The Real McCain

Robert Greenwald and the folks at Brave New Films have a new video on the straight-talking maverick...



More straight-talking videos can be found here.

Technorati Tags: John McCain, straight-talking maverick, Robert Greenwald, Brave New Films

Kathleen Parker, Blut und Boden and the "culture war" (Pt 1 of 2)

"Elitist" textile workers striking in Lawrence MA back when - some of them were no doubt less than 100% Americans (by Kathleen Parker's definition)

Washington Post Writer's Group Columnist Kathleen Parker, whose specialty has long been to phrase nasty prejudices for respectable white folks to use in polite company, may be losing her touch. In Full-blooded Americans Orlando Sentinel 05/14/08, she uses an approach that may embarrass some of their disciples here and there.

Glenn Greenwald (High Standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed page Salon 05/17/08) calls it her White Power column. Although I would say that its only a slightly more egregious example than her standard efforts.

But I suppose I should be grateful to her for giving me an in-the-headlines opening for a follow-up post on historian Christopher Lasch's ideas on the "culture war". Parker's latest says - with attempted polite language, of course - that white folks shouldn't vote against Obama because he's a scary black man, but because Great American McCain has a longer American ancestry.

Here she makes a stock "culture war" pitch phrased for white folks who think of themselves as the polite middle-class:

Contributing to the growing unease among yesterday's Americans is the failure of the federal government to deal with the illegal-immigration fiasco. It isn't necessarily racist or nativist to worry about what these new demographics mean to the larger American story.

Yet, white Americans primarily - and Southerners, rural and small-town folks especially - have been put on the defensive for their throwback concerns with "guns, God and gays," as Howard Dean put it in 2003. And more recently, for clinging to "guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them," as Obama described white, working-class Pennsylvanians who preferred his opponent.

The "guns, God and gays" trope has haunted Democrats, and Republicans have enjoyed dusting it off when needed to rile the locals. It's an easy play.

But so-called ordinary Americans aren't so easily manipulated and they don't need interpreters. They can spot a poser a mile off and they have a hound's nose for snootiness. They've got no truck with people who condescend nor tolerance for that down-the-nose glance from people who don't know the things they know. (my emphasis)

The phrase I bolded makes it a nonpartisan criticism of those nasty elitists, you see. And it also let middle-class white folks who don't want to be completely identified with "rednecks" or with - mercy me! - low-class types who might join unions a way to remind their listeners that while they themselves aren't part of such a class of people, they still respect them as the salt of the earth and all as against those "elitists" in the "Democrat Party".

I posted before about Christopher Lasch's 1991 book The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. In that book, he was addressing the question that engaged conventional wisdom so intensely at the time, of how the Democrats could ever win the Presidency again in the face of the Republicans' successful "culture war" appeals.

A large part of that discussion, then and now, missed or ignored some bedrock basics about the American political scene. Two major regional political shifts have occurred in American politics since Richard Nixon began the Republican Southern Strategy in 1968. The South now votes Republican in national elections. And California votes Democratic.

The later shift had not yet occurred in 1991. Bill Clinton carried California in 1992. And that fool Republican Governor Pete Wilson had the dandy idea to support the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in 1994. Since the polite language of nice white ladies like Kathleen Parker couldn't hide the nativist and racial bigotry displayed by many of Prop 187's supporters, it had the effect of galvanizing Latino voters to register and go to the polls in higher proportions than ever before, a habit that has continued. It also reminded them dramatically that the Republican Party is the one that doesn't like black and brown people all that much and thinks Spanish is some kind of sinister plot against regular white Americans.

Since then, the state that gave the country Presidents Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon has generally voted Democratic in statewide elections ever since, the Rovian political coup of Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003 and his re-election in 2006 being exceptions.

Now Democrats cannot expect to win the Presidency without carrying California. That fact sometimes gets obscured by press discusses of "the West" leaning Democratic. But California's huge electoral vote prize and the significance of Silicon Valley and Hollywood fundraising clout for the Democrats means that the Dems have to keep California Democrats reasonably happy. And while California voters rejected gay marriage in a statewide referendum - unconstitutionally so, as the state supreme court happily just ruled - the need to keep California in the Democratic column means that the national Democratic Party can't afford to pander too heavily to conservative hot-button issues.

And what had already become true in 1991 is that the South was something close to a Solid South for Republicans. And today, the Republicans are more dependent on the South, both in Presidential races and in their Congressional delegations, than the Democrats ever were.

The Democratic Party prior to the Second World War involved a coalition of Southern segregationists with Northern liberals, city-dwellers and the labor movement. That doesn't mean that there was no support for liberal economic ideas among Southern whites, on the contrary. Mississippi's Theodore Bilbo, who was to become one of the Senate's most notorious racists ever, entered the Senate as a New Deal partisan.

But while the postwar Democratic Party in the South remained the protector of segregation, the contradictions in the national party increasingly showed. Truman in 1948 faced party splits on the left with Henry Wallace and his Progressives and on the right from Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats. Democrats in the 1970s assumed that the recently-enfranchised African-American vote might give them a shot at holding on to the South. However we weigh the role of race and the so-called "white backlash" in the shift to the Republicans in the South, voters there clearly trended more conservative.

So as long as black voter participation in the South was relatively low compared to whites, and as long as California was presumed to be a more-or-less safe state for Republicans in Presidential elections, the national Democratic Party felt strong pressure to mitigate the effect of "culture war" issues in the South. It also meant that there was more pressure to bring swing voters in states outside the South into the Democratic column.

