By Jim Sleeper |

Introductory note: In 1982, news of serious flaws in the preparation of a pending indictment of New York Congressman (now Senator) Charles Schumer for an alleged conflict of interest fell into my lap, wholly through a conflict of interest of my own. That made the story hard for me to report. I wound up having to do it not as a journalist but as a lonely citizen, writing unpaid guest columns for a small Brooklyn weekly, The Prospect Press.

No other journalist seemed engaged or motivated enough to report the story at all, partly because it involved malfeasance by other journalists: The reason I couldn‘t tell the story in the Village Voice — where I’d been freelancing regularly — was that Voice writers were trying to gin up an indictment of Schumer, whom they disliked intensely for not being “progressive” enough. It was they who’d urged his prosecution upon an ambitious and receptive young U.S. Attorney for Brooklyn, Edward Korman, who’d recently brought down Congressman Fred Richmond, as described in one of the Voice essays linked in “A Sleeper Sampler” and elsewhere on this site.

My Voice colleagues and the prosecutor were pursuing the case for moralistic and personal reasons with scant legal justification. I knew this only for a reason that undermined my own credibility, though: My girlfriend was working in Schumer‘s office and was giving me the other side of the story.

Not surprisingly, the only people inclined to believe my account were those who had reasons of their own to distrust the Voice muckrakers and/or the U.S. Attorney. To grasp the injustice of the case, one had to shed the righteousness of “white hat” muckrakers. You had to know that the criminal justice system itself is highly susceptible to abuse if its skeleton of laws lacks a “cartilage” of extra-legal trust and integrity among prosecutors.

My columns in The Prospect Press, the small neighborhood weekly, were handed around and played a role in alerting people in the Justice Department and the courts to the flaws in the indictment. It was dropped before being formally brought, but only after a lot of publicity and controversy.

Ironically, the probe had been instigated not only by partisan Republicans but also by leftist muckrakers, and it was closed down by senior Reagan Justice Department officials after Schumer’s attorney, Arthur Liman (later the Democratic counsel to the congressional Iran-Contra commission) went to Washington and confronted them with the bizarre truth about the inquiry.

Twenty five years later, in 2007, I had a reason to tell the whole story of the Schumer case again as Schumer, by then on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was investigating the Bush Administration‘s efforts to politicize U.S. Attorneys‘ prosecutions of Democrats. Again, the “cartilage” of trust and professionalism had worn thin, but by 2007 I must have been the only reporter to recall that Schumer had been the victim of a politicized, prosecutorial investigation. Schumer has many faults, and he can certainly be criticized robustly by people to his left as well as his right. But trying to “nail” him — as the Voice reporters crowed to one another that they were doing —  through selective prosecution for a minor indiscretion that many of their’ own heroes were also committing, was a miscarriage of journalism.

When Talking Points Memo published this piece in 2007, the site promoted it with a note that appears below the piece itself here. Later on, though, TPM’s founder and editor Joshua Micah Marshall “deep-sixed” this essay, along with dozens of other pieces by several TPM authors, without ever citing a single error or ethical lapse. TPM thereby violated a cardinal rule of journalism: No Orwellian Memory Holes. Fortunately, I had saved the piece in my files, and I hereby rescue it from oblivion. Perhaps TPM will rescue it and other such pieces someday — in the interest of good journalism, free of self-righteous muckraking and of suppression.

AS PUBLISHED IN 2007: The Truth About the Schumer Case (and about the dangers of self-righteous muckraking)

         It would be all-too easy to cast New York senior Senator Charles Schumer’s grilling of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales today as the climax of a long-nursed, partisan grudge. Twenty-three years ago, during Ronald Reagan’s first term, the Republican U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York came within a millimeter of destroying Schumer with highly dubious criminal charges. None of the other indictment dodgers in Congress can be more sensitive to potential abuses of prosecutorial discretion and the Justice Department’s power to countenance or curb such abuses than Chuck Schumer, Gonzales’ chief inquisitor.

         Now that I have your attention, let me complicate this a little. The masterminds of the long, unrelenting drive to indict Schumer (for deploying his New York State Assembly staffers in his first congressional campaign while paying them state salaries) were left-liberal Democrats and activist muckrakers hell-bent on nailing Schumer for personal, social, and ideological reasons. They tipped off and then collaborated closely with the zealous young U.S. Attorney Edward Korman (now a federal judge), whom they’d befriended and worked with for years. Irony of ironies, it was the Reagan Justice Department that called off this witch hunt at the last minute.

        Why did Attorney General William French Smith exercise such restraint? Out of ethical principle? Jurisdictional caution? Some obscure political calculation? The Justice Department claimed only that Schumer’s campaign practices were a state, not federal, concern, and Smith’s deputy at the time, Rudolph Giuliani, actually apologized to Schumer for the two-year ordeal that preceded this decision. Unless you believe that Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove and their favorites in the press would be at least that judicious now in a case against a liberal Democrat, you can understand why Schumer has been preparing for today’s hearing, which may make clear how frighteningly, if subtly, federal law enforcement has changed from what it was even under Reagan.

         Schumer calls himself an “angry centrist” at least partly because the Schumer case, as it was known, ended not thanks to partisan or ideological heroes, Republican or Democrat, right or left, but thanks to a fragile, silent web of constitutional tradition and comity. More than any actual statues, that tradition of engrained ethical conduct and judgment tempers partisan passions and personal vendettas — if prosecutors and journalists have the integrity to defer to, rather than manipulate, judicial proprieties. We are talking about the political culture or cartilage of a republic here, not just about its legal skeleton.

         Sad but true, some who tried to drive the Schumer case beyond all that were Village Voice muckrakers, the late Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett, with their younger and not-yet-wiser colleague Joe Conason running interference for them. Aside from some reliable civic-republican observers – Tom Goldstein, in the Columbia Journalism Review; Tony Schwartz, in New York magazine – most journalists were too preoccupied, timid, cynical, or lazy to challenge what amounted to a public, daylight mugging of New York’s most promising young Democrat at the dawn of the Reagan ascendancy.

         To summarize the relevant case law quickly: Since legislative staff communicate with constituents all the time and work irregular hours, there were no rules or laws then — and few now — against assigning such staffers to campaigns, which, after all, do involve communicating with constituents. As a Sept. 8, 1983 New York Law Journal essay put it, “Not one of the court papers filed in the [Schumer] case cite any specific federal or state law to prohibit such conduct.” The only thing illegal is putting someone on payroll who never shows up. Voice reporters also knew well that their own heroes in public office did what Schumer did, if not as egregiously when they had larger budgets and staffs than do young Assembly members.

         Yet in an incredible, Kafkaesque syncopation of unannounced prosecutorial moves and eerily well-timed or prescient Voice stories, Korman would drag Schumer for more than two years through the positing and abandonment of eight different theories of guilt. This is worth looking at a little more closely to understand what’s at stake for Schumer, and all of us, in the current hearings on how Justice Department handles U.S. Attorneys.

          I should say first that I played a part in derailing the Schumer indictment because I happened to be in the right places at the right times (or was it the wrong ones?!): As a regular Voice freelancer, I worked closely with Newfield & Co. on other stories and absorbed their antipathy toward Schumer. But I also grasped that something was wrong with their antipathy as I came home nightly from the Voice to my girlfriend, who was Schumer’s congressional-district chief of staff.

           The dissonance was even more excruciating than it may sound, because I was a dedicated writer for the Voice’s beloved progressive community. Even after Schumer had sat in my own living room in 1983, begging me and my partner to help him break the noose which Voice reporters and prosecutors were tightening around his neck, I faced a long, hard slog toward acknowledging that he was in the right. Doing him justice, as I did by helping to break the case, involved breaking my ideological heart and some of my role models, who exacted predictable and tawdry retribution.

            Toward Schumer himself I never bore much love. The brash, young Harvard Law School hot shot had won his first congressional race on the November day in 1980 when Jimmy Carter lost to Reagan and when the then-sainted Elizabeth Holtzman — Schumer’s own congressional predecessor — lost her bid for a Senate seat to Republican hit man Alfonse D’Amato, of Whitewater investigation fame. (Schumer would defeat D’Amato years later by 14 points).

            Schumer thought then, as he does now, that the self-styled saints of the left (Newfield was known as “the Conscience of New York”) had lost in 1980 precisely because they’d become too saintly. He derided Holtzman – who’d endorsed him only with condescension to succeed her in the House — for having neglected nuts-and-bolts lawmaking and constituent services in her quest to be a grand scourge of Richard Nixon.

            That wasn’t quite fair: Holtzman’s upwardly mobile, heavily Jewish Brooklyn district hadn’t sent its iconic daughter to Congress to fix potholes; it was Al D’Amato who’d be known as “Senator Pothole.” Soon enough, though, the defeated, embittered Holtzman would amply confirm Schumer’s biting assessment, put better by Montaigne, that there is often “a remarkable correspondence between super-celestial opinions and subterranean morals” in pretenders to political sainthood. That is the moral of this story.

             Sure, liberal saints had more than a few true grievances, and real enemies besides Nixon. Both muckraker Newfield and prosecutor Korman had grown up in tough, racially-changing Brooklyn neighborhoods, but instead of blaming blacks for the decay, they’d blamed political hacks and corrujpt contractors, cheering on the interracial Dodgers and progressive unions that carried the best of New York’s proletarian civic energy. Newfield’s hero was Robert Kennedy; Korman and his predecessor David Trager became Republicans, but in the tradition of the Party of Lincoln and the outgoing liberal GOP Senator Jacob Javits, against the heavily corrupt, often racist Brooklyn Democratic machine.

          As Reagan and D’Amato rode to victory in 1980, these working-class-hero writers and prosecutors, groping for traction in the conservative tide, convinced themselves that whiz-kid Schumer had survived the surge only because he’d been an ambulance-chasing publicity hound who’d truckled to the corrupt Democratic bosses. Worse, he’d been a sore winner, rubbing salt in defeated progressives’ wounds. It rankled all the more that he’d gone to Harvard College before Harvard Law; interned at the powerful Paul, Weiss, Rifkind law firm; and won election to the state Assembly at age 23 and Congress at age 29, thereby becoming an employer before he’d ever really been a worker.

           By his own later, rueful admission, Schumer had had to do a lot of his growing up while in public office, driving some disgruntled staffers to Newfield and Barrett, who began assailing him in Voice articles pretty early on. The young know-it-all had been too busy climbing the greasy pole to find out who Roy Cohn was, attending a party for that aging McCarthyite thug unwittingly at the behest of a woman he was dating. Suffice it to say that Schumer and the Voice were oil and water almost from the start.

           A truce of sorts with the Voice was arranged during Schumer’s 1980 congressional race against a far worse opponent in the decisive Democratic primary. For six months the paper left him alone, partly because he’d confronted Newfield about its skewed reporting and threatened to expose Newfield’s own behind-the-scenes dealings on behalf of his opponent. The paper sat on a Schumer staffer’s complaint that his Assembly Oversight and Investigations Committee staff had worked for months only on his congressional campaign.

           At an election-night party that turned into a bitter wake for Democrats nationwide, a triumphal and oblivious Schumer accused Newfield of having helped the opponent he’d defeated in the primary: “Well, Jack, your anti-civil liberties, pro-death-penalty candidate lost!” Newfield had to be physically restrained. “That fuck. I’ll get him for this,” he swore then and, in similar words, later, as an affidavit by the public-relations mogul John Scanlon would confirm. “Schumer is a miserable human being. He belongs in hand-cuffs,” Newfield told me of Schumer.

            And so the worm of righteous indignation began to turn, the story presaging what we’ve heard more recently about journalists like Robert Novak or the minions at Fox News; about political operatives like Karl Rove; and about ideological or partisan crusaders in the Justice Department. In December, 1980, just a few weeks after the election-night confrontation, the Voice ran a story by Wayne Barrett, “Chuck Schumer’s $taff $candal,” a purported expose of campaign practices the paper had seen fit to bury throughout the campaign itself.

