there's at least a chance we'll have a Democratic administration inheriting two overt wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and less overt ones in Somalia and Pakistan, it doesn't hurt to think about reasons that democratic reformists and the Democratic base may have to find real differences with a liberal Democratic administration. The "sixties" experience can at least serve as a reminder.

One of the challenging things about the politics of the 1960s is that the civil rights and Black Power movements, the opposition to the Vietnam War, and the New Left in its various manifestations were to a large extent directed against Democratic Party liberalism.

Liberalism means something different in the United States than in most countries. The classical liberals of the nineteenth century and their most direct ideological descendants, like the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in Germany today, advocated constitutional government, civil liberties, and minimal regulation of business activity. Something like American Libertarians.

American "liberalism" in the sense we know it today is pro-labor and believes in affirmative government action on social and economic problems. That labeling happened in America in the wake of the First World War. Reformists had called themselves Populists and Progressives in the preceding decades, because "liberalism" was understood in the classical sense. But after the war and the collapse of a distinct Progressive movement, then pro-labor, pro-affirmative-government reformers began to use the label "liberal" in a new way to distinguish themselves from the Progressives and also from the scary Bolsheviks who had taken over in Russia. That fear also had led the Wilson administration to promote a Red Scare ("red" meant Communist then, not Republican), and it wasn't overly scrupulous in respecting civil liberties in going after scary radicals. So there was also an urgent need to emphasize the "liberal" virtues of the rule of law and human rights at the time.

In terms of the left/liberal distinctions in the 1960s in the US, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. made a wide-ranging commentary on the issues that were highlighted in conflicts between the New Left and Democratic liberals in The Crisis of Confidence: Ideas, Power and Vilence in America (1969).

In what could be seen as a stereotypical liberal framing, he compares the New Left to what he call the New Right, by which he apparently means the George Wallace movement, with its fury against the elites and a heavy dose of racism and authoritarianism:

In particular, the New Left and the New Right are agreed in their condemnation of the central institutions of American power, whether real (the national government), semi-mythical (the Establishment) or mythical (the power elite) [the latter being the title of C. Wright Mills' most influential book]. However much they detest each other, the two extremisms have common methods and common targets. "The real enemy of the radical left in America," writes the New Left Washington Free Press, "is and always has been liberalism." Karl Hess, who as Senator Goldwater's speech writer in 1964 reputedly wrote that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," recently said, "I take my stand with the anti-authoritarians, and so does the New Left. ... This is one of the reasons I find many of the statements and actions of SDS very satisfying."

It is a happy symbiosis. George Wallace needs Tom Hayden and Eldridge Cleaver; Tom Hayden and Eldridge Cleaver need George Wallace. As Hayden put it in Chicago in August 1968, "America is reaching a point of bankruptcy and decay so complete that only military tools can protect the political institutions. ... As reform has failed, the reliance on police power has become more visible. . . . Our victory lies in progressively demystifying a false democracy, showing the organized violence underneath reformism and manipulation." This is exactly what Wallace requires for his followers; and Wallace's promise to save law and order by stationing paratroopers twelve feet apart on every block is exactly what Hayden and Cleaver require for their followers. Thus New Left and New Right verify each other's claims and witness each other's pretensions. For all their vast differences in values and objectives they end as tacit partners in a common assault on civility and democracy. (my emphasis)

SDS and antiwar leader Tom Hayden seems to have really been bugging Schlesinger at the time he wrote that book.

What makes that a stereotypical liberal framing is that it present the liberal viewpoint, which he is applying there, as defending bedrock American values against the midguided forces of barbarism on the far left and the far right.

The problem is, that construction relies on rhetorical abstractions. The Wallace movement that he called the "new" Right was what the Southern Democrats were from, oh, the end of the Civil War to the 1960s. Wallace in non-racial policies was more liberal than many of his fellow Southern Democrats.

The New Left in the US was directing its criticism against liberalism, or "corporate liberalism" which is probably a better name for it. That was in no small part due to the fact there was a liberal Democratic President in the 1960s who was prosecuting the Vietnam War.

Schlesinger distinguishes between the "new politics" ativists, those antiwar and reform-minded activists who backed Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy in 1968, and the "New Left". That's a meaningful distinction. But it wasn't clear-cut, either. "New politics" activists often had some background in the civil-rights or studewnt movements. And their priority concerns around civil rights and opposing the Vietnam War were similar.