In other words, the idea of a massive cultural shift among working-class voters or voters in smaller cities from Democrats to Republicans nationally can be highly misleading. At least according to one count I've seen discussed recently, working-class voters (the definition of which can vary greatly) nationally vote more consistently Democratic today than 40 years ago. And that makes perfect sense. In the 1960s, the now-extinct species called "liberal Republicans" was still extant in the person of politicians like Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Jacob Javits of New York and John Lindsey of New York City (who switched to the Democrats later).

Failure to take that distinction into account leads astray a lot of the writing from the last 25 years or so on how Democrats can deal with "culture war" issues. And to a certain extent, that happened with Christopher Lasch's book, as well.

In Part 2: Liberal "elitists", race and the "culture war"

Tags: culture war, christopher lasch, kathleen parker, neoconservatives

Maverick Iraq War policy

Sen. Joe Biden points out that the bold Maverick McCain's talk about winning in Iraq by 2013 is empty talk (McCain Has Zero Plan to Get Us Out of Mess President Bush Has Created Huffington Post 05/15/08):

John McCain revealed today that he has no plan - none - to get us out of the mess the president has created. Senator McCain said that it is important for presidential candidates to "define their objectives and what they plan to achieve not with vague language but with clarity." But especially when it comes to Iraq and Afghanistan, the picture he painted today of where he hopes to be by 2013 is totally divorced from reality and there is zero clarity about how he would get there. It's beyond being vague: John McCain is totally silent about how he would realize his rosy vision for 2013. ...

Exactly how will we have any chance of winning in Afghanistan and defeating al Qaeda if we keep 140,000 troops in Iraq for another three or four years? Senator McCain doesn't say because he can't. ...

Today's speech is further proof that when it comes to Iraq, there is no daylight between John McCain and George W. Bush. They are joined at the hip. When it comes to Iraq, there will be no change with a McCain administration and so there is a real and profound choice for Americans in November. (my emphasis)

That's our Maverick!

Tags: afghanistan war, iraq war, joe biden

Polite Men of the Cloth

I remember watching Mike Huckabee during the Republican debates over the winter, and thinking that he was a really nice guy. He was speaking about immigration, and saying that we shouldn't punish the children of immigrants by denying them health care and education, since it wasn't really the children's fault that they were here illegally. He said it in such a nice and soft southern voice, and I thought, wow, here's a Republican who really is a compassionate conservative. I was thinking that here's a guy, who is a true Christian, a real man of faith, and that if he weren't a Republican, maybe I could vote for him. So I began to pay more attention to him.

And of course, the more I listened, the more I was convinced that his Christian values were not right for a nation such as ours, that his idea of changing the laws of our nation to reflect the laws of God, would not make life better for all of our citizens, namely people like me who live an alternative lifestyle. But his voice was so appealing, it was almost hypnotic, lulling me into thinking that I might be happy as a straight person, married to a guy named Bob, with hair on his chest, and an un-shaved face. And I could almost get there, but the thought of kissing a guy with razor stubble is so disgusting to me, that I'd rather not ever kiss anyone. Ever. I don't hate men physically, and I could probably live with one, if he faithfully went to get waxed at least once a week, and didn't forget to shower every day, but I'm sorry, the body hair...I just can't get past that.

And Mike Huckabee....he talks so sweet, but then he shows up at a gun rally, isn't that what all those NRA things are really? And he makes a joke about a gun being pointed at a Presidential candidate. And I'm thinking...what is a Christian doing at a gun rally, and why is he making a joke about political assassination? Some Americans remember a time when our politicians were gunned down, and we are still recovering from those violent events. You have to be wary of those sweet talking men of the cloth. Don't be fooled by a priest who takes an interest in your child, and always question the honesty of a man who preaches the words of Jesus, while at the same time speaking in favor of guns.

Technorati Tags: barak obama mike huckabee guns

A "60s" view of African-American history

I can't help but be fascinated, this year especially, by "the 1960s", which has defined the views of present-day Republicans to a remarkable extent.

I've mentioned before that there is an online archive of the journal Radical America, which began as "An SDS Journal of American Radicalism", SDS being Students for a Democratic Society, one of the more explicitly radical organizations of the time, with primarily white membership. The initials SDS are still enough to trigger apocalyptic nightmares among our "culture warriors", although they seem to have more fun obsessing about its violent offshoot, the Weather Underground.

This post is about an article that appeared in the July-Aug 1968 issue of Radical America, "The Historical Roots of Black Liberation" by Marxist historian George Rawick (1929-1990). (The link is to a PDF of the entire issue.) The article is also online in HTML format, The Historical Roots of Black Liberation (July 1968) at the Marxists' Internet Archive. So if you are afraid of catching demons in your head or some other part of your body from seeing a Marxist writer quoted, you should stop reading now. Rawick is best known in his profession as editor of the 29-volume The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. He was apparently associated for at least some years with the largest of the American Trotskyist groups, the Socialist Workers Party.

There's an appealing earnestness about much of the left activist writing from that period, not to be equated with the false innocence of which psychologist Rollo May warned. Rawick, born in 1929, was no kid in 1968. But this article addresses an audience that was focused on both developing an honest understanding of racism in American and on finding effective ways to combat it.

In that, they were acting out the heritage of the democratic ideology of the Second World War as well as the best of American religious and political-radical traditions. Yes, trolls, this is the kind of stuff scary black preachers sometimes talk about.


Rawick frames his approach as a way of understanding the "Black Revolution", which is how he understood the civil rights and Black Power movements of 1968. He seeks to throw light on the historical context in which the contradictory yet complementary impulses of rebellion and conformity have developed in the US.

