Everyone attending the long wake for high-end newspapers knows about My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at The New York Times, the new memoir-cum-indictment of racism at that paper by the late Gerald Boyd, who was fired as its managing editor in 2003, along with executive editor Howell Raines, partly for their supposed “diversity”-driven coddling of Jayson Blair, a black reporter who’d plagiarized and fabricated elements in many of his news stories.
Boyd left bitterly, protesting that although he’d never mentored Blair, whom others could and should have reined in, he was being blamed only because, as the paper’s senior black editor, he embodied a Times “diversity” regimen that was detested by many whites at the paper.
Let me stipulate that Boyd is right about this part of the story and that racism at the Times has often been ubiquitous and grinding, if sometimes subtle. But let me also stipulate what good journalists are supposed to remember: that there is another side of the story – and I don’t mean the nasty, Glenn Beck side, which isn’t part of the story at all.
The “real” other side in this case is that the Times’ loopy “diversity” regimen of the 1990s sometimes compounded the racism it was supposed to confound. Not only racist whites detested it; so did some non-whites and white left-liberals. (It should also be said that while the Blair scandal was the immediate cause the newsroom rebellion that ousted Boyd and Raines, that rebellion was as much about both men’s peremptory management style as about race.)
Acknowledging that both sides of the racial dimension of a story may be true — in this case, that both racism and its “anti-racist” antidote at the Times could be dangerously wrong — requires what John Keats called a “negative capability” to hold two incompatible truths in mind at once.
Unfortunately that capability deserts many otherwise formidably intelligent American liberals whenever they consider anything touching upon race. They tend, not surprisingly, to be the liberals whose own workplaces and social lives are atypically sheltered from diversity regimens and from black colleagues and friends. The most absurd diversity protocols tend to be imposed by rich, white liberals such as Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. and by less-rich but penitential white southerners such as Howell Raines.
In a review for The New York Review of Books, Russell Baker adopts an agnostic, even bemused stance toward Boyd’s charges of racism and others’ complaints that “diversity” had run amok at the paper. Baker keeps trying to joke about the national media furor over Jayson Blair, invoking for example, “John Kenneth Galbraith’s definition of a newspaper columnist as a person obliged to find significance three times a week in events of absolutely no consequence.”
But Baker also has to keep reminding himself and the rest of us that one can’t dismiss the Blair fiasco as easily as he seems to keep wanting to do: “‘Diversity’ is not a subject for light amusement in America,” he intones at one point. “It is a subject that Americans take to the Supreme Court.” Yet Baker seems determined to leave it right there, lifting not a finger to assess either old-fashioned racism or liberal racism at Boyd’s Times.
Liberal Racism’s chapter on “diversity” at the Timesopens with a story that Gay Talese told me about Gerald Boyd. It then describes some sad, silly aspects of the Times’ diversity regimen. It ends by showing that the “diversity” obsession sometimes compromised the paper’s news coverage of race.
Like this Daily News column about Raines in 1994, the chapter was an Early Warning that something was amiss. But I am white, and, in the minds of people whose negative capability collapses before race, that was that.
When Boyd read my account of the Talese story about him in galleys of the book, he called me. I still remember returning his call from a pay phone at the corner of Astor Place and Broadway and listening to him threaten to summon his attorneys. “Make my day,” I replied. He never did.
I’ve never thought of Gerald Boyd as anything less than what Baker suggests — a tragic and therefore somewhat noble casualty of racism. But I think that he was a casualty of both the old-fashioned, enduring kind and the liberal kind, which he detested for lowering the bar — and with it, whites’ estimation of him — when all he really wanted was the elementary compliment of being judged by the same standards the Times applied to whites.
Liberal racism bedeviled Boyd — as it does millions of American blacks — until its debilitating over-solicitude became indistinguishable from what it really is: a species of racism itself. No wonder that liberals still can’t talk about it.
(Originated on TPM, April 5, 2010. Updated February, 2023)
In March, 2010, The New Republic published the linguist John McWhorter’s denunciation of the damage he insisted had been done to African-Americans such as himself and his relatives by the leftist-activist professors Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. Piven and Cloward had tried to bring down capitalism in the 1960s by flooding welfare rolls with angry would-be recipients. Nearly half a century later, McWhorter still hadn’t gotten over it. He cast them among the crackpots of racial protest, writing that he’d love to “erase” them from memory: “Rarely in American history have people with such a destructive agenda [as Piven and Cloward] had such power over the lives of the innocent…, helping to ruin the lives of, for example, some of my relatives.”
Such power? McWhorter was certainly on-message with conservative thunderings against Piven and Cloward by Glenn Beck and the right-radical provocateur David Horowitz — everyone’s source on the horrors supposedly perpetrated by Piven and Cloward.
For me, there’s a wrinkle here: Horowitz’s source on the follies of Piven and Cloward was me, in The Closest of Strangers,Chapter 3, “The Politics of Polarization,” where I, too, condemned what I found destructive in their strategy. McWhorter carried his unquenchable rage at Piven and Cloward into a post titled “Frances Fox Piven, Jim Sleeper, and Me.”
I had written that Piven, Cloward and many on the left were in thrall to assumptions about racism and capitalism that carried a lot of truth, but that also needed the deconstruction I provided in my Chapter 3 and on pp 159-162, drawing on my immersion in inner-city Brooklyn.
Soon after my reckoning was published in 1990, Horowitz, whom I did not know, called to tell me that he loved the book. Easing him off the phone with a polite “Thanks, but no thanks,” I began to understand the dangers in racial truth-telling in a polarized society: I was getting vilification from the Piven-oriented left and sloppy wet kisses from neo-cons and paleo-cons. At times, I felt pretty much how George Orwell felt when he tried to tell the left in London that Stalin was killing social democrats as much as fascists in the Spanish Civil War. For documenting Stalin’s brutal hypocrisy in trying to crush his detractors on the left, Orwell was canceled by leftist editors and publishers, as I recount in the essay I’ve linked in the previous sentence.
A lot of American leftist ideology cast Blacks as the cats’ paws of revolution against a regime that had long consigned them to a “reserve army of the unemployed,” exploited and brutalized. Yet Piven and Cloward’s call for resistance, via their racialized “politics of turmoil,” was no solution. It opened no path to political or economic justice, let alone integration.
That doesn’t mean, however that Piven and Cloward and their followers were the malevolent conspirators that McWhorter made them out to be. Their strategy of storming welfare offices to demand more benefits to overwhelm and discredit the system and to clear the way for revolution was counterproductive, for sure; it only compounded racist contempt for the people they intended to mobilize. My book made this pretty clear, and many on the left reacted against it by doubling down on their histrionic, moralistic, romantic, ultimately tragic tactics. But that didn’t make Piven and Cloward the malevolent monsters that McWhorter portrayed them s being.
I’d admired McWhorter’s Losing the Race, which I reviewed for The Washington Monthly in 2000. But I’d cautioned him there against becoming the conservative-movement water-carrier: In his New Republic he even dismissed the Brazilian radical educator Paolo Freire, one of my inspirations (as I once explained while quoting him in reporting on my encounters with poverty, race, and a rich congressman in Brooklyn).
The conspiracy mongering about Piven and Cloward that came from Glenn Beck and other right-wing demagogues should have given McWhorter pause. Beware the prospect of unmasking Evil Others on either end of the spectrum. Yes, they’re out there. But just as George Kennan was right to urge firm containment of Soviet Communism without proposing militarized rollback, keepers of the American civic-republican faith and flame, as McWhorter wants to be, need to develop new ways to stand firm against its subverters without lashing out so histrionically. Yet the left in those days played inexorably into the hands of the more-powerful right by lashing out.
Here is a comment on what you’ve just read, posted by “Jimmy of Staten Island” on the website of New York City’s NPR station, WNYC, after host Brian Lehrer quoted a passage from this column. “Jimmy,” writing from a neighborhood where many Archie Bunkers surely live, described himself as “Still a Democrat, still Union, but Lord Almighty, folks like Ms. Piven do little but alienate the folks in my local, and weaken their allegiance to the Democratic Party. Her ‘strategy’ to cause rifts within the voting blocs that make up Municipal Democratic Parties, to force LBJ’s hand, did nothing but bring about Nixon-Reagan, and the long-term kneecapping of the greater, national Democratic party.”
With a comment like Jimmy’s, I rest my case — against Piven & Co. for being hapless enough to have long time, but also against McWhorter, Beck, and Horowitz, because, obsessing as they do about Piven’s holding “such power over the lives of innocents,” end up mobilizing people who are racist enough to embrace scapegoating. Chastise the left for its follies, as I’ve done often enough myself. But spare us any hyped-up indignation about liberal racism that, like McWhorter’s indignation, accepts and even excuses the brutal, ubiquitous realities of racism itself.
Last year here I criticized enlightened denizens of the Chattering Classes Zoo for trying to rehabilitate David Brooks, an ingratiating neo-con who’s as doomed as a charming, brilliant vampire to suck the blood of the American republic while thinking he’s in love. (It’s Halloween, okay? But this is dead serious, too.)
In his Times columm today Brooks gives us yet another sinuous warm-up for the strength-sapping passion that drives all his comic lines and phone calls to experts. Linking Afghanistan’s dark prospects to his doubts about Obama’s “tenacity” against real evils, Brooks tries to seduce us into a real war. As with Iraq, he’s sublimating primal fears and resentments that fuel his and other neo-cons’ grand causes.
But mightn’t they be right this time? Afghanistan isn’t Iraq, and Obama isn’t Bush. The problem with writers like Brooks is that, in their bones, they’re jingoists: Their patriotism requires enemies, and they fight wars with other people’s blood while currying Established Power’s favor with all the determination of heat missiles seeking heat. The world is hard, dark, and cruel, as they tell us – and some people do need to be told. But Brooks & Co. have faith in only one way to save it. Watch David run:
In the first year of the Iraq war, Brooks swooned over Bush’s and Rumsfeld’s characterologically ignorant tenacity against insuperable complexities. He denigrated the war’s critics, but as it went bad, he rehabilitated those critics who’d argued that only more troops would prevail.
Then, as the Surge failed to secure very much that could outlast American occupation, Brooks began praising the “deliberative” Obama as Obama moved toward Power. But now Brooks frets over Obama’s characterologically intelligent respect for the insuperable complexities Bush ignored. And Brooks flirts with General (and Possible Presidential Candidate) Stanley McChrystal.
The point I wish his admirers would take from all this is that, characterologically (by which I mean something worse than neurotically), Brooks has to do this. The common thread in all his re-positionings is a supposedly knowing, conservative apprehension of the need to use force against force. We have no choice.
Sometimes, that’s true. But Iraq was a neo-con-abetted war of choice, and a disastrously wrong one for fighting terrorists. It’s one big reason we’ve “lost” Afghanistan, even assuming we could have outdone the British or the Russians in “winning” it. (The Russian defeat has been reprised chillingly, from Soviet archives, in the Times by Victor Sebestyen. The analogies are daunting.)
Brooks tells us he’s spent the last few days calling around to experts who wonder portentously, as he does, whether Obama has the tenacity to sally forth into the doom Brooks unknowingly craves.
“Come on people, let’s get a grip. This week, Chicken Littles like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were ranting that Iraq is another Vietnam….. I’ve spent the last few days talking with people who’ve spent much of their careers studying and working in this region. … As Charles Hill, the legendary foreign service officer who now teaches at Yale, observed, ‘I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the boldness and resolve.'” Brooks touted the Rumsfeld “dead-enders” line and assured us tenacity would bring victory.
By 2006, as I’ve noted, Brooks had stopped denigrating critics who’d warned two years earlier of the quagmire he’d assured us wasn’t there. Now,he told us,
“Everybody denigrates pundits and armchair generals, but… the smartest of them recognized that something unexpected was happening: The US was not in the midst of a conventional war but was in the first days of a guerrilla war [and] that it was time to shelve the rosy scenarios…. In TV studios and on op-ed pages,… retired officers and columnists called for more troops and officers on the front lines saw the same thing the smart pundits saw. Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks saw nothing wrong.”
Neither did Brooks, of course, but by 2006 he was with those who’d called from the beginning for more troops, not less. He and all the neo-cons would support the Surge that has given us the Iraq we see now.