           Even more tellingly, the article and subsequent stories hinted at possible federal prosecution strategies: Accusing Schumer’s committee — which actually had a rather impressive record — of conducting headline-hunting investigations without even issuing subpoenas, Barrett added, “Now, the only subpoena some staff members are talking about is the subpoena they would require before they would willingly spell out the details of how Schumer used the committee.”

           That article ran in tandem with Korman’s opening a preliminary investigation, and soon a grand jury was indeed summoning Schumer campaign workers, from 14-year-old volunteers on up. Barrett himself jumped out from behind a bush in front of the home of a staffer who’d not returned his calls, admonishing her, “Talk to me, or you’ll have to talk to a grand jury.” How did he know?

           “Chuck Schumer is heading for cover,” Barrett announced only three months after Schumer’s election-night confrontation with Newfield, in an article headlined “Schuck Chuck Panics”: “Schumer recently hired counsel… and is reportedly digging in to defend himself against the charge that he converted virtually the entire staff of his investigatory committee into an extension of his campaign.”

           In fact, Newfield and Barrett had been privy to the Schumer investigation as it was unfolding: Newfield had had little trouble making Schumer seem criminal to Korman — whom I first met at a party in Newfield’s home in April, 1982, as he was bringing down a far more wealthy, sexually wild congressman, Fred Richmond.

           The muckrakers’ and prosecutors’ relationships made me think of “good old boys” in a rural county seat where the local editor whiles away summer afternoons with the district attorney at a watering hole near the courthouse. Newfield and Thomas Puccio, chief of the Eastern District’s ABSCAM Strike Force, shared a summer home at which they prepared and carried nearly to contract a proposal for a book on the scandal before the defendants even knew they’d been taped accepting bribes.

           Barrett was similarly close to Korman’s predecessor, David Trager, beginning 1976 when Trager successfully prosecuted Voice charges against another politician. Another head of an Eastern District strike force sometimes welcomed Newfield (once with me), into his office on the third floor of the former Brooklyn federal building at 25 Cadman Plaza. Illegally he would play Newfield tapes made by wired informants in ongoing investigations; Newfield would identify and evaluate those heard or named on the tapes, telling prosecutors how they were connected and whether this one or that might be turned state’s evidence.

            The prosecutors had faith that Newfield and Barrett would craft Voice stories carefully enough to help them only by indirection, stopping just short of violating a standard well enunciated by former Carter Justice Department official Abbe David Lowell, writing about the Schumer case in the New York Law Journal in 1983: “No First Amendment interest is served by illegal leaks of grand jury evidence, premature announcement of a criminal investigation, or by an improper alliance between a journalist and a prosecutor.”

            Since the target of a grand-jury investigation is informed and consulted only at prosecutors’ discretion, it was a year before Schumer’s lawyer, Arthur Liman — for whom he’d interned at Paul, Weiss, and who would later be chief counsel to the congressional Iran-Contra investigation commission – was able to get Korman to look at case law precedents that destroyed most of his working assumptions. Korman kept recalling witnesses to show that Schumer’s Assembly committee had done no legislative work for certain months in 1980; that the legislative work the committee had in fact done wasn’t as good as work it had done in 1979; that even if staff weren’t required to do actual legislative rather than constituent-service work, they’d done only campaign work; and so on.

           None of this ran afoul of any statute, but Schumer’s attorneys weren’t told the exact counts of the indictment that went to the Department of Justice for approval under Korman’s successor, Raymond Dearie (who endorsed it but played no role in the investigation). Liman was summoned twice to Washington to show why no indictment should be brought. “This is a case in search of a rationale,” Liman charged in his closing brief. “Over the last year, the Government has articulated no fewer than eight theories of why Schumer’s conduct allegedly violated the law. We have rebutted each theory in turn. Yet no sooner does the United States Attorney admit that one theory must be discarded than another rises to replace it…”

          At best (and probably), the Eastern District’s prodigious efforts to indict Schumer reflect poor judgment and bad faith. Korman and his associates just couldn’t reconcile themselves to the moral limits of their considerable legal powers. Whether they pressed on anyway out of an obsession with winning, or a sense of obligation to collaborators like Newfield, or the arrogant moralism that so often attends and enshrouds power, they misdirected far more taxpayer dollars and good faith to a fruitless quest than Schumer did to his campaigns.

           Finally, on January 17, 1983, nearly two years after Barrett’s “Chuck Schumer $taff $candal” story, Justice announced it had “determined that the matter is not appropriate for federal prosecution and closed the investigation.” Newfield and Barrett learned of the decision four days before it was announced. “They went ape-shit,” recalls a Voice staffer, and repeatedly they called and visited the office of by-then-District Attorney Holtzman, threatening to expose her many blunders as D.A. if she didn’t find a way to carry on a state-level investigation.

            For a full year, she tried, indeed, to carry on an investigation, in a comedy of errors so awful I wish I had time and space to describe it. The American Lawyer called her Schumer probe “the most absurd case on [Holtzman’s] docket,” charging that she was “afraid to drop the case for fear of offending her supporters at The Village Voice, who first printed the ‘charges’ against Schumer.” Holtzman became tangled so embarrassingly in her own conflicts of interest, inconsistencies, and prosecutorial incompetence that, finally, lamely, she tried handing the material to the Federal Elections Commission, which had no jurisdiction whatever.

            In all this time Schumer had been a far better congressman than he’d been an assemblyman, taking his legislative responsibilities seriously and serving his constituents well. Unopposed in his 1982 primary, he won the general election with close to 80 percent of the vote. After Holtzman abandoned the case and he was truly in the clear, he treated several of us, including Liman and Assembly Speaker Stanley Fink, to dinner at Peter Luger’s Steak House, and thanking us, he wept.

            The righteous rage that drove Newfield, Barrett, Conason, Korman, and Holtzman is just what the justice system’s non-statutory ethics and ethos are meant to restrain. By turning their own antipathies and obsessions into a criminal prosecution, his pursuers themselves got caught, not criminally but ethically, crossing lines that divide advocacy journalism from revenge, and prosecution from political persecution. These are lines which Schumer knows that Gonzales and Rove have crossed.

            The Schumer case shows us that such abuses of power aren’t peculiar to the right. Both right and left have credible claims on certain truths – the left to the need for social provision, without which none of the values which honorable conservatives cherish could flourish; the right that there are irreducibly personal responsibilities, without whose vigilant exercise even well-intentioned social engineering can turn individuals into clients, cogs or worse. But both left and right tend to cling to their claims so tightly they soon become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right only about how the other is wrong. Both get stuck in their imagined upswings against power and disappoint in the end.

             That’s why we need the staying power of sheer professionalism and the civic-republican energy of “angry centrists” like Schumer, who is determined now to make sure that what happened to him at the hands of fellow liberals won’t happen in any U.S. Attorney’s office under Alberto Gonzales. So far, the only places we can feel sure it hasn’t happened were the offices of those U.S. Attorneys whom Gonzales has recently removed.

Addendum, posted April 20, 2007 – 9:21am Jim Sleeper said:

A word, if I may, to readers who think that the Schumer case must have been more substantial than I report — that he must have been doing something terribly wrong if all this prosecuting and muckraking was going on around him.

The story isn’t about my picking up some impressions from lunching with the muckrakers or from being with someone who worked for their target. It’s more about what provoked me and others, in the American Lawyer, The New York Law Journal, the Columbia Journalism Review, and New York magazine, to publish the analyses that are mentioned or quoted in my account.

And it’s about the facts, the details, which I couldn’t have laid out fully in this essay. That’s a limitation inherent in all journalism, even the longest investigative piece: At some point, you have to decide whether to trust that the writer has done what lawyers call “due diligence” and has marshalled the facts responsibly.

Politics is not a spectator sport. Its lessons are hard lessons, often very painful. What matters is to absorb and factor them into one’s thinking and political being, all while pressing on with a more constructive politics. From social movement leaders (such as Martin Luther King, Jr.) to elected politicians (Barack Obama? Al Gore?), the best have “done time” in the backrooms and even back alleys of politics and grown from the experience and learned how to move forward.

That’s how I see Schumer. In contrast, Gonzales and Rove are two moral casualties of politics; they’ve grown only in the sense that their hearts have been cankered in its back rooms and back alleys, leaving one a pathetic toady and front man and the other a malevolent genius whose perversity is now there for all to see. Like these betrayers of the American republic, Schumer’s pursuers hadn’t grown, except perversely. Fortunately, their power hadn’t grown to the proportions of Gonzales and Rove.

I say all this prompted by a couple of comments from readers that sound a bit… well, hurt. I understand. I wrote that my own experience with the Schumer case “broke my ideological heart” and deprived me of some role models. That’s how it is. One grows from it and presses on. Get used to it, and don’t give up.

_______________________________________________________________

A READER’S COMMENT, AND MY REPLY:

On April 20, 2007 – 12:24pm jhaber said:

Jim, don’t worry about the details, but do me a favor and fill me in on a key point. I said it’s plausible that having staff work on your campaign is a bad thing, and it’s similar to any number of more recent scandals. So what’s the exculpatory bottom line here?  Did they simply quit first? 

I found that Voice team’s reporting not to be too marred by outright error and bias, just very limited and too keen on taking credit beyond its limits. Say, they milked nailing Harding for so long it became filler.

John 

On April 20, 2007 – 6:01pm Jim Sleeper said:

There’s really no exculpatory bottom line in a case like the Schumer case, because, in New York as well as many other states, there were (and in most cases still are) no statutes on the basis of which the case should have been brought in the first place.

The only legal standard in most places is that you can’t hire complete “no shows,” put people on payroll who do no work for you. Other than that, the courts (and, self-servingly, the legislatures!) have decided not to micro-manage how legislators use their staffers, unless perhaps to do their personal housework, outside commercial ventures, etc.

That’s what made the Schumer case absurd. Few would say that he was engaged in “good government,” but he was doing what many good and effective politicians in New York, including Voice heroes in office, did all the time, without moral censure, much less charges. U.S. Attorney Korman kept asking Schumer’s lawyers, “But is what he did right?” They kept trying to tell him that it wasn’t for a prosecutor to frame questions of “rightness” but only of legality. There was simply no statute or regulation. I could go into more detail — how the NY State Legislature told every newcomer during orientation, including Schumer, that the standard was, “no No-shows,” and that he adhered to it. If he hadn’t, Korman and his Voice helpers would have found that out!

Unlike the Justice Department and its U.S. Attorneys, the rest of us are perfectly free to pose questions of rightness and to persuade voters not to tolerate practices we don’t like. The Voice writers, too, were perfectly justified in doing that. The point where they and their prosecutor pals crossed the line was in cranking up the coercive apparatus of law enforcement, with all its intimidating, moralist connotations, to smear and destroy a man for reasons that far outstripped any possible charges.

As a writer in the New York Law Journal put it, the case raised valid questions about whether the prosecutor’s intent was really to achieve a conviction, or whether he was just trying to wear Schumer down and discredit him by carrying on an endless investigation replete with regular press leaks (to The Village Voice).

That’s something Karl Rove has been only too happy to teach: The more you spread smears and lies about someone, the more people will believe that the target must have done something seriously wrong. That’s why our own skepticism should cut both ways — even against prosecutors and muckrakers, and especially when people like the Voice writers are portraying the prosecutors with such stagey reverence, as keepers of the civic flame. It’s hard for some people to imagine just how cynically they did that.

__________________________________________________________

THIS INTRODUCTORY NOTE WAS POSTED BY TPM WHEN THEY CARRIED THIS PIECE IN ‘TPM CAFE’:

JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL wrote:

Senator Schumer is grilling Alberto Gonzales. Since the beginning, he’s been out in front in asking questions and demanding answers of the DoJ. Many conservatives have attributed this to his obviously significant partisan zeal.

