In French the phrase on dit means, literally, “one says.” But really it signifies what someone in the know considers it au courant and fashionable to say.
No one works harder to parade his apartness from such pseudo-sophisticated posturing than New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, who dispatched the apostles of on ditlast week by complaining,
“Our sophistication is merely a skill for many surfaces. … Its objective is breadth, not depth. It is… the intellectual aspiration of a dinner guest. …. We teach ourselves to become even a little haughty about what we discovered the day before yesterday. (“What, you haven’t seen Osipova?”) And the victims of our intimidation go home to bone up in private, to remediate their out-of-the-loopness and prepare themselves for a role in the on dit–except of course the strong ones among them who recognize this game for what it is, and prefer something better than sophistication, more specific and more substantive, a parcel of knowledge strenuously acquired and genuinely possessed…..”
And here is Wieseltier, recognizing the game for what it is on October 8, 2001, as the ruins of the World Trade Center smoldered, dispatching Vanity Fair sophisticates’ reactions to the calamity:
“I always wondered what it would take to put a cramp in the trashy mind, and at last I have my answer: a mass grave in lower Manhattan. So now depth has buzz. The papers are filled with hip people seeing through hipness, composing elegiac farewells to Gary Condit and Jennifer Lopez. The on dit has moved beyond the apple martini. It has discovered evil and the problem of its meaning. No doubt about it, seriousness is in. So it is worth remembering that there are large swathes of American society in which seriousness was never out. Not everybody has lived as if the media is all there is. Not everybody has been consecrated only to cash and cultural signifiers. Not everybody has been a pawn of irony.”
Not a pawn of irony but its master, Wieseltier has consecrated himself to the kind of sincerity and profundity that, well before 9/11, made him join Richard Bruce (Dick) Cheney and Carl Christian Rove on the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Even on Sep. 20, 2001, as he was penning the comments quoted above, Wieseltier and 40 others signed a public letter to George W. Bush from the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century urging that ”even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”
The on dit about Wieseltier is that he keeps on repeating himself, in print and in politics, as I showed at some length here two years ago. Perhaps that is something for him to ponder and — dare one say it? — atone for. He can’t do that by banging away at people who’ve dropped him from their dinner party lists, and certainly not by sounding, week after week, as if he himself had penned my own modest proposal for his epitaph:
I am so wise, That my wisdom makes me weary. It’s all I can do To share my wisdom with you.
In August, when PBS broadcast a shamefully worshipful, 3-hour “documentary” of Reagan Administration Secretary of State George Shultz’s supposedly heroic career, I posted “What Politics Does to History,” exposing the fraudulent scholarship of the man who’d written most of Shultz’s memoir and is now teaching students at Yale. At least, though, Charles Hill has had the wit to seek refuge in “literature” for his rather chilling take on history, as I showed also in Foreign Policy.
The historian Victor Davis Hanson is something else again, a magpie of misplaced, forced analogies from ancient to post-modern events. Hanson conscripts his studies of ancient Greek wars to the service of the Bush national-security agenda, which he’d love to revive. Now he’s done it again in Makers of Ancient Strategy, an anthology I’ve just reviewed for the new, fall issue of Democracy journal. And Hanson, true to form, is ranting about the review.
”When someone attacks me, I reply with twice that,” Hanson told the Boston Globe, which noted that he “has penned many a blistering response to a negative review. It’s not unlike the tactic Hanson recommends in war: ‘You do that a few times, and people stop attacking you.”’
Sorry, Victor, but the main reason people stop attacking you is that you discredit yourself without their having to bother. No sooner had Hanson submitted his counter-attack to Democracy, than he posted it, twice, perhaps expecting that this shock-and-awe approach would silence criticism.
It certainly pleased his site’s ditto-heads, but Hanson had no choice but to link the review he was attacking, and I invite anyone who can read without moving his or her lips to compare it to Hanson’s rant. The review shows that the man can’t separate his historiography of ancient wars from his Vulcan ideology, He can’t help trying to draft his scholarship — and, yes, some of history’s enduring truths — into his efforts to promote and then justify misadventures like ours in Iraq.
These are hard times for would-be warriors like Hanson, Charles Hill, and Martin Peretz, all of whom are scurrying to burnish their dubious scholarly credentials to cover their real-world blunders. But although I’ve caught Hanson trying to do that in his new anthology, some of its contributors — and, he now tells us defensively, its Princeton University Press readers — have higher standards than he does and didn’t let him get away with it entirely.
The result, as I explain in the review, is an anthology that makes Victor Davis Hanson look better than he is despite his efforts to sanitize his war-mongering solutions through scholarship. It’s all in the review; Enjoy!
Glad though I was last summer (and am now) to see ex- war hawk Peter Beinart indict much of American Jewish leadership for corrupting the American republic and Israeli democracy out of misplaced enthusiasm for bad Israeli strategies, I’ve always found Beinart’s conversion a bit less than convincing.
In Bookforum, I argued in May that Beinart’s The Icarus Syndrome, which surveys U.S. foreign-policy hubris across a century, and his criticisms in the New York Review of Books of American-Jewish Israel lobbying, sounded like testimonies in a conversion that was a little too opportune. It felt to me as if Beinart were trying to escape Beltway liberals’ disapproval more than as if he were undertaking any deep reckoning with himself or the foreign-policy history he schematically surveyed.
But it was one thing for me to say it; it’s quite another for The New York Review of Books itself, where Beinart made his criticisms of the American Israel lobby, to publish a review saying the same things. The NYRB has a clubby reputation as “The New York Review of Each Others’ Books.” But not this time, and that’s noteworthy.
You need a subscription to read Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s review online, and you need to register (for free) to read mine in Bookforum. Suffice it to say that I do credit Beinart for taking sound positions but that I share (and anticipated by several months) Wheatcroft’s judgment that “[F]or all [Beinart’s] apparent new-found realism, he ends his book on a jarring note” of American self-congratulation that recapitulates the hubris whose dire consequences “he has just spent nearly four hundred pages describing….”
In other words, too much of Beinart’s book sounds like Beltway-speak — a barometer of some stirrings inside the Beltway, perhaps, but not a reckoning as wise and consistently prescient as William Pfaff’s half a century of writing about American foreign policy, including his new The Irony of Manifest Destiny, which Wheatcroft reviews in the same NYRB essay.
None of my criticism excuses attempts by some defensive Jewish organizations and leaders to misrepresent the important arguments Beinart is making now. It does mean that, sooner or later, for the sake of honest discussion, he’ll have to know — and explain more convincingly than he has — why he spent so many years saying the opposite of what he’s saying now and assailing those who were already saying it.
Anyone who actually writes anything about Israel that perfect strangers are likely to read had better believe he’s got the wisdom, pointillist clarity and courage to unmask others’ myopia and bad faith. Too often, though, the would-be Truth-teller, no matter where he stands on a political or religious spectrum, is less wise about Israel than he is driven by swift, dark currents in history and in himself that he may not have explored or even acknowledged.
Fortunately, I alone have gone the distance and exited the hall of broken mirrors and flying brickbats where public discussion of Israel rages. So I can explain, as no one else can, how both Israel’s brutal, devious nationalists and its arch, airy universalist scourges are getting everything wrong.
Of course, I’m joking. Yet, posting this from a vest-pocket park on Masaryk Street in Tel Aviv, I’m glancing at the Israeli workers, students, and mothers and toddlers taking breaks here or passing through, and I’m also glancing at my laptop whenever the intellectual pinball machine that is the blogosphere lights up with a new explanation of former New Republic editor Peter Beinart’s much ballyhooed conversion from his old magazine’s Zionist perversity to The New York Review of Books’ waspishly busy reprovals of that perversity.
A lot is missing from the Beinart fracas, some of it right before me at this moment. Also missing is an understanding of how Beinart’s pilgrimage began in Lithuania before he was born, and how it ran through Cape Town, South Africa, long before it took him from Martin Peretz’s desk to Robert Silvers’. Is this a pilgrimage of conscience, or a career move, or smart politics — or all three? There are several ways to approach that question. Let me at least turn over a few stones.
When Beinart was at The New Republic, he was an ardent promoter of Joe Lieberman for President in 2004 and a shrieking scourge of anti-Iraq war liberals through 2006. I recount some of this record in a review of his new book The Icarus Syndrome, which bookforum.com has just posted and which I urge you to read for grounding.
Now, in The New York Review, Beinart has come out with an apostate’s-over-compensatory ardor against the American Jewish establishment’s self-destructive efforts to align public opinion and policy with Israel’s ugliest gambits and conceits.
The liberals on my screen, among them TPM’s own redoubtable M.J. Rosenberg, an earlier and even more ardent apostate from the Israel Lobby, are touting St. Peter’s epiphany on his road from the Council on Foreign Relations and The New Republic to J-Street and The New York Review. I give Beinart my own, more measured, applause in the bookforum.com review.
Sitting here half a kilometer from the spot where Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by a right-wing religious zealot, I agree with Beinart that Israel’s energetically slippery American strategists and its governing coalition in Jerusalem are further isolating and degrading the Jewish state. Yet, looking up from my laptop, I see something that’s not on screen or in Beinart’s article and book, which barely mentions Israel in its penitential survey of American foreign-policy hubris across a century. Let me try to explain what’s missing by saying something about the Israeli civil society I’ve encountered on this and other visits.
Tel Aviv’s many shabby Bauhaus buildings and cheaply built plazas suggest to some a failed politics and aesthetic as urban renewal efforts have done in many American cities. But while Israel’s wistfully modernist dimension has little elegance and even less that’s exotic, it has refreshingly less pomp or pretension of the sort one encounters in, say, Vienna. What Israel has instead is an easy elan that’s hard to dismiss and is not as compromised as many readers really insist on believing that it is by the racism or militarism that are commonly ascribed to the whole country.
When you’ve been on your own here (not in a tour group) for even just a few hours (I’m not talking about myself, since I’ve been here a bit longer than that; my first involvement in Arab-Jewish encounters here was in 1969), your aesthetic and moral centers of gravity begin to shift from American pieties and protocols of consumption to the more frank and trustworthy relations of a society whose synapses actually work. For all the growing inequalities, among Jews as well as between Jews and Arabs, that Israel’s conservative free-marketeers have pushed under banners of religious nationalism, people aren’t living as frenetically as Americans do on “need-to-know” networking and courtly ingratiation.
Jews and Arabs walk Israeli streets at any hour with none of the fear of street crime that urban Americans have coded into their body language. You can feel that curse lifting by your second day. There is very little binge drinking and alcoholism. Body language tends to be more supple and just plain relaxed. (I’ve just come from New York, okay?) Go to Israel’s health clinics and hospitals — it has one of the best and most universal public-health systems in the world — and you see Palestinian doctors, nurses, and patients alongside Jewish ones.
There are fewer Rambos because there are fewer loners, and that’s because most Israelis are or have been part of a citizen army where no one salutes anyone and everyone knows everyone through others they already know. There’s an unadorned, level-headed candor and solidarity in everyday encounters, out of uniform as well as in.
Many Americans would envy Israelis’ casual confidence that a stranger will honor a simple request or agreement. The shared civic-republican entitlement and mutual obligation are earned by exposing one’s body and life to and for others in ways most of us haven’t done. “Life is With People” was the silly title of a schlocky Schocken book about shtetls, but in Israel you feel it in a thick, civic-republican sense that makes the bad architecture seem ancillary or at best ornamental. As your center of gravity shifts, new nerve ends start growing.
Most TPM readers think of the military as too militarizing, especially in places like Israel, and so do I. But the universality of the army here complicates its norms with civilian ones in ways not so easy to parse or condemn. In America the abolition of universal conscription in favor of a volunteer army was actually a conservative master stroke against a civic-republican spirit that had been aroused by a sense of shared public destiny and the outrages of the Vietnam war. There is no doubt about a shared, imminent destiny in Israel, and you needn’t be a Zionist to know it.