David the vampire had a domestic appetite, too. He’d made his name, in fact, by sidling up to confused, upscale liberals and purring, “C’mon, you know that you really love your real estate and your unearned income, and that you like circulating commodities more than ideas. And… [wink, tickle] it’s okay!“
I’d never before seen a political columnist work himself into deliriums watching other people shop. Brooks seemed almost to have forgotten, except in rhetorical gestures at the end of his Bobos in Paradise, that we must be fellow-citizens as well as consumers, or else we are lost. But to be serious about citizenship is to spend a lot of time and energy nourishing a disposition to rise above narrow self-interest, especially in peacetime, not just in wars that twist and drain the very public strengths the war-makers claim to be mobilizing.
On Brooks’ watch at the Times, his lusts for consumerism, for comic sociology, for war-making, and for baiting liberals who try to cultivate the softer arts of citizenship were ill-timed. His tweaking of do-gooders was accompanied by Katrina, with Blackwater patrolling the streets of New Orleans; by predatory finance capital ‘s transformation of real estate into un-real estate; by a pestilence of executive and Wall Street welfare queens; and — from Enron to Cardinal Law, or from Bernie Madoff to the media’s necrophilia over Michael Jackson — by a riot from the top by America’s multi-problem overclass, whose tangle of pathologies the indulgent Brooks had been too busy deriding liberals to notice.
Abroad, we sowed and reaped a whirlwind borne of displacing our anxieties about these ills into a confrontation with the unquestionably evil Saddam — namely, a battered Iraq that the Surge hasn’t saved and that we have now made ourselves too weak fiscally and morally to expand or reform.
Brooks isn’t quite as far gone as William Kristol, his former mentor at the flagship neo-con Weekly Standard, who has given us such great American leaders as Alan Keyes, Dan Quayle, and Sarah Palin (whom Kristol “discovered” on a Weekly Standard cruise in Alaska and commended to John McCain). I don’t really imagine Brooks bursting into applause and cheers, as Kristol’s staff did, when Obama failed to win America’s bid to host the Olympics in Chicago.
Facing the real disasters I’ve mentioned above, Brooks knew enough to start pirouetting furiously, with prophylactic applications of Malcolm Gladwell in his columns and with cuddly feelers to people who can help him buff up his image among liberals. Yet too many of his columns, especially a breathtakingly sophistical account of the mortgage meltdown, showed him still plying his intellectual usury.
Now he informs us that “Afghan villagers,” unsure of “the state of Obama’s resolve,” are “hedging their bets, refusing to inform on Taliban force movements because they are aware that these Taliban fighters would be their masters if the U.S. withdraws.”
The options are indeed grisly. But does Brooks really believe that if Obama’s tenacity became as obdurate Bush’s, Afghan villagers would trust thousands more white and black American guys with boots and buzz cuts? Or is he just sucking more American blood and calling it love?
Here he goes again. In 2004, David Brooks told us that John Kerry had “a brain of sculpted marshmallow,” and he never missed a chance to ridicule Kerry with some variation of George Wallace’s old barb about liberal “pointy headed professors who can’t park their bicycles straight.”
Brooks tells us now that Al Gore is a “radical technological determinist” whose book The Assault on Reason “reminds us that whatever the effects of our homogenizing mass culture, it is still possible for exceedingly strange individuals to rise to the top…. While most politicians react to people, Gore reacts to machines…”
Always and everywhere, such insulting cheap shots are the fallback strategy of someone whose own worldview, left or right, is crumbling: When George Orwell reported in Homage to Catalonia in 1937 that the Spanish Civil War wasn’t what the Anglo-American left wanted to believe, The Daily Worker‘s David Brooks, one Harry Pollitt, called him a “disillusioned little middle class boy.”
Among conservatives, the fallback position now involves blaming liberals in similar terms, inflating their shortcomings and hypocrisies to lend a false integrity and coherence to conservative lies. Liberals like Gore make easy targets, having done well by a system whose deepening inequities they don’t fundamentally challenge but don’t wholeheartedly defend. They tend to have a weakness for moralistic, symbolic gestures (moralism about racial preferences, hope for technological fixes) that don’t seriously address the problems.
Say, then, if you will, that Gore is a pointy-headed autodidact, a political stumblebum, a naif. But then consider the people his attackers champion. And begin to suspect that there’s something that Brooks doesn’t understand about the ways a republic needs more public reason and even a little “strangeness” like Kerry’s or Gore’s — more than like, say, Rudy Giuliani’s.
Throughout 2004, Brooks did never give us a metaphor analogous to “sculpted marshmallow” to describe the brain of either of the two exceedingly strange men he was helping to keep the presidency and vice presidency, to which they’d risen in the strangest election imaginable. Yet only a year after their (and Brooks’) 2004 victory, as the Iraq venture went from bad to worse, he told The Nation‘s Ayal Press that, “”Sometimes in my dark moments I think [Bush is] ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ designed to discredit all the ideas I believe in.”
Isn’t that a little strange? Brooks thinks Al Gore is even stranger. He is annoyed by “the chilliness and sterility of [Gore’s] worldview,” which “allows almost no role for family, friendship, neighborhood, or just face-to-face contact. [Gore] sees society the way you might see it from a speaking podium – as a public mass exercise with little allowance for intimacy or private life.”
Sure, and George W. Bush is the regular kind of guy whom every other all-American guy would like to have a beer with. And family, friendship, neighborhood, etc. are for regular guys like Brooks’ “patio man.” But think a minute about how Bush sees society from a triple-riveted podium, before triple-vetted audiences of triple-“enlisted” listeners. Contrast that public mass exercise with Eric Pooley’s unforgettable account of Al Gore’s recent national speaking tour with his “global warming” show.
The more you think about it, the more David Brooks himself begins to look a little strange.
From Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson on, the American Republic has always relied critically on the strangeness of autodidacts, eccentrics, bounders, blowhards, and more. Consider most American inventors and entrepreneurs. Even in the 1980s, Bill Gates said that Japan’s booming economy wouldn’t bury us, because we’re far less aristocratic or regimented. Here, he said, “three guys in a garage” really can re- invent our communications and cultural networks.
I thought Brooks knew that. But our patio man is too busy trying to ingratiate and insinuate himself into a civic culture he doesn’t understand. Gore’s enthusiasm for new science and technology is bumptious, sometimes misguided: “Has Al Gore ever actually looked at the Internet?” Brooks taunts, in full denial that Gore’s experience of Internet interactivity comes from his experience as an investor, advisor, and Google board member, not to mention 16 years in face-to-face contact with ordinary Americans while in Congress. Brooks, by contrast, has inhabited only the communications world – and not as an entrepreneur, like, say, Ned Lamont.
What matters here is a widely-shared, growing misapprehension, which Republicans cultivate, that public reasoning is less important to a republic than family, friendship, neighborhood or just face-to-face contact. Actually each has its vital role, but neo-conservatives have been subverting the place of public reason with a beguiling sophistry that appeals to unreasonable impulses, as Brooks does by insulting Kerry and Gore.
Al Gore’s struggle, like that of Barack Obama and other decent candidates, puts flesh on Griel Marcus’s understanding that the ideals of America are “too big to live up to and too big to escape.” The country’s genius and strength rest on a paradox: Its classical liberalism and free markets rely on civic-republican virtues and beliefs which the liberal state and free markets themselves can’t fully nurture or enforce, because they have to honor the autonomy — the “strangeness” — of free individuals.
The conservative truth here, which its propagandists harp on at liberals’ expense, is that if enough free individuals are going to rise above their narrower interests at times and find themselves more fully by giving to the whole, their inclination to do that will have to be nurtured intensely somehow, not by the state – or, heaven help us, a state religion – but by “family, friendship, neighborhood, or just face-to-face contact.”
But the liberal side of the paradox reminds us that, no matter what autonomous individuals do in private, a republic has to induce and equip them defend their private preferences through reasoned arguments and bargaining that address the needs of others who may disagree but still want the republic to cohere.
Alexander Hamilton sketched the stakes that define this country when he wrote that history seemed to have destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
How might the worst happen? “History does not more clearly point out any fact than this, that nations which have lapsed from liberty, to a state of slavish subjection, have been brought to this unhappy condition, by gradual paces,” wrote Founder Richard Henry Lee. Hence Ben Franklin’s answer in 1787 to a bystander outside Independence Hall who asked what kind of government was being formed: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Unreason and impulse are the default logics of human history; republican freedom is a fragile, if world-historical gain. It requires cultivation and nurture.
Al Gore’s argument in “The Assault on Reason” is that we are being brought gently into something less by sound-bite savants like David Brooks, who argue that the cornucopia of consumption is liberating. Gore argues that radio and television, owned as they are by conglomerates driven to emphasize entertainment and diversion over reason, have weakened the citizenry and strengthened the sophists. He hopes that Internet interactivity will keep the big guys from cornering the marketplace of ideas.
And, yes, he is more than a bit wishful in saying this. Just how wishful Gore is depends on how many Americans are determined to be free, not brought low “by gradual paces” with the help of soothsayers like Bush and Brooks, who tell them they’re free while serving powers that are encroaching on their freedom.
John Adams wasn’t blaming only government when he warned that, “[w]hen the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. … The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependants and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.”
The point was that you don’t strengthen freedom by handing the people over from their elected officials to their paymasters; the polity has to remain sovereign over the economy. What does this mean, exactly? The liberal state empowers corporate entities and investors who can tyrannize and degrade people in daily life, even if not ostensibly in public politics (although it doesn’t take them long to invade the latter, as well.)
Gore avoids a dramatic answer, although he does slam “corporate consolidation and control” of the electronic media (including, he warns, the Internet). This makes him a fat target for the Brookses, but Gore is defending the same Lockean, entrepreneurial capitalism conservatives champion under the name of free markets. He’s challenging them to admit that vast economic engines, bought and sold anomically at the click of a broker’s mouse, have few of the entrepreneur’s virtues, and less of the ordinary citizen’s regard for a republic in which we sometimes transcend our own private interests.
The Republican conservative strategy, and David Brooks’ very modus operandus as a columnist, was sketched very well in Thucydides’ account of the Mytilene debate, during which Diotodus convinces Athenians not to fall for the smears which vulcan orators like Brooks lay on candidates like Kerry and Gore. Diodotus warns Athenians not to trust a speaker who,
knowing that he cannot make a good speech in a bad cause, … tries to frighten his opponents and his hearers by some good-sized pieces of misrepresentation. … The good citizen, instead of trying to terrify the opposition, ought to prove his case in fair argument. And… when a man’s advice is not taken, he should not even be disgraced, far less penalized. [If instead the losing candidate is treated respectfully, even when his advice is rejected,] speakers will be less likely to pursue further honors by speaking against their own convictions in order to make themselves popular; and unsuccessful speakers, too, will not struggle to win over the people by the same acts of flattery….
[Instead] a state of affairs has been reached where a good proposal honestly put forward is just as suspect as something thoroughly bad, and the result is that just as the speaker who advocates some monstrous measure has to win over the people by deceiving them, so also a man with good advice to give has to tell lies if he expects to be believed. And because of this refinement in intellectuality, the state is put into a unique position; it is only she to whom no one can ever do a good turn openly and without deception. For if one openly performs a patriotic action, the reward for one’s pains is to be thought to have made something oneself on the side. ….
Thucydides and other classical authors are big hits with conservative pedagogues whom Brooks has praised for training American youth for war and imperial management. But any honest reading of Thucydides, like any honest reading of Al Gore’s humbler book, would confront today’s Republicans and their apologists with a mirror of their own betrayal of the American republic.
Brooks knows this. Lately he has made gestures in the direction of a political makeover, praising Obama’s deliberative mind. (Three years ago, he’d have called it “sculpted marshmallow.”) But the specter of a revived Al Gore prompts a certain desperation (and perhaps guilt) that drives Brooks and other Republicans back to old habits and fears. If Obama looks better to them by comparison, that’s only a fringe benefit, but let’s take it.
If you’re crusading for “public decency” (and, really, I’ve no fear that any TPM reader is wearing that cloak), you’re probably not expecting much help from the New York Times, not even from its brilliant media critic David Carr. But Carr has just uncovered the devastating fiscal and sexual indecency of bottom-liners at “the venerable Tribune Company” (publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Long Island Newsday, and Baltimore Sun).