But Jim Sleeper traces Schumer’s sensitivity to the politicization of the DoJ back to the early 80s when he himself was the target of a dubious investigation by a Republican U.S. Attorney.

Sleeper’s is a history of compromising relationships and vindictive power struggles amidst a messy urban politics. It includes Schumer, a young deputy U.S. Attorney named Rudolph Giuliani, a powerful muckraking journalist named Jack Newfield, a young reporter named Joe Conason, and Sleeper himself.

And it’s not to be missed.

• Andrew Golis

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Nov 9, 2006

By Jim Sleeper | bio

As control of the Senate hung on the Virginia tally for a day after the election, no political analyst was going to belabor a race that was done and had nothing to do with Senate control, anyway — Sen. Joe Lieberman’s victory over Iraq war opponent Ned Lamont in Connecticut. Right?

Not right, if you’ve been following the continuing fulminations about Lamont by pundits such as David Brooks. Like a weather vane snapping back and forth in a storm, the wrenching, ongoing embarrassment of Brooks’ attempted public political makeover on the New York Times’ op ed page has produced wildly varied columns throughout the run-up to the election.

One column touted Barack Obama’s deliberative mind and Periclean prospects. Another defended Rick Santorum’s war on poverty and his own potential as a philosopher king: Santorum’s “discussion of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre… is as sophisticated as anything in Barack Obama’s recent book.”

Another Brooks column heralded the end of ideology and piously urged a new civility in public discourse, while yet another demonstrated Brooks’ own mastery of such discourse by characterizing Lamont’s “vicious,” “Sunni-Shiite style of politics,” whose “flamers… tell themselves their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious, too.” And in Thursday’s election post-mortem, Brooks announced that Lieberman had “defeated the scion of the Daily Kos net roots, Ned Lamont.”

All this variety isn’t intelligent complexity, much less comity; it’s sophistry, driven by an odd desperation. Even the word “scion” is malicious: Lamont, the scion only of a formidable American civic-republican family tradition, was little-acquainted with bloggers and other activists who backed him.

What we have here is an obsession with more than Lamont. The Ghost of Left-Liberalism Past is what’s spooking aging neoconservative and liberal war-hawk pundits. They keep summoning it to displace a gnawing, growing anxiety borne of hypocrisies they dare not face in themselves: They’ve done a bit too well in corporate America as we know it now to challenge its increasingly swaggering and degrading seductions, its inequalities, and its outright scams. Yet they’re too well-intentioned to be comfortable defending it, either — except when they can find enemies and evils that are far worse, at home and abroad.

There are indeed such enemies, and how liberating it feels to find them! Fighting “the good fight” against Islamic fascism and its supposed domestic enablers, such as Michael Moore and Ned Lamont, excuses the critics from thinking too much about threats to the American republic and social justice coming from much closer to home.

Some of their targets do deserve criticism, indeed condemnation. Neo-cons and liberal hawks aren’t wrong to charge that the left’s economic determinism, false populism, and worse have sometimes undercut serious civic-republican challenges to the tawdry consumer marketing ethos in which we live and move and have our beings. Equally misguided (as I argued a decade ago in Liberal Racism) has been the inflated racial and sexual identity politics that collapsed struggles for justice into narrow group demands, which liberals tried to accommodate without really touching the deeper inequalities that now divide blacks from blacks and women from women, as well as blacks from whites, and women from men.

Yet however maladroit and politically self-destructive some left-liberal reactions to racism and inequality have been, they’ve been reactive, not causal. Focusing on them lets neo-cons and liberal-hawks off the hook for misconstruing the deeper causes of our national discontent and for missing the wellsprings of a stronger civic-republican center. Obsessing about what the late Michael Kelly called the left-liberal “sandalistas” is fundamentally a dodge. It only reinforces a taboo on criticizing new configurations of capital, employment and consumption that are eviscerating social trust. Tuesday’s vote was in part a protest against that evisceration, for which Republicans, their apologists and some Democratic fellow-travelers like Joe Lieberman bear a lot of responsibility and have no answers. To shout that most liberals have none, either, isn’t itself an answer.

Blaming liberals, liberals, liberals and the left remains these pundits’ first and last resort, though, and Lamont-bashing is only the most egregious recent instance of it. Three years ago, New Republic editor Peter Beinart led a pack of Iraq War supporters in bellowing that Michael Moore was more dangerous to the national anti-terrorist strategy than Donald Rumsfeld. More recently, some of the same savants cried that Harvard’s politically correct, self-protective academic faculty had martyred former Harvard President Lawrence Summers for trying to shake things up.

These were all anthropologically perfect reenactments of Salem witch-hunts of the 1690s, which (I am old enough to remember) enlisted the most prominent opinion-makers of that time in finding false targets for a community’s unexamined fears. Just as the “witches” then weren’t the real dangers to the Puritan settlement, the liberal academics at Harvard now aren’t the real threats to the academy; it wasn’t they who ousted Summers for turning liberal education into a game of money, marketing, and public perception. The New Republic’s Martin Peretz had a public meltdown over the alleged left-liberal subversion of Summers, and the Wall Street Journal’s fact-challenged editorial page likened Harvard’s faculty to the “People’s Congress at Pyongyang,” but hard reportage by Institutional Investor and Economicprincipals.com on Summers’ persistent flunking of Management 102 and Ethics 102 persuaded the high-capitalist Harvard Corporation to show him the door.

Similarly, the War on Terror has never been threatened by an anti-war movement, whether led by Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan or Ned Lamont, as much as it has been undermined by that war’s own architects and apologists. “The Good Fight” against terror isn’t selling because Beinart and others have distorted that undertaking badly. Lamont felt revolted enough by such nonsense and Lieberman’s truly awful record of supporting it to ignite the spark that changed the national conversation.

The war in Iraq certainly is different from the one in Vietnam, but not in the ways its apologists expected. Before its first shot was fired in 2003, they were assailing “deja-vu” dissenters who predicted reruns of Vietnam’s trumped-up pretexts, massive overkill, and bottomless quagmires. The Iraq war advocates squelched or deflected such dissent so effectively that they have made the war different in ways they didn’t intend. This time, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves when the Americans and half the Malaki government are helicoptered out of the Green Zone with the desert equivalent of Vietnam boat people clinging to their heels. This time, no antiwar movement will have “forced us to fight with one hand tied behind our backs,” as Vietnam war apologists charged. This time, no Jane Fonda will have gone to Saddam’s Baghdad to lend aid and comfort and or demoralize our troops in the field. This war’s masterminds and their pundit-cheerleaders have done all that themselves. Have they ever.

No wonder they have made Lamont the ghost of George McGovern, whom they saw as a dupe or front man for Very Bad People back in 1972. That ghost was summoned the day after Lamont’s Democratic primary victory by Slate’s Jacob Weisberg, son of two Chicago Democratic Party loyalists who’d backed McGovern. Many of McGovern’s supporters imposed identity politics on the party so fully that the columnist Mike Royko likened its new color-and-gender-coded delegate-selection rules, which nearly expelled white-ethnic men, to the regimen of a person who begins a diet by shooting himself in the stomach.

Royko had a point, and here I’ve always agreed with critics of left-liberal folly. Yet I couldn’t join Brooks, Weisberg, and others on Tuesday night in applauding the tableau of a victorious Joe surrounded by beefy, placard-bearing “Firefighters for Lieberman” (“We don’t forget our friends,” one said, recalling that Lieberman had increased their funding in good old party-machine fashion.) Even the pre-McGovern northern Democratic Party which the Lieberman tableau recalled so romantically had betrayed the country in 1968 by defending a hideous war conceived and run by “tough liberal” Democrats. Like Peter Beinart now, those “tough” liberals had been eager to prove that they could fight a grave threat abroad — world Communism, whose Vietnam victory’s subsequent absorption into world Capitalism rather makes you wonder why we sacrificed 50,000 American lives fighting Ho Chi Minh in the first place.

Since the War on Terror is indeed different from the one in Vietnam, Lamont supporters have protested it and its Iraq miscarriage very differently from the way anti-war movement of the 1960s and ‘70s protested. But that hasn’t stopped Weisberg from invoking McGovern’s ghost or Brooks from claiming that Lamont supporters “rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country.”

When someone writes this way without realizing how accurately he is describing himself, he certainly isn’t going to inform his readers that Lamont lost mainly because most Republicans voted for Lieberman — who estimates that 75 percent of his voters were either unaffiliated or Republican — and that, even so, Lamont carried Connecticut’s largest, poorest and least-white cities against Lieberman overwhelmingly: Hartford by more than two to one, Bridgeport by nearly two to one, New Haven by three to two. Is that a Net roots triumph? Hardly. Does Brooks’ “comic sociology” hold the answer? Silence.

Gazing intently instead into the rear-view mirrors of their historical imaginations, Brooks et al saw nothing in Lamont’s insurgency but Vietnam-era or Sunni lunacy. That helped them not to notice that they’ve bloodied themselves up to their elbows in a lunacy of their own, a web of assumptions, rationalizations, lies, and alarums that’s unraveling like their commentary. That’s why Brooks — who urged us last spring to give up “parlor purity” and meet “savagery with savagery” in Iraq, where insurgents “create an environment in which it is difficult to survive if you are decent” — could see nothing in Lamont’s insurgency but nihilists who “tell themselves their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious, too.”

But who set up this hall of mirrors in the first place? Who, trapped in their own illogic and then their belated discovery that the world is a place too hard for Wilsonian idealism, wound up in the arms of a Senator who’d gone hook, line, and sinker with the Bush National Security Strategy? It’s time these scribblers stopped peddling the line that Lamont was the candidate of Moore, Al Sharpton, and Moveon.org That’s not who he is or ever was, and it’s not what 40 percent of Connecticut voters endorsed. Brooks, Beinart, and Weisberg should avoid a post-mortem account that insults Lamont and his supporters by reducing them to the demons in their own fevered imaginations.

Comments

On November 10, 2006 – 4:40am moshplant said:

If the idiots who supported the Vietnam War in the 1960s had realized their misstake and changed course, there would have been no take-over of the Democratic Party. McGovern was right about Vietnam.

And despite how people like Beinart cover their ears and close their eyes, McGovern was right about Iraq, too. A week after Colin Powell lied to the UN Security Council about how the US knew Iraq had WMDs, McGovern was interviewed by Judy Woodruff on CNN (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0302/13/ip.00.html) and said:

You know, I think most people would agree that had it not been for that 9/11 attack, we wouldn’t even be here talking about Saddam Hussein. The irony of that is that he had nothing to do that with that attack. Iraq had nothing to do with it. This was Osama bin Laden’s. He was the mastermind. He planned it, and his al Qaeda network, that little band of desert radical young men that he’s assembled. So I don’t see the connect between that and this march to war in Iraq. And I disagree with the president. I don’t think Iraq is a threat to the most mighty military power in the history of the world.

http://www.darrelplant.com/blog_item.php?ItemRef=576

On November 10, 2006 – 6:50pm madison idea said:

Great post

On November 10, 2006 – 2:55pm Voice said:

Beautifully articulated, Jim.
Thank you.

On November 10, 2006 – 2:56pm Karen444 said:

Would that we had a way out of Iraq like we had in Vietnam where we could just hand the mess over to the North and leave. The American public will not go along with an invasion and regime change of Iran, resulting in occupation of Iran. Our leaders are going to wind up having to deal with the Iranians, after demonizing them.

On November 10, 2006 – 3:08pm Bill Section 147 said:

So good I am going to have to print it out and re-read it the old fashioned way so I can highlight it and digest it all.

What a pleasure to actually read something thoughtfully written.