The image of "Sambo" the compliant slave is one of the most discussed topics in studies of American slavery. Sambo was a contemporary term under slavery and it is still commonly used in discussing that phenomenon. Historian William Freehling, who discusses this topic in detail, uses a different contemporary term, "Cuffee", in a similar way but uses it to emphasize that the whites in slave states were uncomfortably aware that Sambo was at least in part an act put on for the benefit of whites.

Rawick writes quite perceptively about the historian Eugene Genovese, who was then regarded as a "left" historian, even a rising star among left historians. Genovese has long since developed into a genuinely reactionary historian who defends the slaveowning class in the South. Rawick wasn't calling him a reactionary then, but he did see aspects of Genovese's work that tended in that direction:

All previous indication of rebelliousness in San Domingo [before the Haitian Revolution of 1794] is relegated by Genovese to unimportance: "We find a Sambo stereotype and a weak tradition of rebellion ... when the island suddenly exploded in the greatest slave revolution in history, nothing lay behind it but Sambo and a few hints."

This conclusion is fundamentally absurd, the absurdity of sincere but pessimistic radical scholarship.

Rawick argues that those who claim that the Sambo mentality prevented slaves from engaging in more active revolts than they did in the US are trying too hard. Applying a version of Occam's Razor - giving preference to the simplest explanation that explains the known facts - he writes:

Slaves in North America were in every respect far outnumbered by the whites, who in any area could successfully hold off an attack until help came from elsewhere.

The slave revolt was not the usual method of direct action on the part of slaves in the United States because it was obvious that such a small, isolated minority could not successfully struggle this way. Rather the slaves usually chose other, more suitable tactics. While the slaves did not engage, particularly after the defeat of Nat Turner in 1831, in large revolts, they did struggle in a most conscious fashion and in a most successful manner through the Underground Railroad, strikes, and acts of individual withholding of or destruction of production. Most important, they fashioned their own independent community through which men and women and their children could find the cultural defenses against their oppressors.

The black community was the center of life for the slaves. It gave them, marked off from the rest of society, an independent base. The slave did not suffer from rootlessness – he belonged to the slave community and even if he were sold down the river, would usually be able to find himself in a new community much like his previous one, in which there would be people who shared a common destiny and would help him find a new life.

Rawick's essay stresses the role of African-American culture in keeping alive dignity, self-respect and the will to be free among the slaves. Revolutionary movements like the Haitian Revolution of 1794 led by Toussaint L'Ouverture seemed to many to spring suddenly from nowhere. This is a widespread phenomenon. To take just one more recent example, the Shah of Iran was also surprised by the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

But Rawick argues that in reality, to understand the roots of such surprising, seemingly sudden outbursts of revolutions, reform movements or just large-scale acts of social disruption, one has to understand the cultures that gave rise to them. While that may seem obvious, we're dealing in 2008 and for years to come with American involvement in Iraq's civil war(s) that came about with President Bush not considering it especially important to understand so much as the difference between Shi'a and Sunni Islam before he invaded and occupied that country. Rawick references another Marxist historian, C.L.R. James, who was apparently a favorite among SDSers (he has an article in the same issue of Radical America), on this question:

Despite Genovese’s stated respect for C.L.R. James, he seems to be turning the historian upside down. For the point James is making in The Black Jacobins – a point which cannot be missed by the careful reader – is that the oppressed continuously struggle in forms of their own choosing and surprise all mankind when they transform the day-to-day struggle into monumental revolutionary deeds. The pre-revolutionary activity was a necessary predecessor to the Haitian revolt; and without Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vessey and Nat Turner, there could have been no Fredrick Douglass, Rap Brown, Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver.

This question of understanding where such surprising events originate was a matter of no small concern in the 1960s, even to conservatives. Between urban riots, mass antiwar protests and student demonstrators, a lot of people wondered why such unexpected outbursts were suddenly disrupting their established views of how things worked in American society.

Understanding the role of slave and free-black culture is also critical to understanding the abolitionist movement. While it often impinged on the political process in the form of disputes among whites - since the vote was restricted to white men - that can distort our view of the movement. Certainly, there was antislavery/abolitionist sentiment among whites which could and did go along with racist, white supremacist ideas and feelings. But, as Rawick writes:

Through the instrumentality of the African cult [another term for slave culture], a concrete expression of a philosophy most adequate to the task at hand, the Afro-American slave prepared the ground and built the community out of which could come the struggles of the abolitionist movement. Abolitionism was at all times dominated by Afro-Americans, not by whites. Every abolitionist newspaper depended upon the support of Negro freedmen for its continuation. And these black freedmen received their impetus from the struggles of their brothers and sisters in slavery. Rather than stemming from the New England Brahmin conscience, abolitionism grew from, and carried, the necessity of black liberation whatever the cost. And in liberating the black community abolitionism transformed American society; it took the lead in creating a new America.

Although it will seem outrageous for those who think of movements as primarily organizations, offices, finances, printing presses and newspapers, writers and petitions, the heart of abolitionism was the slave community itself. The Underground Railroad, the efforts of the slaves for their own liberation, and their struggles’ impact on Northern Whites [sic] and slave blacks – these were the movement’s indispensible [sic] core. In the South, it gave the slaves the hope that enabled them to engage in the daily struggles that won for them that amount of breathing space which made more than mere continued existence possible. (my emphasis)

Rawick also talks about the dynamic relationship of slave culture to that of the masters:

The slaves themselves created the conditions for the inner corruption of the Master Class. While the rulers portrayed the institution of slavery as beneficent, the constant rebellion of the slaves made them know they lied. And when there is no way in which men can believe in the fundamental morality of a social system, even one they profit by, that system begins to die because the masters lose their ability to defend it. The slaves, in the struggle to the death with the rulers, repudiate the latter’s claim of moral justification, demonstrate to all the bad faith of the masters. (Seen from this vantage point, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn depicts the superiority of the moral claims of the runaway slave, Jim, to those of the masters based on property rights.)