I commend Carr’s story also to William Bennett, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and preacher-politicians who blame social rot on “liberals” and the 1960s counterculture. Carr shows business interests turning counter-cultures into over-the-counter cultures that are more devastating to public morals than anything Woodstock Nation ever imagined.
Fortunately, even if you’re more titillated than nauseated by this, there’s a bracing new antidote in Chris Lehmann’s just-published Rich People Things, about which more in a minute, because you’ll need it even more than any cloak of virtue you may happen to have lying around.
“At Flagging Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture,” reads the Times headline – emphasis on “Culture,” although the Tribune empire is bankrupt also as a company. Its bosses aren’t just grown men acting like “14-year-old boys,” as one of Carr’s sources says. They’re an insult to 14-year-old boys, and what really matters here – although Carr stops short of saying so — is the relationship between consumer capitalism and cultural decay.
Years ago, about the raciest thing in the Chicago Tribune was the “Dear Abby” personal-advice column by Ann Landers, whom I once saw exiting the gothic Tribune Tower and gliding into a limousine. What the billionaire Sam Zell and his top dog Randy Michaels have done since then…. Well, settle back with some Alka Seltzer and Carr’s story. As you read, imagine the sickly smiles on the faces of decent, stodgy lifers at the Tribune who tried to keep their jobs by pretending they were having fun.
Carr makes clear that the pervasive atmosphere of sexual harassment and general alienation went along with economic harassment and dispossession underway. To which I’d add that it’s not only at the Tribune Company that corporate bosses introduce sexual hi-jinks as a palliatives and metaphors for the corporate screw.
More than a few Tribune workers in Chicago (and at some in other Tribune-newspapers) are church-goers; it’s not unusual to see foreheads marked on Ash Wednesday. But as they’ve been insulted by their bosses in Chicago, they’ve also been betrayed, along shockingly analogous lines, by princes and priests of the Church, to the gloating satisfaction of some Tribune bosses, who, of course, love running such exposes. Now that these bosses are being exposed in the Times – and, I expect, in other Chicago news media — we’ll see if they keep gloating.
But this is about more than corrupt priests and idiot editors. It’s about how the bankruptcy of America’s pathological, multi-problem over-class is devastating and demoralizing American civil society. You needn’t be a church-going secretary or press-room guy at the Tribune to understand what an incitement to vomit and violence American consumerism has become.
You needn’t be a Marxist, either. The proliferation of road rage, lethal store-opening rampages, extreme or “cage” fighting, reality TV and midday “talk” shows where people scream their guts out over other people’s voluntary self-humiliations; all this preceded Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, and Linda McMahon, and the rest, most of whom are consequences of corporate marketing’s relentless pumping of violence and lewdness into our public bloodstream.
I caught onto this almost two decades ago in the New York Daily News, way back before that paper, too, became a carrier of the degradation. (I got at it also in “Behind the Deluge of Porn, a Conservative Sea Change,” for the quarterly Salmagundi and, more briefly, in the Dallas Morning News – to which serious Christian evangelicals wrote in to agree with me.) But really, people have been flagging this problem ever since the movie “Network” (not “Social Network!”) caught it in 1976.
The only question left is why so much of the disorientation and rage is being pointed at liberals and government – at Obama rather than the Tribune’s Zell and sexual thugs. We get closer to an answer thanks to Chris Lehmann’s new book, Rich People Things.
Lehmann, whom TPM readers will recognize as a veteran contributor to The Baffler, which was on to corporate “liberation” marketing years ago, has also been an editor at Newsday, the Washington Post, and other “venerable” publications which bottom-lining has now made less venerable. He is a sophisticated, compassionate, and scathing survivor of all he surveys in Rich People Things. Follow carefully what he says.
Lehmann studied for years with the late social historian Christopher Lasch, who thanked him in the acknowledgments of his magisterial The True and Only Heaven. Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism was an early-warning signal to the still-clueless paladins of “sophisticated” public discourse at the Times,The New Yorker, and other high-end publications that sound too often as if they existed only to reassure the affluent college graduate who seeks “the most comfortable and least compromising attitude he can assume toward capitalist society without being forced into actual conflict,” as the critic Robert Warshow wrote seventy years ago about the typical reader of… yes, the New Yorker.
Lehmann has scathing, scintillating chapters on the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell; on the Times and on its “chirpy” and delusional columnist David Brooks; on Wired Magazine’s breathless paeans to new media’s broken promises; on reality TV; and on other ventures and adventurers who, often unwittingly, work hard to suppress or deflect their own and their audiences’ understandings of what consumer and casino-finance capitalism are doing to us.
David Carr’s story today is a striking account of that process in action. Chris Lehmann’s Rich People Things explains what’s actually driving it – and what keeps most of us from seeing and acknowledging it.
Stepping lightly into his grave as an American writer in the grand cemetery he and other well-known journalists have designed for the American republic, TIME’s Eric Pooley seems as ecstatic as a jihadist ascending to another world. It’s frighteningly instructive to read his July 9 apologia-cum-hagiography on Rupert Murdoch for what it tells us about how American journalism is changing, especially now that Murdoch has virtually won his bid for The Wall Street Journal and its parent company Dow Jones, according to sources on the company’s board. The deal is done, they say, though Dow Jones is denying it, perhaps pending a formal announcement expected next week. But even if it fails, something has been lost in the anticipatory applause of people like Pooley.
At least Pooley, TIME’s star composer of breathless encomia to great men (like Rudy Giuliani after 9/11) who’ve broken the rules and borne lesser mortals’ uncomprehending rage to change the world, paused to take note of the rage at Rupert, the latest, weirdest addition to his pantheon.
“The notion of this tabloid terror controlling the world’s leading business journal [The Wall Street Journal] is being met with ferocious opposition,” Pooley allows, assigning the protesters their seats in the past (including me, presumably). “Some of the opposition is principled, some of it is sanctimonious, and some of it seems driven by a tangle of ideological and commercial motives. Each day brings another investigative story about Murdoch using his media properties to boost his business interests, reward his friends and punish his rivals, and each story carries the message that this man will destroy the Journal by using its hugely respected news pages as his personal fief.
“Of course,” Pooley adds, waving off those critics, “the Journal’s editorial pages are already more conservative than Murdoch.” Actually, those pages are less conservative in any Burkean or Buckleyan sense than they are fanatically delusional, and Pooley knows that the presence of a few editorial bats in the Dow Jones attic – the batty James Taranto, John Fund, and the ghost of Robert Whitewater Bartley – didn’t justify anyone’s selling the whole mansion to the Count Dracula of journalism.
The real reason, Pooley argues, is that the mansion itself is old-fashioned and decrepit, at least by the go-go marketing standards his own Time-Warner Corporation shares with Murdoch’s News Corporation. Murdoch is the herald of an economic and civic climate change larger than himself, and Pooley is hot to introduce us to the inevitable. He hints often at the intimacy of his access to the Great Man, though not so loudly that you wonder why he was granted it. Time-Warner and the News Corporation are rivals, but they’re partners in weaning us of old-fashioned civic republican morals. They do that subliminally every day.
So let’s try to notice what’s getting lost here, including Pooley himself, who used to care about America’s republican integrity. He’s surfing the tidal wave of our collective corporate destiny by rendering Rupert as a charming rogue and great explorer of this century’s vasty deeps, a pirate/pilgrim as awesome as Columbus or Cortez, and never mind the sins and sicknesses they brought with them. The profile reflects a shift in American journalism, which is giving up the ghost of civic-republicanism to follow our new conglomerate masters’ obsession with market share uber alles.
Pooley offers a sprightly tutorial on this to all who aren’t yet clued in — a terrific read for Time-Warner’s long-sought demographic, twenty-somethings who are sloughing off the musty liberal arts they wasted four years getting graded on in college. (I include here those balding, 50’ish twenty-somethings who zoom past me on the Meritt Parkway in their BMWs and armored vehicles; there seem to be millions of them).
Pooley waves aside any lingering suspicion that we Americans shouldn’t be just speculators and self-marketers but citizens who require good journalism as much as we do oxygen to achieve a common good. He and Murdoch are administering euthanasia to all that, and in this quick joint venture they do it more entertainingly than Jack Kevorkian:
“‘They’re taking five billion dollars out of me and want to keep control,’” Rupert Murdoch was saying into the phone, “’in an industry in crisis! They can’t sell their company and still control it–that’s not how it works. I’m sorry!’
“It was a little before 5 o’clock on Friday, June 22, and the chairman of News Corp.–the world’s third largest media conglomerate, with a value of $68 billion, and one of the few mega-corporations controlled by a single individual–was at his desk on the eighth floor of his midtown Manhattan headquarters, trying to shore up a deal he had dreamed about for a decade…. He was speaking in soft bursts to an investment banker on the other end of the line. Murdoch had stripped off his jacket and tie, and his thin, dyed-brown hair was scattered across his scalp. His controversial $5 billion deal to acquire Dow Jones & Co. and its crown jewel, the Wall Street Journal, was in danger of crashing. Murdoch was playing poker: to get the deal back on track, he had to threaten to walk–and mean it.”
He’s plays more than poker. In 2005, Murdoch outbid Viacom for MySpace at a price few thought it was worth, but soon he “looked like an Internet visionary,” Pooley tells us, as he told Murdoch himself. “‘I love being called that,’” Murdoch answers, “‘but the truth is, I’m just lucky and nimble.’” He “generates his own good fortune by being perhaps the most gifted opportunist in media,” echoes Pooley, calling him “the last of the true media moguls, the one who’s still building — grabbing Dow Jones, dreaming about trading MySpace for a big chunk of Yahoo!, trying to launch a Polish TV network. News Corp.’s voting stock, of which the Murdoch family owns 31%, has gone up 18% in the past year, making him worth $9 billion.”
“He lives like an old-fashioned tycoon too,” Pooley swoons, “hopscotching the planet on his 737 and recharging on his yacht off St. Tropez. Recent stop: London, where he got thrown from a horse (but didn’t break anything–too busy). His likeness was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery and he threw a party in Kensington Gardens for 400 friends, including incoming British Prime Minister Gordon Brown….”
But what about those sins and sicknesses? Isn’t Murdoch a right-winger who’s corrupting news and public discourse? Naw, Pooley assures us:
“Murdoch isn’t a party-line guy. He’s a pragmatist. He likes strong politicians and change agents and winners;… he has supported moderates like Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton. But he has a stubborn populist streak, and his populism finds an outlet on Fox News, a channel that gives voice to angry middle-aged white guys.” Then Pooley lets Rupert himself do the spin: “‘[I]f you look at our general news, do we put on things which favor the right rather than the left? I don’t know…. We don’t think we do. We’ve always insisted we don’t. I don’t think we do. Aw, it’s subjective. Neither side admits it.’
“Has Murdoch just said what I think he said?” Pooley asks disingenuously. “Has he flirted with an admission that Fox News skews right?” Since we can’t respond to this phony question, he does: “If so, Murdoch quickly backs away. ‘We don’t think we do.’”
It’s Pooley who keeps backing away from glints of skepticism he musters for theatrical effect while setting up Murdoch’s responses with his soft-ball questions. Compare with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Noting that 60 percent of Americans have believed that Iraq and Al Qaeda were linked, that W.M. D. had been found, or that world public opinion favored the war with Iraq, Krugman reported that only 23 percent of PBS and NPR audiences “believed any of these untrue things, but the number was 80 percent among those relying primarily on Fox News…. [T]wo-thirds of Fox devotees believed that the U.S. had ‘found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization.’”
Pooley doesn’t report that Murdoch became a U.S. citizen in 1985, to get around rules limiting foreign ownership. By my lights that makes him even more un-American than Dick Cheney for rousing of 3500 young Americans to die in desert sands. But maybe citizenship is as marginal to the brave new world of conglomerate media as Columbus’ Italian-Jewish nationality was to the Spanish empire-builders Ferdinand and Isabella.