On November 10, 2006 – 3:29pm kenfair said:

I believe it was Digby who summarized this best as “an irrational fear of hippies.” And clearly, David Brooks is one of its most afflicted victims.

On November 10, 2006 – 4:44pm kj said:

I’m pretty sure that David Brooks is the product of two Manhattan hippie parents.  I remember him talking about it at a forum of some sort once.  I guess he’s still chasing those ghosts, trying his best to prove his parent’s wrong.

On November 10, 2006 – 4:09pm SteinL said:

David Brooks is desperate. Ever since they introduced Times Select, he’s been at the bottom of the pile in reads among the columnist “elite” there, and he rarely appears on the list of columnists whose entries are e-mailed to others.

He’s been trying to have it both ways to woo readers, before the editors figure out how irrelevant his voice is.

On November 10, 2006 – 4:53pm jimpol said:

Great piece, well written

On November 10, 2006 – 6:45pm bluebell said:

I can’t figure how they can obsess on CT without noticing that the 51st Democrat in Senate comes from Rhode Island and if that wasn’t an anti-war vote I don’t know what was!

Plus, these neo-cons types purely do not understand the Midwest either. The war is not popular out here in cities, suburbs or rural areas. Patriotic types may put out the flag and support the troops and enlist in the National Guard but they do it to defend their own country not to advance some ideologue’s utopian agenda.

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On November 10, 2006 – 7:39pm chancellor said:

A first class piece of writing. I’ve been aware that many in the neo-con pundit class are still trying to link Lamont and George McGovern, but, of course, this is nonsense. If one really chooses to select that analogy, it is Cindy Sheehan who played the role of George McGovern to Ned Lamont’s modern day Robert F. Kennedy. There hasn’t been anyone since the Kennedys to muster fanatical loyalty the way Ned Lamont has. For someone who came of age during the Kennedy era, there were even some eerie moments when Ned Lamont sounded exactly like John F. Kennedy–from his accent to the way he delivered a sentence in a speech. It must drive Brooks crazy that the NYT endorsed Lamont. It’s clear he still hasn’t gotten over it.

On November 10, 2006 – 8:14pm DanielGree said:

There is no doubt that David Brooks has an axe to grind against the very educationed upper middle class. He regularly goes after those he believes speaks for them and who ignore those who live in what once were called the edge cities.

However it, Jim, that you have your own scores to settle. You spend at least as much effort attacking Peter Beinart as David Brooks. As best as I can tell Beinart was largely right about Michael Moore. He over state Moores importance.

At one level the group that controls American politics wants to refight the 1960s. I recommend E.J. Dionne’s book “Why Americans Hate Politics. ” Obviously the Osama Bin Ladens aren’t the Soviet Union and the United States is much more powerful now than it was in the 1960s and the world is actual agreement with the United States far more now, Iraq excepted, than ever before.

You did not address the question of Lamont successfully winning over the bloggers and other anti-war Democrats but unable to carry one of the bluest of states. Was this just inexperience or did this election not hinge on only one issue?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

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Glenn Beck Shows Neo-cons it’s 1939

By Jim Sleeper – November 12, 2010

American Jewish Stalinists of the 1930s broke with Russian Communism in lurches, as what they called their “locomotive of history” kept on derailing. Some were jolted off the train by Stalin’s unofficially but patently anti-Semitic “purge trials” of the mid-1930s. Others, who downplayed Russian Communism’s “Jewish question” out of noble or hardened faith in its professed universalism, woke up only in 1939, when Stalin signed his infamous non-aggression pact with Hitler. Still others woke up only in 1956, when the USSR rolled over the Hungarian Revolution and Nikita Khrushchev acknowledged Stalin’s totalitarian crimes.

By then, most American Jewish Stalinist thinking was on its way to neo-conservatism, a new haven for unchanging, preternatural insecurities and the over-compensatory bombast that always accompanies them. As this mindset migrated from left-universalist socialism to right-nationalist capitalism — both ends of the spectrum “religious” and Manichaean in their different ways — it disdained most American Jews, who’ve never been Stalinists and will never be neo-cons because they’ve had the intellectual and political maturity to become civic-republican liberals in the American way.

“A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality,” claimed neo-con godfather Irving Kristol, meaning the “reality” that most people who claim to be noble are actually duped by, or strategists of, movements dark and cruel. Kristol, believing that liberals are especially naive about this, didn’t suspect that a liberal might also be a neo-conservative who’s been mugged by a reality like Glenn Beck’s attacks on George Soros. Daily Beast columnist Michelle Goldberg has rightly called Beck’s rants “a symphony of the dog whistles of anti-Semitism.”

Yes, it is happening here, and neo-conservatives are experiencing another lurch that should jolt some more of them off the right-wing train. From Norman Podhoretz to Irving Kristol’s son William, they will have to take an unequivocal stand, not just against Glenn Beck but against Fox News: Beck has no First Amendment right to be on Fox, and Fox can exercise its First Amendment right (and moral obligation) to take him and its other bigots off the air. So far, Bill Kristol and his Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard have been silent about this. Most neo-conservatives have been silent.

The sickening, acrid feeling rising in their stomachs is just the beginning of what they’ve been asking for for 30 years. Soros today, Summers tomorrow; anything but blame casino-finance, corporate-welfare capitalism itself: “Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools,” as August Bebel put it. Little-big-man fools like Glenn Beck will have their day, and other fools, like Kristol, will pay.

Under the elder Kristol’s tutelage, neo-conservatives made a Faustian bargain with what would become Beck’s blend of right-wing Christian fundamentalism, national-security state militarism, and casino-finance capitalism. That bargain disgusts many Burkean conservatives because it exposes their own as well as neo-cons’ inability to reconcile their ardent desire for ordered liberty with their equally ardent obeisance to every whim and riptide of the casino- and corporate-welfare capitalism that are subverting all they cherish.

This false bargain’s cheerleaders have broken with it in lurches, just as the old Stalinists did. The promise of American “Free World” hegemony has been derailed not by terrorists or Islamicists but by its own bankrupting of the American republic’s economy, military, and civic culture, in ways you’d have to wrap yourself in an awfully big flag not to notice.

For some neo-cons, the wake up came around 1992 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which they had transformed from an object of obsessive desire into an object of obsessive hatred. Suddenly, neither object was there. This equivalent of sensory deprivation owed less to their own incessant warnings across thirty years about “the present danger” of Soviet Communism and about American “failures of nerve” to confront it than it owed to wiser Americans’ policy of steady containment. That policy drew subtly on deeper republican strengths instead of drawing down the republic’s stored moral capital, in blunder after blunder, from Vietnam to the Supreme Court’s decision early this year to open the floodgates to corporate electioneering.

It was the cultivators of a more sober containment who won the Cold War, to which neo-cons brought the same manic insecurity and bombastic over-confidence that their intellectual forebears had brought to Communism and, before that, to the national greatness of the German Kaiserreich on the eve of World War I.

For years, I’ve urged American neo-cons to read Chapter 9, “War Fever,” in Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933. But they haven’t read it, because they’ve been too busy writing it all over again with their lives. The same propensity to clamber onto the national security state in the name of a popular majority that’s actually more ambivalent about it than these courtier-consultants who live in it and off of it; the same tawdry “revolver journalism,” as Rebecca West called it, that degrades public discourse and deliberation to stampede the masses toward war.

For some American neo-cons, the wake up came in 2006, with the embarrassment of their own desperate strutting during the Iraq War and with Republican setbacks in congressional elections. Still others, such as David Brooks and David Frum, woke up when the economic meltdown and Republican National Convention of 2008 brought to the surface chilling undercurrents of “Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay!” blood-think that were coursing through a body politic degraded by decades of supply-side economics and national-security militarism. These were the naked emperors that haberdashers such as Brooks and Frum had worked so deftly and energetically to clothe.

Because the neo-cons’ rickety bargain with fundamentalism, militarism, and casino capitalism is as self-destructive as Stalin’s “Socialism in One Country,” they’re caught, like the Communists, teetering back and forth between imperial overreach and, when it fails, the scapegoating of….

The rest of the sentence is, of course, the problem, just as it was in Stalin’s Moscow and Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. And the rest of that sentence has been written in the New York Times’ description of Glenn Beck’s recent programs on Soros.

For neo-conservatives, it is no longer 2006 or 2008. It is 1939. It’s time for them to leave Murdoch’s evil empire and the corruption of the American republic that it represents.

All that remains to be written is the response of people like the younger Kristol, who “discovered” and commended Sarah Palin to John McCain and recently penned yet another of his strained apologias for both her and Glenn Beck in a Weekly Standard editorial on the Beck rally in Washington.

I could name many other neo-con talking machines I’m waiting to hear from. They’ll harrumph that they’ve known all along that Beck is a bit deranged, but David Bromwich was making that clear enough in the New York Review of Books last week, when they were still denying it.

So let them speak out. No one needed to hear what the last Stalinists were telling themselves in 1992 or what the last Jewish apologists for German national greatness were thinking in 1932. But, for Jewish neo-cons, it is no longer 2006 or 2008; it is 1939. And the rest of the Jewish community, not to mention America, is listening.

• 
  Excellent post. The hardest thing to do, after you’ve sold your soul, is to try to get it back.

• This is the best (short) set of categories making up the right wing I have seen to date. I also agree with mimi-katz above. It’s damned hard to commit yourself body and soul to an ideology and its organization and then find that it totally contradicts the very reasons you committed yourself in the first place.
  
  The usual reaction is to totally ignore the contradictions, even to the extent of attacking those who bring them up, and recommit to greater effort to achieve the goals of the organization and ideology you have joined. It takes a really important emotional event to break the commitment.

• mimi-katz said the same thing a lot more succinctly. I, of course, am always looking for the social mechanism that makes it true.

• RE: Mr. Beck said he was “probably more supportive of Israel and the Jews than George Soros is.” – NYT article
  MY COMMENT: Whatever, Glenn. And I’ll bet that some of your best friends are Jewish. And you have a condo on the beach in Tel Aviv. Right?

• Hungary!
  First, Éva Gábor.
  Now, George Soros.
  Don’t you see the pattern?
  Proof positive that Beck is right!

• What of the historical fact, minutia though it may be that most of the leading lights of neoconservatism have a trotskyist, not a stalinist pedigree?
  
  This may not change much, and this ancient controversy may mean nothing to most of today’s readers, but accuracy still has its place.

• Actually, most of the leading lights of neo-conservatism have neither a Trotskyist nor a Stalinist pedigree; Irving Kristol was briefly a Trotskyist in his youth, but that’s about it.
  
  My point wasn’t that neocons as individuals have flipped from Stalinism to McCarthyism or Palinesque patriotism but that both extremes have the same mental morphology, the same habits of mind. More than a few “red diaper babies,” children or grand-children of the old, heavily Jewish New York left, have become neo-cons, because what they picked up from their elders was not a specific doctrine but a disposition to think ideologically that is harder and deeper-wired than the points of doctrine as such.
  
  Thus it’s possible to love the Soviet Union from afar, or hate it from afar, for reasons that are strikingly similar in terms of political psychology.
  
  That’s the point that needs to be understood about neo-cons, and, yes, I think that Jewish historical experience trying to adapt to and overcome marginality via universalism and power has a lot to do with it. That’s why Glenn Beck’s anti-Semitic imbecile rant leaves neo-cons looking so hypocritical or helpless; its very predictability makes the neo-cons seem either naive (in having sucked up to the rising power of the right) or opportunistic and clannish (if they cross their current ideological lines to defend Soros, a fellow Jew). Neo-cons aren’t visibly enough committed to a civic-republican give-and-take to get out of this looking trustworthy.

• Neocons seem to have ended up in the unfortunate position of not qualifying for the position Leo Strauss’s proclamation laid out that the superior intellectually and morally men of insight and superior wisdom must rule.