So people here still get out of their cars and direct traffic to clear up jams without waiting for cops, although it must be added that they are driving like maniacs and paying the price. Employees behind counters think and respond realistically rather than euphemistically to your inquiries and requests, a refreshing contrast to even the best American response, which is usually something like, “No problem.” To me that phrase has always implied that even a simple request is almost a problem for a temp worker who’s been put there without any real training or public incentive to perform.
I am not excusing anything. Israel’s unpretentious, reliable public felicity and trust are fraying, and they’re often (though not always) missing in relations between its Arab and its Jewish citizens within the old borders; and beyond that, they unravel completely in pretty much the ways they have done at the borders of American Indian reservations and urban ghettos and in the American South, whose civic graces eddied around color bars.
But, actually, things are more complicated in Israel, owing to conflicting senses of belonging and danger that are much older and deeper than anything that even paranoid American Tea Partiers can imagine. There are too many forces intent upon Israel’s total elimination, and most of those forces come from societies that aren’t nearly as democratic.
The dark side of Zionism has several sources of its own, as I’ll indicate here, but one of them — and it maddens even the “polite” eliminationists when I say this — is a source you could understand if you could imagine what America would be like if it had had thousands of suicide bombings, proportionate to the 250 or so that drove Israel nearly crazy in the middle of the last decade but that Israel’s critics never ponder. And yet, for all the paranoia, there was more than enough civic indignation in Israel last week to force Netanyahu’s bone-heads to rescind their barring of the 81-year-old Noam Chomsky from entering the West Bank to teach at the Palestinian Birzeit University.
Chomsky embarrassed Netanyahu anyway by declining the new offer of admission and delivering his talk by video from Amman. Bully for him. I am not giving this government any credit for deciding to let Chomsky enter the West Bank; in George Bush’s America a few years ago, Chomsky had “no problem” addressing an auditorium full of cadets at West Point. He was even given respectful applause and a plaque.
Yet I’m wary of characterizing Israelis any more harshly than we ourselves would have wanted to be characterized when Bush was our president and the Iraq War was emblematic of our country’s national security strategy. Should our universities have been boycotted by the rest of the world, our scholars disinvited by other countries, on account of our brutal foreign policies? Weren’t we all implicated — in much the same way that we casually implicate all Israelis — since Bush had won in 2004 by a clearer margin than Netanyahu would win by five years later? By that logic, shouldn’t a boycott like the one proposed against Israeli universities have been proposed with extra vigor against Britain’s under Tony Blair? Why wasn’t it? Don’t Americans and Britons have a lot more to answer for?
Again, I am not excusing anything. Israel has never seemed to me more sad and disgusting than when Ehud Olmert touted it as America’s junior partner in George Bush’s war on terror or when it has mimicked Americans’ gluttonous consumerism or Singapore’s go-go, lockstep capitalism. (That got Israel admitted last week by unanimous vote to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.) Even the almost perfectly idiomatic if faintly neo-connish American English of Benjamin Netanyahu, who grew up in Washington diplomatic and academic circles, is as cloyingly off-putting as the patter of an Anglophile Jew who’s trying to get something for nothing by pretending to be something he isn’t.
Such postures evoke everything foreseen by Hannah Arendt, who assisted solicitously at Israel’s birth and worked for world Jewish organizations for many years but warned in the 1950s that if Israelis “continue to ignore [partnerships with neighboring] Mediterranean peoples and watch out only for the big, faraway powers, they will appear only as… the agents of foreign and hostile interests. Jews who know their own history should be aware that… the anti-Semitism of tomorrow will assert that Jews not only profiteered from the presence of the foreign big powers… but had actually plotted it and hence are guilty of the consequences….
“The big nations that can afford to play the game of power politics have found it easy to forsake King Arthur’s Round Table for the poker table,” Arendt continued; “but the small, powerless nations [the Jews in Palestine] that venture their own stakes in that game, and try to mingle with the big, usually end by being sold down the river.”
Beinart invokes Arendt, who nettles myopic neo-cons so much that they sputter every few years over her supposed betrayals of the Jewish people. They cannot acknowledge or review the brilliant collection of her Jewish Writings, edited by her literary executor Jerome Kohn, from which the above excerpt is taken. Adam Kirsch couldn’t do it a few weeks ago in the New York Times as he went out of his way to tie the sometime Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger about Arendt’s neck – but not about the necks of Heidegger’s other Jewish adepts, including Leo Strauss, whose philosophy was more Heideggerian than hers.
Like Arendt, Beinart, the scourge of Israel’s apologists, nettles The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, an often-reasonable and likable apologist for too much that Israel has done wrong. It is Chait who observes, on my screen here in a Tel Aviv park, that Beinart’s AIPAC-bashing is “overwrought” because he hasn’t outgrown the jejune idealism and moralism that made him declare a “liberal” war on Islamo-fascism in 2006. Beinart’s bellicosity then heartened neo-conservatives, even though he tried to distance his war-whooping and left-bashing from their war whooping and left-bashing. Should liberals really be heartened by his new moral ardor now?
Chait casts Beinart’s 180-degree turn now in terms somewhat reminiscent of the aphorism, les extremes touchent, meaning that a spectrum’s ideological poles sometimes have more in common with each other than with the middling positions in between. Stalinists become neo-cons without altering anything in their cankered and bitter psychology; Beinart, yesterday’s American hegemonic warrior against the multilateralist, anti-nationalist left, becomes Beinart, today’s apostle of multilateralism against the nationalist, power-politicking right. His mental habits don’t really change, and his moralism doesn’t abate, because he sustains it more to restore his own good odor and emotional equilibrium than to deepen his insights and convictions and to reach out to ordinary American Jews or the ordinary Israelis around me in the park.
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg notes that “the essay’s placement, in the New York Review of Books, the one-stop shopping source for bien-pensant anti-Israelism, is semi-tragic. If Beinart’s goal is to talk to the great mass of American Jews who support the institutions of American Jewry but who are troubled by certain trends in Israeli politics, this is not the way to do it. Who is he trying to convince? Timothy Garton Ash? Peter should have published this essay on Tablet, or some other sort of publication not associated with Tony Judt’s disproportionate hatred of Jewish nationalism.”
The supreme irony for Beinart is that the extremes at both ends of the Israel controversy touch each other within him in no small part because he carries both of their ethno-cultural inflections. These do matter: In the Israel controversy’s public discourse and bare-knuckled politics, it’s predominantly the descendants of Russian and Eastern European Jews — whether American neoconservatives like Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol or members of the Knesset like Natan Sharansky and Avigdor Lieberman — who drive the cankered, bitter Jewish nationalism, with its opportunistic abuses of religion and its contempt for any social-welfarism that reminds it even fleetingly of the Communist totalitarianism that some of them escaped.
At the other extreme of the controversy, it’s Britons — and British Jews who are unlucky enough to have internalized British stereotypes of Jews in their formative years — who dominate the cankered, bitter, obsessive, and hypocritically fine-spun loathing of Israel. Political decay, impotence and bitterness slither out of people in peculiar ways, and, for too many Brits, who have so much more to regret and apologize for and so much more bottomless hypocrisy to plumb than Israel ever will, the anguish of decline slithers out against the Jews in eerily disembodied, oddly passionless ways:
“How odd of God to Choose the Jews,” runs a characteristically disdainful verse by the 20th Century British journalist William Norman Ewer. (To which my own riposte is, “Moses, Jesus, Spinoza; Marx, Einstein, and Freud; no wonder the gentiles are annoyed.”)
Well, there are lots of annoying people and things in the world, but British Jews who swallowed Ewer’s hook on some playground or classroom in their early years seem condemned to writhe with it, much as American blacks who’ve internalized a standard of idealized whiteness turn it toward vicious detestation of blacks who are darker-skinned than themselves, and much as German Jews who’d internalized an idealized German kultur loathed the embarrassing Ostjuden from… Russia and Eastern Europe. Here – and let us not mince words – we are talking about self-hatred, a cold, fine-spun, exacting usurper of sound judgment.
Beinart’s ancestors came from Lithuania, but before World War I they migrated, with a sizable contingent of other Litvaks, to South Africa. In the interwar years of Wilsonian nationalist awakening In Lithuania and all over Europe, many more Lithuanian Jews saw what was rising around them in their home of 500 years and opted for Zionism, transforming their ancestral, liturgical Hebrew into an old/new language and migrating to Palestine in the 1920s and 30s. Still others opted for the more universal promise of Communism in Europe and Russia, and others for capitalist opportunity in America. Those who stayed put were slaughtered — more than 135,000 of them in the woods and fields around their towns and were buried in mass trenches by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen and their Lithuanian recruits in the summer of 1941.
Some Lithuanian-Jewish Communists had fled not to the USSR but to South Africa as well as to America, among them Joseph Slovo, a founder of the African National Congress. A few of the next generation of South African Jews were ANC sympathizers, like the young Ian Shapiro, now a political scientist at Yale. And some of these leftists later became neo-conservatives or bureaucratic apparatchiks in the manner I’ve mentioned, grafting an old mental morphology onto Established Power rather than onto a revolutionary pursuit of Power.
Beinart’s family and most other South African Jews weren’t leftists. They came seeking freedom from persecution and bourgeois. But in South Africa they internalized the idealized British standards I’ve mentioned, and few were immune to internalizing the “odd” but unrelenting British discomfort and pretended bemusement about Jews.
All this prompts many a British Jew’s own efforts at expiation and projection. Even young Beinart, although he grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts and attended the Buckingham Brown and Nichols School and then Yale, where he was influenced by the Jewish nationalist political theorist Steven Smith, eventually spent a year at Oxford reckoning with whatever aspirations and insecurities the Brits of South Africa had implanted in his parents and, through them, in him.
This is a recipe for the unsavory mix of aspirations and fears we encountered in his writings and his trajectory as I sketch them briefly in bookforum. Although I don’t share their positions, Chait and Goldberg have a point: Beinart, like the estimable Tony Judt, himself a British Jew, is right in principle about Israel’s worst apologists, but he overstates his case for reasons having more to do with swift, dark currents in history and himself than with the complicated realities in Israel and Palestine.
How is Beinart resolving this? He is fulfilling a certain British stereotype of Jews. Above on this page, Bernard Avishai notes that Beinart recently “told Jeffrey Goldberg: ‘…my grandmother used to say, “the Jews are like rats,” we leave the sinking ship. So yes, I’m a Zionist. I’m close enough to people who still have their bags packed.’ He takes for granted that American Jews constitute a distinct ‘community,’ replete with communitarian institutions and an ‘Establishment'”
I don’t like what kind of American this makes him. Yes, history has often forced Jews to live with their bags packed. But if America is about anything, it’s about becoming a republic where no one has to live that way. In Beinart I sense a shiftiness about this — from his bombastic, crude, and suspect patriotism of a few years ago to what he tells Goldberg now — that troubles me.
Again, I’m not excusing anything about Israel. There are plenty of dark, swift currents swirling around me here in Tel Aviv, to say nothing of Jerusalem and occupied Palestine. I’m just looking at hundreds of decent, ordinary people around me at the moment and realizing that there are wiser ways than Beinart’s to be right about what their American Jewish cheerleaders and supposed champions are getting wrong.
Israel’s Tragedy, America’s Folly
Nine columns by Jim Sleeper
Written in January and February in response to Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, these trace the arc of a thought-process about the State of Israel’s posture in the Middle East over the past 40 years. Many others have come painfully to conclusions like mine without articulating them as I do here.
Below these are two more columns, about not-so-young American neo-conservatives who cheered the miscarriage of American public thinking and policy under George W. Bush.
