Rick Perlstein

The Constitutional Roadblock to Efforts to Fix Federal Elections

Rick Perlstein on February 6, 2013 - 11:23 AM ET

Voters wait to cast their ballot early in Ohio. (AP Photo/Mark Duncan.)

Yesterday The New York Times ran a front-page feature on attempts by Democrats, both in the White House and on Capitol Hill, to pass reforms to fix the scandalously long lines faced by voters at the polls last November. It comes the same day that the Virginia House and Senate passed a bill to disallow the use of a utility bill, pay stub, bank statement, government check or Social Security card as acceptable identification to present at the polls—making it, of course, all the harder for traditionally Democratic constituencies in this crucial battleground state to have their voice heard at the ballot box.

Nation readers will be well aware of the problem, of how profoundly it contributes to our democracy deficit in America, and how neatly it notches with Republican attempts (defensive, they always claim) to sabotage Democratic turnout, at least since future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist was spied intimidating Hispanic voters at Phoenix polling places in 1962. Like me, you probably keep a catalogue in your mind of the most excruciating examples thereunto, like, in this last election, the fact that the Florida ballot was larded with so many right-wing referenda that had to be printed in full, and was so confusing, that it caused four- and five-hour lines even in precincts that weren’t all that crowded.

Now, the Times piece is swell. It reports research such as the study done at MIT that determined that blacks and Hispanics waited an average of twice as long to vote as whites; work by an Ohio State professor and the Orlando Sentinel concluding that more than 20,000 Florida voters “gave up in frustration” rather than stick out the long lines; and a New York Times/CBS News poll that found 18 percent of Democrats waited at least a half-hour to vote compared to 9 percent of Republicans. Pretty damned damning. “Democrats in the House and Senate,” they note, “have already introduced bills that would require states to provide online voter registration and allow at least 15 days of early voting, among other things,” reports the Times. James Clybourn, the black South Carolina representative and assistant House Democratic leader, said of Obama, “I think he’s going to devote pretty significant political resources to bear on this question.”

But the Times piece also suffers a damning lacuna. It doesn’t note that the President and Congress have little or no constitutional authority upon which to act. Here’s a dull two-by-four to the head to all of you hoping Washington can fix the voting problem. It is one of the best kept secrets in our political life: There is no federal right to vote for Congress to guarantee. I’d be glad to be corrected, but as best I can tell, that means that technically, in almost every case, a state can make it as hard as it wants for its citizens to vote, and there’s practically nothing DC can do about it.

I learned about all this thirteen years ago when I reviewed for The Washington Post a marvelous, pathbreaking book by Harvard historian Alexander Keyssar, The Right To Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. “Boldly overturns everything you think you know about Americans’ most taken-for-granted right,” went my blurb on the cover of the paperback. Though come to think of it, the word “right” should have appeared in quotation marks. I wrote:

He begins with an enormous irony: The Constitution “did not grant anyone the right to vote.” Instead—debate on this particular subject falling to quick compromise during an overpowering spell of Philadelphia humidity—the framers decided to leave the question to the states…. What followed, however, was the inspiriting story you learned at your schoolmaster’s knee: State after state through the early nineteenth century convened the constitutional conventions that collectively made America “the first country in the Western world to significantly broaden its electorate by permanently lowering explicit economic barriers to political participation.” But you didn’t learn what happened next, which was that the United States then became the first country to instill “a prolonged period during which the laws governing the right to vote become more, rather than less, restrictive.”

More precisely, states instilled that prolonged period—and the federal government stood aside, because that was how the Constitution worked.

The big exception was when the disenfranchisement was racial. In the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the federal role is underwritten by the language of the Fifteenth Amendment (“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”). And I suppose a present-day Supreme Court majority could conceivably use the Fifteenth Amendment to again allow Congress to ban contemporary practices proved to have obviously racially discriminatory features.

I also suppose monkeys could fly out of my posterior. Because that is is about as likely as today’s Supreme Court legitimating new federal voting guarantees, given that they seem to be the verge of striking down the Voting Rights Act’s key provision of “preclearance.”

The other exceptions are that, following the Nineteenth and Twenty-Sixth Amendments, states can’t take the vote from women or people eighteen years of age or older. Disenfranchise anyone else, though, and you’re just about in the clear.

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Except, of course, if we pass another constitutional amendment. This is one of the reasons the loss of Jesse Jackson Jr., from Congress is such a sad thing. In his neglected but visionary book A More Perfect Union, Jackson proposed just such an amendment (and seven others besides, all rooted in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights: guaranteeing rights to quality healthcare, housing, education, a clean environment, and equality for women). The suggested right-to-vote amendment went like this:

SECTION 1. All citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, shall have the right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides. The right to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, any State, or any other public or private person or entity, except that the United States or any State may establish regulations narrowly tailored to produce efficient and honest elections.

SECTION 2. Each State shall administer public elections in the State in accordance with election performance standards established by the Congress. The Congress shall reconsider such election performance standards at least once every four years to determine if higher standards should be established to reflect improvements in methods and practices regarding the administration of elections.

SECTION 3. Each State shall provide any eligible voter the opportunity to register and vote on the day of any public election.

SECTION 4. Each State and the District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall establish and abide by rules for appointing its respective number of Electors. Such rules shall provide for the appointment of Electors on the day designated by the Congress for holding an election for President and Vice President and shall ensure that each Elector votes for the candidate for President and Vice President who received a majority of the popular vote in the State or District.