The southern slave owner was denuded of civilization by the very system he fostered. Instead of the southern plantation owner and the classes close to him being made up of the knights in armor of racist folklore, slavery produced a society in the American South dominated by a class who lived in corruption and within an atmosphere worthy of the Marquis de Sade. ...

The myth of the gracious South dies hard, but die it must. (my emphasis)

I like this description of the inner turmoil between the urge to rebel and the fear of doing so:

This is not to argue that the slave was in no sense Sambo. A man is Sambo precisely when he is at the very point of rebellion he is fearful of being the rebel. Rebel he must be, but self-confident he is not. The greatest of all abolitionist leaders, the ex-slave Fredrick Douglass, tells repeatedly in his autobiography that when in the very act of fleeing, he was not only afraid – he also felt he was doing something wrong. Everything seemed to tell him that he was incapable of being a freeman; but at the same time, everything told him he must be a freeman. Unless we understand the contradictory nature of the human personality in class societies, we can never portray reality. One never knows whether the victim or the rebel will manifest himself again, but then again one need never know. It does not matter. In real life, men engage and then they see. The man of courage is not afraid to act, not because he is certain he will not be the coward, but only because he knows that, if he does not act, he most certainly will be the coward.

What he is describing here is a psychological condition, not a prescription for rebellion whenever one feels like it. Rawick's article makes clear that rebellion is not only or even primarily about dramatic events like the fabled storming of the Bastille.

I've emphasize in this post that Rawick was a Marxist historian because of the context in which I'm quoting him. But writing this got me thinking about whether there are particular advantages for an historian in taking a Marxist approach to understanding history.

Volumes could be written on this, and probably have been. I'll restrict myself to paragraphs here.

My basic answer is that the Marxist viewpoint doesn't confer any advantage not available to historians with an understanding and appreciation of democratic movements. But Marxist historians are possibly more interested in the history of rebellions and revolutions and popular movements than others, although the decades-long trend of academic interest in the history of daily life may mean that even that is no longer the case.

But, however one weighs the various forms that 20th-century Marxism took, from social democracy to Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot (to name some of the most consequential variations), Marx and Engels saw themselves as part of the radical cutting-edge of the democratic and labor movements of the 19th century. So historians working in that tradition presumably are alert to the importance of those movements, their dynamics and contradictory aspects.

But it makes sense in that way that historians like W.E.B. DuBois and Herbert Aptheker, both of whom were members of the orthodox, Soviet-line Communist Party in the US, made significant contributions to the history of slavery. Aptheker's work, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), can perhaps serve as an example of risks and opportunities in that approach. His book is respected and widely cited on that topic. But he is generally regarded as having overstated the significance of overt slave revolts. If your ideology values such occurrences highly, it can affect the empirical historical work.

Also, Marxist historians are as capable of writing junk as anyone else. Conforming one's historical work to a current party program can also present challenges of its own. Political science geeks might enjoy picking apart Leon Trotsky's position on the Confederacy, for instance. But so far as I'm aware, that particular dispute hasn't added greatly to our understanding of the Civil War.

And I was quite interested to see Rawick's takedown of some of Genovese's early work. I read one of Genevese's essays from the late '60s not long ago. I'm not sure if he called himself a Marxist then. But I came away thinking, this doesn't sound either very "left" or very well-founded to me. And although William Appleman Williams was not a Marxist historian, he was an influential historian among left activists and writers, especially his work before 1970. But he also managed to find room in his framework for elaborate praise for Herbert Hoover's economic policies and for the ne-Confederate view of the Civil War. And some of his anti-imperialist analysis of late 19th century American history may not have had the empirical rigor one might have hoped.

So I suppose my bottom line on that would be, you have to take good research and analysis where you find them. And you have to recognize bad ideas wherever they pop up.

And, in this particular case, it's a reminder that some of those scary hippie radicals of the 1960s were thinking about more than just sitting around saying, "Down with the racist pig power structure." Although they were known to say things like that, too, on occasion.

Tags: 1968, george rawick, slavery

Obama on foreign policy

If Obama can stay in this mode, he can win in November.



He still makes a couple of references to bipartisanship. And as long as it stays mostly atmospherics, as it seems to be here, it won't get in his way too much. McCain and the rest of the Bush fans aren't interested in bipartisanship. And until they get slammed at the polls over and over like they did in Mississippi's 1st Congressional District this past week, they will continue with their "rule or ruin" approach.

Of course, I guess with the Republicans we get "ruin" even when they rule. So maybe that saying doesn't apply to them any more.

I should add that I think Obama's position on not talking with Hamas until they recognize Israel is unrealistic. It seems to me that such a recognition can only come as part of a larger settlement package.

Tags: barack obama, republican party

The Wars Within Him

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! It's John McCain and war in the New York Times Magazine...or you can just go ahead and read it now.

(Post altered/edited to better reveal that you don't have to wait until Sunday to read the article.)


Technorati Tags: John McCain, war(s), New York Times Magazine

My First Name Ain't Baby

I love quoting Janet Jackson. It’s not often I get to do it. I mean, I guess I could write a post about Nasty Boys, or Control, or even, What Have You Done For Me Lately, but nothing says it better than the title of this post, and nobody says it better than Janet Jackson.

I have been a bit emotional these last few days, you could blame it on that time of the month, or you could say that I have a hormonal imbalance, or you could be a total A-hole, and tell me not to worry my pretty little head about something like an election.