What about Murdoch’s degrading his news outlets? Krugman calls him “an opportunist who exploits a rule-free media environment — one created, in part, by conservative political power — by slanting news coverage to favor whoever he thinks will serve his business interests.” Now, there’s a conservatism the Journal’s editorial-page bat-heads champion, whatever their jitters about Murdoch’s telling them how to do it. And it’s what the paper’s brave news side has kept at bay. Again Pooley bobs and weaves: “Murdoch waves away the past and cuts to the heart of the matter: the Journal. ‘Why would I spend $5 billion for something in order to wreck it?’ he asks” – as does Pooley, who fleetingly acknowledges Rupert’s nasty record but just as quickly portrays the Journal as a basket case that only a market visionary like Murdoch could save.
Pooley glances at Murdoch’s phony populism but then veers back to calling him a bold explorer-inventor, unlike “sanctimonious” journalists – that word again, Pooley’s word – who still consider serious reporting the lifeblood of democracy. Murdoch’s own editors aren’t sanctimonious, of course; one of them throws Pooley their line: Murdoch may meddle, the editor allows, but “if he’s not interested, then were is the money going to come from…. if Dow Jones wants to grow globally?”
“Show me the money.” That shuts up most would-be do-gooders these days. But what if “growing globally,” like growing imperially, involves dying internally? What if only aroused republics can channel or limit that growth? What if that requires honest reporting? Pooley never asks, because Murdoch shows he tolerates only the doom-eager populism he pumped up for Iraq.
“‘Journalists should think of themselves as outside the Establishment, and owners can’t be too worried about what they’re told at their country clubs,’’” quoth Rupert (a bit sanctimoniously). But he doesn’t mean it, and Pooley, realizing this, pretends to doubt him, calling him “the man who influences Prime Ministers and Presidents and still poses as a scrappy outsider.” But he adds just as quickly that “associates say he’s finally considering his legacy and wants to run the Journal impeccably to upgrade his reputation….”
Murdoch “scoffs at the notion. ‘I’m not looking for a legacy, and you’ll never shut up the critics. I’ve been around 50 years. When you’re a catalyst for change, you make enemies–and I’m proud of the ones I’ve got.’ Murdoch has invested billions in newspapers when few others were willing, but he has also kept them alive through a lowest-common denominator approach typified by the trashy Sun, with its topless Page 3 girls…. Murdoch wouldn’t be Murdoch if he didn’t love sticking it to sanctimonious J-school toffs. ‘When the Journal gets its Page 3 girls,’ he jokes late one night, ‘we’ll make sure they have M.B.A.s.’”
So, laugh it all off, okay? But notice, too, what you were supposed to have forgotten during Pooley’s pirouetting: By crowning Rupert an empire builder, however scrappy, he’s buried any thought that journalism must remain outside the establishment with anything more than the fake populism of war machines and of topless girls.
Pooley wheels in more apologists: “‘Those who say he’ll wreck the Journal are in for a surprise,’” a British professor of journalism tells him. “‘What they miss is that he really does distinguish between his tabloids and his serious papers…. At his serious papers, there’s much more of a discussion.’” Much more of a discussion? “‘There’s such a thing as a popular newspaper and an unpopular élite newspaper,’” Murdoch concurs. “‘They play different roles. We have both kinds. Just like we have the Fox network with American Idol and 24, and we also have the National Geographic Channel. It’s hard for outsiders to understand that.’”
Is it hard to understand that Fox does a lot more damage to the republic than National Geographic does good?
Pooley has given Murdoch his say as if he had no other way to be heard. But Rupert Murdoch is a liar, and Eric Pooley is his enabler. Everything in this profile, circling the globe in TIME’s foreign editions and online, is disingenuous and self-serving. You read lie after lie and wait for Pooley to challenge Murdoch’s credibility as Krugman did and as the Columbia Journalism Review did in an editorial on his promises not to ruin the Journal:
“A familiar fable tells of a scorpion that asks a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is sensibly fearful of getting stung. But the scorpion is persuasive, pointing out that if he stings the frog, they will both sink into the water and die. Why would he do such a thing? So the frog agrees. Midway across the stream, the scorpion stings. The dying frog asks: Why? It’s my nature, the scorpion explains…..
“We appreciate that the Bancrofts [the Journal’s owners] have come to realize that Dow Jones needs a fresh direction. And it is easy for outsiders to ask people to walk away from a $5 billion offer. But this is their moment in history. We hope they find a way to keep this American treasure away from Rupert Murdoch, who will smile even as he raises the stinger.”
Surely he’s smiling this morning. But let’s assume that for the first year after he takes over, Murdoch will pump more resources into the Journal than it has ever enjoyed, transform its outreach, and sustain its reportorial independence, just enough to get his critics on record saying they were wrong. Then the Journal will begin its inexorable, tawdry decline into a Murdochian half-life, complete with a fantastic position for Pooley.
I get an “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” feeling watching the transformation of writers – Nicholas Lemann at The New Yorker, Ronald Brownstein at the Los Angeles Times — who used to care about reporting for a republican polity they apparently no longer believe in. It isn’t just Murdoch who has swept away their old coordinates as free citizens. A tidal wave of conglomerate consolidation and relentlessly strange and intrusive marketing has done that.
Joseph Schumpeter wrote about capitalism’s powers of “creative destruction;” Pooley names Murdoch one of the creators. What he can’t afford to tell us, or himself, is that tidal waves are awesome but meaninglessly destructive and that the empire builders riding them hurtle from the sublime to the ridiculous. Sooner or later, as Jonathan Schell demonstrates brilliantly in his The Unconquerable World, better people show them — as Ghandi did the British, King the American South, Mandela the Afrikaners, and Havel, Michnick and Walesa the Soviets — that empires aren’t really as strong as tidal waves, or as irresistible as democratic hopes.
Jonathan Chait’s New Republic, post today, “David Brooks At His David Brooksiest” takes to a new level my own not-so-quiet campaign to wake up Brooks’ enablers and fans:
“Today, David Brooks has written the platonic ideal of a David Brooks column,” Chait observes. “It… captures the major elements so perfectly that it almost feels as if every previous David Brooks column has been an homage to this one.” Chait disrupts Brooks’ familiar tap-dance from facile sociology to partisan skullduggery by calling out his every insidious move. . Funny thing: In 2008 I wrote, “Occasionally people ask me why I’m so hard on [Brooks], who some find insightful and others so irrelevant they can’t understand why I get angry at all. At last, I’ve found a way to explain it. It’s all there in his column of today, “The Culture of Debt.” … [which] captures everything that is wrong with this man and his ideas — and maybe with readers who believe him.”
One reason is that Brooks goes down well with some liberal readers of upper-middling intelligence who want – no, crave – to be beguiled out of their uneasy consciences.
They’ve done a bit too well by our liberal-capitalist dispensation to have any serious intention of attacking its deepening injustices and absurdities; but they can’t defend it wholeheartedly, either. So they grasp at moralistic, symbolic gestures – against racism, sexism and homophobia — that leave the fundamentals unchanged and so wind up dividing women from women, blacks from blacks, etc., without wholly erasing the old divisions between women and men and blacks and whites.
The consumer-marketing regimen that the left once thought patriarchal and racist has turned out being happy to shuffle our racial and libidinal decks while promoting the equal-opportunity degradation we feel rising all around us. I’ve argued this at length in Salmagundi, noting there that Brooks has these liberals’ number: Go to pp 125-126 there.
What he does is sidle up to the formerly leftist liberal moralists, purring, “C’mon, you know that you love your unearned income and your real estate and that you love circulating commodities more than ideas. And (wink, tickle), it’s okay!” He gives them absolution, jollying them back into the arms of the mother capitalist church. (That’s my way of characterizing his message, but there are some delicious excerpts from Brooks himself, in his role as high priest of the Bobos, in the Salmagundi pages linked above.)
Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor told Jesus that while some would follow him for love of God, most just want some bread and solace from the church. Brooks is similarly jesuitical and charmingly Mephistophelean. It’s a character flaw that’s been with us throughout history, and, to be fully honest, some of us resent Brooks especially because we’ve resisted similar temptations in ourselves.
What about the gate-keepers who empower him? Well, maybe I’ve just answered my own question. Editors and producers shrug that they’re only responding to Brooks’ obvious popularity – a column of his on Obama last Friday was the second-most widely e-mailed of the Times’ articles – and therefore to what’s profitable.
Not only that, upscale editors and producers are precisely the kind of liberals whose number Brooks has, the ones to whom he sidles up, purring his absolutions. The writer George Packer never revealed more about himself than when he wrote almost meltingly about Brooks, like one monkey grooming another in the Chattering Classes Zoo. He seemed intent on helping Brooks complete a make-over for polite society after years of defending the indefensible in the ways we critics had described (and which driftglass does summarize, however viciously). (I suspect that my column on Packer’s grooming delayed Brooks’ redemption, as perhaps Chait’s post will again now.)
What Brooks’ editors and fans get wrong isn’t their desire to find a good conservative; we all need smart, honorable conservatives to keep liberals and the left honest, and if you don’t understand why, you can read me on George Orwell here.
The objection to Brooks by Confessore, Chait, me, and others isn’t a left-versus-right complaint. It’s our civic-republican desire to draw an all-important if subtle distinction between integrity and opportunism, between honesty and sophistry. Any opportunistic, sophistical speaker will note pridefully that he sometimes agrees with the right, sometimes with the left, and he’ll ask you to believe that this confirms his honesty.
In an honest person, it might do that. But it also might be the strategy of a person who really only craves to be thought well of in public.
You wouldn’t expect uneasy corporate liberals at the New York Times to see this, since their reason for being is to circulate ideas as commodities, for profit as well as for public interest — just what Brooks does well and gives them absolution for doing.
Nor would you really expect even most editors and producers in the not-for profit but still corporate and nervously liberal sector to grasp the difference between Brooks’ pirouetting and, say, Mark Shields’ elemental, bedrock honesty. I do wonder how Shields, on “The News Hour,” and E.J. Dionne, on “All Things Considered,” can stand being opposite Brooks. But then, it’s not entirely up to them.
Again, the problem isn’t that Brooks is more “conservative” than they but that he’s a chameleon: He poses as a cuddly conservative, but he’s a sophist, beneath whose mask breathes a neo-con whose sinuous dishonesty makes him uniquely culpable in a lot of American deaths, devastation, and degradation.
If there is bedrock below this poor man’s posturing, it’s neo-conservatism at its hoariest and most embarrassing, but that’s a story for another time, one I’ve sketched briefly here in the past.
Brooks’ instinctual neo-conservatism, a harvest of pessimism and ressentiment, generates his compulsive and sophistical geniality for protective coloration. And his disguise is the real reason Brooks bears so much moral responsibility for the Iraq war, for the administration that blundered in response to Katrina, and for the economic and social meltdown he has been seeding ever since he began writing at the Wall Street Journal around 1990.
If I could believe that we’ve only been watching David Brooks grow up slowly in public, that would be one thing — a reminder, perhaps, that mass-media columnists really should be older and wiser before they’re given licenses to commit punditry.
But Chait’s column today reminds us that Brooks has not been growing up. He’s just been growing wider while playing the same increasingly tiresome game, a neo-conservative in sophist’s clothing. That makes him as horrifying a creature to contemplate as the montage that accompanies driftglass’ merciless post and that flashes increasingly before my eyes whenever I see him on the News Hour or hear him on PBS or read him in the New York Times.
Jim Sleeper, February 2010TPMCafe and openDemocracy
The Boston Tea Party’s history of trying to properly separate government and business holds serious lessons for today’s partiers
I don’t see why Tea Party Patriots in Nashville paid Sarah Palin $100,000 for a keynote last week when, for no more than the love of country, they could have honored me, a living witness to the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1973.
I would have told them how I stood boldly that day on Boston’s old Congress Street Bridge as the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission and Boston 200, a consortium of corporations including the Salada Tea Company, sent costumed National Guardsmen to dump imitation tea chests from a replica of the Beaver, one of three ships that colonial rebels had relieved of their cargo 200 years before.
The chests of 1973 were empty, but demonstrators organized by a “People’s Bicentennial Commission” offset the lavish unreality of it all by dumping metal drums from the Beaver to protest big oil companies’ complicity in the fuel crisis of that year, whose long gas-station lines I also joined, albeit involuntarily.