That would solve every last one of our voting problems. (I bet, although you’d have to ask a constitutional lawyer, it would even cover our gerrymandering problem, or really, as I prefer to call it, our cheating problem—you know, the one that lets Republian state legislatures crowd Democratic voters into almost-unanimously Democratic districts, making it so a Democratic presidential candidate can win a state like Pennsylvania by over five points while that state is still represented by thirteen Republican and only five Democratic Congressmen). Of course, the idea went nowhere.

The Times article downplays the federalism problem, relegating it to an aside—“conservatives have complained that Democrats are politicizing an issue [love that: like, what kind of freak could possibly consider voting a political issue…] that should be handled by the states, not the federal government.” But it’s not an aside. It’s the whole ballgame. Maybe it’s time for some visionary leadership on the issue. “Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote,” Barack Obama said in his inaugural address. Right on, Mr. President. Make it so. Push Jesse Jr.’s constitutional amendment. If you really mean what you say, I don’t really see how there’s any other choice.

Why do we need voter registration at all? North Dakota has conducted registration-less elections for fifty years “without incident,” Voting Rights Watch reports.

Why a Permanent Democratic Majority Is Not a Demographic Inevitability (Part One: Antecedents)

Rick Perlstein on February 4, 2013 - 2:24 PM ET

After Lyndon Johnson's resounding defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, pundits incorrectly predicted the decline of the Republican party. (AP Photo/Bob Daugherty.)

Following Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney a certain argument became ubiquitous: the argument from demographic inevitability. That the Republican Party, absent deep-seated changes that are all but unimaginable, is in for a generation or more of electoral doom. Indeed the argument was being made long before the votes were even cast. Here was Jonathan Chait in New York magazine, etching the argument sharply almost a year ago:

The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency.

It is the curse of the historian to be long-memoried. First thing. Pace Chait, “frantic, fearful response” is the default reaction of conservatives to every moment of liberal ascendency. (See, for instance, the rise of the Minutemen upon the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, which I wrote about in my last post, and the general reactionary mass mobilizations against Kennedy, which I wrote about in my 2001 book, Before the Storm). Second thing. “Last chance”? We’ve seen last chances before. Later in this series, I’ll address some of the fallacies in the specific arguments such folks have been making about today’s supposed demographic inevitability. For now lets’ review the overflowing cornucopia of past moments of when Democrats were supposed to rule the universe forever.

There was 1964. Following Lyndon Johnson’s overwhelming landslide victory over Barry Goldwater—at 61 to 38.5 in the popular vote and 486 to 52 in the electoral college, far more staggering than Obama’s not-at-all-overwhelming 51 percent to 47 percent and 332 to 206—the pundits said things like, If the Republicans continue “advocating reactionary changes at home and adventures abroad that might lead to war” (this was the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau chief), “they will remain a minority party indefinitely.” Those arguments were fundamentally demographic: The nation had been 38 percent rural in the 1950 census and 33 percent rural in the 1960 census, and falling. So how could an ideology of backward rural folk—conservatism—possibly survive?

The conclusion was on every supposedly intelligent person’s lips, but it betrayed an actual idiocy. The census classified an American as “rural” (if memory services) if they lived in a municipality with 5,000 residents or less. That excluded suburbanites, of course—and Goldwaterite proclivities was of course the reason many of them lived in suburbs in the first place. In any event, the Republicans bounced back handily by 1966, borne aloft in many cases by big-city voters (for instance, Chicagoans in the Illinois senate race) who ran screaming from the Democrats’ continued embrace of civil rights during a season of riots.

As it happened, that 1966 result—repeated in the presidential races of 1968 and 1972—confounded a previous generation’s glib assumptions about demography and destiny. Those newly minted urban Republicans came from immigrant populations—Italians, Eastern Europeans, the Irish—that had formed the beating heart of the New Deal coalition. Back when Roosevelt won his four terms, followed by the Democratic electoral dominance of the 1950s and '60s (the Republicans had to run the non-ideological general who had defeated Adolf Hitler to create practically the only exception), the declining population share of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants had people presuming that Democrats would enjoy a “natural majority” for time immemorial. We’ll talk more about that, and the presumptions concerning another vector of immigrant inevitability, in future installments, but for now, just this thought: no one then bothered to consider that voting behavior might not be a trait passed on in the genes, from generation to generation.

Then in 1971 pundits spied another demographic inevitability right around the bend. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment passed, lowering the federal voting age to 18. Early reports were that 90 percent of high school seniors were registering as Democrats. The political scientist Samuel Lubell wrote: “As of now, the nation’s newest voters would defeat Nixon…. Crammed into my interview notebooks are angry outbursts from business-oriented youths who say, ‘The Republicans are better for my career,’ but vow, ‘I’ll vote for almost any Democrat to end the war.’ ”

Well, the nation’s newest voters did not defeat Nixon. Like just about every other category of voter, they gave majority support for his reelection. Indeed one of the reasons Nixon gladly signed off on the Amendment was that young voters might contribute in Democratic primaries to producing a nominee that would be easier for him to beat. He was smarter than the pundits; he knew that “demographic inevitability” is a cheap and unreliable way to make electoral arguments.