• RE: “…both extremes have the same mental morphology, the same habits of mind. More than a few “red diaper babies,” children or grand-children of the old, heavily Jewish New York left, have become neo-cons, because what they picked up from their elders was not a specific doctrine but a disposition to think ideologically that is harder and deeper-wired than the points of doctrine as such.” – Sleeper
  MY COMMENT: This is a very intriguing working hypothesis. It makes a great deal of sense to me, but I would need to see other instances of this phenomenon having operated similarly in the past. I suspect they are there, but I am not enough of a student of history to identify them.
  A POSSIBLE (WEAK) EXAMPLE: What about some of the formerly paleoconservative Republicans who have “flipped” (or may be in the process) to being fairly/somewhat liberal Democrats/Independents/Greens? Possibilities: John Dean, Andrew Bacevich, David Stockman, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Bruce Fein..

• Well, I don’t think that the examples of Stockman, Bacevich, et al really fit, because these people pretty clearly are thinking for themselves outside of their former ideological boxes, not just “flipping” from one ideology to another.
  
  Perhaps more typical of what I have in mind are:
  
  a) the “new” right-winger who’s an obsessive anti-Communist and even an anti-liberal, precisely some leftist movement broke his faithful, youthful heart — people like a Whittaker Chambers, or, in our own time, a David Horowitz, a Ronald Radosh, or maybe even a Sol Stern or a Fred Siegel, two former 1960s leftists who can’t stop acting out the drama of their disillusionment by crusading against the naivete of those who, in their view, aren’t yet as disillusioned and clear-sighted as they;
  
  b) on the other end of the spectrum, the obsessive anti-capitalist who’s an “old money” WASP, such as Henry Wallace — a familiarly obdurate type who remains willfully blind to, and indeed clings to, the left’s fault lines and follies because he’s so preoccupied with cleansing himself of the sins of the privilege and false piety in his upbringing. WASPS who fall into this mode don’t bend; they simply transpose their intrepid Calvinist, Presbyterian or Puritan certainties into their new loyalty to “progressive” movements even those that are in fact themselves quite horrible. It’s political psychology on parade.
  
  I’m trying to write a longer essay about this. We’ll see who’s interested!
  
  Both characters are letting down a civic-republican ethos, and I think that some neo-cons’ cathexis onto Israel is driven by their effort to escape facing their own betrayal of that ethos here in America. ….

• In Aharon Appelfeld’s novel “Badenheim 1939” the future Holocaust victims explain away the antisemitism by blaming those nasty and smelly “Ostjuden” for the problem–if it weren’t for them there wouldn’t be any prejudice against Jews. It seems that the contemporary Left plays the same kind of role in the minds of neocons–if their gentile bedfellows on the Right are so bigoted it’s really George Soros’ fault.

• Yes, and I went further in 2006, when I noted that several centrist and liberal journalists who were creatures of the corporate state — from David Brooks to Jacob Weisberg — were blaming the continuing conservative hegemony of that time on the “crazy” left of Michael Moore, Ned Lamont, and Daily Kos and MoveOn, all in order to spare themselves a long look in the mirror.
  
  

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By getting fired, has he set the stage for an insurgency against Obama?

By Jim Sleeper – June 24, 2010

An interesting theory about Stanley McChrystal’s motives and strategy — and about what Obama may have lost by dismissing him — popped up in a thread below my column yesterday, and I urged David Seaton to make the comment into a post of his own. He did so, suggesting that McChrystal — furious at Obama’s time-lines and low level of commitment of troops and resources to what the general believes should be a massive counterinsurgency, embedded in a total war — wanted to be fired, so that blame for the inevitable defeat of the present effort would be placed on Obama and his civilian team’s refusal to commit fully to win the war.

McChrystal could retire from the military after a decent interval and undertake a domestic insurgency of his own, with total commitment from Rupert Murdoch and the conservative noise machine. Neo-cons would be back in the saddle of public discourse, riding hard. As Seaton notes, the “I want my country back” crowd will march in lockstep behind McChrystal, denouncing Obama’s indecision, not the impossibility of the grand strategy itself.

Hence a Machiavellian question: Shouldn’t Obama have refused McChrystal’s resignation; made him eat humble pie in public by proclaiming his undying fealty to civilian control; and sent him back to Afghanistan? By firing McChrystal, hasn’t Obama instead punished himself for supporting our entry into Afghanistan as LBJ did our entry into Vietnam — less out of conviction than out of a desire to cover his right flank at home? Isn’t this another Greek tragedy, with McChrystal now playing the part of Obama’s Nemesis?

Well, maybe. You can see tragedy unfolding if you note how, soon after the Rolling Stone story about McChrystal’s supposed disloyalty to the Commander in Chief broke, some neo-cons’ initial “surge” on behalf of McChrystal collapsed into a very different, more sinister strategy by day’s end.

Neo-cons hoped at first to save the architect of their grand strategy in Afghanistan; I mocked their doe-eyed raptures about nation-building there some months ago in Dissent. But the only story they really want to push now is about Obama’s failure to commit us to the total war and total victory that they crave in all times and all places.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, whose counterinsurgency raptures I cited in Dissent, hides this bent with a “more in sorrow than in anger” defense of McChrystal today. This typically amnesiac and dishonest column doesn’t tell us that on one of his only trips abroad as a Times columnist (for all his Iraq War cheer-leading, he never visited Iraq) he went to Afghanistan last year and got the full McChrystal treatment. So now he casts McChrystal as a victim of the voracious “new media” culture that has turned power-holders’ private kvetches into public business.

Awash in Beltway narcissism (see Andrew Sullivan’s put-down of Brooks’ coziness and Sullivan’s defense of the Rolling Stone freelancer), Brooks tells us of a lost golden age of media restraint (apparently there was no Walter Winchell or McCarthyism), and he bypasses McChrystal’s own past efforts to play the media against Obama. He gives us St. Stanley the Innocent, being eaten alive by newshounds.

Brooks’ default position is the same as the rest of the neo-cons’: to persuade us that it is 1938 or 1940, and that everywhere (Moscow, Baghdad, Tehran, the Pashtun) is Hitler’s Berlin, and that every liberal Democrat is, sooner or later, a Neville Chamberlain, fatuously proclaiming “Peace in our time.”

That’s what Obama did last year, to hear neo-cons tell it, when he went to Cairo, Istanbul, and Moscow — and even Berlin. Why didn’t he just go to Munich? That’s what they want to know. They recite — in their sleep, in the shower, and online  — Winston Churchill’s response in 1940 to a message from FDR bearing a Longfellow poem:

Sail on, Oh ship of state
Sail on, Oh Union strong and great.
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

Churchill read this poem on the air to Britons, who were hanging on his every word as the Nazi threat loomed. Then he said:

“What shall be my answer, in your name, to this great man? ‘Give us the tools, and we will finish the job!’“

And what did the neo-conservative Commentary magazine’s Peter Wehner write yesterday while trying to make the best of Obama’s replacement of McChrystal with Petraeus? “Barack Obama better be all in,” Wehner warned, meaning that the president had better scrap his time-lines and ramp up the war. “If given the tools, David Petraeus — one more time — can finish the job.”

The echo of Churchill is no doubt deliberate. But is this 1940? Are the Muslim insurgents (against what, exactly?) really the Axis? There’s a debate underway about that, but, knowing all the answers as they do, neo-cons were solidly behind McChrystal until yesterday and, in some cases, even a day after the Rolling Stone story raised serious questions about his commitment to civilian control of the military.

The first neo-con to rush forward in McChrystal’s defense was Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin, one of the many, always-on-message drones who never think a serious political thought because they’re too busy lacing the line of the moment with just the right mix of solemn patriotism and tactical slime (I bold-face both below) to put “the line” across:

“Far from being evidence of McChrystal’s insubordination, the [Rolling Stone] article actually says much more about the administration’s mistakes in the course of a warto which they have committed so much American blood and treasure. If there is dissension in the ranks about some of the political and diplomatic blunders of the past year and a half, it speaks more to Obama’s own failure to exert leadership than to McChrystal’s faults.”

Obama’s leadership is a legitimate concern, whether you want total war or think that we shouldn’t have tried counterinsurgency at all and that Obama was dragged into it only as LBJ was. But neo-cons already considered McChrystal a better national leader than Obama, so out came Rubin’s unthinking, on-message reaction.

Similarly on-message was Washington Post neo-con editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt, whose page offered three reasons why McChrystal must not be fired: He had created the counterinsurgency strategy; he had good working relationships there; and now he’d outed the Obama administration’s faults, which, of course, were more grievous than his own.

Rubin, clearly delighted to be singing in Hiatt’s chorus, weighed in immediately with “a fourth reason” to keep McChrystal: “Obama needs to shed his peevish and self-absorbed persona,… and to dispel the growing perception that he’s in over his head…. (And by the way, if McChrystal does quit, won’t we hear a whole lot more from him about the civilian officials who’ve been making the military’s job harder?) “

Who did Rubin think she was advising here, and to what end? It was getting a little embarrassing, especially when the Weekly Standard announced a Message Change, moving with its hero John McCain’s statement to the effect that McChrystal must indeed be dismissed. The ostensible reason for this shift was loyalty to the republic’s cardinal principle of civilian control. The real reason, as far as people like Rubin is concerned, is a desire to have a martyr who perhaps can help to heap the blame on Obama.

Rubin began to backtrack about keeping McChrystal in Afghanistan, but only in order to stay with the Message: “Obama’s decision to accept Gen. Stanley McChyrstal’s resignation was not unexpected. By bringing back Gen. David Petraeus, he assuages the concerns from supporters of the Afghanistan mission as to whether we are committed to victory. There are two more essential changes required,” she continued: Since “McChrystal threw the curtain open on the dysfunctional and counterproductive civilian team in Afghanistan,… Richard Holbrooke and Karl Eikenberry should be canned…. Second, a wise reader likes to tell me, ‘Generals should only talk to their troops.’ What a fine idea.”

Oops, not so wise or so fine: Rubin’s Commentary online colleagues began to correct this and others of her butt-covering lurches, Max Boot informing her that, these days, generals actually need proactive public media strategies, not silence.

Finally, Peter Wehner weighed in “In Praise of Obama and Petraeus,” as linked above. What had complicated the Message was that Obama chose Petraeus, hero of the Iraq surge. Now Obama’s detractors have to drive a wedge between him and Petraeus by showing that Obama isn’t giving him the tools to finish the job. Wehner’s “praise” of Obama for appointing Petraeus will very soon be followed by his not-so-sorrowful despair at the president’s failure to follow through.

It won’t be very hard to carry this line, especially once McChrystal gives his first big, out-of-uniform speech at the American Enterprise Institute. Brace yourself for calls to escalate the war that’ll make McCain’s “Bomb, bomb, bomb/ Bomb bomb Iran” seem like the joke he only half-meant it to be.

This is no joke. It’s either 1940, and the Axis is just across the channel, or it’s 1914, and the neo-con revolver journalists are teaming up with generals, as their predecessors did then in Europe, to foment public enthusiasm for this war and another with Iran.

The problem, as Seaton suggests, is that the “I want my country back” crowd — and, I would add, many of our would-be public intellectuals, from Paul Berman to the New York Times Book Review’s increasingly creepy deputy editor Barry Gewen — have become addled and angry enough to believe that it is 1940 and that that is how the world is, and how it must be, unless we gird up our loins and unleash the dogs of torture and war. For them, there is no other way, and now Obama has given them a new martyr and champion.

This is really just an addendum to my post:

In airing this “theory” about McChrystal wanting out (not just so that he can escape blame for a failing mission, but perhaps also to make sure that the blame attaches to the administration, not the Pentagon), I’m assuming only two things.