That counter-demonstration was choreographed, too. But honestly, now, who was closer in spirit of the tea partiers of 1773 — the costumed guardsmen and the salespeople at Salada’s on-site exhibit and gift shop that day, or the counter-demonstrators? I think that today’s Tea Partiers know the answer, but that they talk about only half of it.
As Gordon Wood, the great historian of the American Revolution (he’s mentioned by Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting”) told me this week, the original Tea Party was a rebellion not just against a tax but against government favoritism for a global corporation it considered too big to fail.
With 17 million pounds of unsold tea languishing in the East India Company’s warehouses as other merchants’ teas glutted the market, there were rumors that the British government might even revoke the company’s charter and take over its management.
Instead, Parliament granted the company an exclusive license to sell tea; removed all duties; forfeited an annual payment the company had made to the government; and advanced a large loan.
Sound familiar? In 1773, though, all these favors actually lowered the price of tea, underselling as well as excluding Dutch tea smugglers and American tea merchants. No wonder that “Poor Lord North [King George III’s prime minister] thought he was doing the colonists a favor” by saving the company from bankruptcy and giving it a monopoly in America, as Wood explains.
A modest tea tax remained, offending colonists’ stand against taxation without representation. But Wood — crediting Benjamin Woods Labaree, the authority on the Boston Tea Party — notes that “Giving the monopoly was probably more important in arousing the anger of many small New England merchants than the tea tax.”
Moreover, the few locals who were licensed to carry the company’s tea included relatives of Massachusetts’ royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson, who ordered ships not to accommodate populist pressure by leaving the harbor without first unloading their tea.
“Samuel Adams and his radicals were looking for an issue to exploit,” Wood notes, and Hutchinson’s nepotism gave them and local merchants the hot button they needed to turn out the men who actually stormed the ships and dumped the tea.
Forgive me for asking, but had I been given the podium at Nashville instead of Sarah Palin, could I have admonished today’s Tea Partiers to dump some of the medicines that are being sold by Big Pharma under the big Bush Administration prescription drug benefit plan, which bars its providers from buying cheaper generic drugs in Canada?
I know that that’s awfully radical. But Samuel Adams was too radical for his cousin John Adams, until the Tea Party made John exult, “This is the most magnificent movement of all. This destruction of the tea is so bold, so daring, … and it must have so important consequences, and so lasting, that I cannot but consider it as an epoch in history.”
Will today’s Tea Partiers give us a new epoch of independence? Trolling the Tea Party Patriots’ website, I do find scathing mentions of oil companies, bankers, Big Pharma, and their lobbyists – but mostly in comments posted by wonderfully sincere, impassioned citizens.
But is Sarah Palin their Sam Adams? Is there a John Adams among the tea partiers’ cheerleaders at Rupert Murdoch’s global News Corporation? Tea Partiers protest rightly that our government is coddling incompetent and dishonest corporations with taxpayers’ money. But will they take direct action against these incompetent and dishonest corporations’ control of government? Or will they just wear revolutionary-era costumes?
I don’t see why Tea Party Patriots in Nashville paid Sarah Palin $100,000 for a keynote last week when, for no more than the love of country, they could have honored me, a living witness to the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1973.
I would have told them how I stood boldly that day on Boston’s old Congress Street Bridge as the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission and Boston 200, a consortium of corporations including the Salada Tea Company, sent costumed National Guardsmen to dump imitation tea chests from a replica of the Beaver, one of three ships that colonial rebels had relieved of their cargo 200 years before.
The chests of 1973 were empty, but demonstrators organized by a “People’s Bicentennial Commission” offset the lavish unreality of it all by dumping metal drums from the Beaver to protest big oil companies’ complicity in the fuel crisis of that year, whose long gas-station lines I also joined, albeit involuntarily.
That counter-demonstration was choreographed, too. But honestly, now, who was closer in spirit of the tea partiers of 1773 — the costumed guardsmen and the salespeople at Salada’s on-site exhibit and gift shop that day, or the counter-demonstrators? I think that today’s Tea Partiers know the answer, but that they talk about only half of it.
As Gordon Wood, the great historian of the American Revolution (he’s mentioned by Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting”) told me this week, the original Tea Party was a rebellion not just against a tax but against government favoritism for a global corporation it considered too big to fail.
With 17 million pounds of unsold tea languishing in the East India Company’s warehouses as other merchants’ teas glutted the market, there were rumors that the British government might even revoke the company’s charter and take over its management.
Instead, Parliament granted the company an exclusive license to sell tea; removed all duties; forfeited an annual payment the company had made to the government; and advanced a large loan.
Sound familiar? In 1773, though, all these favors actually lowered the price of tea, underselling as well as excluding Dutch tea smugglers and American tea merchants. No wonder that “Poor Lord North [King George III’s prime minister] thought he was doing the colonists a favor” by saving the company from bankruptcy and giving it a monopoly in America, as Wood explains.
A modest tea tax remained, offending colonists’ stand against taxation without representation. But Wood — crediting Benjamin Woods Labaree, the authority on the Boston Tea Party — notes that “Giving the monopoly was probably more important in arousing the anger of many small New England merchants than the tea tax.”
Moreover, the few locals who were licensed to carry the company’s tea included relatives of Massachusetts’ royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson, who ordered ships not to accommodate populist pressure by leaving the harbor without first unloading their tea.
“Samuel Adams and his radicals were looking for an issue to exploit,” Wood notes, and Hutchinson’s nepotism gave them and local merchants the hot button they needed to turn out the men who actually stormed the ships and dumped the tea.
Forgive me for asking, but had I been given the podium at Nashville instead of Sarah Palin, could I have admonished today’s Tea Partiers to dump some of the medicines that are being sold by Big Pharma under the big Bush Administration prescription drug benefit plan, which bars its providers from buying cheaper generic drugs in Canada?
I know that that’s awfully radical. But Samuel Adams was too radical for his cousin John Adams, until the Tea Party made John exult, “This is the most magnificent movement of all. This destruction of the tea is so bold, so daring, … and it must have so important consequences, and so lasting, that I cannot but consider it as an epoch in history.”
Will today’s Tea Partiers give us a new epoch of independence? Trolling the Tea Party Patriots’ website, I do find scathing mentions of oil companies, bankers, Big Pharma, and their lobbyists – but mostly in comments posted by wonderfully sincere, impassioned citizens.
But is Sarah Palin their Sam Adams? Is there a John Adams among the tea partiers’ cheerleaders at Rupert Murdoch’s global News Corporation? Tea Partiers protest rightly that our government is coddling incompetent and dishonest corporations with taxpayers’ money. But will they take direct action against these incompetent and dishonest corporations’ control of government? Or will they just wear revolutionary-era costumes?
“One of most intriguing mysteries here in recent weeks is why members of the Congressional Black Caucus have chosen to buck their party and president in trying to stall financial regulation reform,” writes the New York Times’ Eric Lipton. “The answer lies at least in part with an aggressive lobbying campaign by a troubled New York City-based radio broadcasting company, Inner City Broadcasting, whose co-founder is a prominent New York politician and businessman, Percy Sutton.”
But there is another part of the answer, and I have it.
Lipton’s part of the answer puts politely what Irving Levine, a New York City inter-group relations expert, taught me years ago: “All ethnic succession involves sharp polarization, power struggles, accommodations and trade-offs that lead to coalitions and, finally, joint ventures to make money through polite graft.”
That part is true, as far as it goes: The Congressional Black Caucus doesn’t care a whit about Tim Geithner’s financial “reforms” or even about defending the “civil rights” of minority entrepreneurs, as it claims it’s doing. No, it’s holding reform hostage to secure unrelated protections for one of its big Sugar Daddies. But the gambit only gets worse from there.
In fronting for Sutton, the CBC seems no worse than the Republican “Black Horse Cavalry” of yore (and of two years ago), or than any Democratic Congress, almost ever; it just gives the word “blackmail” a new, unfortunate twist.
This twist has even Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, dancing like a marionette because the Caucus holds the swing votes on his committee, and because Frank’s Massachusetts constituents include knee-jerk white liberals who’d be shocked if he stood up to anyone claiming the mantle of civil-rights.
But it’s the history of civil rights struggles, and the recent dispossession of so many of blacks by the predations of finance capital, that makes the Caucus members’ behavior even sadder than the usual “polite graft.” And the 89-year-old Sutton, a cosmopolitan but bitter paladin of inner-city broadcasting, makes the Caucus’ intransigence truly sickening.
Elected Manhattan Borough President in the 1970s, Sutton became enraged by what he saw as white Democratic reformers’ racist betrayals of his mayoral aspirations. He left politics and made millions partly by programming slick, demagogic racial rants, interrupted by commercials for Visa credit cards on his radio station WLIB in New York.
On the morning talk show, host Clayton Riley was fond of naming white columnists and politicians he disliked and, after a stagey pause, reminding listeners of a certain black general’s admonition to “Find the enemy; isolate it; and kill it.” One morning I heard Riley call a certain columnist “crypto-fascist slime, asleep at the wheel. Gonna crash! Gonna crash!”
In 1993 the civil-libertarian Nat Hentoff wrote Sutton an open letter in the Village Voice, asking what Sutton thought might happen if a deranged loner took Riley and others on the station seriously. Sutton – who had been Malcolm X’s lawyer in his younger years — never answered Hentoff’s letter, his silence betokening a latter-day media mogul’s unquenchable, fine-spun rage.
Two months later, Colin Ferguson, a black man who turned out to have been a dedicated listener to WLIB, gunned down white passengers on a Long Island Railroad car during the evening rush hour. That prompted me to recall and re-publish the black poet Julius Lester’s warning, when Louis Farrakhan had threatened David Dinkins with death ten years earlier, that
“The time has come to stop making apologies for black America, to stop patronizing black America with that paternalistic brand of understanding which excuses and finds reasons for the obscenities of black hatred…. Farrakhan is 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.”
Well, you can look up Percy Sutton in myThe Closest of Strangers and read about his “hate radio” in the second and third pdfs on this string. But the important question is why the Congressional Black Caucus is stalling any reform of finance capital in order to protect him.
The short answer – over to you and the Times, Eric Lipton — is that Sutton, who now owns 17 stations in several states, is a big campaign contributor to many of these bozos, including Harlem’s Charlie Rangel, a loveable, old-time pol who’s ardent in Sutton’s defense.
A longer answer, as I showed in Liberal Racism and here — and as Lani Guinier came around to arguing very clearly last year in the Modern Law Review — is that “safe” minority districts produce perpetual, possessive incumbents. They trade on skin color as a token of solidarity, but otherwise they demobilize and pacify their constituents on issues that might really get them active and more demanding of change — and of challengers to the incumbent. These place-holders and ersatz tribunes of the downtrodden prefer money for radio commercials (this is what takes them to Sutton) more than old-fashioned political service-delivery and patronage methods that really organize and turn out masses of voters. Surprise, surprise.
Guinier writes that Mayor David Dinkins was surprised when black City Council members whom he’d thought would support his initiatives for their poor constituents proved more interested in cutting deals with moneyed sources that wanted very different initiatives. Even legislators who postured as militants often aspired, like Sutton, to become establishment insiders, brokers of whatever patronage, real-estate deals, franchises, contracts, zoning variances, and tax breaks they could wrest from the white establishment, only occasionally by charging “racism.”
Frankly, I doubt that Dinkins was all that surprised by any of this. He was an early investor in Sutton’s Inner City Broadcasting, and he celebrated his mayoral victory in 1989 by saying, “Tonight I stand on the shoulders of Percy Ellis Sutton.” He certainly knew the drill of minority advancement through polite graft.
I don’t suggest that Dinkins ever liked, much less endorsed, the hatred on WLIB, although he did appear regularly on that station, where Riley – between rants – would interview him as obsequiously as Fox News’ Neil Cavuto used to interview George Bush between rants at liberal Democrats such as Senator Dick Durbin.
But neither would I suggest that Sutton and his investors and political dependents are all that keen to reconfigure finance capital, especially those arrangements that, with a little tweaking, benefit them, as they have “leaders” of other rising ethnic groups at the expense of their own poor, trusting, and/or resigned constituents. If the Caucus wanted to hold up the process in order to demand real reform, this would be a different story.