But don’t ever, ever, call me Sweetie.

I’m really surprised at our Democratic nominee. Maybe he thinks he’s home free, he’s got the delegates, he’s got more super delegates, he’s even got John Edwards. Does he think he doesn't need the support of women? John Edwards can vote at the convention, and his vote will count 10,000 more times than mine, and so can John Kerry, and Ted Kennedy, and George McGovern, but in the fall, John and Ted and George will only get to vote once, as I will, and I'm not voting for a guy who calls women he is not married to, sweetie.

Don’t call me baby, don’t call me mama, don’t call me sweetie, unless you’re married to me, don’t be so familiar, cause I don’t think you’re cute in your jeans, it does nothing for me.

You can call me MS. Tankwoman.

Go Hillary!!!!
Technorati Tags: sexism sweetie obama

"Munich", "Munich", go away!

The "Munich analogy" is itself becoming an analogy of history degraded to slogans and then degraded to even more mindless slogans, producing an all-too-real threat inflation that causes all-too-real problems.

Our Dear Leader Bush was addressing the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) on Thursday and he used the Munich analogy to criticize Obama; he didn't mention Obama by name, but the White House made it clear that he was one of the appeasers referenced. But I want to note before getting to more specifics that Dear Leader was so off-base on this one that it actually drove Chris Matthews, yes, that Chris Matthews, into acting like a real journalist for several consecutive minutes! It was that bad.

Dear Leader said:

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along."

"We have heard this foolish delusion before," Bush said. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

Obama fired back immediately. Joe Lieberman agreed with Dear Leader. And that bold, independent Maverick McCain ... agreed with Bush 100%. (See quotes below.)


The Munich analogy as it has become embedded in the American political vocabulary over the decades has usually been used to refer to backing down unwisely in the face of a military aggressor. Bush's usage today is a neocon version that takes it into a further step of deterioration: "appeasement" in his Knesset speech means even negotiating with a potential enemy.

Wasn't it the neocons political god Winston Churchill who said on that topic the "jaw, jaw" is better than "war, war"? John Kennedy's famous line - "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate." - doesn't sound like cowardly shirking of duty to me. It sounds more like plain common sense.

But in CheneyWorld, we've gone from "Munich" being a bad deal (the more-or-less reality-based version) to a cowardly backing down from a dangerous aggressor (the threat-inflation version) to the problem having been the whole idea of even attempting to use diplomacy to avoid war. If it keeps going down this path, "Munich" will eventually mean the cowardly failure to invade and occupy Germany in 1921 or so when Hitler's political career was just getting started. Even with Bush's version, any attempt to seriously apply historical lessons from the "Munich" experience of 1938 has evaporated into the air.

Sen. Joe Biden, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called Bush's comment "bulls**t". A perfectly sober analysis, I would say.

Chris Matthews is the walking embodiment of what is wrong with our sad excuse for a press corps these days. But credit where credit is due. He at least pinned down some fool rightwing radio ranter named Kevin James on what he knew about "Munich". And the guy didn't know squat. Enjoy the show in text and video at Chris Matthews Stumps Right-Wing Radio Host: ‘Tell Me What Chamberlain Did?’ ‘I Don’t Know’ ThinkProgress.org 05/15/08.

Let's not go overboard. Since this Kevin James guy has a head so empty that even OxyContin probably isn't in there, Matthews looked like a well-informed guy by contrast. But even in those unaccustomed moments of committing an act of journalism, he was a little shaky on some details. He didn't seem to know much about William Borah (rightwing isolationist Senator who actually admired Hitler), who Dear Leader referenced in his Knesset speech. And he was kind of shaky on whether the Munich Conference was in 1938 or 1939. (It was 1938.)

See: 'Appeasement' remark by Bush sets off political fray by Johanna Neuman Los Angeles Times Online 05/15/08

McCain: Bush ‘Exactly Right’ On ‘Appeasement’ Remark, Praises Reagan’s Handling Of Iran Hostage Crisis ThinkProgress.org 05/15/08. The bold Maverick even had the gall to say:

Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain. I believe that it’s not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.

What a shameless bunch of hooey! Leave aside for the moment Reagan's arms-for-hostages deal that Ollie North and his boys ran for him that became infamous as the Iran-Contra scandal.

There's a substantial body of mostly circumstantial evidence, circumstantial but very persuasive in an historical sense, that the Reagan campaign did negotiate with Iran behind the backs of the Carter administration in 1980 to delay the release of the hostages until after the 1980 election. Yes, I know that conventional wisdom considers this "October surprise" story to be a silly conspiracy theory.

But I'm one of maybe ten people in the US who believes that it was Oswald in the book depository with the rifle in 1963. Single assassin. And I'm probably the only person alive who doesn't believe Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe had an affair (though I'm willing to concede there's evidence for a one-night stand that could convince a reasonable person). Which is not evidence of any kind for the October surprise. But I'm just saying.

Gary Sick laid out the evidence in his 1991 book October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan. Robert Perry reported on his own two-year investigation of the story in Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery (1993). Sick's book provoked the Democratic-controlled Congress into a desultory investigation, which concluded with no thorough digging into the story. But the investigations did produce some additional information, as Perry reports in his account.

It's too bad the investigation wasn't pressed much more seriously. One of the key players in the October Surprise story, for instance, was Laurence Silverman, who went on to become a federal judge who played a disreputable role in the Whitewater witch-hunt against the Clintons in the 1990s.