First, that the strategy in Afghanistan is going nowhere, not just because Cassandra-like, sensationalist news media say so, but because it’s really going nowhere;

Second, that McChrystal, who drank the “soft power” kool-aid during his year at Harvard’s Kennedy School, got grandly ambitious about it, and that he has been frustrated ever since, believing that Obama and his team (Biden, Eikenberry, Holbrook) have let him down by under-funding and stage-managing everything for domestic politics. So he has felt betrayed.

I don’t say that he orchestrated his departure all that much; he may have lurched into his confrontation with Obama somewhat. But I suspect that it would have happened sooner or later, even if the Rolling Stone reporter had been a pushover and the volcano hadn’t stranded McChrystal’s staff with him for so long. McChrystal seems to have tried to outfox the civilian leadership via the media before.

So, no, I’m not thinking literally that there was a “master-stroke” on McChrystal’s part but that he did feel betrayed and is bitter and that he has a mind of his own and some ambitions. And I’m assuming that neo-cons and the “I want my country back” crowd would love to use him in any way they can to discredit Obama.

I’m not suggesting that McChrystal will run for office whenever he actually leaves the military, only that he may want to speak his mind in some way that sticks. But maybe the ghost of Ollie North is haunting me; he did run for office, and, although he lost, he remained a cause celebre and champion of the abnormally disaffected. Perhaps McChrystal is too “liberal” for that, as some are claiming, but after all that he’s been through, I’m less sanguine.

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By Jim Sleeper – October 21, 2009, 6:53PM

A couple of years ago The Nation’s Eric Alterman published What Liberal Media?, shredding the familiar conservative charges. It may be too soon to ask, What liberal academy? — although I’ve had fun exposing what I called “Wiley E. Coyote conservatives” who rushed off cliffs a couple of years ago blaming faculty feminists and radical leftists for ousting Lawrence Summers from Harvard’s presidency — although it was the high-capitalist Harvard Corporation that ousted him, and not for politically correct reasons — and exposing conservatives at Yale who blamed liberals there for enrolling a former Taliban spokesman as a special student, even though it was a conservative Yale foreign-policy network that blessed his admission).

In 2009 a Chronicle of Higher Education debate questioned whether and why liberal academia spurns conservative scholars. Actually, the fiscal crises gripping public and private universities influence their priorities far more powerfully than do leftist doctrines. Yet, in the Chronicle, Columbia intellectual historian Mark Lilla wrote that on many campuses a pervasive ideology normalizes “liberal” views that are narrow and arbitrary. Boston College’s Alan Wolfe agreed that colleges promote little true intellectual diversity, although he acknowledged that conservatives are part of the problem.

Others added brief observations. I noted that what’s actually normalized by the typical campus mix of political correctness and corporatist discipline isn’t very “liberal,” as most Americans use that term. Baiters of “tenured radicals” – the conservative humorist P.J. O’Rourke, the propagandist Roger Kimball, the provocateur David Horowitz – can’t claim now, as David Brooks did in 2002, that America “houses its radical lunatics … in [academic] departments that operate as nunneries for the perpetually alienated.” Not only do market forces rule; lavishly funded nunneries for failed, aging neo-cons are sprouting or entrenching themselves at Yale, Duke, George Mason, Claremont- McKenna-Pomona, Chicago, and elsewhere.

At some of these places, conservative activists and national-security functionaries teach undergraduates to read Thucydides as a prophet of the war on terror and to pursue national-security state networking through habits of discretion and public dissimulation that hobble the humanist truth-seeking conservatives claim to defend.

I support the conservative argument that colleges have to balance humanist truth-seeking with civic-republican leadership-training and that serious conservative thinkers are invaluable to it. A liberal arts college’s mission, after all, (as distinct from that of a research university in which it may be housed) isn’t to produce many scholars, much less the dray horses of the financial and legal establishments that many leafy campuses actually do produce in large herds; it’s to turn 18-year-olds into citizens who are intellectually and morally strong enough to carry on public life through deliberation and choice, not force and fraud.

Why aren’t colleges doing enough of that? Read the Chronicle discussion and my 450- word contribution to it [below here on screen] for a hint at why “liberals” really aren’t the problem.

http://chronicle.com/article/Intellectual-Diversity/48799/

The Chronicle of Higher Education

October 18, 2009

Intellectual Diversity and Conservatism on Campus

To the Editor:

Mark Lilla says rightly that at many liberal-arts colleges, a pervasive ideology insensibly normalizes views that are narrow and arbitrary, and Alan Wolfe says rightly that colleges promote too little intellectual diversity. But nothing very “liberal” is being normalized by today’s campus mix of political correctness and corporatist discipline.

Visit any Ivy League Economics 101 course or classes in microeconomics, statistics, computer science, and most social sciences. The homunculae economicae and the number-crunching “methodologues” at the podium may not be flag-waving conservatives, but neither are most of them liberals or leftists, except in the “color equals culture” sense that big corporations embrace for management and marketing purposes.

“Diversity” itself is an industry, and universities themselves are run like corporations whose students and faculty members are “customers,” as one unfortunate Yale memo actually put it. But, then, increasingly, students are customers: Thousands of visits per capita to vapid Internet sites and shopping malls before matriculation have annealed them against whatever campus Marxists or postmodernists could hope to impart. Before 2008, most seniors at most Ivies flocked yearly to recruiters from investment banks, consulting firms, and their ilk.

So, yes, liberal-arts colleges promote too little intellectual diversity, and, yes, a pervasive ideology (of free-marketing, self-marketing, predatory marketing) normalizes orientations that are narrow and arbitrary, indeed. Even the supposed campus leftists are pitchmen, like the Harvard Shakespearean scholar Marjorie Garber, who, in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety and Sex and Real Estate, swings like a semioticist with marketing that’s reshuffling our libidinal and racial decks.

Other leftists administer revival meetings for penitent racists and sexists who want to feel better about making money by backing reforms that now divide blacks from blacks as well as blacks from whites and whites from whites and women from women as well as women from men and men from men. Progress, perhaps; but “progressive” it’s not.

Could conservative scholarship discipline this campus capitalist circus? America warehouses its “radical lunatics … in [academic] departments that operate as nunneries for the perpetually alienated,” David Brooks has claimed, but lavishly funded nunneries for conservative lunatics are sprouting at Yale, Duke, George Mason, Claremont McKenna, Chicago, and elsewhere, and some hire conservative activists and national-security functionaries as teachers who cast Thucydides as a prophet of the war on terror. That’s not how to balance humanist truth seeking and civic-republican leadership training.

Yet Lilla is right to want serious study of conservative ideas. I’d trade lunatic semioticists in a heartbeat for more on Adam Smith’s abhorrence of capitalist corporations, John Gray’s doubts about capitalism tout court, and Edmund Burke’s indifference to anything more religious than a state religion that’s the Tory Party at prayer.

Serious conservative scholarship would highlight American conservatism’s failure to reconcile its yearnings for ordered, sacred liberty with its obeisance to every global capitalist riptide that’s subverting liberal education more than tenured radicals ever did.

Jim Sleeper
Lecturer in Political Science
Yale University
New Haven

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By Jim Sleeper – January 27, 2010

Yes, it was a great State of the Union speech, the more so for its unadorned honesty, not for soaring, rhetorical cadences like those of his campaign. Yes, he told the Roberts Court to its face what damage it has done. Yes, he put Republicans on the spot over the filibuster and their nation-destroying negativity. And he hit lobbyists and even big corporations.

What has changed for me, though, is my growing (hardening) conviction that the chamber he was speaking to is stuffed to its gills with frauds. (There are exceptions.) Beyond the few measures on which there is a rare alignment of stars, nothing he called for will happen, unless his road trip unleashes a firestorm in the American people against Congress for the systemic sins mentioned above.

Most Americans didn’t watch the speech. And with good reason. They’ve heard laundry lists and fine rhetoric before. As long as most Americans’ default position in politics remains what I said it is after the Massachusetts debacle, Congress will remain unworthy of Obama’s broad wisdom and self-discipline, and it will remain wide open, therefore, to the most malign and predatory interests.

“A republic, if you can keep it,” Ben Franklin said, doubting that, in the long run, we could. I don’t want to doubt it, but of late I see very little evidence that we can or will.

But hasn’t the republic survived graver doubts than mine for more than two centuries? Certainly, from the moment King George III was gone, the Founders took a hard look at the American people and became obsessed with how a republic ends. Franklin sketched the odds at the Constitutional convention. He warned that the Constitution “can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall have become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

History showed that this can happen not with a coup but a smile and a friendly swagger like George W. Bush’s, as soon as the people tire of the burdens of self-government and can be jollied along into servitude — or scared into it, when they’ve become soft enough to intimidate.

Alexander Hamilton sketched the stakes when he wrote that history had 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 that 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.

The Founders were all reading Edward Gibbon’s then-new account of how the Roman republic had slipped, degree by self-deluding degree, into an imperial tyranny. Leaders could bedazzle citizens out of their liberties by titillating and intimidating them into becoming bread-and-circus mobs that “no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army ….”

Gibbon added pointedly that Augustus, the first emperor (I tend to think of George W. Bush when I read this passage), “wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government” and that he knew that “the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.” Campaigning in an open shirt, as it were, “that artful prince … humbly solicited their suffrages for himself, and for his friends, and scrupulously practiced all the duties of an ordinary candidate … . The emperors … disdained that pomp and ceremony which might offend their countrymen but could add nothing to their real power. In all the offices of life they affected to confound themselves with their subjects and maintained with them an equal intercourse of visits and entertainments.”

And so Rome became what Gibbon called “an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth,” not by conspiracy but thanks to a confluence of deeper currents that had enervated people’s republican virtues and beliefs.

This, of course, is precisely what Republicans promised, for eight years — no, for 30 years, ever since Ronald Reagan’s winning campaign in 1980 — that they would save us from, with the help of God, deregulation, and martial valor. They convinced a lot of Americans that it was liberal governmentalists who wanted to coddle them into servitude and decadence.

Plenty of liberal folly reinforced that perception, and Obama wrestles with the burden of trying to dispel that perception even as he tries to make government as pro-active as it truly needs to be. But he also has the burden of most Americans’ obdurate refusal to admit that rule by big, private corporations, not government, is ever more confining, intrusive, and even degrading of our virtues and our public courage — in employment, entertainment, patterns of consumption, even the subtle skewing of public discourse (journalists, write this down!), as well as of government itself.

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 afterward. 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 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.”

We are there, I fear. At least, that was my feeling as I watched a President who is as wise as the founders addressing a den of hogs sent there by an American people that seems more deeply beleaguered and befuddled than at any time in my life, which has been long enough to include some pretty bad times.

Over at The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan shares my assessment for the most part and responds to this post, adding that the time has come to fight with and for Obama against not only the special interests but the conniving legislators and Justices who serve them.

That kind of mobilization and resistance — drawing on clean anger from a civic-republican center, if you will — is what the American Revolution was about. Do we still have the public courage, the sense of national honor, and the habits of command necessary to do it again?

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By Jim Sleeper – November 3, 2010

The slogan behind Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory — “It’s the economy, stupid” — has worked to Republicans’ advantage in 2010 for reasons we need to understand. Obama’s comment that voters don’t face facts when they’re scared was true, even if ill-advised, and it didn’t cost Democrats nearly as much as economic desperation itself.

The Tea Party’s “ideology” of rage and its floodgate funding gave Republicans new right-wing candidates, but the reason they won is more elemental and elementary: Democrats, like Republicans, are a party of casino-finance capital and corporate welfare, and their fiscal and regulatory timidity made Republican sins easier to forget.

Even were Democrats bolder, they can’t fairly be blamed for failing to undo, in just the two years since their 2008 victories, the immense damage done by Republican governance and policies. But Republicans’ congenital inability to offer more than slick demagoguery and obstruction won’t benefit hamstrung Democrats in 2012 unless voters recognize that Republicans are even more perverse than Democrats. Whether voters see that will depend a lot on the spin doctors and the big money behind them.