Schlesinger, a close associate of Bobby Kennedy, was sympathetic to the "new politics" activists but was anxious to distinguish himself from groups like the Black Panthers or the SDS with explicitly revolutionary goals. And that in itself was fair enough. Schlesinger was not a revolutionary. And, of course, neither was Bobby Kennedy.

But the mirror-image equivalence he draws between New Left and New Right was unrealistic, particularly on the issue of violence. However reckless some of the talk about violence from left militant groups may have been, it also came out of years of seeing nonviolent protests being met with violence: in the South, on college campuses, in antiwar demonstrations. The resonance of the Black Panthers' slogan of armed self-defense with so many in urban ghettos was due to real experiences of chronic police misbehavior by nearly all-white police forces in their communities.

The Wallace movement, on the other hand, represented a harsher and more authoritarian version of that institutionalized violence on the national level. But it didn't represent anything "new" in the Deep South. Wallace represented the kind of repression and violence that had been the "establishment", the dominant practice of government, in the segregated South.

Sure, any groups that stand outside the mainstream can be equated in some of the mechanics of their movement, e.g., trying to get third parties on the ballot. But the content of the politics of the movements Schlesinger was calling "New Left" and "New Right" is essential to any meaningful description of them.

And even if he defined the New Left as being in his eyes a totalitarian movement in its goals, or maybe "objectively" a totalitarian movement as Marxists and neocons might put it, it's still pretty basic that the real existing New Left movement in 1968-9 was a radical-democratic movement. The Wallace movement was antidemocratic and authoritarian. The New Left were looking for more active forms of "participatory democracy". The Wallace movement defended the segregationist version of "states rights" so that the local shurffs would have maximum discretion in dealing with uppity Negroes. Sure, there are levels of abstraction where those differences would not look so great. But they would have to be stratospheric levels of abstraction.

The New Left did not succeed in creating a permanent, distinctive political force in American politics. In Europe, the Green Parties can reasonably be seen as a long-term instutitional successor to the New Left. Though, I might add, so far as I'm aware none of them has declared their parties to be officially guided by the philosophies of Franz Fanon or Herbert Marcuse.

In the US, the two major parties of the 1960s have not been displaced. The Republican Party has become essentially what the George Wallce movement was in 1968. Let's be fair to Wallace, though. I don't believe he ever officially and openly endorsed torture as the present-day Republican Party does.

There was no comparable takeover of the Democratic Party by the New Left. And the actual influence of ideas that could be considered distinctively New Left is very diffuse, though by no means without lasting influence in some ways. Considering that Barack Obama's politics appear to be distinctly more conservative than Bobby Kennedy's, I think it's safe to say that the Democratic Party has not been taken over by followers of Franz Fanon, either.

Tags: arthur schlesinger jr, new left, tom hayden

Democratic voter groups

This is a long post, and kind of heavy on the wonkery, because it includes some long quotes that give some good conceptual frameworks for looking at the class issues in this year's elections. More specifically, they give some basis for judging how close the Big Pundits are coming to reality when they make some self-confident assertion about what "the white working class" is thinking, or about what "latte liberals" want. (When they talk about what "the American people" want, that's easy to interpret; that mean what the pundit who's speaking wants. Big Pundits assume they speak for "the American people".)

Mark Schone did a great interview with Tom Schaller, Ruy Teixeira and Sean Wilentz, What role did race play with white Democrats? Salon 06/03/08. Schaller, Teixeira and Wilentz do a good job in this piece of trying to adhere to empirical data on the groups they discuss. In it, they talk about the current Democratic coalition:

Schaller: I hate to crystallize it, but in a sense, and they're not equally proportionate in their size, but if you think of the Democratic Party as working-class whites, working-class blacks, which is almost a redundancy because of socioeconomic differences, though obviously there are some middle-class blacks, and then the elite class, whatever that is, the cappuccino, latte class ... and trichotomize the Democratic Party coalition as those three things, if you can get two of the three you're probably going to be the nominee. And I don't want to speak for Sean, but I think his point is well, OK, but you need all three to win the general election and which two do you need to start with? And I suspect Sean would say that you need to start with the two working-class components because the college professor and the New York City liberals, they're going to come home eventually. Whereas if you start with the cappuccino classes and the black coalition you don't know if you're going, and this is Hillary Clinton's essential argument, you don't know if you're going to get the white working-class voters to come along in the end. (my emphasis)

I actually think Schaller has some pretty good shorthand terms there. The "cappuccino classes" is a phrase that can cover the Democratic investment bankers as well as affluent environmentalists, small business owners, and liberal-minded middle managers and professionals.