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Next, 1974: not an argument from demographic inevitability, necessarily, but one about inevitability nonetheless. In the first election following Richard Nixon’s resignation, so many young Democratic “Watergate Babies” were elected (thirty-one of them were holding elective office for the first time) that Democrats outnumbered Republicans in the House of Representatives by more than two to one. The Republican pollster Robert Teeter soon announced that only 18 percent of Americans were willing to call themselves “Republicans.” That Democratic hegemony appeared to be confirmed when Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford in 1976. In 1977, liberals celebrated their incipient generation of governmental control by crowding the congressional docket with things like aggressive bills for labor law reform and a new consumer protection agency. Both were crushed, for various reasons—but one of them was a datum from Teeter’s poll less noticed in all the celebration: 61 percent of Americans still considered themselves conservative.

But not to fear: Republicans had no apparent leadership prospects over the horizon. The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew wrote after Ronald Reagan’s near-miss for the nomination at the 1976 Republican, “This is probably the end of Reagan’s political career.” Wrote public opinion expert Evertt Carll Ladd in his 1978 book Where Have All the Voters Gone?, the “GOP is in a weaker position than any major party of the U.S. since the Civil War.”

Enough. I’m just having fun now. Pundits are easy to beat up on; predicting the future is hard; things are complicated. And the progressive tilt of the electorate is very real, something I discussed in these pages in a cover article in the middle of 2007 (but I’ll be writing about that one later, too). I’ll be getting into specific critiques of the various arguments-from-inevitability by the by—leaving you only with this thought. My skepticism here is a personal thing. When the 2008 victory of Barack Obama and the defeat of grumpy old John McCain began looking, um, inevitable, I started fielding inquiries about whether “Nixonland”—the name of the book I published that spring about the origins of the generation of Republican hegemony built on the politics of white middle-class cultural grievance—was over. Then people simply confidently proclaimed it, as a fact. Next came the Tea Party Thermidor of November 2010.

Now: last week when Sarah Palin was fired by Fox News, my friend Kevin Drum wrote, “With her gone, it might be a sign that the long, twilight success of Nixonland as a political strategy is finally starting to fade. I think Rick Perlstein should write a few thousand well-chosen words on the subject.”

Kevin, these won’t be the few thousand well-chosen words you’ve been looking for. That’s not how I see the world working.

Next up in my argument against inevitability, I’ll be writing about the protean nature of fear and the ease of its exploitation—the most unpredictable political variable of all.

Despite its lackluster election results, the Republican party's "make-believe consensus" has successfully moved the debate away from vital fundamental questions.

Nothing New Under the Wingnut Sun: 'Survivalism'

Rick Perlstein on February 2, 2013 - 4:46 PM ET

Photograph from National Geographic’s Doomsday Preppers, courtesy of National Geographic Channel

There’s nothing new under the wingnut sun.

Survivalists are back in the news this week, though now we call them “preppers.” In Alabama the hostage standoff against a doomsday prepper holding a 5-year-old in a bunker he’d been working on in the middle of the night for over a year approaches the end of its first week. Adam Lanza shot up the children of Sandy Hook elementary with weapons his mother was reportedly stockpiling “for the economic and social meltdown.” And the brittle worldview that drives the survivalist mentality—the imagination of one’s one innocent enclave, always ever threatened by siege from dread unnamed Others—was laid bare at the recent congressional hearings on gun control, when Gayle Trotter of the Independent Women’s Forum (incidentally: not independent, not by and for women, not a forum) spun out her delirious fantasy of “a young woman defending her babies in her home” by fending off “three, four, five violent attackers” with one of those lightweight, easy-to-handle assault rifles.

Recently a young blogger, in a nice profile of the diverse subculture as it thrives now, unfortunately described preppers as a “nascent” movement. That ain’t so. As I’ve insisted earlier, “too much of what we observe today on the right we act as if started the day before yesterday. Always, we need to set the clock back further—as a political necessity. We have to establish deeper provenances. Or else we just reinvent, and reinvent and reinvent the wheel.” Let’s think about this: for generations we have shared our America with Americans who fear change, fear difference, fear you and me, fear everything falling apart. So much so that they organize their lives and politics around staving off the fear—which often entails taking political action that only makes America more fearful and dangerous in for everyone; which destroy the trust and love it takes to sustain communities; and who reinforce one another in their fear to such a degree that the less crazy among them surely play a positive role in spurring the more crazy to the kind of awful acts we see around us now. We need to better understand where that comes from, and why it is not going away.

So let’s get down to work.

In the early 1960s there was a group called the “Minutemen,” preparing for the imminent combined Communist and United Nations invasion. Their founder, Robert DePugh, a manufacturer of veterinary phamarceuticals in Misssouri, told the press that while waiting for the final showdown, his men would monitor and check subversive activities in their hometowns. DePugh claimed inspiration from a speech given by John F. Kennedy: “We need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take up arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as a basic purpose of their daily life.”

Make no mistake: armed right-wing enclave-defenders aren’t just a function of their hatred for Democrats; they are also enabled by Democrats who braid paranoia into the political identity of the nation—Cold War paranoia then, “Homeland Security” paranoia now.

The stickers they distributed included read ones reading “REGISTER COMMUNISTS, NOT FIREARMS,” and tiny one members would slap on restroom walls or inside phone books featuring an image of rifle cross hairs, and this text: “See that old man at the corner where you buy your papers?… He may have a silencer equipped pistol under his coat. That fountain pen in the pocket of the insurance salesman that calls on you might be a cyanide gas gun. What about your milkman? Arsenic works slow but sure.… Traitors, beware! Even now the crosshairs are on the back of your necks.”