The Congressional investigations drug on into 1992. But this was the year the Establishment press went off the cliff with the Whitewater story. We were entering a new era of press malfunction. The Republicans in Congress belligerently opposed the investigation. The press poo-poohed the evidence. And the Dems finally gave it up.

Now, the Maverick can say, "He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home."

Will any of the Great American's Hannah Montana fan-boys and -girls in the press dig into what a ditzy statement that is? Hell could freeze over tomorrow, too. Life is full of surprises.

Joe Lieberman has really become a sad case, as we see in Lieberman On Bush Comparing Democrats To Nazi-Appeasers: 'The President Got It Exactly Right' ThinkProgress.org 05/15/08:

President Bush got it exactly right today when he warned about the threat of Iran and its terrorist proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah. It is imperative that we reject the flawed and naïve thinking that denies or dismisses the words of extremists and terrorists when they shout "Death to America" and “Death to Israel,” and that holds that — if only we were to sit down and negotiate with these killers — they would cease to threaten us. It is critical to our national security that our commander-in-chief is able to distinguish between America’s friends and America’s enemies, and not confuse the two.

This viewpoint doesn't see diplomacy as even part of foreign policy in dealing with potentially hostile states or groups. Foreign policy without diplomacy is not really foreign policy, it's just straight-up militarism. War and the threat of war are the only tools in that toolbox.

And for anyone who actually cares about the history of the Munich Conference and what real lessons sane people might learn from it, I can't recommend highly enough Jeffrey Record's The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007), which I reviewed on 01/02/07. It's a serious book but it's not that long and it's very accessible.

Most of the book's text is available online from the US Army's Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (Aug 2005).

The scary thing is, people like Dick Cheney and Rummy and the rest of Bush's crew actually make policies and invade countries based on thinking that's this disconnected from the actual experience of the past. Used in this way, the "lessons of Munich" just become a magic talisman to use against anyone who disagrees with your foreign policy of the moment.

Tags: appeasement, jeffrey record, munich agreement, second world war, world war two

Fantasy will set you free!

Today's NY Times includes a report from Ohio of a speech by John McCain in which McCain describes his vision of success in Iraq:

“By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom,’’ Mr. McCain said at the Columbus Convention Center. “The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced.’’

The United States, Mr. McCain added, “maintains a military presence there, but a much smaller one, and it does not play a direct combat role.’’

Missing from the speech was an explanation of how this notion of "four more years" in Iraq is any different than what George W. Bush would promise if he could run for a third term.

Also missed out in this speech was any recognition of the cost of continuing this war until January 2013: the thousands of lives to be lost, the hundreds of millions of dollars to be borrowed from China - perhaps a trillion dollars over four years, the need for a draft to fill the recruitment gaps, the need to forgo major social spending programs - such as universal health care - in order to replace the munitions and equipment consumed by the war, and the tax increases needed in case China refuses to lend us another trillion dollars.

Oh yeah - he forgot to mention his little war with Iran. Misremembered, I suppose.

A reporter asked the Maverick if his fantastic vision did not amount to a "Magic Carpet Ride" - how rude! The man has a dream, that's all. He dreams of flying a Navy jet onto an aircraft carrier, and unfurling a big "Mission Accomplished" banner.

Four more years?

Let the sound take you away!

Religious Freedom, not so much...

Reported from Kentucky (Ryan Alessi / McClatchy Newspapers):

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign has ramped up its efforts to emphasize his Christian faith in a series of new radio and television ads, as well as in a flier that volunteers have distributed.

Kentucky Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo, who endorsed Obama on Sunday, narrated a new radio spot for Obama that highlights the Illinois senator's upbringing and values, including how Obama is "a strong Christian."

You can be black, you can be a woman. If you want to get elected, just make sure everyone knows you are a Christian.

The pathetic state of freedom of religion in America.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, Kentucky, Freedom of religion, My God is bigger than your God

That Mississippi win

Bob McElvaine is Paintin' It Blue in Mississippi at his new Huffington Post blog 05/14/08. The topic, of course, is Travis Childers win in the 1st Congressional District special election:

But the Tuesday poll result that provides the clearest (and for Republicans most terrifying) writing on the wall came from here in Mississippi. The victory by Democrat Travis Childers over Republican Greg Davis in a special election for the House seat representing Mississippi's First District is sending shock waves throughout the Grand Old Party. ...

Three of the four Congressmen from Mississippi are now Democrats. What's more, there is a very real chance that, with Obama at the head of the ticket, a huge African-American vote in November will enable Democratic former Governor Ronnie Musgrove to defeat newly appointed Republican Senator Roger Wicker. Furthermore, as I argued nearly two years ago, there is a real possibility that Obama could carry Mississippi. ...

It has rarely been the case that as Mississippi goes, so goes the nation, but when this red state turns blue it's a sure indication that the GOP is the Gone Old Party.

I appreciate Bob's optimism, though an Obama win in Mississippi is hard to imagine. If that happens, the Republican Party might want to think about disbanding altogether. I can easily imagine that Musgrove has a shot at Trent Lott's old Senate seat. Bob's post is also a reminder that the business about "red" and "blue" states can be misleading. Three of Mississippi's four members of Congress are Dems, the Dems have a good shot at one of the Senate seats, and the Republican Senator Thad Cochran is about 150 years old and probably more reactionary than Dick Cheney. Mississippi may become a "purple" state rather than a "red" one.

Tags: mississippi, mississippi politics, robert mcelvaine

Freedom on the march

The New York Times reports that the California Supreme Court overturned a ban on gay marriage today.

"Our state now recognizes that an individual's capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual's sexual orientation," the court wrote.