Israel’s Tragedy
The first column, “Can There Be Politics in Tragedy?”, confronts Israeli policy toward Gaza over the past 40 years through the eyes of a young but formidably well-informed American who has worked in Gaza. Finding his account revelatory yet incomplete in its understanding of Israel, I pose questions about the history and intentions of both sides.
The second, “How Dysfunctional Is Israel?” probes the dominant Israeli mindset in the war – and a dominant but untrustworthy mindset in some of its critics.
The third, “Gaza Needs a George Orwell Now,” warns Israel’s critics against a too credulous or one-sided reading of reports from Gaza. Hideous though Israel’s destruction has been I note that while Franco the fascist was the great villain of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell found evil, as well, in the supposedly heroic Stalinist resistance. He also found that no one wanted to know. This short column prompted a 20 minute NPR interview that is also linked below,
The fourth, “How and How Not to Assess Israel’s Moral Self-Destruction,” carries the search for full reportage (and sound premises) into a critique of Gaza reporting by Chris Hedges (a moralistic critic of Israel) and Jeffrey Goldberg (a neo-connish apologist for the war.) Instead I endorse the thinking of Avraham Burg and Jonathan Schell.
The fifth, “U.K., U.S., Drop Their (and Israel’s) Grand Strategy,” written shortly before Obama’s inauguration, summons an observation about Zionism by Hannah Arendt as my endorsement of recent comments by the British Foreign Secretary about the inutility of the “war on terror.”
The sixth, “Israel’s Only Way Out,” written shortly before the Feb. 10 elections, draws together these themes, criticizing Michael Walzer’s apologetics for the war and proposing a new way of thinking about Israel and wars of this kind.
Two other columns consider the uses of “coercive non-violence” in people’s resistance, as applied (or not) to Palestine and Israel.
American Neo-cons’ Folly
“The Pity of It All, about young American Jewish writers who’ve gone wrong, and
“U.S. Neo-cons Jump Conservative Ship,” about their ideological confusion, as expressed in essays such as Sam Tanenhaus’ “Conservatism Is Dead.”
If the graying of Barack Obama as a herald of progressive change is getting you down, consider “Fun City Revisited,” the new PBS documentary about John Lindsay, New York City’s heraldic young mayor and presidential hopeful during the tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s. (“Fun City Revisited: The Lindsay Years” can be viewed in its entirety via its website.)
The Lindsay story won’t exactly cheer you up, but it’ll remind you that some things seemed even worse back then: American cities and backwaters were imploding on racial hatreds and economic undertows; the whole country was exploding over the Vietnam War. Lindsay — elected only two years after the assassination of another dashing, young, Ivy League champion — revived the promise of elite liberal leadership in a style that recalled JFK’s and anticipated Obama’s. It also discredited that promise, but not without offering the lesson that we need an open, circulating elite, but one whose members would be trained with a depth and discipline that we’ve lost.
The old elite liberal leadership style involved more than just youth and charisma. It had streaks of moralism and naivete about the things that new configurations of corporate and finance capital were doing to American society. But the documentary shows in Lindsay three additional qualities that have made his liberalism and that of JFK and Obama credible, even when not successful:
1. Each of them had an aloof, almost aristocratic, intelligence, borne partly of a good liberal education. When coupled with character, that intelligence kept each man from losing his cool under pressure, even when it opened up no clear solutions. (By the way, “aristocratic” didn’t necessarily mean “rich:” Lindsay wasn’t even as well off as Obama, the best-selling author, and Kennedy’s wealth was “new,” not aristocratic. Intelligence and character mattered more: They were “disinterested” in the civic-republican sense of that term, which means that they didn’t often put their personal or special “interests” ahead of the republic. Like Plato’s guardians, they identified themselves so deeply with the republic that they let it define their self-interest more than vice-versa.)
Each of them made some colossal misjudgments: Evan Thomas’ The Very Best Men shows that Kennedy tinkered timorously but fatally with the Bay of Pigs invasion plan. The PBS documentary shows Lindsay being too moralistic with some unions when he should have been more Machiavellian. Obama has been too Machiavellian with corporate and finance capital, when he should be pushing their substantial reconfiguration, as the “aristocratic” Roosevelts weren’t hesitant to do.
Kennedy, Lindsay, and Obama have seen further ahead of their own time than have most other politicians, and each has walked (sometimes too slowly, but in Lindsay’s case perhaps too rapidly) toward those distant horizons instead of getting mired in the political passions and preferments of the moment. A serious liberal education will do that for you — or to you — if it’s coupled with character training, their second shared quality:
2. They had something called “sand” and certain essential public virtues. “Behind all the hurly burly of organized college activity lay something called the Yale spirit – usually called ‘sand’ by the undergraduates,” writes Brooks Mather Kelley of the college life that shaped Lindsay. “Sand was placed under the wheels of locomotives to make them go, and sand – grit, determination, ‘persistence, reliability, self-reliance, and willingness to face the consequences of one’s actions’ – was what made Yale undergraduate life go.”
Learning to face the consequences of one’s actions often comes only from rites of passage early in one’s life – tests of courage, prowess, and dedication that bond youths to one another and the larger society in their most impressionable, formative years under the guidance of ratifying elders.
At the schools and colleges Kennedy, Lindsay, and Obama attended, extracurricular regimens and studies of the classic epics and disputations taught that self-denial for a common good requires first a self that is strong enough to deny: What might seem just a row of automatons rowing down a river is really a seething cauldron of eight private struggles against fear and infirmity, refined to a common identity and purpose.
At its best, such training can stimulate a quiet readiness to take responsibility without sure reward; a capacity to bear pain with grace (if only because spiritual grace seems thereby assured); and a direct if understated felicity in speech and bearing, including self-scrutiny and a self-deprecating humor that deflects others’ envy and perhaps one’s own doubts about privilege. Americans have seen this in all three men, whose training linked liberal education’s Truth-seeking to the civic arts and disciplines of republican Power-wielding.
The Yale graduates of Lindsay’s time prided themselves “on being good teammates and knowing how to win. Believing that success was virtuous, they respected and rewarded dedication and ‘grit,’ the personality traits that could decide a close contest. Valuing tact and consideration, they subjected their personal interests to those of the group,” writes Isaiah Wilner in a book about the two Yale grads who founded TIME magazine in the early 1920s.
Some Yale men, like the social activists Dwight Macdonald (a descendant of two of the college’s early Puritan presidents) William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Dave Dellinger, and Staughton Lynd also carried a strain of the old Calvinist conviction that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. At times, they actually inspired or provoked others to live by it. Lindsay carried that strain, too.
3. They also knew how to sustain trust in networking to wield power for interests besides their own. People who get their sand and moral steel from early rites of passage know how to bond and work together later on in life, outflanking demagoguery. Whenever tea-partiers, religious fundamentalists, or racist militias reprise Joe McCarthy’s terrors of the 1950s, serious public leadership knows that such rampages will crest at around 40 percent of the population — if a society’s best standard-bearers can draw themselves up, tell one another, “We can’t have this,” and work together to deflect and defang the worst of it.
To do that, good leaders have to trust one another in ways the old rites taught them to do. “To a remarkable extent, this place has detected and rejected the very few who wear the colors of high purpose falsely,” Yale’s president Kingman Brewster, Jr. told my entering class in September, 1965. “This has not been done by administrative edict or official regulation [but]by a pervasive ethic of student and faculty loyalty and responsibility and mutual regard which lies deep in our origins and traditions.”
It’s easy to dismiss Brewster’s pride in this collective capacity for mutual scrutiny as nothing but a defense of clubby elitism and its conceits. Sometimes, it is just that. Writing in my class’ 25th anniversary class book, Thomas McNamee acknowledged that “one of the skills useful to a befogged Yale undergraduate is the ability to write down under-informed over-generalizations with an air of easy grandeur” and that “optimism and confidence, even when forced or false, enhance performance.”
You can see some of that in Lindsay, too, and in Kennedy. But Brewster justified his ideal of a self-reinforcing logic of trust when he wrote, in a passage that is now the epitaph on his grave in New Haven, ”The presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept. In commonplace terms it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger.”
JFK, Lindsay, and Obama have certainly held true to that admonition to extend trust cannily, not naively, in ways that actually do elicit trust from others and thereby enhance strengths in a free society that wealth can’t buy and that national-security strategies alone can’t guarantee.
For example, one of the first honorary doctorates Brewster gave, at Yale’s 1964 Commencement, was to Martin Luther King, Jr., who’d just been released from jail. Brewster understood, as Lindsay did, that poor black churchgoers who walked trembling into tense Southern squares were re-enacting The Exodus from slavery to freedom, opening the hearts of astonished northern WASPS and Jews whose ancestors (including Brewster’s own) had made history of that same Exodus myth in ages past.
Watching King on television from the White House during the 1963 March on Washington, Kennedy understood this, too. His own speech to the nation on civil rights shortly before his death testified to his commitment to a civic-republican community transcending time, space, and political self-interest. Doing that, at tremendous political risk, required sand, moral steel, and public trust.
The documentary shows Lindsay, too, bearing brave moral witness to that commitment as he walks through Harlem after riots in 1967 and after King’s assassination a year later. I’ve written more than a little about his blind spots and blunders, and in the film I say a little more about that. But there’s no question that his presence on the streets actually made a difference, because ordinary people still trusted civic-republican leadership like his and like that of the martyred Jack Kennedy’s soon-to-be martyred brother Bobby. Somewhat similarly, Brewster’s own leadership helped keep Yale from blowing up in 1970, as Columbia and Kent State had done not long before.
People could feel these leaders’ sand, steel, and trust, and they trusted them, knowing that they’d earned their prerogatives through self-sacrifice and moral imagination.
Narrow ideological partisanship was secondary, and party affiliation was tertiary. Not always, of course, and not always advisably. But even Lindsay’s most formidable opponent in the 1965 mayoral race, William F. Buckley, Jr., who ran on the Conservative Party line, was a product of a Yale civic-republican training that, when it worked, nourished friendships across ideological lines: Late in his life, drawing, perhaps, on what he’d learned in his early rites of passage, Buckley sensed that conservative ideologues had strayed from the civic-republican depths and comity he valued more deeply than he did the fatuous ideas he’d preached, at 24, in God and Man at Yale.
Among Buckley’s lifelong left-liberal friends was the columnist Murray Kempton, who helped Lindsay in 1965 by writing, “He is fresh, and everyone else is tired.” That became a Lindsay campaign slogan, but New York Times reporter Sam Roberts, who has edited a companion volume of essays to go with the PBS documentary, notes that when Lindsay was reminded of it many years later, he quipped, “We’re tired, and everyone else is dead.” If one knew how he’d been trained, one feels in that riposte the sand and self-deprecating humor he’d absorbed so much earlier in life.
You see a little of this in the documentary. Kennedy’s Harvard imparted some it, too; think of the Roosevelts and Al Gore. (And when you think of Dick Cheney flunking out of Yale in 1961, you begin to sense his misunderstandings of where republican strength really comes from and how it’s best defended.)
By the time George W. Bush was at Yale a few years later — in the Class of 1968, while Lindsay was mayor — the old rites of passage were breaking down, although not for everyone: John Kerry (’66) and Howard Dean (’71) were there, too. While some resentment of Ivy graduates now is manufactured by conservatives who still consider their colleges too “liberal,” more of it comes from people who’ve lost faith that these wunderkinds, liberal or conservative, still earn and uphold their leadership roles in the ways I’ve been sketching here.
Fortunately, great American leaders are trained in lots of other places — church basements, Little League lots, immigrant settlement houses, public schools, state universities, historically black colleges, labor unions, and social and political movements. I’ve been learning recently that a staggering number of these seedbeds of public leadership — including Obama’s high school in Hawaii — were founded or led by people trained with a fateful, almost missionary intensity in rites of passage at Yale. But what really counts is that a republic have an open, circulating “elite” of leaders drawn from many sources but trained with depth and discipline for their work.