Both African-Americans and Latinos are groups which face certain issues that heavily affect their voting behavior which are more likely to override class factors than among the majority whites, so it certainly makes sense to view them as distinct voting groups.

The "white working-class" designation is in some ways the vaguest, just because of lack of consensus on how that group should actually be defined, and the problems in the data that have to be used to do so. But it's still a meaningful and useful way to describe a critical element of the Democratic coalition.

Salon: My interest is whether or not you alienate them [the Clinton voters], after they've chosen the other candidate, by telling them that they were bad people for choosing that candidate.

Wilentz: I think that's an excellent point. The media is getting those voters very angry by saying that it is based on race. ...

Teixeira: It's interesting to note that even now, the national security issue having been highlighted, it's more a national security election now between Obama and McCain than it's likely to be later, because McCain has basically talked about what he's wanted to talk about and Hillary and Obama have been cutting themselves up with knives. So it's a pretty good time to be pushing the election in that direction. And yet, take the latest Pew poll, Obama is still ahead by three points, even in a poll in which he's deemed not tough enough by a lot of voters, many more than John McCain on national security, he's got a nine-point deficit among white voters. They don't give a white working-class voter data point, but nine points, which is much better than John Kerry. So already he's there. You would think that the dynamic as it unfolds and as it moves more to domestic issues whether John McCain likes it or not is going to make that even more favorable.

Schaller: For all the discussion of the Appalachian white voter, however you want to define it, which was made very real in recent weeks because of Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and so forth, when you look at the election and pull this back to the lens of the actual electoral map and the states that actually matter, you're talking about Ohio, Pennsylvania, maybe Missouri, as your Appalachian states that matter, and then really, the election in the last two cycles where it matters, in the Midwest, particularly the upper Midwest and the Southwest, and the white voters there are a little different. In the Midwest, yes, they're a little more evangelical, but the Midwest has the highest high school graduation, it has the highest college graduate rates of any region in the country. And your independent voters in Colorado, in New Mexico and Nevada are potentially in play for Obama or for Clinton if she were to be the nominee. Those voters are transplanted voters, often from the greater Northeast, who moved down there because of property values and bigger communities and more control over their land and new jobs and a new economy, or they moved east from California. And Ruy and John Judis wrote about these sorts of communities: the Santa Fe-Albuquerque corridor, the Denver-Boulder corridor. So the white voter discussion, yes, is partially about the white Appalachian voter, but that's only a third of the conversation in terms of where it really matters [for the Presidential election]. We don't really have to talk about the Barney Frank white voter in Massachusetts because that's out of play and we don't have to talk about the white voter from South Texas because that's really not an issue, we need to talk about pretty well educated upper Midwest white voters and we need to talk about independent white voters in the growing suburbs of the Southwest and we, yes, we need to talk about Appalachian downscale, non-college educated or some college education white voters in Appalachian districts.

Teixeira: I agree with that and even a little bit more specific, if you look at a lot of these places, including even in some of these Appalachian linked states and certainly outside of it, one thing that's kind of interesting, the sort of upper tier of the white working class if you define it in education terms, those with some college, which is a growing group compared to the rest of the white working class, they tend to be quite a bit more sympathetic to Obama than people with a high school degree or less. I think if Obama could possibly put more of those voters in play, that could make a difference in a lot of these states. It appears like a lot of these voters that have at least some college, a little more cosmopolitan, are a little less likely to reject Obama on cultural familiarity or even a racial basis. That could wind up making a difference in this election. I think there's a problem because people hear the white working class, however it's defined, they gravitate as if pulled in by a magnet to the idea that some blue-collar dude who works in a factory or something, has a high school degree, it's so different than the way any reasonable definition of the white working class would be today. It's such a variegated and highly diverse and much more upscale group than I think people are used to thinking about it.