The city of San Francisco, two dozen gay and lesbian couples and gay rights groups sued in March 2004 after the court halted San Francisco's monthlong same-sex wedding march.

"Today the California Supreme Court took a giant leap to ensure that everybody -- not just in the state of California, but throughout the country -- will have equal treatment under the law," said City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who argued the case for San Francisco.

Equal treatment under the law. Not too much to demand in a country that prizes human rights and individual liberty. Seems downright American to me.

Misremembering

One of the Iraq War architects, Douglas Feith, was on the Daily Show Tuesday night trying to sell a few copies of War and Decision, which seems to be a huge attempt at self-deception on Feith's part, a weird sort of reverse mea culpa. According to Feith...

When people read this book, I think people will be surprised to be reminded of what was actually said. I think a lot of people’s perceptions of what was said are filtered through the recent history. … I think they misremember a lot.

Even after two segments, some of the interview ended up on the cutting room floor. Here's "Douglas Feith Uncut Pt. 1"...



Pt. Deux is here.

Technorati Tags: Douglas Feith, Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, War and Decision, misremember

What Are They Worried About?

I changed my mind. It's a woman's prerogative, so they say. I'm glad Hillary Clinton is still in the race for the White House. I know she's not going to win, and she's a smart person, so I'm pretty sure she knows she's not going to win. But I'm so brassed off at the mainstream press, oohhing and ahhing over Barak in his jeans, Barak in his workout clothes, and then slamming Hillary Clinton for not stepping aside to let the men take over. F-That! Women have been pushed aside by men for thousands of years, and I'm proud of Hillary Clinton for doing the difficult thing, standing up to all of the Tim Russerts, and the Dana Milbanks, and the Chris Mathews, and all of those women who are joining in the slamming, like Wonkette, who would maybe be pregnant right now, a housewife with 5 brats, if women like Hillary Clinton, and me, Tankwoman, hadn't fought for her reproductive rights, and the right to earn 67 percent of what men earn today.

I do like wonkette though, I'm glad she was able to choose her own career, and not have to stay at home with an odious husband and 5 babies, one right after another. And did Keith Olbermann really, not in so many words say this?
8:30 PM — Olbermann asks Sen. James Clyburn, basically, "Are West Virginian voters just terrible racists?"
Obama is going to win the nomination, Chris, and Tim, Keith, and Dana, so what are you so afraid of?

Women in this country have been waiting a lifetime for a woman to run for President, and Hillary Clinton has gotten so very Freaking close, why not let her finish? I'm glad she is still in the race, I hope she wins and shoves it right up the whazzo of all of NBC.

Oh and as for me, I'm so pissed off at the men in this country, I'm going to post something good about Hillary Clinton every day from now until November.

Remembering 1968: Ralf Fücks gives a Green view

Ralf Fücks, chair of the German Green Party and co-president of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung (Foundation)

The best of the ten essays in Dissent magazine's Spring 2008 symposium on "1968" is the contribution by Ralf Fücks (Dissent uses the Anglicized spelling "Fuecks" - and, no, it's pronounced more like "fooks" than what some of you are thinking). Fücks is the chairman of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, the foundation aligned with the German Green Party. The Heinrich Böll Stiftung also has an English-language Web site, which features a copy of the Dissent article under the title 1968 and the Discovery of Politics.

Opening by observing that the year 1968 resonated in some "truly revolutionary" political and cultural develops, he proceeds in the second paragraph:

It is true that the protest movement of that year did not lead to a dramatic overturn of the political order like the French or Russian revolutions. The extent of violence and counter-violence of 1968 is not comparable to the excesses of past wars and civil wars. It was the Prague Spring - an event that is often ignored when we speak of 1968 - that came closest to being the revolutionary overthrow of a regime. A peaceful revolution began in Czechoslovakia, and it shook "really-existing socialism" to its foundations. The revolution was destroyed by the tanks of the Warsaw Pact. The tragic gravity of the Prague events went far beyond the symbolic actions and theatrical stage-managing of student protests in the West. The Soviet invasion buried hopes for "socialism with a human face." In fact, communist hegemony in Eastern Europe was doomed from that moment. It was only a matter of time until a system incapable of reform collapsed. If there is an inherent link between 1968 and 1989 it is that the defeat of the Prague Spring would lead one day to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. (my emphasis)

The German Green Party always opposed the hardline Cold War pressures for military buildups and political confrontation between East and West in Europe.


But the Greens were also notable since their founding for their active solidarity with the democratic opposition in Communist East Germany (DDR, Deutsche Democratische Republik, English GDR, German Democratic Republic). In this way, they distinguished themselves from the two major German parties of today, the Social Democrats (SPD) and Christian Democrats (CDU). The Green Party supported the Ostpolitik initiated under the leadership of the SPD's Willy Brandt to make a de facto normalization of relations between East and West Germany. But, unlike the SPD and CDU in practice, the Greens understood Ostpolitik to include active solidarity and interchange with the grassroots democratic movements in the DDR, which organized around religious, peace and ecological issues.

The Greens' version of support for democracy and human rights in the Eastern bloc was not simply a slogan against The Enemy, as it was for hardline conservatives, for Realists, and too often for liberal internationalists in the West, including the US. It was a part of the Greens' core view of democracy and the peace movement and of their support for German unification.