In 1966, Minutemen were arrested in a raid after FBI infiltration indicated they were on the verge of attacking three pacifist camps in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. They had stockpiled rockets, bombs and literally tons of ammunition. (You can read all about the group in this excellent book published at the time.)

What was DePugh’s connection to later preppers and survivalists? It was direct. In 1973 he published Can You Survive? Guidelines for Resistance to Tyranny for You and Your Family. Read the Amazon comments (“Everything they don’t want you to know…”); some people still find it useful now. And note the cover of the paperback. Like I said: the enclaves of innocents, always ever threatened by sudden siege by dread unnamed Others. Be prepared.

By the way, heard that new one? That a liberal is a conservative who’s been incarcerated? According to an article in his hometown newspaper published upon his 2009 death, “DePugh spent four years in federal prison and wrote a book about the plight of the incarcerated. Many consider it his best and most compassionate work.”

But that article also noted, “His ideas were so out of whack with what most poeple were thinking that the great majority of people laughed him off as a kook.” Not precisely so. The culture DePugh helped midwife grew and grew—so much so that, by 1981, Peter Arnett, then of the Associated Press, did a four-part series on the subject. It began: “Small but growing bands of Americans are arming themselves and learning how to kill because they are convinced the social order is crumbling and they will have to and they will have to fend for themselves to surive…. “There are inner perimeters in America today, places people are reluctant to leave for fear of their own safety. The national perimeter no longer seems secure.’”

Enclaves of innocents, always ever threatened by sudden siege by dread unnamed Others.

And now we have the hit new cable series.

Is there a continuity of culture here? Well, consider the reviews by the podcasting proprietor behind TodaysSurvival.com of “Best of the 80s Survivalist Books” (“The gem, the golden find of this book is his reloading tables: He has provided load data for virtually every cartidge in existence…with only 3 powders. This is incredibly helpful to the survivalist reloader who may anticipate reloading ammunition for themselves, and possibly others. By storing only 3 types of powder one may reload everything from the 219 Zipper to 300 Weatherby Magnum to .44 Special and everything in between. This book is out of print, but Mr. Stair is alive and well. He runs the ‘End Times Report’ web site, which sells a pamphlet containing the reloading data in the ‘booklet’ section.”)

There’s nothing new under the wingnut sun—only that, these days, you’re more likely to find ideas that once upon a time might have got you laughed off as a kook aired out in front of respectable congressional committees.

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Libertarian Mugged by Reality

Rick Perlstein on January 30, 2013 - 2:29 PM ET

The University of Chicago campus. (Courtesy of Wikimedia.)

As a freelance political writer living in Hyde Park, the neighborhood that encompasses the University of Chicago, it has frequently been my lot to be haunted by bright-eyed twentysomethings. They seek my professional counsel. Or are just eager to talk about politics. We have lunch; I take on all comers (presuming they’ll buy me lunch). One day in the middle of 2008, the fellow who approached me was named Alex Beinstein.

Alex Beinstein was, like many other a fidgety and overconfident undergraduate who’d sought my company in this way, considerably to the right of center—a libertarian, he told me. We talked; he taped an interview with me for his political talk show on the college radio station; he annoyed me with right-wing clichés; we went our separate ways.

Later, as these kids sometimes do, he got back in touch. But something had happened in the interim. That something, in fact, seems to be happening a lot: kids I knew who were conservatives when they lived in the ivory tower were now liberals. The real world has made them that way.

That’s not how the story is supposed to go. Remember the maxim apocryphally attributed to Churchill? “If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.” That was then, I suppose. This is now. What changed? The other day I sat down with Alex—I was buying lunch this time—to find out. He was no longer fidgety. He was confident, not overconfident—a grownup.

I mentioned the Churchill maxim. “Yeah, I’ve heard that. I don’t think you can flip it 100 percent for me. But I think you can flip it about 80 percent.”

He recalled coming to college vaguely liberal. But the people who were declaring themselves for causes looked like hypocrites to him. “So I felt myself being drawn more and more to the libertarian philosophy. Like: ‘At the end of the day we’re all selfish.’”

Was it, I asked, exacerbated by the notoriously libertarian-friendly confines of the University of Chicago?

“Definitely. It was easy for me to make a lot of libertarian friends. We had many, many dinners, sitting around, saying, ‘This is a scam, and that is a scam,’ and, ‘If you read what Milton Friedman helped to do in Chile.’ ”

And they would talk about something else. In my first post on this blog, I spoke of the right’s “curious fallacy, a crushing intellectual failure. They’ll act like only governments have the power to deprive citizens of freedom.” Libertarian kids at the University of Chicago think so, too: “It was all about ‘People have jobs, and that’s that, and anything that gets in the way between employer and employee is unhealthy for the system.’ ”

What happened next? He got a job.

He sold books at Borders in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It “did kind of a 180 on me. Just in terms of the rigidity of a corporate structure! You know: they tell you you have to take your lunch break at 1. But at 12:58 a customer starts speaking to you. And if you speak to them until 1:02 the bosses at Borders would start yelling at you to take your break at one, and then if you got an extra minute to 1:31 it throws off the whole schedule but if you volunteer to go two minutes early they fear they might be fined!”

Call it the irrationality of the market.