As a candidate in 2008, Obama evoked and, of course, embodied some of what Brewster had honored in King and what Lindsay had walked through Harlem to affirm. But is Obama marching alone? Or, worse, has he donned the colors of high purpose falsely, as even some leftists now claim?
Obama is probably wiser than Lindsay was in deploying his public virtues against daunting odds. He understands that another liberal capitalist War on Poverty wouldn’t conquer poverty any more than Reaganite free-marketeering has done. But he also believes that no leftist war on capitalism would do it, either. It will take strong leadership that inspires trust to strike a plausible balance among bleak options.
Knowing this doesn’t guarantee that Obama will make sounder judgments, let alone achieve any more than Lindsay or Kennedy did; and both of them failed, albeit for very different reasons. What worries me more is that the spiritually deep convictions and rites of passage that produced good leadership are indeed breaking down under riptides of consumer marketing and reckless disinvestment that only civic-republican leadership, widely diffused, might counter and channel.
Our patriots of the moment don’t know this, or can’t face it. They certainly don’t acknowledge that a liberal capitalist republic has to rely ultimately on virtues and beliefs that neither the liberal state itself nor markets can nourish or enforce. Somehow, liberal leaders have to be nurtured all the more intensively.
Yale did that, and Obama found his own nourishment for leadership in bits and pieces from his mother, his high school, Columbia, and Harvard Law, as well as on Chicago’s South Side in a black branch of the United Church of Christ, the Congregational church of Kingman Brewster’s Puritan ancestors. Obama wasn’t faking this in the campaign, but he was re-discovering its limits as well as its necessity.
The need to regenerate great civic-republican leadership is an American Dilemma. Only if we can address it can we develop better strategies for the tsunamis and undertows that are upon us. If “establishment” liberals can’t muster more of what the Roosevelts, Kennedys, Lindsay, and countless unsung civic leaders did, and adapt it for our time, as Obama has promised to do, then Americans will never trust liberals to help them detect and reject those who wear the colors of high purpose falsely.
THE DOCUMENTARY “Fun City Revisited: The Lindsay Years”
WHEN | WHERE Thursday night at 8 on WNET /13; also Wednesday at 10 p.m. on WLIW /21
REASON TO WATCH Overview of eight tumultuous years (1965-73), by veteran PBS producer Tom Casciato.
WHAT IT’S ABOUT “Tall . . . patrician . . . blue-eyed” are words that went with two-term New York City Mayor John Lindsay to his grave, and you won’t avoid them here. He was the Hollywood mayor in the big, troubled city. He was “fresh [when] everyone else is tired,” in columnist Murray Kempton ‘s memorable assessment. A Republican in name only, he tried to heal racial divides and only widened them, according to some critics. A minute after his inauguration on Jan. 1, 1966, transit union chief Mike Quill – who puckishly referred to the new mayor as “Lindsley” – called a strike, forcing New Yorkers to walk increasingly dangerous and (soon) dirty streets. A garbage strike followed and a bitter teachers’ one, too – the dispute in Ocean Hill / Brownsville was bungled by Lindsay and nearly shattered the fragile proto-Rainbow coalition he had tried to build.
Cast off by the Republicans because of political differences, he narrowly won re-election in 1969, running on the Liberal Party line. Two years later, he became a Democrat and unsuccessfully sought the party’s nomination for president in 1972, giving critics more ammo.
MY SAY There are many fair-minded appraisals of Lindsay here, notably by former Newsday columnists such as Jimmy Breslin and Jim Sleeper, and even onetime Newsday reporter Dick Aurelio, also a Lindsay aide. But an ex-Times reporter offers the most arresting image.
Joyce Purnick says that when she saw Lindsay leave City Hall on his last day in ’73, he was crying: “What a way to end this experiment in modern progressive liberal leadership, glassy-eyed in tears.” Lindsay was certainly not a wimp – he won five battle stars in the Navy during World War II , then spent eight years battling New Yorkers – but to this day, the word “sad” is appended to him as well.
The documentary tries to erase that troubling word, but the essence of Lindsay – who died in 2000 – still eludes its grasp. More time was needed.
Long after leaving public office, he tried different jobs, even as part-time host of ” Good Morning America ,” and was so financially stressed that Mayor Rudy Giuliani had to give him a ceremonial gig so he could get health insurance.
BOTTOM LINE Not quite a total reappraisal, the show still establishes that Lindsay had an enduring triumph – his embrace of black New Yorkers. Sometimes just a single triumph in any long political career, especially one of this magnitude, is enough.
Everyone attending the long wake for high-end newspapers knows about My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at The New York Times, the new memoir-cum-indictment of racism at that paper by the late Gerald Boyd, who was fired as its managing editor in 2003, along with executive editor Howell Raines, partly for their supposed “diversity”-driven coddling of Jayson Blair, a black reporter who’d plagiarized and fabricated elements in many of his news stories.
Boyd left bitterly, protesting that although he’d never mentored Blair, whom others could and should have reined in, he was being blamed only because, as the paper’s senior black editor, he embodied a Times “diversity” regimen that was detested by many whites at the paper.
Let me stipulate that Boyd is right about this part of the story and that racism at the Times has often been ubiquitous and grinding, if sometimes subtle. But let me also stipulate what good journalists are supposed to remember: that there is another side of the story – and I don’t mean the nasty, Glenn Beck side, which isn’t part of the story at all.
The “real” other side in this case is that the Times’ loopy “diversity” regimen of the 1990s sometimes compounded the racism it was supposed to confound. Not only racist whites detested it; so did some non-whites and white left-liberals. (It should also be said that while the Blair scandal was the immediate cause the newsroom rebellion that ousted Boyd and Raines, that rebellion was as much about both men’s peremptory management style as about race.)
Acknowledging that both sides of the racial dimension of a story may be true — in this case, that both racism and its “anti-racist” antidote at the Times could be dangerously wrong — requires what John Keats called a “negative capability” to hold two incompatible truths in mind at once.
Unfortunately that capability deserts many otherwise formidably intelligent American liberals whenever they consider anything touching upon race. They tend, not surprisingly, to be the liberals whose own workplaces and social lives are atypically sheltered from diversity regimens and from black colleagues and friends. The most absurd diversity protocols tend to be imposed by rich, white liberals such as Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. and by less-rich but penitential white southerners such as Howell Raines.
In a review for The New York Review of Books, Russell Baker adopts an agnostic, even bemused stance toward Boyd’s charges of racism and others’ complaints that “diversity” had run amok at the paper. Baker keeps trying to joke about the national media furor over Jayson Blair, invoking for example, “John Kenneth Galbraith’s definition of a newspaper columnist as a person obliged to find significance three times a week in events of absolutely no consequence.”
But Baker also has to keep reminding himself and the rest of us that one can’t dismiss the Blair fiasco as easily as he seems to keep wanting to do: “‘Diversity’ is not a subject for light amusement in America,” he intones at one point. “It is a subject that Americans take to the Supreme Court.” Yet Baker seems determined to leave it right there, lifting not a finger to assess either old-fashioned racism or liberal racism at Boyd’s Times.
Liberal Racism’s chapter on “diversity” at the Timesopens with a story that Gay Talese told me about Gerald Boyd. It then describes some sad, silly aspects of the Times’ diversity regimen. It ends by showing that the “diversity” obsession sometimes compromised the paper’s news coverage of race.
Like this Daily News column about Raines in 1994, the chapter was an Early Warning that something was amiss. But I am white, and, in the minds of people whose negative capability collapses before race, that was that.
When Boyd read my account of the Talese story about him in galleys of the book, he called me. I still remember returning his call from a pay phone at the corner of Astor Place and Broadway and listening to him threaten to summon his attorneys. “Make my day,” I replied. He never did.
I’ve never thought of Gerald Boyd as anything less than what Baker suggests — a tragic and therefore somewhat noble casualty of racism. But I think that he was a casualty of both the old-fashioned, enduring kind and the liberal kind, which he detested for lowering the bar — and with it, whites’ estimation of him — when all he really wanted was the elementary compliment of being judged by the same standards the Times applied to whites.
Liberal racism bedeviled Boyd — as it does millions of American blacks — until its debilitating over-solicitude became indistinguishable from what it really is: a species of racism itself. No wonder that liberals still can’t talk about it.
(Originated on TPM, April 5, 2010. Updated February, 2023)
In March, 2010, The New Republic published the linguist John McWhorter’s denunciation of the damage he insisted had been done to African-Americans such as himself and his relatives by the leftist-activist professors Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. Piven and Cloward had tried to bring down capitalism in the 1960s by flooding welfare rolls with angry would-be recipients. Nearly half a century later, McWhorter still hadn’t gotten over it. He cast them among the crackpots of racial protest, writing that he’d love to “erase” them from memory: “Rarely in American history have people with such a destructive agenda [as Piven and Cloward] had such power over the lives of the innocent…, helping to ruin the lives of, for example, some of my relatives.”
Such power? McWhorter was certainly on-message with conservative thunderings against Piven and Cloward by Glenn Beck and the right-radical provocateur David Horowitz — everyone’s source on the horrors supposedly perpetrated by Piven and Cloward.
For me, there’s a wrinkle here: Horowitz’s source on the follies of Piven and Cloward was me, in The Closest of Strangers,Chapter 3, “The Politics of Polarization,” where I, too, condemned what I found destructive in their strategy. McWhorter carried his unquenchable rage at Piven and Cloward into a post titled “Frances Fox Piven, Jim Sleeper, and Me.”
I had written that Piven, Cloward and many on the left were in thrall to assumptions about racism and capitalism that carried a lot of truth, but that also needed the deconstruction I provided in my Chapter 3 and on pp 159-162, drawing on my immersion in inner-city Brooklyn.
Soon after my reckoning was published in 1990, Horowitz, whom I did not know, called to tell me that he loved the book. Easing him off the phone with a polite “Thanks, but no thanks,” I began to understand the dangers in racial truth-telling in a polarized society: I was getting vilification from the Piven-oriented left and sloppy wet kisses from neo-cons and paleo-cons. At times, I felt pretty much how George Orwell felt when he tried to tell the left in London that Stalin was killing social democrats as much as fascists in the Spanish Civil War. For documenting Stalin’s brutal hypocrisy in trying to crush his detractors on the left, Orwell was canceled by leftist editors and publishers, as I recount in the essay I’ve linked in the previous sentence.
A lot of American leftist ideology cast Blacks as the cats’ paws of revolution against a regime that had long consigned them to a “reserve army of the unemployed,” exploited and brutalized. Yet Piven and Cloward’s call for resistance, via their racialized “politics of turmoil,” was no solution. It opened no path to political or economic justice, let alone integration.
That doesn’t mean, however that Piven and Cloward and their followers were the malevolent conspirators that McWhorter made them out to be. Their strategy of storming welfare offices to demand more benefits to overwhelm and discredit the system and to clear the way for revolution was counterproductive, for sure; it only compounded racist contempt for the people they intended to mobilize. My book made this pretty clear, and many on the left reacted against it by doubling down on their histrionic, moralistic, romantic, ultimately tragic tactics. But that didn’t make Piven and Cloward the malevolent monsters that McWhorter portrayed them s being.
I’d admired McWhorter’s Losing the Race, which I reviewed for The Washington Monthly in 2000. But I’d cautioned him there against becoming the conservative-movement water-carrier: In his New Republic he even dismissed the Brazilian radical educator Paolo Freire, one of my inspirations (as I once explained while quoting him in reporting on my encounters with poverty, race, and a rich congressman in Brooklyn).
The conspiracy mongering about Piven and Cloward that came from Glenn Beck and other right-wing demagogues should have given McWhorter pause. Beware the prospect of unmasking Evil Others on either end of the spectrum. Yes, they’re out there. But just as George Kennan was right to urge firm containment of Soviet Communism without proposing militarized rollback, keepers of the American civic-republican faith and flame, as McWhorter wants to be, need to develop new ways to stand firm against its subverters without lashing out so histrionically. Yet the left in those days played inexorably into the hands of the more-powerful right by lashing out.