Part of what makes these categories seem vague and awkward is that they tend to come into play when we're talking about national trends and statewide elections. But it's not always easy to put defining images or concepts together with the groups being described. In a local or Congressional election, you're talking about getting support from this homeowners association, or that trade group, or the city veterans group, or a regional environmental coalition, or the local merchant's association, etc. But when we talk about voting by groups in larger aggregates, it's harder to think of commonly-assumed images or groups to which to attach them.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. In The Crisis of Confidence: Ideas, Politics and Violence in America (1969) looked at the changing demographic dynamics within the national Democratic Party, as exhibited in the politics of 1968. Since that was the pivotal time for the political realignment that eventually shaped the parties as they are in 2008, it's an interesting comparison.

He describes the growing constituency of the Republican Party as the "technostructure", highly skilled professionals and middle managers:

The technostructure has, of course, its hip wing which in the main followed [Democratic] Senator [Eugene] McCarthy in 1968. ["Hip" in 1969 meant cool, fashionable, stylish.] But its square majority in the suburban foxholes saw themselves contentedly, if not quite ecstatically, in Mr. Nixon. The highly programmed character of the Nixon campaign faithfully expressed the technical virtuosity of the new men, as the campaign's intellectual emptiness reflected their conviction that technique matters more than substance. Mostly salaried employees, moving from one place to another at the organization's behest, they are beset by taxes, mortgages, installment debt, social permissiveness, rebellious children and racial integration. In the campaign Mr. Nixon called them "the forgotten people ... those who are not breaking the law, those who do pay taxes, those who do go to work, those who do support their churches and their schools." These "forgotten Americans," he said, "finally have become angry ... because they love America and don't like what has been happening to America for the last four years."

Schlesinger saw Gene McCarthy's appeal lying with new interest groups that had grown up within the Democratic coalition. The New Deal coalition had united industrial workers, farmers, Northern urbanites and Southern segregationists. By 1969, the Southern segregationist configuration was no longer possible, unless some of those voters could be kept within the Democratic Party on some new basis.

McCarthy was the prototypical latte liberal, though latte's hadn't become "hip" yet. This was the pre-Starbucks era. They had progressive instincts on peace and social reform issues. But they would die of embarrassment if any of their friends saw them walking a picket line. (We're talking stereotypes, here.) To put that latter point another way, they were individualistic enough to not want to think of themselves as part of an interest groups. Schlesinger writes:

The new interest groups - the suburban middle class, the college students, the church groups, the peace groups - may be less familiar than the wool industry or the steelworkers, less familiar even than the Negroes, the Puerto Ricans, the Mexican Americans, the Indians and the poor in general. That hardly makes them any less interest groups.

Historian Peniel Joseph makes a similar point about Obama's core voters (Obama Breaks Political Ground En Route to Nomination PBS Newshour 06/04/08):

I think what Obama has done -- and this is what Hillary Clinton supporters have to realize and even Latino voters have to realize, as well -- it's the whole notion of "E pluribus unum" in terms of he's going beyond just race and saying that he's going to represent all Americans.

So it's not the old politics of sort of interest group politics, and we have the feminists or African-Americans or environmentalists, and we all want a piece of the pie. We want a transformation where one candidate actually represents all those interests, including the interest of white, working people and the white poor, as well.

I didn't quote that to try to equate McCarthy's appeal with Obama's. That would confuse more things than it would clarify. But Joseph describes some of that sense of wanting to get beyond "interest group politics", the idea being that there's something inherently wrong with interest groups.

Continuing with Schlesinger's definition of the McCarthy vote in 1968:

It was McCarthy's achievement to understand that voters were beginning to defect from the old interest groups. It was his effort to put together a coalition of the new interest groups. The inner logic of his remarkable campaign was to unite the college-educated, whatever their race, religion or previous condition of servitude: teachers, students, church leaders, enlightened businessmen, civic-minded suburbanites, the rising professional, managerial and technical classes. This, of course, is why his campaign was so popular in the suburbs. This is why he was the Democratic aspirant with the greatest appeal to Republicans. This too accounts for the "we happy few" flavor of the McCarthy campaign. It explains why his embattled followers on the streets of Chicago [during the 1968 Chicago convention] were mostly sons and daughters of the white middle class — why they received so little sympathy or support from the blacks, the workingmen and the poor.

In that last observation, I suspect Schlesinger was overly influenced by the conventional wisdom of the day. I'm sure that there were plenty of blacks, poor people and workers who didn't think the Chicago police ought to be busting heads unless it was really necessary. And people could figure out even from TV news reporting in those days that the Chicago "police riot" wasn't necessary.