He learned, too, about the nature of unaccountable power in the workplace. One day the boss promised him five shifts the following week. Then, of a sudden, the boss assigned him only three. And apologized. Said it wouldn’t happen again. Then it happened again.

“I mean, there was a lot of disingenuousness. And I was privileged enough that if I needed a little bit more money from my parents to pay the rent it was fine, but if I was the type of person where literally that was the difference between me paying rent or not, this was a huge deal. It wasn’t like they had enough time to plan in advance—or find another job, because if they think they have to work those days”: their schedule has been monopolized. Which, sort of, is the point. “All of the sudden you see how little liberty average people do have.”

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It’s like that inspiring right-wing slogan says, the one right up there with “Give me liberty or give me death,” and “Government for, by, and of the people”: “You can always quit.”

“I was working with people in their mid-30s who had kids and there was one day when somebody’s kid was really sick…but there was no paid sick leave, so they couldn’t afford to take the day off. And then you know people who have really long commutes to this job in Cambridge, and they’re not really investing in transportation systems in the Boston area…”

So he started thinking about infrastructure. He was walking to work through East Cambridge, “which was not a very nice place, and you could could see how unkept the buildings were and how shoddy the hospital was, and the general sense of hopelessness and despair, and all of the sudden I felt like a total fraud for believing the Hayek-Friedman stuff!…I didn’t really see them having any liberty.”

In high school he never worked. In college he always had nice desk internships. “I never felt guilty if I took a bathroom break that was longer than ninety seconds! Or that I took a thirty-one-minute break or something because it was out of my control. That just totally changed everything. And I’ll never think the same way again.”

So there you go, conservative parents, the ones afraid that if they send their darlings off to college that—well, remember how Rick Santorum put it last year? That “there are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate him. I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.”

Nope. The right’s problem began when the indoctrination stopped. That’s when the forbidden thoughts started:

“I could see how much good the liberal stuff had done, but how much more was needed to be done.”

Rick Perlstein last wrote about a libertarian scheme to transform a park in Detroit into a sovereign nation with a $300,000 citizenship fee.

Hell Isle

Rick Perlstein on January 28, 2013 - 11:51 AM ET

A mother and child sit on the beach on Belle Isle in Detroit. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

Check out what the loopy Ayn Randroids are up to now. In long-suffering Detroit, a libertarian real estate developer wants to buy a civic crown jewel, Belle Isle, the 982-acre park designed by Frederick Law Olmstead—think the Motor City’s Central Park—and turn it into an independent nation, selling citizenships at $300,000 per. Not, mind you, out of any mercenary motives, says would-be founder Rodney Lockwood—but just “to provide an economic and social laboratory for a society which effectively addresses some of the most important problems of American, and the western world.” (Sic.)

Address how? Well, let’s say I’ve never seen a document that better reveals the extent to which, for libertarians, “liberty” means the opposite of liberty—at least since Rick Santorum held up the company town in which his grandpa was entombed as a beacon of freedom.

An aspiring Ayn Rand himself, Lockwood has set out his vision in a “novel,” poetically titled Belle Isle: Detroit’s Game Changer. Although he’s actually done the master one better, by imagining he can get his utopia built. Last week he presented the plan, alongside a retired Chrysler executive, a charter school entrepreneur (who apparently enjoys a cameo in the novel running one of the island’s two K-12 schools) and a senior economist at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, to what The Detroit News called “a select group of movers and shakers at the tony Detroit Athletic Club,” who included the president and CEO of the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Never let it be said Rod Lockwood (perfect pornstar name? You be the judge) hasn’t thought this thing through. The plan is foolproof: “Belle Isle is sold by the City of Detroit to a group of investors for $1 billion. The island is then developed into a city-state of 35,000 people, with its own laws, customs and currency, under United States supervision as a Commonwealth.” Relations with neighboring, impoverished Detroit will be naught but copacetic, and not exploitative at all: “Plants will be built across the Detroit River…. with the engineering and management functions on Belle Isle. Companies from all over the world will locate on Belle Isle, bringing in massive amounts of capital and GDP.” (Because, you know, tax-dodging international financiers of the sort a scheme like this attracts are just desperate to open and operate factories.) Government will be limited to ten percent or less of GDP, “by constitutional dictate. The social safety net is operated charities, which are highly encouraged and supported by the government.”

Although, on Belle Isle, “the word ‘Government’ is discouraged and replaced with the word ‘Service’ in the name of buildings.” Note the verb-tense slippage between present and future throughout. Lockwood is a realist.

He says what he imagines is a “Midwest Tiger”—helpfully explaining that his self-bestowed nickname is “a play on the label given Singapore as the ‘Asian Tiger.’ Singapore, in recent decades, has transformed itself into the most dynamic economy in the world, through low regulation, low taxes and business-friendly practices.”

Singapore. You know: that libertarian paradise where chewing gum is banned; thousands of people each year are sentenced to whippings with rattan canes for such offenses as overstaying visas and spray-painting buildings; the punishment for littering can be $1,000, a term of forced labor and being required to wear a sign reading “I am a litter lout”; and where pornography, criticizing religion, connecting to an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot and (yes!) over-exuberant hugging are all banned. Freedom!

What are the Commonwealth’s other inspirations, you ask? “The country of Liechtenstein, which, although a monarchy, has a very effective government.”