Here is a comment on what you’ve just read, posted by “Jimmy of Staten Island” on the website of New York City’s NPR station, WNYC, after host Brian Lehrer quoted a passage from this column. “Jimmy,” writing from a neighborhood where many Archie Bunkers surely live, described himself as “Still a Democrat, still Union, but Lord Almighty, folks like Ms. Piven do little but alienate the folks in my local, and weaken their allegiance to the Democratic Party. Her ‘strategy’ to cause rifts within the voting blocs that make up Municipal Democratic Parties, to force LBJ’s hand, did nothing but bring about Nixon-Reagan, and the long-term kneecapping of the greater, national Democratic party.”
With a comment like Jimmy’s, I rest my case — against Piven & Co. for being hapless enough to have long time, but also against McWhorter, Beck, and Horowitz, because, obsessing as they do about Piven’s holding “such power over the lives of innocents,” end up mobilizing people who are racist enough to embrace scapegoating. Chastise the left for its follies, as I’ve done often enough myself. But spare us any hyped-up indignation about liberal racism that, like McWhorter’s indignation, accepts and even excuses the brutal, ubiquitous realities of racism itself.
Last year here I criticized enlightened denizens of the Chattering Classes Zoo for trying to rehabilitate David Brooks, an ingratiating neo-con who’s as doomed as a charming, brilliant vampire to suck the blood of the American republic while thinking he’s in love. (It’s Halloween, okay? But this is dead serious, too.)
In his Times columm today Brooks gives us yet another sinuous warm-up for the strength-sapping passion that drives all his comic lines and phone calls to experts. Linking Afghanistan’s dark prospects to his doubts about Obama’s “tenacity” against real evils, Brooks tries to seduce us into a real war. As with Iraq, he’s sublimating primal fears and resentments that fuel his and other neo-cons’ grand causes.
But mightn’t they be right this time? Afghanistan isn’t Iraq, and Obama isn’t Bush. The problem with writers like Brooks is that, in their bones, they’re jingoists: Their patriotism requires enemies, and they fight wars with other people’s blood while currying Established Power’s favor with all the determination of heat missiles seeking heat. The world is hard, dark, and cruel, as they tell us – and some people do need to be told. But Brooks & Co. have faith in only one way to save it. Watch David run:
In the first year of the Iraq war, Brooks swooned over Bush’s and Rumsfeld’s characterologically ignorant tenacity against insuperable complexities. He denigrated the war’s critics, but as it went bad, he rehabilitated those critics who’d argued that only more troops would prevail.
Then, as the Surge failed to secure very much that could outlast American occupation, Brooks began praising the “deliberative” Obama as Obama moved toward Power. But now Brooks frets over Obama’s characterologically intelligent respect for the insuperable complexities Bush ignored. And Brooks flirts with General (and Possible Presidential Candidate) Stanley McChrystal.
The point I wish his admirers would take from all this is that, characterologically (by which I mean something worse than neurotically), Brooks has to do this. The common thread in all his re-positionings is a supposedly knowing, conservative apprehension of the need to use force against force. We have no choice.
Sometimes, that’s true. But Iraq was a neo-con-abetted war of choice, and a disastrously wrong one for fighting terrorists. It’s one big reason we’ve “lost” Afghanistan, even assuming we could have outdone the British or the Russians in “winning” it. (The Russian defeat has been reprised chillingly, from Soviet archives, in the Times by Victor Sebestyen. The analogies are daunting.)
Brooks tells us he’s spent the last few days calling around to experts who wonder portentously, as he does, whether Obama has the tenacity to sally forth into the doom Brooks unknowingly craves.
“Come on people, let’s get a grip. This week, Chicken Littles like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were ranting that Iraq is another Vietnam….. I’ve spent the last few days talking with people who’ve spent much of their careers studying and working in this region. … As Charles Hill, the legendary foreign service officer who now teaches at Yale, observed, ‘I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the boldness and resolve.'” Brooks touted the Rumsfeld “dead-enders” line and assured us tenacity would bring victory.
By 2006, as I’ve noted, Brooks had stopped denigrating critics who’d warned two years earlier of the quagmire he’d assured us wasn’t there. Now,he told us,
“Everybody denigrates pundits and armchair generals, but… the smartest of them recognized that something unexpected was happening: The US was not in the midst of a conventional war but was in the first days of a guerrilla war [and] that it was time to shelve the rosy scenarios…. In TV studios and on op-ed pages,… retired officers and columnists called for more troops and officers on the front lines saw the same thing the smart pundits saw. Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks saw nothing wrong.”
Neither did Brooks, of course, but by 2006 he was with those who’d called from the beginning for more troops, not less. He and all the neo-cons would support the Surge that has given us the Iraq we see now.
David the vampire had a domestic appetite, too. He’d made his name, in fact, by sidling up to confused, upscale liberals and purring, “C’mon, you know that you really love your real estate and your unearned income, and that you like circulating commodities more than ideas. And… [wink, tickle] it’s okay!“
I’d never before seen a political columnist work himself into deliriums watching other people shop. Brooks seemed almost to have forgotten, except in rhetorical gestures at the end of his Bobos in Paradise, that we must be fellow-citizens as well as consumers, or else we are lost. But to be serious about citizenship is to spend a lot of time and energy nourishing a disposition to rise above narrow self-interest, especially in peacetime, not just in wars that twist and drain the very public strengths the war-makers claim to be mobilizing.
On Brooks’ watch at the Times, his lusts for consumerism, for comic sociology, for war-making, and for baiting liberals who try to cultivate the softer arts of citizenship were ill-timed. His tweaking of do-gooders was accompanied by Katrina, with Blackwater patrolling the streets of New Orleans; by predatory finance capital ‘s transformation of real estate into un-real estate; by a pestilence of executive and Wall Street welfare queens; and — from Enron to Cardinal Law, or from Bernie Madoff to the media’s necrophilia over Michael Jackson — by a riot from the top by America’s multi-problem overclass, whose tangle of pathologies the indulgent Brooks had been too busy deriding liberals to notice.
Abroad, we sowed and reaped a whirlwind borne of displacing our anxieties about these ills into a confrontation with the unquestionably evil Saddam — namely, a battered Iraq that the Surge hasn’t saved and that we have now made ourselves too weak fiscally and morally to expand or reform.
Brooks isn’t quite as far gone as William Kristol, his former mentor at the flagship neo-con Weekly Standard, who has given us such great American leaders as Alan Keyes, Dan Quayle, and Sarah Palin (whom Kristol “discovered” on a Weekly Standard cruise in Alaska and commended to John McCain). I don’t really imagine Brooks bursting into applause and cheers, as Kristol’s staff did, when Obama failed to win America’s bid to host the Olympics in Chicago.
Facing the real disasters I’ve mentioned above, Brooks knew enough to start pirouetting furiously, with prophylactic applications of Malcolm Gladwell in his columns and with cuddly feelers to people who can help him buff up his image among liberals. Yet too many of his columns, especially a breathtakingly sophistical account of the mortgage meltdown, showed him still plying his intellectual usury.
Now he informs us that “Afghan villagers,” unsure of “the state of Obama’s resolve,” are “hedging their bets, refusing to inform on Taliban force movements because they are aware that these Taliban fighters would be their masters if the U.S. withdraws.”
The options are indeed grisly. But does Brooks really believe that if Obama’s tenacity became as obdurate Bush’s, Afghan villagers would trust thousands more white and black American guys with boots and buzz cuts? Or is he just sucking more American blood and calling it love?
Here he goes again. In 2004, David Brooks told us that John Kerry had “a brain of sculpted marshmallow,” and he never missed a chance to ridicule Kerry with some variation of George Wallace’s old barb about liberal “pointy headed professors who can’t park their bicycles straight.”
Brooks tells us now that Al Gore is a “radical technological determinist” whose book The Assault on Reason “reminds us that whatever the effects of our homogenizing mass culture, it is still possible for exceedingly strange individuals to rise to the top…. While most politicians react to people, Gore reacts to machines…”
Always and everywhere, such insulting cheap shots are the fallback strategy of someone whose own worldview, left or right, is crumbling: When George Orwell reported in Homage to Catalonia in 1937 that the Spanish Civil War wasn’t what the Anglo-American left wanted to believe, The Daily Worker‘s David Brooks, one Harry Pollitt, called him a “disillusioned little middle class boy.”
Among conservatives, the fallback position now involves blaming liberals in similar terms, inflating their shortcomings and hypocrisies to lend a false integrity and coherence to conservative lies. Liberals like Gore make easy targets, having done well by a system whose deepening inequities they don’t fundamentally challenge but don’t wholeheartedly defend. They tend to have a weakness for moralistic, symbolic gestures (moralism about racial preferences, hope for technological fixes) that don’t seriously address the problems.
Say, then, if you will, that Gore is a pointy-headed autodidact, a political stumblebum, a naif. But then consider the people his attackers champion. And begin to suspect that there’s something that Brooks doesn’t understand about the ways a republic needs more public reason and even a little “strangeness” like Kerry’s or Gore’s — more than like, say, Rudy Giuliani’s.
Throughout 2004, Brooks did never give us a metaphor analogous to “sculpted marshmallow” to describe the brain of either of the two exceedingly strange men he was helping to keep the presidency and vice presidency, to which they’d risen in the strangest election imaginable. Yet only a year after their (and Brooks’) 2004 victory, as the Iraq venture went from bad to worse, he told The Nation‘s Ayal Press that, “”Sometimes in my dark moments I think [Bush is] ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ designed to discredit all the ideas I believe in.”
Isn’t that a little strange? Brooks thinks Al Gore is even stranger. He is annoyed by “the chilliness and sterility of [Gore’s] worldview,” which “allows almost no role for family, friendship, neighborhood, or just face-to-face contact. [Gore] sees society the way you might see it from a speaking podium – as a public mass exercise with little allowance for intimacy or private life.”
Sure, and George W. Bush is the regular kind of guy whom every other all-American guy would like to have a beer with. And family, friendship, neighborhood, etc. are for regular guys like Brooks’ “patio man.” But think a minute about how Bush sees society from a triple-riveted podium, before triple-vetted audiences of triple-“enlisted” listeners. Contrast that public mass exercise with Eric Pooley’s unforgettable account of Al Gore’s recent national speaking tour with his “global warming” show.
The more you think about it, the more David Brooks himself begins to look a little strange.
From Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson on, the American Republic has always relied critically on the strangeness of autodidacts, eccentrics, bounders, blowhards, and more. Consider most American inventors and entrepreneurs. Even in the 1980s, Bill Gates said that Japan’s booming economy wouldn’t bury us, because we’re far less aristocratic or regimented. Here, he said, “three guys in a garage” really can re- invent our communications and cultural networks.
I thought Brooks knew that. But our patio man is too busy trying to ingratiate and insinuate himself into a civic culture he doesn’t understand. Gore’s enthusiasm for new science and technology is bumptious, sometimes misguided: “Has Al Gore ever actually looked at the Internet?” Brooks taunts, in full denial that Gore’s experience of Internet interactivity comes from his experience as an investor, advisor, and Google board member, not to mention 16 years in face-to-face contact with ordinary Americans while in Congress. Brooks, by contrast, has inhabited only the communications world – and not as an entrepreneur, like, say, Ned Lamont.
What matters here is a widely-shared, growing misapprehension, which Republicans cultivate, that public reasoning is less important to a republic than family, friendship, neighborhood or just face-to-face contact. Actually each has its vital role, but neo-conservatives have been subverting the place of public reason with a beguiling sophistry that appeals to unreasonable impulses, as Brooks does by insulting Kerry and Gore.