Unfortunately, the following is probably an anecdote that accurately portrays one of the less attractive aspects of Gene McCarthy's perspective:

He was attempting something novel in progressive politics — a revolution against the proletariat. [That sentence is an uncharacteristically lame formulation by Schlesinger.] McCarthy himself pointed up the contrast between his conception and Robert Kennedy's conception of the Democratic coalition when he told a university audience in Corvallis during the Oregon primary that public opinion polls showed Kennedy running best "among the less intelligent and less educated people in America. And I don't mean to fault them for voting for him, but I think that you ought to bear that in mind as you go to the polls here on Tuesday." (my emphasis)

Here's RFK partisan Schlesinger's take on the Kennedy voters within the Democratic Party in 1968. He saw the 1968 standard-bearer Hubert Humphrey as trapped within "Old Politics" conceptions based on a New Deal coalition that had been transformed dramatically since 1945:

The Kennedy way, in my judgment, stands in sharp contrast to both the Humphrey and McCarthy ways. Kennedy saw the Democratic party as a coalition neither of political brokers nor of college graduates but as a link between the two Americas — between educated and uneducated America, between rich and poor America, between white and black America. Unlike Humphrey, he did not suppose that the traditional political institutions could control their constituencies in the new age of television and public opinion polls. Unlike McCarthy, he did not regard the "less educated" as necessarily the "less intelligent," and he was not prepared to surrender the working masses — even the cops and the cabdrivers — to George Wallace.

Like Humphrey and McCarthy, Kennedy began his analysis with the crisis of the Roosevelt coalition; but I think he read the Roosevelt experience with more precision and penetration. He dissented from the Humphrey way because he understood that Roosevelt did not create his coalition through the institutions to which Humphrey had committed himself; these institutions were the effect, not the cause of FDR's success. He dissented from the McCarthy way because he did not believe that the old Roosevelt coalition had splintered beyond recall, though he knew that coalition had to be extended by enlisting the technostructure and the suburbs. Where Humphrey proposed to reconstruct the Roosevelt coalition from above, through the political brokers, Kennedy proposed to reconstruct it from below, through his intense personal identification with the victims and casualties of American society, through urging programs on behalf of the alienated groups and through increasing their own direct participation in the political and administrative process.

Tags: 1968, arthur schlesinger jr, democratic party, eugene mccarthy, robert f kennedy jr., ruy teixeira, sean wilentz, tom schaller

Credibility gap

This sure sounds awfully familiar. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote in The Crisis of Confidence: Ideas, Power and Violence in America (1969):

One of the oddities of the Vietnam period was the reverence accorded General Westmoreland by the American press as well as by the President of the United States. Westmoreland's assessments of the Vietnam problem are worth recalling: "I am optimistic and we are making good progress" (June 20, 1964); "I believe the whole operation is moving in our favor" (July 8, 1964); "This is the time to be more aggressive and take the offensive" (April 14, 1965); "It is doubtful if we will ever have anything in the way of opposing land forces as in the Korean War" (July 9, 1965); "Backed at home by resolve, confidence, patience, determination and continued support, we will prevail in Vietnam over the Communist aggressor" (April 28, 1967); "We have achieved all our objectives, while the enemy has failed dismally" (July 13, 1967); "[Neocon guru] Senator Henry Jackson said that Westmoreland ... 'feels quite confident. He sees the enemy losing steadily and continuously' " (November 17, 1967); "I am absolutely certain that, whereas in 1945 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing. ... In general he can fight his large forces only at the edges of his sanctuaries. ... His guerrilla force is declining at a steady rate. ... I see progress as I travel all over Vietnam. ... The enemy's hopes are bankrupt" (November 22, 1967); "Through careful exploitation of the enemy's vulnerabilities and application of our superior firepower and mobility, we should expect our gains of 1967 to be increased manyfold in 1968" (January 1, 1968); "Although the enemy has achieved some temporary psychological advantage, he suffered a military defeat. ... I do not believe Hanoi can hold up under a long war" (February 26, 1968); "Militarily we have never been in a better relative position in South Vietnam. ... The spirit of the offensive is now prevalent throughout Vietnam" (April 8, 1968); "The enemy seems to be approaching a point of desperation. His forces are deteriorating in strength and quality. ... Time is on our side" (May 30,1968); "The enemy is getting nowhere militarily. ... He is frustrated to the point where he is desperate" (Jun 9, 1968).