And indeed, just like little Liechtenstein, Belle Islanders will enjoy protection from America’s security umbrella: “As a Commonwealth of the United States…Belle Isle pays its share of the U.S. defense budget, based on its population. It amounts to about $2,000 per person per year.” In fact Belle Islanders can expect nothing but fiscal gratitude from citizens of the United States. Yes, “a citizen who lives on Belle Isle who operates an investment fund with world-wide customers will pay no income taxes” to the United States. “Won’t the US lose a lot of tax revenue?” Oh, ye of little libertarian faith. “It will probably gain revenue…. Entrepreneurs from around the world will locate on Belle Isle and headquarter there, but often have their plant operations in the US because the island is so small. Businesses producing products in the U.S. will still be taxed at US corporate rates…. the influx of capital and jobs will be staggering…. Detroiters will see this vision as the answer to their prayers, and how could the federal government deny Detroit a chance to turn itself around, accelerate its re-birth, all at no cost to the taxpayer? How could they deny this long standing population of over 700,000 their first real shot at the American dream.” (Sic.)

Want in? Three requirements. First, of course, you need to come up with $300,000. “Will the citizenship fee pay for the purchase of any land for homes or businesses on Belle Isle?” “No—that will be an additional cost.” But look what that $300,000 buys you: “One of the core values” of the new nation, Lockwood writes, “is respect for all its citizens, no matter their station in life.”

Second: approval by the “citizenship board.” (Freedom!) Third step: “a command of English.” Because nothing says “respect for all its citizens” like “funny-talkers need not apply.”

And yes, it’s true, Lockwood proposes the “Rand” as the name of Belle Isle’s currency. But I’m sure he means Rand as in “Ayn Rand,” not, you know, Rand as in “South Africa,” the former home of a social system that functioned by surrounding minority enclaves of affluent whites with a reserve army of impoverished and disenfranchised blacks. Not like that at all.

What could go wrong? What’s the downside? After all, writes Lockwood in the section of his FAQ asking, ‘What is Bell Isle used for currently?”, “It is uninhabited and functions as a public park.” Just like that dead zone between 59th and 110th Streets in Manhattan.

You can sign up for updates on the project here. Although, take note, in order do so you have to give the organizers your phone number. Because, you know… freedom.

Rick Perlstein last posted about Barack Obama’s upbringing in violence-ridden Indonesia and how it may have affected his “art of denial” regarding Republican obstructionism.

Our Obama Bargain (Part 3 of 3): Obama in Indonesia

Rick Perlstein on January 24, 2013 - 2:20 PM ET

(AP Photo/Drew Angerer.)

I’m fascinated by Barack Obama’s arts of denial. Here we are in the midst of the greatest string of organized rule-bending and -breaking and norm violation by an opposition party perhaps in American history. Just this past week, consider the story from Virginia, where Republicans rammed through a redistricting plan by taking advantage of a brief respite in the State Senate’s 20-20 Democrat-Republican split—because a black state senator, a civil rights hero, was in Washington attending the inauguration. But that was just an especially egregious example of a decade-long pattern: Squeezing all the Democrats in an area into massively super-majority districts, Republican state legislators gerrymander their way past any semblance of democracy—for instance in Pennsylvania, which voted 54 percent for Barack Obama, but whose US House delegation is overwhelmed by Republicans, thirteen to five. It’s cheating, and they’re working hard to leverage that gerrymandering to fix presidential elections, as Nation colleague John Nichols notes: RNC chair Reince Priebus “is urging Republican governors and legislators to take up what was once a fringe scheme to change the rule for distribution of Electoral College votes. Under the Priebus plan, electoral votes from battleground states such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and other states that now regularly back Democrats for president would be allocated not to the statewide winner but to the winners of individual congressional districts.”

That’s how our Republican friends think about rules. Here’s how they think about norms of civility. Wayne LaPierre, to whom the president has extended the hand of fellowship with a White House invitation, responded to an anodyne line in the inaugural address—“we cannot mistake absolutism for principle”—by telling him, “I’ve got news for the president. Absolutes do exist…. It’s the basis of all civilization.” That’s right. Mellow old Barack Obama is literally pulling down civilization, by telling folks to be nicer to each other. And the other side? Well, here’s an example I stumbled upon today from 2010, in which a Tea Party candidate for State Assembly in California made his appeal to the electorate as follows (he won): “I am going there to reach across the aisle to the enemies of freedom and annihilate them and pound them into the ground and take back our power…. We don’t stop until Americans are back in power.”

And how has Barack Obama responded to this historically tectonic shift in rule- and norm-breaking? With silence. As if it’s not really happened at all (except, possibly, “on both sides”). Has he ever, ever, ever specifically addressed the crisis of right-wing antinomian extremism? Of violent rhetoric, or just violence, on the American right? Show me an example and I’ll buy you a steak dinner.

It’s not that he doesn’t know it exists; he’s not stupid. I have reason to know. In August of 2011, during the first debt-ceiling imbroglio, Joe Klein reported that Obama “took a cultural wander through the recent history of US political dysfunction” by reading my book Nixonland, an account of where this Republican nihilism comes from. At first I was plenty flattered. I called Joe Klein for the fuller scoop. He told me that when Obama related to him he was reading the book, the president was more depressed than he had ever seen him, wrecked by spectacle of John Boehner not being being able to sell the deal he and Obama had reached to his caucus. It forced upon him, apparently, some sort of fresh insight that the Republican Party was crazier than he had ever realized. At that I was worried. Had the president of the United States really not noticed before that Republicans have been fantasizing about reaching across the aisle to annihilate us and pound us into the ground before… August of 2011? If that’s so, is he really qualified for his job?