But the story right now is that its behavior stinks, as such congressional behavior always has – only, this time, even more so.
I’ll say this as nicely as I can: The Congressional Black Caucus is a parasite whose movements show vividly what ails the Democratic caucus as a whole. Republicans, of course, are a cancer, but the parasite mattered more after voters removed some of the cancer in 2008 and made Democrats the majority, whetting appetites on that side, not least at the CBC.
Early in December, I posted here a column, “The Congressional Black Corrupticus Strikes Again.” The CBC was holding finance-regulation hostage to a favor it demanded for Percy Sutton, a folkloric black pioneer in elective office who died a month later with many accomplishments to his credit but also with many scores settled and an estate enhanced thanks to the CBC.
Typical though the CBC’s behavior was of congressional corruption, I argued that the caucus is uniquely wrong to misuse the civil-rights-movement’s legacy to feather its nest by screwing its constituents. My post was met with crashing silence, but I learned that some at the New York Times had noted it. To the paper’s new reinforcement of my warning, I’d add this: Whether you seek bipartisanship or ideological purity, don’t ever let political correctness bar you from telling the truth.
By Jim Sleeper. TPM Cafe, Dec. 3, 2009, after Obama spoke at West Point
Barack Obama is the wisest American president of my lifetime, which began during Harry Truman’s presidency and includes John F. Kennedy, who might have outdone Obama had he lived, and Bill Clinton, who as president was terrifically clever but not so wise. Obama is wise in the ways a loving, seasoned sage is wise. And he’s a canny strategist, playing a series of long, slow games against daunting odds and against time.
But time and those odds are not on the side of the republic he swore to preserve, protect, and defend. To say so, as I have just done, is not to underestimate or betray Obama; it is to try to face a predicament that won’t be improved either by the fretting now rampant among his erstwhile supporters or by sagacious (and rather orotund) appreciations of him.
It’s not about him. It’s about the republic, as Benjamin Franklin put it to a bystander in the words that form the title of this possibly ill-starred post. Let me try to explain why I see it this way.
Last night I posted a response to Obama’s West Point speech that some people took as the fretting of an unreconstructed Marxist, circa C. Wright Mills, and others took as the preening of a defeatist. Perhaps they were projecting.
Or maybe it was my title – “Commander-in-What?” Years as a columnist have taught me that even intelligent, busy people do not draw much from an essay beyond whatever its title seems to convey, especially if they’re already worried about its subject. I fear that my title failed in its intention to emphasize the “What” over the Commander.
Or maybe it was this sentence: “‘States hover like crows over the nests that nations make,’ wrote the historian Robert Wiebe, and by the time Obama faced the state’s gray ranks of cadets last night as their commander in chief, the crows of national security statism and free marketeering had cannibalized so much of the republic’s strength that Obama found himself in command of the wreckage and Orwellian newspeak they’ve left behind.”
When I wrote ‘wreckage,” by the way, I didn’t mean the cadets and their instructors, who put many of us to shame. I’ve visited with them at West Point. Those I met are deeply thoughtful and brave. To my way of thinking, that adds up to being noble. How “thoughtful” are they? Well, West Point has hosted such lecturers from the “left” as Seyla Benhabib, Jeffrey Alexander, and Noam Chomsky. Think about that for a minute.
The West Point instructors’ and cadets’ craving to hear viewpoints alternative to those coming from the Bush White House – even when they rejected those alternatives — was so poignant during my own visit there that I felt unworthy even just to watch it and to listen to their questions and sense their keen attentiveness to the answers.
Few of us are as open as those cadets were to hearing what we may not want to hear and to facing hard truths. Then again, few of us are so driven by the nature of our work to take hard truths into account. According to a report by Amy Dockser Marcus in Wall Street Journal, students from Yale’s pretentious Grand Strategy program who visited West Point to discuss George Packer’s Assassin’s Gate with cadets “decided not to record the discussion because they did not want to have ‘views expressed in the spirit of intellectual debate be used against them at a Senate confirmation hearing’ some day, said Minh A. Luong, the program’s associate director.”
So here we have West Point cadets, who’ll defend as well as exercise the American right to speak one’s mind, hosting Yale undergraduates who are learning to run the country by cultivating careerist habits of networking, intellectual corner-cutting, and secret-keeping that don’t belong in a liberal education at college. Arguably these habits don’t belong in the democracy their West Point hosts defend by talking with Noam Chomsky and by risking not just their careers but their lives.
Daunting odds like the miscarriage of civic-republican leadership training which I’ve just described threaten the republic. These odds are set not conspiratorially, but often mindlessly, and yet systemically, by immense concentrations of power that are dissolving republican habits and dispositions by penalizing them.
They are doing this not only by accelerating the material dispossession of the republic’s middle and working classes, but also by promoting escapism and careerist self-protection like that of the young grand-strategists at Yale. Whether in the name of free market consumerism or national security, something awful is being insinuated into Americans’ most intimate viscera and desires.
Other daunting odds include the rules and premises that govern the presidency and which Obama hasn’t proved willing or able to change. Whether these rules and premises concern surveillance and civil liberties, or the predatory operations of finance capital, or the exorbitant costs of profiteering in health care, they remain formidably entrenched and debilitating of our society and economy.
The power of the presidency remains primarily the power to persuade, and Obama sometimes seems little more than a Don Quixote, tipping his lance at the windmills of the national-security state, finance capital, and health-care profiteers — concentrations of power that someone will have to reconfigure.
At other times, he’s less than Quixotic — or more, but not necessarily for better: He has taken the great powers’ representatives and apologists into his administration with what we hope, but have yet to see, is a brilliant strategy to induce them to enlighten or adjust their interests to help stop society from breaking down before our eyes.
To see that breakdown, most TPM readers and contributors would have to travel less than ten miles from wherever they’re sitting, and stay there long enough to get a hard knock or two. It’s not about taking a field trip. It’s about doing what might wound one’s moral imagination, not just satisfy one’s curiosity or sense of omniscience.
To suggest, as I have, that Obama isn’t powerful enough because he lacks a strong push from what some people persist in calling the left (but what I would call a civic-republican majority) is not to criticize him. It is to indicate his predicament.
FDR may not have been wiser or tougher than Obama, but he did get a big push from militant labor and, equally important, in my estimation, from tough liberals like my distant cousins Jimmy and Nancy Wechsler (who dined with FDR, by the way, as I noted in this post.) Speaking to tens of thousands at Madison Square Garden in 1936, Roosevelt said that the bankers of America hated him. “And I welcome their hatred,” he thundered. Obama isn’t made that way; the times and the polity aren’t made that way, either.
Most people, whether for materially self-interested or purely temperamental or characterological reasons, aren’t inclined to stare predicaments like Obama’s in the face. We prefer to think ourselves canny realists even when we’re really just sliding around cold realities and the heartbreak they bring. Sometimes we resort to ideological simplifications, wishful idealism, or rank decadence — anything but face too much of the truth.
Sometimes it takes great literary fiction to puncture our “realistic” evasions, but fiction can become an escape, too, and most people now prefer entertainments that reinforce their presumptions and prejudices. Decadence often thinks itself liberating, but it’s fooling itself, and it shows this by having its taboos! It designates things one simply cannot say if one wants to be listened to ever again. (See the Salmagundi essay I mentioned above.)
The same is often true of idealism: If you brook it, you’re accused of bad faith or defeatism or some other self-indulgence. In politics, Ivan Turgenev wrote, the honest man will end by having to live alone. Victor Serge’s novel Unforgiving Years drives home the tragedy of the political with a force that terrifies even the novel’s own heroes into decadence or wishful thinking.
Let me mention two taboos, especially strong among Obama’s defenders as well as detractors these days, that cannot help him and cannot save the republic.
The first is the taboo against deconstructing seriously what corporate and finance capital have become and what they are doing to us.
Even Dwight Eisenhower warned (although only in his presidential farewell address) that a military-industrial-academic complex imperils the republic. But the Marxist left and new left made such a brutal and ludicrous hash of that civic-republican warning that a generation of liberals and former leftists remains embarrassed to utter the words “corporate state.” They’re so desperate not to resemble what they’ve outgrown that they don’t notice that global capital has outgrown them, seducing or wrenching them away from everything they hold dear.
In the Salmagundi essay, I envisioned David Brooks’ sidling up to such penitent leftists in their summer homes, purring, “C’mon, you know that you love your real-estate and your unearned income, and that you love circulating commodities more than ideas…. And (wink, tickle)… it’s okay!” Only nerds and unreconstructed ideologues keep fretting about the corporate state. Just look back over other people’s writings and their lifestyles, at least until 2008.
By late in 2008, it did begin to seem that perhaps it was time to begin to undertake some consideration of the possibility that corporate capitalism, like the once-beloved British monarchy well into the 1770s, no longer made as much social sense as we had been seduced or chastened into thinking it had. Tom Paine urged American colonists to bring their actual experience of the monarchy to the “touchstones of nature,” to look at what their society was becoming, and to recognize, “‘Tis time to part.”. He warned against sleepwalking into tyranny.
But maybe Paine was histrionic, even a little deranged. Maybe monarchy wasn’t really the problem. Certainly, few people had any idea what should replace it, and, for more than a decade, they blundered. Canada, which didn’t replace it, did alright, but we think that that’s mainly thanks to us.
Maybe so, or maybe Canadians were wiser, or maybe it’s a mix. But do we have the right mix of boldness and wisdom now? I don’t see it yet, and the likelihood that Obama is trapped — or has trapped himself – into taking measures that are too little, too late haunts me everywhere I look, not least at West Point, whose paradigms are trying to catch up with realities its graduates must face more fatefully than the rest of us.
Another taboo I want to mention keeps many people from looking very deeply into liberalism’s reliance on the virtues and beliefs that liberal states and markets themselves can’t nourish or defend, because they have to value individual autonomy to an extent that makes it hard for them to distinguish bold, free spirits from free riders.
The counterintuitive lesson of this essential liberal dilemma is that leaders and citizens of a republic have to be nurtured somehow all the more intensively, outside of markets and the state (including the military). This takes us back to matters of faith that don’t go away.
For what it’s worth, I wish we could appreciate what the Puritans — who seeded the republic, almost despite themselves, by staking politics on inner integrity — actually got right in their otherwise failed efforts to balance liberty with authority, positions of power with demands of personal conscience, capitalism with community, and “carnall lures” with other rewards and restraints. For anyone who’s interested, I’ve sketched out an argument here. It does nettle some people.
Our problem isn’t Obama. It’s these swift, dark undercurrents of material gain and of faith or bad faith, running below the strategic and tactical battles in politics, which tries to sluice or ride them, depending on what the politics itself is made of.
These undercurrents can disrupt the promises of a republic like ours, which gets no security or freedom from trumpeting a “blood and soil” patriotism or multi-culturalist belongings. Its only lasting hope lies in a thicker civic culture that Obama embodies so well. But only a tremendous amount of pressure from people who are wise enough not to be too clever all the time can help him to summon and deploy that civic culture’s virtues and faith against those who would exploit it or evade it because – in quasi-Puritan terms – they aren’t up to keeping it.
Many discouraging observations have been made about Americans, some of them clearer than truth: French observers have called us les grands enfants. The late American historian Louis Hartz rued our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind.” Those are two of the nicer assessments. Some of the more-accurate ones are scarier.Although millions of us behave encouragingly every day, often in distinctively “American” ways that I assess on this website, this is no time to congratulate ourselves. But it’s also no time to consign ourselves to history’s dustbin by writing pre-mortems for the 2024 election and for the republic itself.
The following essay is a highly personal account of my reckonings with these challenges. Before you read further here, please read “About This Site” in the left-hand column on this home-page and glance at its survey of challenges now facing an American, civic-republican culture that a mentor of mine, the late literary historian Daniel Aaron, once characterized, felicitously, as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.”
I’d like to see that civic culture transcend and outlive “woke” corporate neoliberalism, authoritarian state capitalism, right-wing, racist nationalism, Marxoid economic determinism, and post-modernist escapism, all of which are responses to global riptides that are transforming humanity’s economic, technological, communicative, climatic, migratory, and other arrangements. These swift, often dark currents are driven not only by capitalism but also by human inclinations, including to greed and power-lust, that antedate capitalism by millennia and seem certain to outlast it. Neither the left nor the right seems able to block them or re-channel them, let alone to redeem us from them.