What an astonishing record of misconception and misjudgment! If someone had complied this record in business, where money is involved, he would have long since been fired. But if he is a general and only spends lives, he is decorated and promoted. (my emphasis)

And then our glorious generals wonder why they develop a credibility gap.

It's painfully obvious that our officer corps didn't learn that lesson from Vietnam. Instead, they "learned" that if they were a bit more slick with their propaganda and controlled information more thoroughly, then there happy-talk would never get exposed for the nonsense it is.

Tags: arthur schlesinger jr, vietnam war

Times change (And where's your flag pin, boy?)

I guess I'm on kind of a 1960-nostalgia kick today. That same year, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote a little book supporting the Democratic candidate for President, called Kennedy or Nixon: Does it make any difference? The bolding in the following quote is mine, but otherwise it's offered with no further comment:

No one with a sense of tradition could have done what Nixon did in the years 1950-1954, thinking it good clean fun to identify his political opponents with treason to the Republic. Not that American politics has not traditionally been lively and uninhibited. Our politicians have always enjoyed a considerable latitude in polemic and invective. But one line of attack has always been considered unforgivable - that is, to question the patriotism of those with whom one disagreed about public policy. "One can criticize, slash hard, accuse opponents of stupidity, blindness, inefficiency - any number of things," as Commonweal once put it in an editorial. "But it is impossible to imply that one's opponents deliberately betrayed the interests of the United States, and then expect to be able to work with these men after the campaign is over as if nothing had happened." Today Nixon, looking back on the days when he used to characterize Truman, Stevenson, and Acheson as the supporters and defenders of the Communist conspiracy, is said to express (in private) a certain rueful regret; but he has never indicated any real understanding of the enormity of his offense. He seems now to dismiss it all as a youthful excess, not appropriate perhaps to the dignity of a Vice President, but still essentially (in one of his cherished phrases) just "a fighting, rocking, socking campaign" in the American way. He seems not to understand that false imputations of disloyalty have never been in the American way. He seems not to understand that he is the only major American politician in our history who came to prominence by techniques which, if generally adopted, would destroy the whole fabric of mutual confidence on which democracy rests. If he understood such things, he would understand better why traditional American politicians like Sam Rayburn, instead of accepting his protestations that he was just a good, free-swinging, hard-hitting American boy, continue to regard him with incredulity and contempt.

Tags: arthur schlesinger jr, authoritarianism

Iraq War critics: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and the doctrine of preventive war

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is a good person for me to quote here, not least because he first became famous with his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1945 book on Andrew Jackson, called The Age of Jackson. It not only provides a vivid picture of Old Hickory. It's also written in the language of militant democracy that was common in the World War II era, when that sort of talk from our leaders wasn't just a cynical justification for war.

Schlesinger in a recent essay analyzes the Bush Doctrine of preventive war:

What is the status of the Bush Doctrine today? Practically speaking, it has been sorely damaged by Mr. Bush's shrunken credibility. The entire case for preventive war rests on the assumption that we have accurate and reliable intelligence about the enemy's intentions and military capacity - accurate and reliable enough to send our young men and women to kill and die.

That is one of several reasons the dispute over Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" isn't going away. If the Bush Doctrine of preventive war is ever going to be a practical policy, it would have to have intelligence of a quality far beyond what was produced prior to the Iraq War.

The Bush administration ... had "not one doubt" about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Nor did it have any doubt about his partnership with Osama bin Laden, or about his capacity to quickly build a nuclear bomb, or about the joyous welcome as liberators that would be given our GIs. The collapse of such confident predictions suggests that the Bush Doctrine imposes a burden too heavy for our intelligence agencies to bear. For we can't ever know all the things we ought to know before going to war. The administration's credibility gap in Iraq may well undermine the preventive war policy. [my emphasis]

Schlesinger suggests that Bush's religious zeal is a political posture. He sees Bush as a Nixonian figure, creatively devious and "skillful at mobilizing opinion and brushing aside opposition." I worry that Schlesinger is being too optimistic. I'm inclined to think Bush holds to dogmatic religious beliefs that reinforce his rigidity, arrogance and self-righteousness. I hope Schlesinger's view is more correct than mine. A genuine religious zealot (who's not dysfunctionally weird like John Ashcroft) can be more dangerous than a cynical pragmatist.

Tags: arthur schlesinger jr, iraq war, laws of war, prventive war