This art of denial: where does it come from? Last time in this series I wrote about an example from his time working as a community organizer. The formative political experience of his career came in the midst of a virtual municipal civil war in which white Chicago alderman preferred to shut down city government rather than let a black mayor govern—and yet Obama seemed to learn no lessons from the experience of reactionary recalcitrance, or at least has acknowledged none.

With trepidation, I want to take the inquiry further back.

In 1966 an Indonesian graduate student in Hawaii lost his student visa and had to return to his native country. His wife, Ann Dunham, and his stepson, then known as Barry Soetoro, soon moved to join him. The boy was soon to be six years old. He stayed in Indonesia for more than four years. Wingnut commentary has focused on how this interval in Barack Obama’s biography helped turn him into a Muslim sleeper-cell agent, of course. But more-or-less liberal Obama chroniclers have made arguments about the influence these years had on him, too: as Chris Bray has written in an outstanding essay on the misplaced sentimentality in sympathetic Obama biographies, the Indonesia experience is said more or less to have been what turned the future president into a multiculturalist and a high-minded idealist.

Bray quotes Janny Scott, author of A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother (which I have not read): “Jakarta had a magical charm…the city felt friendly and safe.” And then Bray quotes an extended passage in which Scott spins as synecdoche for that warm, friendly magic a riff on Indonesian snacks: “They include seafood chips, peanut chips, fried chips from the mlinjo tree, chips made from ground rawhide mixed with garlic, sweet-potato snacks, mashed cassava snacks, sweet flour dumplings made with sesame seeds, sticky rice flavored with pandanus leaves, sticky black rice sprinkled with grated coconut, and rice cakes wrapped in coconut leaves or banana leaves, to name a few….”

David Remnick, in his biography The Bridge (which I also have not read) says that in Indonesia Ann Dunham “was Barry’s teacher in high-minded matters—liberal, humanist values…honesty, hard work, and fulfilling one’s duty to others.” Scott has her “work[ing] to instill ideas about public service in her son,” that “sense of obligation to give something back.”

David Maraniss, in Barack Obama: The Story (of which I’ve read a bit), for his part, takes us inside his Jakarta classroom, where the teacher “spoke idealistically of the notion of tolerance.” And he adds to the multiculti garland, “Barry in Indonesia was not just an early coming-of-age story, but also the start of his coming to grips with race,” which brought him “closer to his father in spirit than he would ever [be] again.”

But what these books talk about barely at all, Bray devastatingly claims, is what had happened in Indonesia but months before Lolo Soetoro’s return there: one of the greatest human rights catastrophes of the second half of the twentieth century. Right-wing general Suharto responded to a half-assed coup attempt by leftists that left behind a death toll of six with a massacre estimated as in excess of 500,000 corpses—of Communists, supposedly, of course; but also of ethnic Chinese, Christians, and any other unfortunate communal outliers. Here’s Wikipedia: Methods “of killing included shooting and beheading with Japanese-style samurai swords. Corpses were often thrown into rivers, and at one point officials complained to the Army that the rivers running into the city of Surabaya were clogged with bodies. In areas such as Kediri in East Java, Nahdlatul Ulama youth wing (Ansor) members lined up Communists, cut their throats and disposed of the bodies in rivers. The killings left whole sections of villages empty, and the houses of victims or the interned were looted and often handed over to the military.”

And here’s Bray after quoting Janny Scott’s roll call of snacks: “This is more detail than Scott has managed for the political events of 1965…. In a story about Indonesia in the late 1960s, you can learn about cookies and chips.”

Again, I don’t know how fair Bray’s critiques of the books are; he does note that Janny Scott “has them living in a place where people are unable to eat the fish because of decaying corpses in the water”; and that Maraniss (before claiming that Obama’s classroom was “a place removed”) reflects on the idea that Lolo Soetoro, a former Army officer and present-day civilian Army employee, was likely agonized to have been called back to Indonesia by this murderous government, at the complicity he was apparently being forced into, and that the development must have “stunned and demoralized” Ann Dunham. But what these biographers do all seem to miss is what habits of mind about conflict and trauma such a death-haunted place might have been inculcated in an exceptionally sensitive and precocious American kid growing up there.

I wonder what Ann Dunham told, or didn’t tell, her son about all their Indonesian friends’ missing cousins, sons, fathers—the missing men: military genocides are like that. Wikipedia observes Indonesians don’t even talk about it now—“The killings are skipped over in most Indonesian history books and have received little introspection by Indonesians and comparatively little international attention. Satisfactory explanations for the scale and frenzy of the violence have challenged scholars from all ideological perspectives”—and surely didn’t talk about it then.

Ann Dunham worked in the American embassy. That embassy more or less signed off on the massacres, informing Indonesian diplomats they were “generally sympathetic and admiring” of the military’s course of action, even helping with supplies such as radios. I wonder what ghosts stalked the corridors of that building? So think of this kid, surrounded by humanists and intellectuals, encouraged in his inquisitiveness on any and all subjects—except, perhaps, for one subject, in a country that was still fundamentally authoritarian long after the killing stopped. (That’s the point of mass political murder, after all: to enforce obedience through terror.)