More than a few Americans actually find these currents energizing as well as disorienting. That’s partly thanks to accidents of this country’s history that have enabled its commingling of faith, innovation, fakery, and force. Americans “have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistible in a space otherwise quite empty,” the philosopher George Santayana noted. “To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education and a career.”
Well, maybe. The 19th-century Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck is reputed to have said that “God protects, fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” The ascent of Donald Trump and of Trumpism has reinforced that impression and made many of us doubt and even despair of “American” virtues that we’d taken for granted or dedicated ourselves to upholding. I doubted our capabilities along those lines in the 1970s and more deeply in 2014, before I or anyone imagined that Trump would run for the presidency, let alone that tens of millions of Americans would be credulous and cankered enough to elect him.
“Jim Sleeper is the Jonathan Edwards of American civic culture – and that’s a compliment,” tweeted The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg, referring to the formidable Puritan “thought leader” of the 18th Century and to my Salon essay “We, the People, are Violent and Filled with Rage,” which you can read later on this site. With Jeremiadic woe, I’d surveyed the civic-cultural damage of the 2008 financial crisis and the run of public massacres, including in Oklahoma City in 1995, Columbine in 1998, and Sandy Hook in 2012. Soon after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, I doubted America’s prospects more deeply still in “It’s Not Only a Constitutional Crisis, It’s a Civic Implosion,”a little essay for Bill Moyers’ website that you can read later on this website’s section, “A Sleeper Sampler.”
Hertzberg’s reference to my cast of mind was fortuitous, and not only because the damage I mentioned has been accelerating: I grew up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a small town settled by Puritans in 1644, just six miles north of the spot where, in 1741, Edwards would preach his (in)famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Some of my Longmeadow public school classmates were direct descendants of the town’s Puritan founders. A few of my teachers seemed to have been writhing in Edwards’ congregation when he preached. Whenever they looked at me in school, I felt them looking into me, partly for a particular reason.
That residually Calvinist, “Yankee” discipline converged with two other cultural currents in my upbringing, inclining me to look into civic-republican society’s ups and downs. The Calvinist current drew on an older, Hebraic, Old Testament one, of law and prophecy, that was my inheritance as a grandson of four Lithuanian Jewish immigrant grandparents and that was deepened in my extracurricular but intensive exposure to it. Neither the Christian nor the Jewish current disappeared when I entered Yale College in 1965 and learned that it had been founded by Puritans who’d put a Hebrew approximation of “Light and Truth” on its seal and envisioned it as a “school of prophets.” As if that weren’t enough, Kingman Brewster, Jr., Yale’s president during my undergraduate years and a lineal descendant of the minister on the Puritan Pilgrims’ ship The Mayflower, had been born in my hometown, Longmeadow.
Fooling around at 19, my freshman yearStill fooling around in Wellesley, MA, age 23, 1971
Beyond Calvinism and Hebraism, a third cultural current, a leftish civic-republican one, surfaced at around the time I turned 30, in 1977. Like many other New Englanders before me, I carried some of the region’s civic and moral presumptions (conceits? innocent hopes?) to New York City, although not to literary Manhattan but to “inner city” Brooklyn, where I ran an activist weekly newspaper before bicycling across the Brooklyn Bridge every day to work as a speechwriter for City Council President Carol Bellamy. By 1982, I was writing for The Village Voice, Dissent, Commonweal and other political magazines. From 1988 to 1995, I was an editor and columnist for the daily newspapers New York Newsday and The New York Daily News.
In 1987, my essay “Boodling, Bigotry, and Cosmopolitanism” sketched New York’s changing political culture for a special issue of Dissent magazine that I edited and that was re-published as In Search of New York. The “Boodling” essay was re-published yet again inEmpire City, a Columbia University Press anthology of 400 years of writing about the city, edited by the historian Kenneth Jackson and the master-teacher David Dunbar.
In 1990, W.W. Norton published my The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York. The book was a tormented love letter to the city. It sparked public debate in and beyond New York. After 1999, while continuing to live in the city and writing many of the pieces referenced and linked on this site, I taught Yale undergraduates for two decades in political science seminars — “New Conceptions of American National Identity” and “Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy.”
In the late 1970s I embraced, and I still affirm, a democratic-socialist politics that, unlike Stalinism and orthodox Marxism, had a distinctively American, civic-republican orientation that rejects Communists’ opportunistic (ab)uses of civil liberties, civil rights, and democracy. Democratic socialism in the 1970s steered fairly clear of the racially essentialist “identity politics” that many of its adepts now wrongly embrace by fantasizing about “Black liberation” and its analogues as cats’ paws of an advancing Revolution. If you sample my offerings in the section “Why a Skin Color isn’t a Culture or a Politics,” you’ll encounter my conviction that although ethno-racial identities are inevitable and sometimes enriching, they’ll never be wellsprings of social hope in America unless they’re transcended by all of us as participants in a thicker civic culture and citizens of a larger republic, if not of the world. Precisely because The United States is more complex racially, ethnically, religiously, and otherwise than most “multicultural” categorizing comprehends, we need to be working overtime to identify and, yes, instill, certain shared civic and moral premises and practices that I discuss in many of the pieces on this website.
No longer fooling around. Brooklyn, age 31, 1978
Beginning in the 1990s and ever since, I’ve taken strong public stands against ethno-racialist evasions of the civic-republican mission. In 1991 I wrote a rather harsh assessment of leftist identity politics for Tikkun magazine that was re-published in Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, edited by Paul Berman. I refined and, dare I say, elevated the argument in civic-republican terms in a 1996 Harper’s magazine essay, “Toward an End of Blackness,” that identified the emptiness of American blackness and whiteness as vessels of social hope. I summarized and updated the argument again in 2021, in a Commonweal essay,“Scrapping the Color Code.” (You can find all of the essays on race that I’ve just mentioned in this website’s section on race, “Why Skin Color Isn’t Culture or Politics.”) I’ve published a lot more along these lines and debated in many public forums, some of them linked in the Commonweal essay and elsewhere on this site. (My two books on the subject are The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream (1997).
Some of this work sparked resentment among activists and academics on the left and among journalists and other writers across the political spectrum. I accused some of them of betraying a civic-republican ethos and creed that’s under assault by capitalist, neoliberal, and even radical-racialist forces, the most dangerous of them white-supremacy, but others of them unconstructively “woke” or more subtly, seductively commercial. Some of my criticisms of writers who’ve ridden these currents have been gratuitously cruel, even when accurate.
Civic-republican strengths and susceptibilities
Although many Americans behaved admirably, even heroically, on 9/11 and in the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, what matters to a republic’s survival are the little things people do daily, when no one’s looking and no digital tracking device, cellphone camera, or journalist is recording them. Essential though a republic’s wealth and military power are to its strength, they can become parasitical on it pretty quickly when people are feeling stressed, dispossessed, and susceptible to simplistic explanations. Neither a booming economy nor massive firepower can ensure a republic’s vitality, especially if prosperity and power are dissolving civic-republican norms and practices.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against this in his Farewell Address in 1960, condemning what he called a “military-industrial” complex. (An early draft of his address, well-known to historians, called it, rightly, a “military-industrial-academic” complex.) Ike, who was hardly a radical leftist inveighing against capitalism or a rightist railing against “the deep state,” was a deeply decent, heartland American who’d gotten to know the military-industrial-academic complex from within, as its supreme warmaker and then as Columbia University’s president. He didn’t like everything he saw there.
Even more than Eisenhower’s warning or Jonathan Edwards’ and the Hebrew prophets’ jeremiads, several developments since 9/11 have convinced me that Americans who are accustomed to think well of themselves would be better off convicting themselves of complicity in democracy’s decline. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the 18th century British historian Edward Gibbon noted that “a slow and secret poison” had worked its way into the vitals of ancient Rome’s republic, distorting and draining its virtues and beliefs. In our own time, faster, glaringly public poisons have been working their way into our republic. Yet most Americans, “liberal” or “conservative,” have been ingesting and pushing them without naming them honestly.
You may insist that whatever is driving Americans’ increasing resort to force, fraud and mistrust comes from human nature itself. The republic’s founders understood that argument in Calvinist terms and also from reading Gibbon’s semi-pagan assessment of human history as “little more than a record of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” They tried to devise a republican system of self-government that “doesn’t depend on our nobility. It accounts for our imperfections and gives an order to our individual strivings,” as one of their legatees, John McCain, put it two and a half centuries later in one of his last addresses to Senate colleagues.
Assessed by these lights, Trump (who cruelly disparaged McCain) is only the most prominent carrier and pusher of imperfections and poisons that the founders knew were already in us, even in those of us who deny that we’re carriers and pushers. Barack Obama reinforced our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind” in 2008 by staging a year-long equivalent of a religious revival rally for the civic-republican faith across partisan, ideological, and ethno-racial lines. But he wasn’t only a performance artist; he embodied and radiated distinctively American strengths that fascinate people the world over — not our wealth and power or our technological affinities, which are often brutally or seductively unfair, but our professed commitment to a classless egalitarianism that inclines an American to say “Hi” to a stranger instead of “Heil!” to a dictator; to give that stranger a fair chance; to be optimistic and forward-looking; and, from those collective and personal strengths, to take a shot at the moon.
I don’t think that the American republic is sliding irreversibly into Nazi-style fascism, as some on the left fear and some on the alt-right hope, or that it will succumb to leftist totalitarian socialism. More likely is an accelerating dissolution of the civic-republican way of life that Daniel Aaron, a mentor of mine, called “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.” That subtle balance of divergent qualities and of the trust and comity they engender is being routed by the global undercurrents -– economic, technological/communicative, climatic/migratory, and demographic/cultural –- that are sluicing force, fraud, and mistrust into our public and private lives. A bare majority of us are holding on to common ground.
Looking across the tracks.Illustration by Philip Toolin, a film art director/production designer who’s been doing this since he was 15.
In his foreboding 1941 prophecy, What Mein Kampf Means for America, Francis Hackett, a literary editor of The New Republic, warned that people who feel disrespected and dispossessed are easy prey for demagogic orchestrations of “the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and, out of these three elements, a counterfeit reality to which there was a violent, instinctive response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fiction as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond. The fiction is taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed.”
Edward Gibbon and Jonathan Edwards would have recognized that condition in us now. Yet its causes and subtleties often escape the notice of journalists who are busy chasing “current events” without enough historical and moral grounding to contextualize them within “undercurrent events” that are driving upheavals and horrors around us and within us. I have a thing or two to say about that myopic side of American journalism (and I have some experiences to share) in this website’s sections on “News Media, Chattering Classes, and a Phantom Public” and on “Scoops and Revelations.”
The undercurrent events that many journalists mishandle aren’t malevolent, militarized conspiracies. They’re civically mindless commercial intrusions into our public and private lives that derange our employment options, public conversations, and daily aspirations and habits. They bypass our hearts and minds relentlessly, 24/7, on their way to our lower viscera and our wallets, to attract eyeballs to their ads, to maximize the profits of swirling whorls of shareholders. These commercial riptides incentivize (and brainwash?) many Americans to behave as narrowly self-interested investors and as impulse-buying consumers, not as citizens of a republic who restrain their immediate self-interest at times to enhance the public interests of a “commonwealth.” That word is still on our legal documents and pediments, but we’re losing its meaning, along with its “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free” ethos.
Decay and Renewal
Imagine a former auto worker, a white man in his mid-50s whose $30-an-hour job and its benefits were replaced a decade ago by a job stocking shelves at Wal-Mart for less than half the pay and who has lost his home because he accepted a predatory mortgage scam of the kind that prompted the 2008 financial and political near-meltdown. Imagine that he winds up here:
“When the people give way,” warned John Adams (a graduate of the then-still residually Calvinist Harvard College and a self-avowed admirer of Hebrews) in 1774, “their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour…. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.”