Al Gore’s struggle, like that of Barack Obama and other decent candidates, puts flesh on Griel Marcus’s understanding that the ideals of America are “too big to live up to and too big to escape.” The country’s genius and strength rest on a paradox: Its classical liberalism and free markets rely on civic-republican virtues and beliefs which the liberal state and free markets themselves can’t fully nurture or enforce, because they have to honor the autonomy — the “strangeness” — of free individuals.
The conservative truth here, which its propagandists harp on at liberals’ expense, is that if enough free individuals are going to rise above their narrower interests at times and find themselves more fully by giving to the whole, their inclination to do that will have to be nurtured intensely somehow, not by the state – or, heaven help us, a state religion – but by “family, friendship, neighborhood, or just face-to-face contact.”
But the liberal side of the paradox reminds us that, no matter what autonomous individuals do in private, a republic has to induce and equip them defend their private preferences through reasoned arguments and bargaining that address the needs of others who may disagree but still want the republic to cohere.
Alexander Hamilton sketched the stakes that define this country when he wrote that history seemed to have destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
How might the worst happen? “History does not more clearly point out any fact than this, that nations which have lapsed from liberty, to a state of slavish subjection, have been brought to this unhappy condition, by gradual paces,” wrote Founder Richard Henry Lee. Hence Ben Franklin’s answer in 1787 to a bystander outside Independence Hall who asked what kind of government was being formed: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Unreason and impulse are the default logics of human history; republican freedom is a fragile, if world-historical gain. It requires cultivation and nurture.
Al Gore’s argument in “The Assault on Reason” is that we are being brought gently into something less by sound-bite savants like David Brooks, who argue that the cornucopia of consumption is liberating. Gore argues that radio and television, owned as they are by conglomerates driven to emphasize entertainment and diversion over reason, have weakened the citizenry and strengthened the sophists. He hopes that Internet interactivity will keep the big guys from cornering the marketplace of ideas.
And, yes, he is more than a bit wishful in saying this. Just how wishful Gore is depends on how many Americans are determined to be free, not brought low “by gradual paces” with the help of soothsayers like Bush and Brooks, who tell them they’re free while serving powers that are encroaching on their freedom.
John Adams wasn’t blaming only government when he warned that, “[w]hen the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. … The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependants and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.”
The point was that you don’t strengthen freedom by handing the people over from their elected officials to their paymasters; the polity has to remain sovereign over the economy. What does this mean, exactly? The liberal state empowers corporate entities and investors who can tyrannize and degrade people in daily life, even if not ostensibly in public politics (although it doesn’t take them long to invade the latter, as well.)
Gore avoids a dramatic answer, although he does slam “corporate consolidation and control” of the electronic media (including, he warns, the Internet). This makes him a fat target for the Brookses, but Gore is defending the same Lockean, entrepreneurial capitalism conservatives champion under the name of free markets. He’s challenging them to admit that vast economic engines, bought and sold anomically at the click of a broker’s mouse, have few of the entrepreneur’s virtues, and less of the ordinary citizen’s regard for a republic in which we sometimes transcend our own private interests.
The Republican conservative strategy, and David Brooks’ very modus operandus as a columnist, was sketched very well in Thucydides’ account of the Mytilene debate, during which Diotodus convinces Athenians not to fall for the smears which vulcan orators like Brooks lay on candidates like Kerry and Gore. Diodotus warns Athenians not to trust a speaker who,
knowing that he cannot make a good speech in a bad cause, … tries to frighten his opponents and his hearers by some good-sized pieces of misrepresentation. … The good citizen, instead of trying to terrify the opposition, ought to prove his case in fair argument. And… when a man’s advice is not taken, he should not even be disgraced, far less penalized. [If instead the losing candidate is treated respectfully, even when his advice is rejected,] speakers will be less likely to pursue further honors by speaking against their own convictions in order to make themselves popular; and unsuccessful speakers, too, will not struggle to win over the people by the same acts of flattery….
[Instead] a state of affairs has been reached where a good proposal honestly put forward is just as suspect as something thoroughly bad, and the result is that just as the speaker who advocates some monstrous measure has to win over the people by deceiving them, so also a man with good advice to give has to tell lies if he expects to be believed. And because of this refinement in intellectuality, the state is put into a unique position; it is only she to whom no one can ever do a good turn openly and without deception. For if one openly performs a patriotic action, the reward for one’s pains is to be thought to have made something oneself on the side. ….
Thucydides and other classical authors are big hits with conservative pedagogues whom Brooks has praised for training American youth for war and imperial management. But any honest reading of Thucydides, like any honest reading of Al Gore’s humbler book, would confront today’s Republicans and their apologists with a mirror of their own betrayal of the American republic.
Brooks knows this. Lately he has made gestures in the direction of a political makeover, praising Obama’s deliberative mind. (Three years ago, he’d have called it “sculpted marshmallow.”) But the specter of a revived Al Gore prompts a certain desperation (and perhaps guilt) that drives Brooks and other Republicans back to old habits and fears. If Obama looks better to them by comparison, that’s only a fringe benefit, but let’s take it.
If you’re crusading for “public decency” (and, really, I’ve no fear that any TPM reader is wearing that cloak), you’re probably not expecting much help from the New York Times, not even from its brilliant media critic David Carr. But Carr has just uncovered the devastating fiscal and sexual indecency of bottom-liners at “the venerable Tribune Company” (publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Long Island Newsday, and Baltimore Sun).
I commend Carr’s story also to William Bennett, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and preacher-politicians who blame social rot on “liberals” and the 1960s counterculture. Carr shows business interests turning counter-cultures into over-the-counter cultures that are more devastating to public morals than anything Woodstock Nation ever imagined.
Fortunately, even if you’re more titillated than nauseated by this, there’s a bracing new antidote in Chris Lehmann’s just-published Rich People Things, about which more in a minute, because you’ll need it even more than any cloak of virtue you may happen to have lying around.
“At Flagging Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture,” reads the Times headline – emphasis on “Culture,” although the Tribune empire is bankrupt also as a company. Its bosses aren’t just grown men acting like “14-year-old boys,” as one of Carr’s sources says. They’re an insult to 14-year-old boys, and what really matters here – although Carr stops short of saying so — is the relationship between consumer capitalism and cultural decay.
Years ago, about the raciest thing in the Chicago Tribune was the “Dear Abby” personal-advice column by Ann Landers, whom I once saw exiting the gothic Tribune Tower and gliding into a limousine. What the billionaire Sam Zell and his top dog Randy Michaels have done since then…. Well, settle back with some Alka Seltzer and Carr’s story. As you read, imagine the sickly smiles on the faces of decent, stodgy lifers at the Tribune who tried to keep their jobs by pretending they were having fun.
Carr makes clear that the pervasive atmosphere of sexual harassment and general alienation went along with economic harassment and dispossession underway. To which I’d add that it’s not only at the Tribune Company that corporate bosses introduce sexual hi-jinks as a palliatives and metaphors for the corporate screw.
More than a few Tribune workers in Chicago (and at some in other Tribune-newspapers) are church-goers; it’s not unusual to see foreheads marked on Ash Wednesday. But as they’ve been insulted by their bosses in Chicago, they’ve also been betrayed, along shockingly analogous lines, by princes and priests of the Church, to the gloating satisfaction of some Tribune bosses, who, of course, love running such exposes. Now that these bosses are being exposed in the Times – and, I expect, in other Chicago news media — we’ll see if they keep gloating.
But this is about more than corrupt priests and idiot editors. It’s about how the bankruptcy of America’s pathological, multi-problem over-class is devastating and demoralizing American civil society. You needn’t be a church-going secretary or press-room guy at the Tribune to understand what an incitement to vomit and violence American consumerism has become.
You needn’t be a Marxist, either. The proliferation of road rage, lethal store-opening rampages, extreme or “cage” fighting, reality TV and midday “talk” shows where people scream their guts out over other people’s voluntary self-humiliations; all this preceded Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, and Linda McMahon, and the rest, most of whom are consequences of corporate marketing’s relentless pumping of violence and lewdness into our public bloodstream.
I caught onto this almost two decades ago in the New York Daily News, way back before that paper, too, became a carrier of the degradation. (I got at it also in “Behind the Deluge of Porn, a Conservative Sea Change,” for the quarterly Salmagundi and, more briefly, in the Dallas Morning News – to which serious Christian evangelicals wrote in to agree with me.) But really, people have been flagging this problem ever since the movie “Network” (not “Social Network!”) caught it in 1976.
The only question left is why so much of the disorientation and rage is being pointed at liberals and government – at Obama rather than the Tribune’s Zell and sexual thugs. We get closer to an answer thanks to Chris Lehmann’s new book, Rich People Things.
Lehmann, whom TPM readers will recognize as a veteran contributor to The Baffler, which was on to corporate “liberation” marketing years ago, has also been an editor at Newsday, the Washington Post, and other “venerable” publications which bottom-lining has now made less venerable. He is a sophisticated, compassionate, and scathing survivor of all he surveys in Rich People Things. Follow carefully what he says.
Lehmann studied for years with the late social historian Christopher Lasch, who thanked him in the acknowledgments of his magisterial The True and Only Heaven. Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism was an early-warning signal to the still-clueless paladins of “sophisticated” public discourse at the Times,The New Yorker, and other high-end publications that sound too often as if they existed only to reassure the affluent college graduate who seeks “the most comfortable and least compromising attitude he can assume toward capitalist society without being forced into actual conflict,” as the critic Robert Warshow wrote seventy years ago about the typical reader of… yes, the New Yorker.
Lehmann has scathing, scintillating chapters on the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell; on the Times and on its “chirpy” and delusional columnist David Brooks; on Wired Magazine’s breathless paeans to new media’s broken promises; on reality TV; and on other ventures and adventurers who, often unwittingly, work hard to suppress or deflect their own and their audiences’ understandings of what consumer and casino-finance capitalism are doing to us.
David Carr’s story today is a striking account of that process in action. Chris Lehmann’s Rich People Things explains what’s actually driving it – and what keeps most of us from seeing and acknowledging it.
Many discouraging observations have been made about Americans, some of them clearer than truth: French observers have called us les grands enfants. The late American historian Louis Hartz rued our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind.” Those are two of the nicer assessments. Some of the more-accurate ones are scarier.Although millions of us behave encouragingly every day, often in distinctively “American” ways that I assess on this website, this is no time to congratulate ourselves. But it’s also no time to consign ourselves to history’s dustbin by writing pre-mortems for the 2024 election and for the republic itself.
The following essay is a highly personal account of my reckonings with these challenges. Before you read further here, please read “About This Site” in the left-hand column on this home-page and glance at its survey of challenges now facing an American, civic-republican culture that a mentor of mine, the late literary historian Daniel Aaron, once characterized, felicitously, as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.”
I’d like to see that civic culture transcend and outlive “woke” corporate neoliberalism, authoritarian state capitalism, right-wing, racist nationalism, Marxoid economic determinism, and post-modernist escapism, all of which are responses to global riptides that are transforming humanity’s economic, technological, communicative, climatic, migratory, and other arrangements. These swift, often dark currents are driven not only by capitalism but also by human inclinations, including to greed and power-lust, that antedate capitalism by millennia and seem certain to outlast it. Neither the left nor the right seems able to block them or re-channel them, let alone to redeem us from them.
More than a few Americans actually find these currents energizing as well as disorienting. That’s partly thanks to accidents of this country’s history that have enabled its commingling of faith, innovation, fakery, and force. Americans “have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistible in a space otherwise quite empty,” the philosopher George Santayana noted. “To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education and a career.”
Well, maybe. The 19th-century Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck is reputed to have said that “God protects, fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” The ascent of Donald Trump and of Trumpism has reinforced that impression and made many of us doubt and even despair of “American” virtues that we’d taken for granted or dedicated ourselves to upholding. I doubted our capabilities along those lines in the 1970s and more deeply in 2014, before I or anyone imagined that Trump would run for the presidency, let alone that tens of millions of Americans would be credulous and cankered enough to elect him.