George Packer’s blog post in the New Yorker gets this right, but in a way that ends up being part of the problem. A few years ago, I rebuked him for chronicling “The Fall of Conservatism” in The New Yorker by giving the floor to a supposedly penitential David Brooks and other Beltway phrase-turners, without letting ordinary voters speak for themselves. Now, sounding as if he’s taking my remonstrance to heart, Packer goes out of his way to contradict Brooks and talk with voters in Virginia’s 5th congressional district.

Not only does he do that, however; he wants us to know how important it is that he did it. It’s important, he informs us, “to go to polling places and talk to actual voters, as opposed to sitting in a television studio and talking to other talkers,” because “you always come away surprised.”

So, what kind of “surprise” does he find? Well, he quotes two voters. One, a poll-watcher, gives him the predictable Republican/conservative line. The other, it turns out, has “come to vote for [Democratic congressional candidate Tom Perriello] because of Jane Mayer’s article [in The New Yorker!] on the Koch brothers (who have poured some of their money into the Fifth). This woman’s husband works for a Koch-owned company, and when they started getting inundated with company literature telling them how to vote, she became suspicious. Then Jane’s article explained it all.”

Mayer’s article was terrifically important, and it made me wish that more Americans got the kind of information she dug up. Unfortunately, the next paragraph of Packer’s post has him talking mainly to himself: “My uncle and grandfather were congressmen, and my mother always described the defeats that ended their careers as devastating. Politicians can’t help taking a loss as a direct personal rejection.”

Pundits, too, apparently. But Packer rouses himself to close with a characteristic drama:

“This midterm is the [Republican] party’s first salvo in its first order of business, to end Obama’s Presidency. There will be little mercy and a great deal of rancor. Tomorrow we’ll find out how Obama sees the next two years. I see one of the ugliest political periods in my lifetime, which has seen a few.”

George, George,….: The Republicans are dreadful. That is no surprise. We need to know why so many people are following them. Your personal testimony doesn’t tell us. What happened last night is not about you, your uncle, your grandfather, your mother, or even about the many things you have gone out and seen in your lifetime. It’s mainly about what other people think they’ve seen and heard. That tragedy remains too little reported.

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By Jim Sleeper – November 4, 2006, 10:21PM

By instinct and necessity, daily newspaper reporters are democratic, inquisitive, and therefore easy to talk to. But there is, as they say, another side of the story, and, wow, was it ever on display last week in two big New York Times profiles of Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman, both of which read as if written by Lieberman’s Senate campaign. Lamont seems likely to lose on Tuesday, and since I’m a Lamont partisan, you’ll assume I’m writing this from sour grapes. But no. Good journalism and civic-republicanism matter more than the outcome of this one contest. Judge for yourself how they’re doing in this one.

According to the two big Times profiles, Ned, “a son of privilege,” can’t be a grounded civic-republican who taught awhile in an inner-city school; and Joe, an independent thinker toughened by the scourging of leftist bloggers and activists who’ve taken over the Democratic Party, can’t have voted for the worst aspects of the Iraq War, the detainee bill, or the mauling of Terry Schiavo. At least the profiles don’t break out of their own fixed ideas enough to report any of these facts.

Lamont, rather, “raised in a well-connected family” and “schooled in training centers of power,” has been “flirting with the possibility of running for major public office” for some time, the Times tells us. But what does that mean? Don’t most Exeter and Harvard grads actually become dray horses for corporate power who, by age 30, can barely finesse a civic-republican idiom? Lamont’s family legacy and personal decisions stand in rather admirable contrast, as I found last month.

The Times profile chose not to understand this and instead rode the “Greenwich millionaire” stereotype relentlessly. I’d told one of its writers to call The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who shared a Vermont farmhouse with Lamont decades ago as they and others worked on a weekly newspaper there. Mayer’s is the one admiring quote that’s not from a “country-club” friend of Lamont’s, but the reporters, apparently obsessed with how many cars he has owned, make clear that he was driving an Audi even in Vermont. Somehow they don’t discover that much more recently he taught poor, nonwhite kids in Bridgeport, for two years, although that may be corrected in a small item between now and Tuesday.

The Times’ Lieberman profile is straight out of the playbook of his old advisor Carter Eskew, who’s quoted twice. Lieberman’s rejection by Democrats has “freed him to do and say exactly what he felt,” reporter Janny Scott tells us. But the question of what, exactly, Lieberman does feel is obliterated by quote after quote asserting that lockstep leftist Democrats have left him, because Joe thinks for himself:

“‘He’s always done whatever he wants to do. Why would anyone expect him at this point to become a good soldier?'”

“‘To his credit, he did run in the primary. And, to his credit, he didn’t trim his sails.'”

“‘The last thing I would have predicted was that, to me, this genuinely spiritual, genuinely likeable guy would arrive at a point at which so many of the leaders of his own party felt insulted by him.'”

“‘I think he came away with a resolve to answer to his country first and his party second.'”

These are representative, from four different speakers. And the other view? Reporter Scott offers that herself, sort-of: “[Lieberman] has long chosen to describe himself as ‘independent-minded’ rather than moderate. That quality has surfaced at every stage of his political career, apparently the product of a combination of upbringing, intellectual orientation, religion, experience, perhaps expediency. Where admirers see a man of deep principles, detractors see an opportunist.”

And the supporting quote from someone to buttress that last assertion? There is none. Anywhere.

But what does Lieberman think when he’s doing all this independent thinking for himself? Not only are there no Schiavo or detainee positions here; there is no evidence Lieberman thinks of anyone besides himself. No reporter asks him how many Connecticut soldiers have died in Iraq, as a Times editor did ask Lamont over dinner. Caught by surprise, Lamont didn’t know. Lieberman must, because a staffer sends out condolences and keeps a list; but would he really be able to answer, if asked on the spot? The Times doesn’t tell, because it didn’t ask.

What’s going on here? A “news side” rebellion against the editorial-page’s Lamont endorsement? An effort to anticipate Lamont’s likely loss to Lieberman? Not at all. Harried reporters, trying to think big, are reminding us that their “first rough draft of history” tends to see breaking news through the rear-view mirror of premises they haven’t time to examine. They work under rushed conditions that prevent them from thinking beyond conventional story lines and cultural mindsets; rather, they have to play to them, collapse things into them, to write something equally rushed readers will understand.

Times journalists didn’t sit in some room wondering, “How can we take down Lamont?” If anything, it was “What makes this guy tick?,” and then they ran around trying to make a horse by committee, grasping at some concept – “son of privilege”; “hardened independent” – that gestures at something in each candidate but buries much of what’s true.

Really these two profiles should be read in their entirety and taught in journalism schools for years to come. They probably won’t be, not least because Lamont may lose, for reasons actually unappreciated in the profiles. For one, Lieberman, in public office since he was 28, feels to many Connecticut residents like an uncle or a comfortable old coat. “I know Joe,” they’ll say, still touched that he patted them on the back once fifteen years ago.

By comparison, Lamont was dry as a stick in debates, even if very decent and principled. He’s been a jejune campaigner, than which there is no greater sin to a savvy reporter. He doesn’t balance an instinct for the avuncular with an instinct for the jugular that would have shredded Lieberman’s folksy charm by hammering on his positions. When Lieberman called last month for doubling the number of troops in Iraq, it seems not to have occurred to Lamont to demand to know if Lieberman was calling to reinstitute the draft, which Joe somehow avoided back in 1967, when he was of age and the Vietnam War was raging.

“Lamont admits he wasn’t ready” to mount that kind of attack. ‘I watched [Lieberman] with Cheney,’ he says of the vice presidential debate six years ago. ‘It was all “My worthy adversary, my esteemed colleague.” It was right out of the House of Lords. Some people say I should have pushed back a little harder, but my nature is my nature.’

“Asked if maybe obnoxious just isn’t his style, he rolls his eyes a bit. He knows where nice guys finish, and it isn’t in the Senate. ‘Oh, I can see the headline now,’ he says. ‘Ned Lamont: Too Decent for Politics.’”

But the preceding two paragraphs are from a Washington Post profile, by David Segal in the paper’s Style section, from back before Lamont won the Democratic primary. Maybe the Times will get there by November 8.

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Two events in 2009 suggested a transition from one conversation about the American republic to another. The old conversation, often little better than a shouting match or a dance of snarky repartees, petered out with the passing, at 89, of Irving Kristol, the “godfather” of neo-conservatism. But a different conversation was renewing itself, in a voice coming from the center of the old republic, thanks to Nicholas Thompson’s gripping, stirring  book, The Hawk and the Dove.

Writing about the half-century-long rivalry and friendship of arms-race “hawk” Paul Nitze and Cold War strategic “dove” George Kennan, Thompson shows that even bitter antagonists can remain friends if they care more about the civic-republican spirit that is the secret of this country’s true strength than they do about themselves or their grand strategies.

It’s not an obvious or easy truth, but it comes to life thanks to Thompson, a grandson of Paul Nitze, the preeminent arms-race “hawk” of the Cold War. In the 1970s, Nitze strode arm in arm with neo-conservatives in their Committee on the Present Danger, inflating the Soviet threat out of proportion to reality at a time when, as we now know, the USSR was beginning to implode. If Thompson were a tribalistic, filopietistic neo-con himself, he’d launch into a pugnacious defense of his often-militaristic forebear. And he would cast George Kennan, the apostle of Cold War “containment,” as the sinister, anti-American foil that many neo-cons did make of him and others who opposed their grand plans.

Irving Kristol made foils of liberals this way even while writing about Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist hysteria in 1952. He acknowledged the senator’s vulgar demagoguery yet added darkly that “the American people” knew well that McCarthy, “like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they know no such thing.”

Nicholas Thompson has something deeper in mind and at heart than writing such shaming, insinuating prose, which became a hall-mark of neo-conservative propaganda, as it had been of the Communist variety in Kristol’s youth. Thompson is intent upon telling a truer, more instructive story of two patriots, each annealed in a civic-republican discipline stronger and more supple than anything Kristol ever truly absorbed.

While Nitze grew up in comfortable circumstances (his father was a distinguished philologist at the University of Chicago), Kennan grew up almost poor after his mother died when he was an infant. Yet both men attended civic-republican training schools (Kennan the Midwestern St. John’s Military Academy, Nitze the elite Hotchkiss preparatory school in northwestern Connecticut) whose brooks seemed to bubble with moral instruction and whose eight-man river rowing taught that self-denial for the common good requires first a self that has been made strong enough to deny.

These schools encouraged self-scrutiny, plain living and high thinking, an understated felicity of expression, a quiet readiness to shoulder responsibility without reward, and a capacity to bear pain with grace (if only because spiritual grace was thereby assured.) A characteristic self-deprecating humor deflected others’ envy. The term “character” is ridiculed these days as shorthand for elite breeding, but these lean, bonded boys honed not only the bookish but also the kinetic and moral intelligence that counts for more than the mere “merit” or distinction whose attainment so preoccupied so many neo-conservatives.

Neither Kennan nor Nitze really took his civic training to heart while undergoing it: Kennan was rather too introspective and bookish, Nitze boisterous and rebellious. But something of these schools’ pedagogy took root and tempered each man’s pride and resentments in ways that would benefit the country: It left each man knowing throughout life that his strategic differences with the other weren’t as profound as their shared commitment to a republican strength that no “national defense” policy can nurture or ultimately even defend.

“They often inspired or enraged each other with their ideas,” Thompson writes. “They did, however, greatly respect each other and admire each other’s seriousness of purpose, demeanor, and dedication. They realized they shared an uncommon endurance. They also shared a similar fate: neither reached his ultimate ambitions, while many lesser men reached the positions of influence [Secretary of State or Defense] to which they both aspired.”