In 1787, Alexander Hamilton, urging ratification of the Constitution, wrote that history seemed to have destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government through reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
In 1975, two centuries after James Madison, Adams, Hamilton, and others designed the republic with dry-eyed wisdom about its vulnerabilities, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt worried that “Madison Avenue tactics under the name of public relations have been permitted to invade our political life.” She characterized the then-recently exposed Pentagon Papers, which confirmed the Vietnam War’s duplicity and folly, as an example of the invasion of political life by public relations, of Madison by Madison Avenue – that is, of efforts to separate its public promises of a democratic victory in Vietnam from realities on the ground, until, finally, the official words lost their meaning and, without them, the deeds became more starkly brutal.
March on Pentagon, 1967 (National Archives and Record Administration)
What many Americans should have learned from that debacle, and what I’ve been learning ever since, reinforces Oliver Goldsmith’s warning, in 1777: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a’prey, when wealth accumulates and men decay.” A wealthy society may decay and implode not only because its prosperity isn’t distributed fairly but also because it’s only material and therefore weak against profit-maximizing engines such as Rupert Murdoch’s media, which prey upon the susceptibilities and resentments of stressed, dispossessed people such as the former auto worker and the Uber driver. If the manipulative engines aren’t stopped, they’ll grope, goose, titillate, intimidate, track, indebt, stupefy and regiment people, many of whom will crave easy escapes in bread-and-circus entertainments like those of Rome in its decline. They’ll join mobs that demand to be lied to with simplistic story lines that tell them who to blame for their pains and who to follow to fix them.
Perhaps with Gibbon’s slow and secret poison in mind, Alexis de Tocqueville described “the slow and quiet action of society upon itself” in the little daily interactions that matter as much as the high moments of national decision. Writing Democracy in America in 1835, he marveled, perhaps wishfully, at an American individualism that seemed willing to cooperate with others to achieve goods in common that individualism couldn’t achieve on its own:
“The citizen of the United States is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety….This habit may even be traced in the schools of the rising generation, where the children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established…. The same spirit pervades every act of social life. If a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare, and the circulation of the public is hindered, the neighbors immediately constitute a deliberative body; and this extemporaneous assembly gives rise to an executive power which remedies the inconvenience before anybody has thought of recurring to an authority superior to that of the persons immediately concerned.”
This civic-republican disposition — to give the other person a fair chance and to back her up as she tries, to deliberate rationally with her about shared purposes, and to reach and to keep binding commitments — relies on the elusive balance of civic values, virtues and body language that’s ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free. You see it in a team sport whenever a player closes in on the action not to show off but to back up a teammate and help him score. You see it in how people in a contentious meeting extend trust cannily to potential adversaries in ways that elicit trust in return.
You used to see it even on Capitol Hill, as I did in 1968 while interning for my western Massachusetts Republican Congressman, Silvio O. Conte:
(That’s me in the dark jacket. standing next to then-astronaut John Glenn, who was visiting Rep. Conte (standing to his right) while planning to run for the U.S. Senate from Ohio.)
Or maybe you don’t see civic grace like that so often these days. Maybe backbiting, road rage, and the degradation of public space and cyberspace are prompting quiet heartache and withdrawal as trust in other people slips out of our public lives. Without the balance that I’m sketching here and elsewhere on this website, the United States won’t survive as a republic amid the undercurrent events that I’ve mentioned.
Civic-republican grace in writing and public life
Finding a better description of civic republicanism than I’ve offered here would require harder analysis and reportage but also more poetry, faith and, sometimes even a little fakery. You can develop an ear and an eye for it, and maybe a voice for it. I’ve been following American civic republican culture’s ebbs and flows since around 1970, when I was 23, but really since World War II, because I was born on June 6, 1947, two years after the war’s end and three years, to the day, after D-Day, so and I grew up in a civic culture that seemed, at least to a child, more triumphant and coherent than it actually was or ever had been.
Some of the writing collected here records my and others’ growing disillusionment. A lot of it began for me in journalism, “the first rough draft of history” if a journalist has some grounding in history and isn’t just chasing “breaking news.” Whenever the chattering classes make cicada-like rackets over the latest Big Thing, I’ve tried to assess that noise in its historical and other contexts, remembering Emerson’s admonition “that a popgun is [only] a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.”
Contextualizing current events this way sometimes yields scoops and insights that others have missed. (See the “Scoops and Other Revelations” Section for a sampler of what I’ve found.) Some of those pieces spotlight fissures and fragilities in the republican experiment, and some assail public leaders and journalists who I believed had lost their civic-republican lenses and standards, along with virtues and beliefs necessary to wise reporting. (See also “Leaders and Misleaders”)
I’m collecting some of my essays for a book that I’ll call Somebodyhaddasayit. Some my work has prompted people to tell me they were glad that I’d written what they, too, had been thinking but were reluctant to say. Somebody really did need to say it, even when doing so made enemies not only among the “villains” but also, as George Orwell lamented, among editors and other writers who cancel honest speech that might embarrass them. “Saying it’ requires not only sound judgment and tact, but also, sometimes, courage. I’ve sometimes “said it” with too little fact or courage.
Editorial writer and editor at New York Newsday, 1992
But usually I’ve defended people who bear the American republican spirit bravely, against daunting odds. One of my pieces began in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library in 2006, when I was looking for family background on Ned Lamont, then a little-known computer executive (now Governor of Connecticut) who was making a Democratic primary bid for the Connecticut U.S. Senate seat of Joe Lieberman, in protest against Lieberman’s unbending support for the Iraq War. I ended up writing not about Ned himself but about a long-forgotten uncle of his, Thomas W. Lamont II, whose young life and supreme sacrifice in World War II seemed to me a fata morgana, a fading mirage, of the American republic and of the citizenship that we’re losing, not at its enemies’ hands but at our own. (See the essay “Duty Bound” on this website’s section, “A Civic Republican Primer.”)
Being an American like Tommy Lamont is an art and a discipline. You can’t just run civic grace like his up a flagpole and salute it, but neither should you snark it down as just a bourgeois mystification of oppressive social relations. When the Vietnam War’s brutality and folly were at their worst and when official words had lost their credibility and official deeds had become murderous, the perennial socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas told protestors “not to burn the American flag but to wash it.” I took his point. I work with it. Americans who consider themselves too sophisticated for that are naïve.
Although one can’t credibly call my writing “nationalist” or “conservative,” more than a little of it has been motivated by my and others’ civic-republican patriotism. I’ve written often for left-of-center sites and journals, challenging much of what’s called “conservative” in American life. But a civic-republican compass points rightward at times, and I’ve written once or twice in right-of-center venues to condemn racialist “identity politics” and ethno-racial banner-waving that passes for progressive politics even when it only compounds a racial essentialism that fuels white superracist politics more than black-power politics.
Although American national identity was developed self-critically and sometimes hypocritically in secular Enlightenment terms, ultimately it relies on something akin to religious faith, even though it doesn’t impose a particular religious doctrine. Living with that paradox requires skill and empathy, as some leftist activists learned while swaying and singing with black-church folk against armed white men in the American South. Precisely because this country is so diverse religiously, racially, and culturally, it needs to generate shared civic standards and lenses, with help from newly potent (and therefore “mythic”) civic narratives. We don’t refuse to ride horses because they’re strong enough to kill us; we learn to break them in. Some liberals need to learn something similar about religion and patriotism instead of refusing them entirely.
How (and How Not) to Think About Left and Right
Both left and right in American life offer distinctive truths that are indispensable to governing ourselves by reflection and choice instead of by accident, force, and fraud. The left understands that without public supports in a village that raises the child, the family and spiritual values that conservatives cherish cannot flourish. But the right understands that unless a society also generates, honors, and defends irreducibly individual autonomy and conscience, even the best-intentioned social engineering may reduce persons to clients, cogs, or cannon fodder. Each side often clings to its own truths so tightly that they become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right only about how the other is wrong.
The consequent damage to the public sphere can’t be undone by clinging to the left-vs.-right floor plan that I mentioned at the outset and that still limits many people I know. Analysis and organizing against socioeconomic inequities are indispensable, but they’re insufficient. That’s equally true of conservative affirmations of communal and religious values that bow quickly to accumulated wealth that, as Oliver Goldsmith noted, preys upon and dissolves values and bonds that conservatives claim to cherish. (See this website’s sections, “Folly on the Left” and “Conservative Contradictions.”)
Ever since Madison helped to craft a Constitution to channel and deflect such factions, the republic has needed an open, circulating elite – not a caste or an aristocracy — of “disinterested” leaders whose private or special needs don’t stop them from looking out for the public and its potential to govern itself by reflection and choice. When John McCain voted in 2017 against repealing Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, he admonished Senate colleaguesto “learn how to trust each other again and by so doing better serve the people who elected us…Considering the injustice and cruelties inflicted by autocratic governments, and how corruptible human nature can be, the problem solving our system does make possible…and the liberty and justice it preserves, is a magnificent achievement…. It is our responsibility to preserve that, even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than ‘winning.’”
Maybe McCain had a good speechwriter, but he believed what he was saying, even though he hadn’t always lived up to it. (See the section, “Leaders and Misleaders”.) Another flawed but sincere legatee of the founders’ Constitutional project was New York Mayor Ed Koch, whom I assailed for years until I got to know him a little better.
Many Americans still do uphold the civic-republican promise –as moderators of candidates’ debates; umpires in youth sporting leagues; participants in street demonstrations; board members who aren’t afraid to say, “Now wait a minute, let me make sure that we all understand what this proposal is based on and what it entails;” and as jurors who quiet the ethno-racial voices in their own and fellow-jurors’ heads to join in finding the truth. Truth is a process as much as it’s a conclusion. It emerges not from radical pronouncements of the general will or from ecclesiastical doctrines but provisionally, from the trust-building processes of deliberative democracy. “[A]nyone who is himself willing to listen deserves to be listened to,” Brewster wrote. “If he is unwilling to open his mind to persuasion, then he forfeits his claim on the audience of others.” In politics, unlike science, the vitality of truth-seeking matters as much as the findings.
At any historical moment, one side’s claims can seem liberating against the other side’s dominant conventions and cant: In the 1930s, Orwell sought liberation in democratic-socialist movements against ascendant fascist powers, and his sympathy remained with workers, but sometimes that required him to oppose workers’ self-proclaimed champions, especially Stalinists, as well as their capitalist exploiters. Orwell “never forgot that both left and right tend to get stuck in their imagined upswings against concentrated power and to disappoint in the end: The left’s almost willful mis-readings of human nature make it falter in swift, deep currents of nationalism and religion, denying their importance yet surrendering to them abjectly and hypocritically as Soviets did by touting ‘Socialism in One Country’ (i.e., while touting Russian nationalism) and preaching Marxism as a secular eschatology” (i.e., as a religion).
The balance that we should hold out for against ideologues is like that of a person striding on both a left foot and a right one without noticing that, at any instant, all of the body’s weight is on only one foot as the other swings forward and upward in the desired direction. What matters is that the balance enables the stride. Again, it requires both a “left foot” of social equality and provision – without which the individuality and the communal bonds that conservatives claim to cherish couldn’t flourish – and a “right foot” of irreducibly personal responsibility and autonomy, without which any leftist social provision or engineering would reduce persons to passive clients, cogs, cannon fodder, or worse.
A balanced stride can be upset by differences among individuals and by the divisions within every individual’s human heart between sociable and selfish inclinations. A strong republic anticipates such imbalances. It sustains an evolving consensus without ceding ground to hatred and violence. It remains vigilant against concentrations of power, because it knows how to extend trust in ways that elicit trust and reward it in return. Being ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free, it acts on virtues and beliefs that armies alone can’t defend and that wealth can’t buy. Ultimately, and ironically, a republic’s or democracy’s strength lies in it very vulnerability, which comes with extending trust. “The presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept,” Kingman Brewster Jr. wrote, in a passage that is now the epitaph on his grave in New Haven. “In common place terms it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger.”
Think of Rosa Parks, refusing to move to the back of a public bus in Montgomery, presenting herself not only as a black woman craving vindication against racism but also as a decent, American working Everywoman, damning no one but defending her rights. Presenting herself that way, she lifted the civil society up instead of trashing it as irredeemably racist.
Civic grace like that is heroic, and rare. But after forty years of tracking American civic culture’s ups and downs, I believe that, ultimately, it’s all that we have.