“Jim Sleeper is the Jonathan Edwards of American civic culture – and that’s a compliment,” tweeted The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg, referring to the formidable Puritan “thought leader” of the 18th Century and to my Salon essay “We, the People, are Violent and Filled with Rage,” which you can read later on this site. With Jeremiadic woe, I’d surveyed the civic-cultural damage of the 2008 financial crisis and the run of public massacres, including in Oklahoma City in 1995, Columbine in 1998, and Sandy Hook in 2012. Soon after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, I doubted America’s prospects more deeply still in “It’s Not Only a Constitutional Crisis, It’s a Civic Implosion,”a little essay for Bill Moyers’ website that you can read later on this website’s section, “A Sleeper Sampler.”
Hertzberg’s reference to my cast of mind was fortuitous, and not only because the damage I mentioned has been accelerating: I grew up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a small town settled by Puritans in 1644, just six miles north of the spot where, in 1741, Edwards would preach his (in)famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Some of my Longmeadow public school classmates were direct descendants of the town’s Puritan founders. A few of my teachers seemed to have been writhing in Edwards’ congregation when he preached. Whenever they looked at me in school, I felt them looking into me, partly for a particular reason.
That residually Calvinist, “Yankee” discipline converged with two other cultural currents in my upbringing, inclining me to look into civic-republican society’s ups and downs. The Calvinist current drew on an older, Hebraic, Old Testament one, of law and prophecy, that was my inheritance as a grandson of four Lithuanian Jewish immigrant grandparents and that was deepened in my extracurricular but intensive exposure to it. Neither the Christian nor the Jewish current disappeared when I entered Yale College in 1965 and learned that it had been founded by Puritans who’d put a Hebrew approximation of “Light and Truth” on its seal and envisioned it as a “school of prophets.” As if that weren’t enough, Kingman Brewster, Jr., Yale’s president during my undergraduate years and a lineal descendant of the minister on the Puritan Pilgrims’ ship The Mayflower, had been born in my hometown, Longmeadow.
Fooling around at 19, my freshman yearStill fooling around in Wellesley, MA, age 23, 1971
Beyond Calvinism and Hebraism, a third cultural current, a leftish civic-republican one, surfaced at around the time I turned 30, in 1977. Like many other New Englanders before me, I carried some of the region’s civic and moral presumptions (conceits? innocent hopes?) to New York City, although not to literary Manhattan but to “inner city” Brooklyn, where I ran an activist weekly newspaper before bicycling across the Brooklyn Bridge every day to work as a speechwriter for City Council President Carol Bellamy. By 1982, I was writing for The Village Voice, Dissent, Commonweal and other political magazines. From 1988 to 1995, I was an editor and columnist for the daily newspapers New York Newsday and The New York Daily News.
In 1987, my essay “Boodling, Bigotry, and Cosmopolitanism” sketched New York’s changing political culture for a special issue of Dissent magazine that I edited and that was re-published as In Search of New York. The “Boodling” essay was re-published yet again inEmpire City, a Columbia University Press anthology of 400 years of writing about the city, edited by the historian Kenneth Jackson and the master-teacher David Dunbar.
In 1990, W.W. Norton published my The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York. The book was a tormented love letter to the city. It sparked public debate in and beyond New York. After 1999, while continuing to live in the city and writing many of the pieces referenced and linked on this site, I taught Yale undergraduates for two decades in political science seminars — “New Conceptions of American National Identity” and “Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy.”
In the late 1970s I embraced, and I still affirm, a democratic-socialist politics that, unlike Stalinism and orthodox Marxism, had a distinctively American, civic-republican orientation that rejects Communists’ opportunistic (ab)uses of civil liberties, civil rights, and democracy. Democratic socialism in the 1970s steered fairly clear of the racially essentialist “identity politics” that many of its adepts now wrongly embrace by fantasizing about “Black liberation” and its analogues as cats’ paws of an advancing Revolution. If you sample my offerings in the section “Why a Skin Color isn’t a Culture or a Politics,” you’ll encounter my conviction that although ethno-racial identities are inevitable and sometimes enriching, they’ll never be wellsprings of social hope in America unless they’re transcended by all of us as participants in a thicker civic culture and citizens of a larger republic, if not of the world. Precisely because The United States is more complex racially, ethnically, religiously, and otherwise than most “multicultural” categorizing comprehends, we need to be working overtime to identify and, yes, instill, certain shared civic and moral premises and practices that I discuss in many of the pieces on this website.
No longer fooling around. Brooklyn, age 31, 1978
Beginning in the 1990s and ever since, I’ve taken strong public stands against ethno-racialist evasions of the civic-republican mission. In 1991 I wrote a rather harsh assessment of leftist identity politics for Tikkun magazine that was re-published in Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, edited by Paul Berman. I refined and, dare I say, elevated the argument in civic-republican terms in a 1996 Harper’s magazine essay, “Toward an End of Blackness,” that identified the emptiness of American blackness and whiteness as vessels of social hope. I summarized and updated the argument again in 2021, in a Commonweal essay,“Scrapping the Color Code.” (You can find all of the essays on race that I’ve just mentioned in this website’s section on race, “Why Skin Color Isn’t Culture or Politics.”) I’ve published a lot more along these lines and debated in many public forums, some of them linked in the Commonweal essay and elsewhere on this site. (My two books on the subject are The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream (1997).
Some of this work sparked resentment among activists and academics on the left and among journalists and other writers across the political spectrum. I accused some of them of betraying a civic-republican ethos and creed that’s under assault by capitalist, neoliberal, and even radical-racialist forces, the most dangerous of them white-supremacy, but others of them unconstructively “woke” or more subtly, seductively commercial. Some of my criticisms of writers who’ve ridden these currents have been gratuitously cruel, even when accurate.
Civic-republican strengths and susceptibilities
Although many Americans behaved admirably, even heroically, on 9/11 and in the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, what matters to a republic’s survival are the little things people do daily, when no one’s looking and no digital tracking device, cellphone camera, or journalist is recording them. Essential though a republic’s wealth and military power are to its strength, they can become parasitical on it pretty quickly when people are feeling stressed, dispossessed, and susceptible to simplistic explanations. Neither a booming economy nor massive firepower can ensure a republic’s vitality, especially if prosperity and power are dissolving civic-republican norms and practices.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against this in his Farewell Address in 1960, condemning what he called a “military-industrial” complex. (An early draft of his address, well-known to historians, called it, rightly, a “military-industrial-academic” complex.) Ike, who was hardly a radical leftist inveighing against capitalism or a rightist railing against “the deep state,” was a deeply decent, heartland American who’d gotten to know the military-industrial-academic complex from within, as its supreme warmaker and then as Columbia University’s president. He didn’t like everything he saw there.
Even more than Eisenhower’s warning or Jonathan Edwards’ and the Hebrew prophets’ jeremiads, several developments since 9/11 have convinced me that Americans who are accustomed to think well of themselves would be better off convicting themselves of complicity in democracy’s decline. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the 18th century British historian Edward Gibbon noted that “a slow and secret poison” had worked its way into the vitals of ancient Rome’s republic, distorting and draining its virtues and beliefs. In our own time, faster, glaringly public poisons have been working their way into our republic. Yet most Americans, “liberal” or “conservative,” have been ingesting and pushing them without naming them honestly.
You may insist that whatever is driving Americans’ increasing resort to force, fraud and mistrust comes from human nature itself. The republic’s founders understood that argument in Calvinist terms and also from reading Gibbon’s semi-pagan assessment of human history as “little more than a record of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” They tried to devise a republican system of self-government that “doesn’t depend on our nobility. It accounts for our imperfections and gives an order to our individual strivings,” as one of their legatees, John McCain, put it two and a half centuries later in one of his last addresses to Senate colleagues.
Assessed by these lights, Trump (who cruelly disparaged McCain) is only the most prominent carrier and pusher of imperfections and poisons that the founders knew were already in us, even in those of us who deny that we’re carriers and pushers. Barack Obama reinforced our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind” in 2008 by staging a year-long equivalent of a religious revival rally for the civic-republican faith across partisan, ideological, and ethno-racial lines. But he wasn’t only a performance artist; he embodied and radiated distinctively American strengths that fascinate people the world over — not our wealth and power or our technological affinities, which are often brutally or seductively unfair, but our professed commitment to a classless egalitarianism that inclines an American to say “Hi” to a stranger instead of “Heil!” to a dictator; to give that stranger a fair chance; to be optimistic and forward-looking; and, from those collective and personal strengths, to take a shot at the moon.
I don’t think that the American republic is sliding irreversibly into Nazi-style fascism, as some on the left fear and some on the alt-right hope, or that it will succumb to leftist totalitarian socialism. More likely is an accelerating dissolution of the civic-republican way of life that Daniel Aaron, a mentor of mine, called “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.” That subtle balance of divergent qualities and of the trust and comity they engender is being routed by the global undercurrents -– economic, technological/communicative, climatic/migratory, and demographic/cultural –- that are sluicing force, fraud, and mistrust into our public and private lives. A bare majority of us are holding on to common ground.
Looking across the tracks.Illustration by Philip Toolin, a film art director/production designer who’s been doing this since he was 15.
In his foreboding 1941 prophecy, What Mein Kampf Means for America, Francis Hackett, a literary editor of The New Republic, warned that people who feel disrespected and dispossessed are easy prey for demagogic orchestrations of “the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and, out of these three elements, a counterfeit reality to which there was a violent, instinctive response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fiction as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond. The fiction is taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed.”
Edward Gibbon and Jonathan Edwards would have recognized that condition in us now. Yet its causes and subtleties often escape the notice of journalists who are busy chasing “current events” without enough historical and moral grounding to contextualize them within “undercurrent events” that are driving upheavals and horrors around us and within us. I have a thing or two to say about that myopic side of American journalism (and I have some experiences to share) in this website’s sections on “News Media, Chattering Classes, and a Phantom Public” and on “Scoops and Revelations.”
The undercurrent events that many journalists mishandle aren’t malevolent, militarized conspiracies. They’re civically mindless commercial intrusions into our public and private lives that derange our employment options, public conversations, and daily aspirations and habits. They bypass our hearts and minds relentlessly, 24/7, on their way to our lower viscera and our wallets, to attract eyeballs to their ads, to maximize the profits of swirling whorls of shareholders. These commercial riptides incentivize (and brainwash?) many Americans to behave as narrowly self-interested investors and as impulse-buying consumers, not as citizens of a republic who restrain their immediate self-interest at times to enhance the public interests of a “commonwealth.” That word is still on our legal documents and pediments, but we’re losing its meaning, along with its “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free” ethos.
Decay and Renewal
Imagine a former auto worker, a white man in his mid-50s whose $30-an-hour job and its benefits were replaced a decade ago by a job stocking shelves at Wal-Mart for less than half the pay and who has lost his home because he accepted a predatory mortgage scam of the kind that prompted the 2008 financial and political near-meltdown. Imagine that he winds up here:
“When the people give way,” warned John Adams (a graduate of the then-still residually Calvinist Harvard College and a self-avowed admirer of Hebrews) in 1774, “their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour…. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.”
In 1787, Alexander Hamilton, urging ratification of the Constitution, wrote that history seemed to have destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government through reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
In 1975, two centuries after James Madison, Adams, Hamilton, and others designed the republic with dry-eyed wisdom about its vulnerabilities, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt worried that “Madison Avenue tactics under the name of public relations have been permitted to invade our political life.” She characterized the then-recently exposed Pentagon Papers, which confirmed the Vietnam War’s duplicity and folly, as an example of the invasion of political life by public relations, of Madison by Madison Avenue – that is, of efforts to separate its public promises of a democratic victory in Vietnam from realities on the ground, until, finally, the official words lost their meaning and, without them, the deeds became more starkly brutal.