“My research revealed two very different men who nevertheless shared a commitment to the United States and to their very different ways of serving it,” Thompson also notes, and he carries that commitment forward himself in a way that gives it brighter prospects.

Such a commitment need not be elitist or naive, as aristocratic indulgences often are. A civic republican resists “solidarity” with either left or right yet draws from both, knowing that both have valid claims to certain truths: The left knows the necessity of public planning and sustenance for the village that raises the child; without it, the individual dignity and traditions that conservatives cherish would never flourish. The right knows the equally important truth that without irreducibly personal responsibility and initiative, even the best leftist social engineering can turn people into clients, cogs, or worse.

A good society, like a healthy person, strides on both feet — the left of social provision, the right of personal responsibility — without worrying whether all its weight is on one or the other foot at any given instant in a balanced stride. But ideologues of the left and right try to strengthen one foot at the expense of the other until it swells, each side clinging to its “own” truth until it becomes a half-truth that curdles into a lie, leaving it right only about how the other is wrong.

Thompson understands this, and he illustrates it by describing the somewhat-unlikely tributes Nitze and Kennan tendered each other, after decades of strategic rivalry, when Nitze dropped his arms-race work for a day to attend Kennan’s 80th birthday party in 1984, at one of the tensest moments in the arms race.

Raising his glass, Nitze said, “George Kennan taught us to approach issue of policy, not just from the narrow immediate interest of the United States, but from a longer-range viewpoint that included the culture and interests of others, including our opponents, and a proper regard for the interests of mankind.”

As Thompson tells it, “Kennan rose to respond: the main lesson he had learned from Nitze, he said, was that when one disagreed with government, ‘it may be best to soldier on, and to do what one can to make the things you believe in come out right.'”

Kennan wasn’t counseling a lockstep or “old school” loyalty without integrity. He was invoking a subtler, more tensile strength that’s necessary to sustain both realism and principle in a world of imperfect institutions. But how and when to do that? Reading Thompson reinforces my belief that Kennan, although he was no democrat, understood better than Nitze that power flows not from top-down command but from bottom-up cooperation and from a voluntary acceptance of necessary authority that comes from democratic deliberation itself.

Thompson’s account also shows that both men understood that the discipline that citizens bring to their deliberations can come only, if at all, from a civic culture that doesn’t rely on statist surveillance and coercion. Rather, it nurtures people’s trust in one another and trains them to cooperate in ways that become second-nature.

If, in contrast, a society has to rely on state enforcement to preserve “freedom,” and if it surrenders its deliberative disciplines to a seductive, predatory consumer marketing and dog-eat-dog materialism, its freedom will be lost and, with it, the strength to take a blow from outside. Neo-cons are constitutionally unable to see this, because so little in their own historical memories, and therefore their temperaments, seems to confirm it.

Reading Thompson, I’m also drawn to Kennan’s peculiar convictions, and writerly temperament — and even to some of his insecurities, prejudices, and Gibbonesque despair of the republic — though not to his anti-democratic biases. I also understand Nitze better and respect his record at least marginally more than I did before.

I’ve been able to reach these conclusions because Thompson’s rendering of Kennan is as compelling, fair, and even sympathetic as is his portrait of his grandfather, whom he knew and loved until his death, when Thompson was 24. This book, then, is more than an effort to give a grandfather his due (or, as some will see it, more than his due) by pairing him with Kennan, whom people like me are inclined to admire more. Thompson is willing to risk my concluding that his grandfather suffers a bit in the comparison, because his true purpose is to present each man’s interaction with the other — and with world events and powers — in a way that strengthens the civic-republican culture that is the real if elusive protagonist of the book:

“The two men were equally influential and equally important, yet vastly different. Nitze was the diligent insider, Kennan the wise outsider; Nitze the doer, Kennan the thinker. Kennan designed America’s policy for the Cold War, and Nitze mastered it. With respect to America’s ability to shape the world, Nitze was an idealist and Kennan a realist. In their old age, Nitze still wanted to win the Cold War, and Kennan wanted to be done with it. Their views overlapped at strange and crucial moments; but for most of their working lives, they disagreed profoundly. In [a] <em>New Yorker</em> article published just before his eightieth birthday party, Kennan had indirectly criticized Nitze — who marked the piece up vigorously and also sent a letter to a mutual friend complaining that the argument showed a ‘complete separation from fact and logic.'”

Thompson doesn’t rest with this quasi-poetic and perhaps pat balancing act. He complicates it with nuances and unexpected details as he unfolds each man’s life. He never polemicizes or debates. He draws contradictory currents of perception and principle together, not as Kristol or Norman Podhoretz would, in order to swamp their enemies, but to show how the currents actually converged and buffeted one another in historical tides that always confound ideologues who think they can channel them.

Writing a book such as this takes formidable civic-republican strength, even a steely, sometimes chilly courage. It’s a strength young neo-conservatives lack because their faith in the republic is over-matched by their insecurities. Thompson’s writerly strength is palpable in spare, unadorned prose that is the more eloquent for declining to call attention to itself — an old WASP virtue that runs back to the poetry on the 18th-century gravestones standing a hundred yards from me as I write this on a weekend in western Massachusetts, where Kennan’s ancestors settled in Puritan times.

Thompson’s rendering is so well balanced (and maybe also ironic) that he even gives us a younger and wiser Norman Podhoretz’s observation in 1968 — in a rare moment of agreement with Kennan, who’d just written a condemnation of student militants and hippies — that Kennan’s voice is “an old-fashioned voice: cultivated, gentlemanly, poised, self-assured. There is strength in it, there is serenity in it, there is solidity in it, there is authority in it – but not the kind of authority that can easily be associated with repressiveness.” That’s not the kind of authority that Podhoretz’s own more clamorous and churlish writing has ever achieved.

Thompson not only appreciates Kennan’s quiet authority; he radiates it himself. He’s not yet Kennan’s equal as a writer, and I’m not an historian of the period who can second-guess his decisions about what to show us and how. But Nicholas Thompson has delivered a book that’s not just a labor of love; it’s a vindication of a tradition of civic-republican comity that can’t be coerced but is quietly stronger than anything the republic’s noisier claimants offer in this frightening, polarizing time.

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(Andrew Sullivan’s Atlantic commentary on this column: https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2011/01/colin-ferguson-and-jared-loughner/177102/)

By Jim Sleeper – January 18, 2011

I’m not satisfied with public discussion of the Tuscon horror. Years ago, I learned from another such massacre, on the Long Island Railroad, that deranged loners like Jared Loughner may be tuned in more acutely than the rest of us to a society’s subliminal signals and that when those undercurrents of fear and hatred are surfaced by impresarios of ethno-racial grievance, the deranged may be only the first to act on them.

I don’t know a lot about building construction, but I do know that, even in this wireless age, new wiring is still being woven into “smart buildings” in ways and for reasons most of us never see or think about. That’s true, too of a society’s subliminal currents — its fears, hatreds, its not-so-grand narratives: They’re always being channeled, sluiced, and tapped into by people who ride and weave them in ways most others don’t stop to imagine.

That’s why Pima county Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was right to say, apropos the Tuscon massacre, that “the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous.”

Those last four words matter: While no good prosecutor would posit a legal connection between the unwired delusions of Loughner and the routinized delusions of Sharon “Second Amendment remedies” Angle or Tea Party demonstrators at congressional town meetings, the truth remains that deranged loners, though separated from us in many ways, are bound into our subconscious hatreds and fears more intimately than the law can acknowledge and most of us care to admit.

Yes, reporters and pundits often draw such connections too quickly. “When disaster strikes,” notes T. A. Frank in The New Republic, journalists “have to …. take mental shortcuts, calling up established narratives… for new and more ambiguous facts.”

I noted similarly almost 15 years ago, in Liberal Racism, that reporters, “[p]lunged daily into a torrent of actors and events out of which they must make some sense on a deadline,… use whatever story lines or narratives are already in their heads or easily at hand.”

But while Frank is criticizing liberal journalists for taking a cue from Sheriff Dupnik to blame Loughner’s hatred on conservatives, I was criticizing them for letting well-worn narratives of black victimhood eclipse a more direct connection: between the 1993 shooting rampage of deranged black loner Colin Ferguson against 25 white Long island Rail Road passengers, six of whom died, and a black radio station, WLIB.

Ferguson was an avid listener to the station, whose morning talk show hosts were spewing so much racial bile at that time, including metaphorical death threats against white journalists, that Nat Hentoff wrote station owner Percy Sutton to ask if he’d ever thought what would happen if some deranged loner took the rhetoric seriously. Sutton didn’t respond and the rhetoric rolled on.

So far, we’ve seen no similarly likely connection between Loughner’s delusional fear that government is controlling our grammar and Angle’s call for “Second Amendment remedies” or Tea Partiers’ delusional demand that government take its hands off their Medicaid. But those of us who aren’t actually prosecuting Loughner and want to track the Tuscon massacre’s extralegal undercurrents or wiring don’t need to prove a legal or policy connection.

All we need to show is what Dupnik showed: that our public sphere is crackling with incitements to violent hatred of government and that Loughner probably picked up such signals in his own weird way before ranting against and then shooting government officials.

In 1985, the black poet Julius Lester noted presciently, nine years before Colin Ferguson shot those commuters, that violent rhetoric such as Louis Farrakhan’s at that time was “subtly but surely creating an atmosphere in America where hatreds of all kinds will be easier to express openly, and one day, in some as yet unknown form, those hatreds will ride commuter trains into the suburbs. By then it will be too late for us all.” (Lester’s comments and mine are on the second item on the pdf I’ve linked here.)

Ferguson’s deed underscored the extra-legal truth that — again — some psychotics are tuned in more acutely than the rest of us to a society’s subliminal signals and that, if those undercurrents of fear and hatred are surfaced by impresarios of ethno-racial grievance, the deranged may be only the first to act on them. That truth was also bared in the lethal rage of former Brooklyn resident Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians at prayer on the West Bank only months after Ferguson’s rampage.

The violent congressional town hall meetings of 2009, too, reminded me of some violent white leftist (as well as segregationist) histrionics of the 1960s. In his book The Sixties, Todd Gitlin recalls some young radicals’ belief that, as a Weatherman communiqué put it, “Smashing the pig means smashing the pig inside ourselves, destroying our own honkiness…. We are against everything that’s ‘good and decent’ in honky America….”

Including, as I recall quite vividly, anything having to do with government.

“No alternative theory or action crystallized from the murk of the collective despair,” Gitlin wrote. “They’re crazy, one heard [of the worst militants], but you have to admit they’ve got guts. Anyway, are you so sure they’re wrong?” By Gitlin’s estimate, between September 1969 and May 1970 there were some 250 “bombings and attempts linkable with the white left…. the explosions amplified, as usual, by the mass media.”

What matters now isn’t that we establish lethal symmetries among leftist terrorists, black or white, and right-wing militias, or that we prove Loughner was glued to Fox News. What matters is public recognition that, in all such cases, a politics that turns on allusions and provocations to killing portends the death of politics.

The angels of that death aren’t always as composed (or, as “heroic”) as Weatherman member Kathy Boudin or the racist militia-bomber Timothy McVeigh. Just as often, they’re as fallen and tormented as a Charles Manson, a Colin Ferguson, or a Jared Loughner. It’s they whom Angle and Palin are provoking, intentionally or not.

Palin and her enablers — one of whom, William Kristol, once applauded warnings like mine against the smooth-talking fanatics who handed Colin Ferguson his bloody script — can’t dodge all blame and self-scrutiny. Nor, I should think, can anyone deny that there are capitalist and spiritualist dimensions to that wiring beneath the law that will have to be reckoned with in ways that neither left nor right have done all that well.

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 Andrew Sullivan’s comment on this post:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/01/colin-ferguson-and-jared-loughner.html

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