His evaluation of the impact of "1968" on the West focuses largely on the experience of Western Europe. But the same analysis could apply in the United States and elsewhere, though it's too seldom formulated with this level of nuance:

In the West, things were different. The superiority of the capitalist democracies was demonstrated by their ability to absorb the momentum created by "1968," even against the will of the ruling elites who feared this would lead to the decline of the West. Open systems transform opposition into innovation. In other words, "1968" ended up giving Western societies powerful innovative momentum, extending from the triumph of popular culture and social emancipation of women to the emergence of new forms of political participation. The ideological recourse to Marxism, the admiration for the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and solidarity with the "anti-imperialist liberation movements" in Vietnam and Palestine disguised the fact that "1968" was actually reformist in character. As is often the case, there was great distance between the self-understanding of the historical protagonists and their impact on society. If the revolutionary rhetoric of the movement’s spokespersons is the benchmark, the ’68 generation failed. However, in terms of the cultural and political changes set in motion by the movement, it was highly successful.

While this is not a specifically Marxist view of the historical process, the Germans do have the benefit of a long democratic labor tradition that includes an Hegelian understanding of history that was also part of the Marxist tradition. And the dialectical Hegelian view of historical processes has a lot to recommend itself. (In the American context for something like this written for general consumption, it would require about ten pages of explanation to adequately troll-proof it, so I'm not going to bother.)

But that paragraph in itself is a reminder about how impoverished the American political vocabulary is in so many ways. When Fücks talks about the "superiority of
the capitalist democracies" in the West, note that he is talking about the ability of the democratic process to adapt to mass demands for change against the will of what would more traditionally be called the ruling class. He uses the more polite and ambiguous term "ruling elites". Something very like this is what is meant when people say - as some ornery Jacksonians are still known to do - that the New Deal of the 1930s saved capitalism from itself.

In his last book published during his lifetime, The Economics of Innocent Fraud (2004), John Kenneth Galbraith described how the word "capitalism" became increasingly uncomfortable for the defenders of the established order in the capitalist countries over the course of the twentieth century. Describing various earlier embarrassments to the system's reputation, not least of which was the widely-held perception in the 1920s that the Great War of 1914-18 had its source in "the rivalry between the great arms and steel combines of France and Germany", he continues:

Later, and more destructive to the reputation of capitalism in the United States, was the visibly insane Florida real estate speculation [of the 1920s], the rising corporate and industrial voice and, most important, the stock market explosion of the late 1920s. Then came the world-resonating crash of 1929 and, for ten long years, the Great Depression. Capitalism all too obviously did not work. So denoted, it was unacceptable.

There followed a determined search for a benign alternative name. "Free Enterprise" had a trial in the United States. It didn't take. Freedom, meaning for enterprise decisions, was not reassuring. In Europe there was "Social Democracy" - capitalism and socialism in a companionate mix. In the United States, however, socialism was (as it remains) unacceptable. In the next years reference was to the New Deal; this, however, was too clearly identified with Franklin D. Roosevelt and his cohorts. So in reasonably learned expression there came "the market system." There was not adverse history here, in fact no history at all. It would have been hard, indeed, to find a more meaningless designation - this a reason for the choice.

Conservatives of various kinds, not just the neocons who sometimes still cherish class concepts from a kind of mirror-image of Marxism, can still be heard to say that capitalism, or the "market system", produces democracy.

But that conservative version of economic determinism has to be justified by some purist, Libertarian-type economic dogma, not from actual history. Parliamentary democracy was the classic political demand of the rising capitalist class in the French Revolution of 1789 and the immensely important European revolutions of 1848, the latter which are very much remembered in European history and political theory but seemingly nearly forgotten in their American counterparts. Capitalism in Britain and and the US found democracy very consistent with capitalist development, though neither country could be said to be "pure" representative democracy in the 19th century by today's standards (e.g., slavery, property qualifications for voting, women deprived of the vote, etc.).

But in Germany and France, healthy capitalist economic development, and less robust versions of the same in the Habsburg empire, co-existed for decades with authoritarian systems (Bismarck's in Germany, that of Napoleon III in France). And the liberals who took their tradition from the capitalist advocates of 1848 often found themselves content with aspects of classical liberalism such as national unity and governmental secularism, without worrying excessively about the democratic parts. In most of Europe, certainly including the German and Habsburg empires, it was the social-democratic parties - which later split into Social Democratic and Communist Parties in the wake of the Great War and the Russian Revolution of 1917 - who were the chief advocates for democracy and individual political rights.

So there's nothing especially new or unusual about observing, as Fücks does in his essay, that "capitalist democracy" allows for expression of popular will, and in many cases effective expression of the popular will, against the consensus among the leading capitalists themselves. Capitalism and parliamentary democracy developed historically in close tandem. But they are not identical. And it became increasingly clear over the last century that there are actual contradictions (if you'll excuse another Hegelian concept) between democracy and capitalism. For myself, I have to credit that particular formulation, the contradiction between democracy and capitalism, to a business school professor of mine, David Palmer, a former investment banker. (It was a Jesuit school, what can I say?)

That was a long riff on a single paragraph of Fücks' essay, I realize. But it's a dynamic conception of history something like what I've described, that lets Fücks argue that even the adoption of very explicitly anti-capitalism ideologies "disguised the fact that '1968' was actually reformist in character." I would like to say he means that the movements of that time in Western countries were objectively reformist. But the neocons' propagandistic use of "objectively", as in "critics of the war are objectively aiding The Terrorists", may have ruined that particular usage for generations. That usage is part of the strong Trotskyist heritage of the neocons, though an Hegelian would probably say that it was a Troskyism that had undergone significant transformation. While less philosophically minded critics might wonder how great the transformation actually was, since the "left" nature of Trotskyism was always of a particular kind that maybe didn't need so much transformation to become neoconservatism. (Long story for another time.)

Fücks gives an orderly list of various long-term observable effects of "1968". The whole thing is definitely well worth reading. But his list includes: "an expansion of the political public"; "the expansio