March on Pentagon, 1967 (National Archives and Record Administration)
What many Americans should have learned from that debacle, and what I’ve been learning ever since, reinforces Oliver Goldsmith’s warning, in 1777: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a’prey, when wealth accumulates and men decay.” A wealthy society may decay and implode not only because its prosperity isn’t distributed fairly but also because it’s only material and therefore weak against profit-maximizing engines such as Rupert Murdoch’s media, which prey upon the susceptibilities and resentments of stressed, dispossessed people such as the former auto worker and the Uber driver. If the manipulative engines aren’t stopped, they’ll grope, goose, titillate, intimidate, track, indebt, stupefy and regiment people, many of whom will crave easy escapes in bread-and-circus entertainments like those of Rome in its decline. They’ll join mobs that demand to be lied to with simplistic story lines that tell them who to blame for their pains and who to follow to fix them.
Perhaps with Gibbon’s slow and secret poison in mind, Alexis de Tocqueville described “the slow and quiet action of society upon itself” in the little daily interactions that matter as much as the high moments of national decision. Writing Democracy in America in 1835, he marveled, perhaps wishfully, at an American individualism that seemed willing to cooperate with others to achieve goods in common that individualism couldn’t achieve on its own:
“The citizen of the United States is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety….This habit may even be traced in the schools of the rising generation, where the children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established…. The same spirit pervades every act of social life. If a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare, and the circulation of the public is hindered, the neighbors immediately constitute a deliberative body; and this extemporaneous assembly gives rise to an executive power which remedies the inconvenience before anybody has thought of recurring to an authority superior to that of the persons immediately concerned.”
This civic-republican disposition — to give the other person a fair chance and to back her up as she tries, to deliberate rationally with her about shared purposes, and to reach and to keep binding commitments — relies on the elusive balance of civic values, virtues and body language that’s ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free. You see it in a team sport whenever a player closes in on the action not to show off but to back up a teammate and help him score. You see it in how people in a contentious meeting extend trust cannily to potential adversaries in ways that elicit trust in return.
You used to see it even on Capitol Hill, as I did in 1968 while interning for my western Massachusetts Republican Congressman, Silvio O. Conte:
(That’s me in the dark jacket. standing next to then-astronaut John Glenn, who was visiting Rep. Conte (standing to his right) while planning to run for the U.S. Senate from Ohio.)
Or maybe you don’t see civic grace like that so often these days. Maybe backbiting, road rage, and the degradation of public space and cyberspace are prompting quiet heartache and withdrawal as trust in other people slips out of our public lives. Without the balance that I’m sketching here and elsewhere on this website, the United States won’t survive as a republic amid the undercurrent events that I’ve mentioned.
Civic-republican grace in writing and public life
Finding a better description of civic republicanism than I’ve offered here would require harder analysis and reportage but also more poetry, faith and, sometimes even a little fakery. You can develop an ear and an eye for it, and maybe a voice for it. I’ve been following American civic republican culture’s ebbs and flows since around 1970, when I was 23, but really since World War II, because I was born on June 6, 1947, two years after the war’s end and three years, to the day, after D-Day, so and I grew up in a civic culture that seemed, at least to a child, more triumphant and coherent than it actually was or ever had been.
Some of the writing collected here records my and others’ growing disillusionment. A lot of it began for me in journalism, “the first rough draft of history” if a journalist has some grounding in history and isn’t just chasing “breaking news.” Whenever the chattering classes make cicada-like rackets over the latest Big Thing, I’ve tried to assess that noise in its historical and other contexts, remembering Emerson’s admonition “that a popgun is [only] a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.”
Contextualizing current events this way sometimes yields scoops and insights that others have missed. (See the “Scoops and Other Revelations” Section for a sampler of what I’ve found.) Some of those pieces spotlight fissures and fragilities in the republican experiment, and some assail public leaders and journalists who I believed had lost their civic-republican lenses and standards, along with virtues and beliefs necessary to wise reporting. (See also “Leaders and Misleaders”)
I’m collecting some of my essays for a book that I’ll call Somebodyhaddasayit. Some my work has prompted people to tell me they were glad that I’d written what they, too, had been thinking but were reluctant to say. Somebody really did need to say it, even when doing so made enemies not only among the “villains” but also, as George Orwell lamented, among editors and other writers who cancel honest speech that might embarrass them. “Saying it’ requires not only sound judgment and tact, but also, sometimes, courage. I’ve sometimes “said it” with too little fact or courage.
Editorial writer and editor at New York Newsday, 1992
But usually I’ve defended people who bear the American republican spirit bravely, against daunting odds. One of my pieces began in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library in 2006, when I was looking for family background on Ned Lamont, then a little-known computer executive (now Governor of Connecticut) who was making a Democratic primary bid for the Connecticut U.S. Senate seat of Joe Lieberman, in protest against Lieberman’s unbending support for the Iraq War. I ended up writing not about Ned himself but about a long-forgotten uncle of his, Thomas W. Lamont II, whose young life and supreme sacrifice in World War II seemed to me a fata morgana, a fading mirage, of the American republic and of the citizenship that we’re losing, not at its enemies’ hands but at our own. (See the essay “Duty Bound” on this website’s section, “A Civic Republican Primer.”)
Being an American like Tommy Lamont is an art and a discipline. You can’t just run civic grace like his up a flagpole and salute it, but neither should you snark it down as just a bourgeois mystification of oppressive social relations. When the Vietnam War’s brutality and folly were at their worst and when official words had lost their credibility and official deeds had become murderous, the perennial socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas told protestors “not to burn the American flag but to wash it.” I took his point. I work with it. Americans who consider themselves too sophisticated for that are naïve.
Although one can’t credibly call my writing “nationalist” or “conservative,” more than a little of it has been motivated by my and others’ civic-republican patriotism. I’ve written often for left-of-center sites and journals, challenging much of what’s called “conservative” in American life. But a civic-republican compass points rightward at times, and I’ve written once or twice in right-of-center venues to condemn racialist “identity politics” and ethno-racial banner-waving that passes for progressive politics even when it only compounds a racial essentialism that fuels white superracist politics more than black-power politics.
Although American national identity was developed self-critically and sometimes hypocritically in secular Enlightenment terms, ultimately it relies on something akin to religious faith, even though it doesn’t impose a particular religious doctrine. Living with that paradox requires skill and empathy, as some leftist activists learned while swaying and singing with black-church folk against armed white men in the American South. Precisely because this country is so diverse religiously, racially, and culturally, it needs to generate shared civic standards and lenses, with help from newly potent (and therefore “mythic”) civic narratives. We don’t refuse to ride horses because they’re strong enough to kill us; we learn to break them in. Some liberals need to learn something similar about religion and patriotism instead of refusing them entirely.
How (and How Not) to Think About Left and Right
Both left and right in American life offer distinctive truths that are indispensable to governing ourselves by reflection and choice instead of by accident, force, and fraud. The left understands that without public supports in a village that raises the child, the family and spiritual values that conservatives cherish cannot flourish. But the right understands that unless a society also generates, honors, and defends irreducibly individual autonomy and conscience, even the best-intentioned social engineering may reduce persons to clients, cogs, or cannon fodder. Each side often clings to its own truths so tightly that they become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right only about how the other is wrong.
The consequent damage to the public sphere can’t be undone by clinging to the left-vs.-right floor plan that I mentioned at the outset and that still limits many people I know. Analysis and organizing against socioeconomic inequities are indispensable, but they’re insufficient. That’s equally true of conservative affirmations of communal and religious values that bow quickly to accumulated wealth that, as Oliver Goldsmith noted, preys upon and dissolves values and bonds that conservatives claim to cherish. (See this website’s sections, “Folly on the Left” and “Conservative Contradictions.”)
Ever since Madison helped to craft a Constitution to channel and deflect such factions, the republic has needed an open, circulating elite – not a caste or an aristocracy — of “disinterested” leaders whose private or special needs don’t stop them from looking out for the public and its potential to govern itself by reflection and choice. When John McCain voted in 2017 against repealing Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, he admonished Senate colleaguesto “learn how to trust each other again and by so doing better serve the people who elected us…Considering the injustice and cruelties inflicted by autocratic governments, and how corruptible human nature can be, the problem solving our system does make possible…and the liberty and justice it preserves, is a magnificent achievement…. It is our responsibility to preserve that, even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than ‘winning.’”
Maybe McCain had a good speechwriter, but he believed what he was saying, even though he hadn’t always lived up to it. (See the section, “Leaders and Misleaders”.) Another flawed but sincere legatee of the founders’ Constitutional project was New York Mayor Ed Koch, whom I assailed for years until I got to know him a little better.
Many Americans still do uphold the civic-republican promise –as moderators of candidates’ debates; umpires in youth sporting leagues; participants in street demonstrations; board members who aren’t afraid to say, “Now wait a minute, let me make sure that we all understand what this proposal is based on and what it entails;” and as jurors who quiet the ethno-racial voices in their own and fellow-jurors’ heads to join in finding the truth. Truth is a process as much as it’s a conclusion. It emerges not from radical pronouncements of the general will or from ecclesiastical doctrines but provisionally, from the trust-building processes of deliberative democracy. “[A]nyone who is himself willing to listen deserves to be listened to,” Brewster wrote. “If he is unwilling to open his mind to persuasion, then he forfeits his claim on the audience of others.” In politics, unlike science, the vitality of truth-seeking matters as much as the findings.
At any historical moment, one side’s claims can seem liberating against the other side’s dominant conventions and cant: In the 1930s, Orwell sought liberation in democratic-socialist movements against ascendant fascist powers, and his sympathy remained with workers, but sometimes that required him to oppose workers’ self-proclaimed champions, especially Stalinists, as well as their capitalist exploiters. Orwell “never forgot that both left and right tend to get stuck in their imagined upswings against concentrated power and to disappoint in the end: The left’s almost willful mis-readings of human nature make it falter in swift, deep currents of nationalism and religion, denying their importance yet surrendering to them abjectly and hypocritically as Soviets did by touting ‘Socialism in One Country’ (i.e., while touting Russian nationalism) and preaching Marxism as a secular eschatology” (i.e., as a religion).
The balance that we should hold out for against ideologues is like that of a person striding on both a left foot and a right one without noticing that, at any instant, all of the body’s weight is on only one foot as the other swings forward and upward in the desired direction. What matters is that the balance enables the stride. Again, it requires both a “left foot” of social equality and provision – without which the individuality and the communal bonds that conservatives claim to cherish couldn’t flourish – and a “right foot” of irreducibly personal responsibility and autonomy, without which any leftist social provision or engineering would reduce persons to passive clients, cogs, cannon fodder, or worse.
A balanced stride can be upset by differences among individuals and by the divisions within every individual’s human heart between sociable and selfish inclinations. A strong republic anticipates such imbalances. It sustains an evolving consensus without ceding ground to hatred and violence. It remains vigilant against concentrations of power, because it knows how to extend trust in ways that elicit trust and reward it in return. Being ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free, it acts on virtues and beliefs that armies alone can’t defend and that wealth can’t buy. Ultimately, and ironically, a republic’s or democracy’s strength lies in it very vulnerability, which comes with extending trust. “The presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept,” Kingman Brewster Jr. wrote, in a passage that is now the epitaph on his grave in New Haven. “In common place terms it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger.”
Think of Rosa Parks, refusing to move to the back of a public bus in Montgomery, presenting herself not only as a black woman craving vindication against racism but also as a decent, American working Everywoman, damning no one but defending her rights. Presenting herself that way, she lifted the civil society up instead of trashing it as irredeemably racist.
Civic grace like that is heroic, and rare. But after forty years of tracking American civic culture’s ups and downs, I believe that, ultimately, it’s all that we have.