And finally: What conclusions can one fairly draw, what questions can one legitimately ask, about the murky corners of a 6-year-old’s, even a 10-year-old’s, past? According to Bray, Obama biographers haven’t had trouble with that question; none doubt that the experience of living in exotic Indonesia shaped him. But what about genocidal Indonesia? I myself come up short trying even to frame, let alone answer, what such a discussion would look like.

So let’s talk about it. Let’s discuss it. What’s the research like about kids growing up in the shadow of national trauma? In the midst of the national repression of trauma? Is there some sort of fatalism that ensues—a shrinking from conflict? A glibness about the reality of conflict—a denial? Is there a line that can be drawn between the operations of Obama’s mind when he acts as if irreconcilables can be reconciled through the force of charisma, and the blunt evidence of his upbringing that sometimes people slaughter those they believe are irreconcilable in cold blood?

Is it fair to draw any line between the repression of the trauma of genocide, and a repression of the trauma gerrymandering?

When Obama hears words—and he has to hear them—like, “I am going there to reach across the aisle to the enemies of freedom and annihilate them and pound them into the ground and take back our power,” how to do they fit into his conception of the world? What does it have to do with Obama’s consistent discomfort with seizing opportunities to push forward his agenda through executive fiat when those (perfectly legally, perfectly precedented) opportunities present themselves? Is it learned helplessness? Or studied strategy, a belief that acting unilaterally on controversial issues in a nation like this cannot but create hatreds too blind to control? Is that what he fears?

Have people even started asking these questions? Have you?

I’m fascinated that when I introduced some of these themes in my post about Obama’s historic silence regarding the far, far more portentous breakdown of decency that he witnessed when living in Chicago, I got very little interest or response. (Contrast that to the intense interest, fascination and concurrence when I rooted Richard Nixon’s adult character formation in experiences that went back hardly earlier in Nixon’s life).

Maybe I’m just wrong? Maybe I’m out of line? Let’s discuss.

Our Obama Bargain (Part 2 of 3)

Rick Perlstein on January 21, 2013 - 10:03 AM ET

Happy Re-inauguration Day. In a post last week, I wrote of the strangeness of our Obama, in his passion for bargaining with people who despise him, and his passion for envisioning deals that, even if struck, deliver nothing particularly good either in policy or political terms. The “bargain” becomes the end in itself, the holy grail. It certainly doesn’t establish trust with his bargaining partners. For instance, his unilateral pay freeze for federal workers announced after the 2010 “Tea Party” elections. That, of course, was meant to build his bona fides among Republicans as a fiscal conservative. How did that work out for you, BHO?

Not just policy bargains, but other kinds of bargains, too. Here’s another example. For the second time in a row, Obama has invited a homophobic right-wing pastor to give his inaugural invocation. Though you won’t hear the Reverence Louie Giglio from the West Front of the Capitol today. The pastor, under fire for his anti-gay views, withdrew his acceptance of the president’ invitation with a plaintive whine, accusing “those seeking to make their agenda the focal point of the inauguration” of persecution. Let the healing begin.

Why is Barack Obama like this? Where does this anything-but-reality-based faith that lions can lay down with lambs come from? The curious thing is that you might have expected experiences of his formative years to have taught him the opposite lesson.

Start with his adulthood, and his first real job, community organizing. He wrote, in Dreams of My Father, of a hard-won lesson of his experience living in New York City just prior to his move to Chicago—of how,

whether because of New York’s intensity or because of its scale, it was only now that I began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class joined; the depth, the ferocity of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well, where no matter how many times the administration tried to paint them over, the walls remained scratched with blunt correspondence between niggers and kikes. It was as if the middle ground had collapsed, utterly.

As an inveterate consumer of national media, he had to have also been aware of the tribal wars then shaping up a half a continent away, in Chicago. He was surely aware of what happened in March of 1983 when the presidential hopeful Walter Mondale and a certain mayor candidate traveled together to an event at a Catholic church in a white working-class neighborhood on Palm Sunday. It was even covered in People magazine, in an article called “Hatred Walks the Streets”:

As Congressman Harold Washington, the black Democrat who would be mayor, arrived, he was met with jeers and epithets: “Blacks go home. Get out of our neighborhood.” Many of the people clinging to lampposts and standing on cars claimed to be lifelong Democrats, but they taunted Washington with placards proclaiming their new allegiance to his Republican opponent, Bernard Epton, 61.

The Rev. Francis Ciezadlo, who had invited both Epton (he declined) and Washington, led former Vice-President Walter Mondale and the candidate past a door defaced overnight with the spray-painted message “Nigger die.” The mood of the pastor’s flock was far from welcoming. In the church vestibule Washington and Mondale sized up the situation and left abruptly. A lawyer on Washington’s staff, a veteran of the civil rights marches of the 1960s, was stunned by the demonstration’s virulence. “It’s like Alabama was,” he said. Later Washington related the incident to the congregation of his own all-black Progressive Community Church. “We went waving the good hand, the healing hand,” he proclaimed, “so you can understand the shock and chagrin when we were confronted by an angry mob.

In Dreams of My Father he refers to his awareness of Washington’s election obliquely, ironically (it’s an oblique and ironic book). But not much of what happened when Harold Washington took office in Chicago was oblique or ironic. Things were pretty straightforward. “What do you know about Chicago anyway?” he depicts himself being asked in his job interview.

“I thought for a moment. ‘Hog butcher to the world,’ I said finally. Marty shook his head. ‘The butcheries closed a while ago.’ ‘The Cubs never win.’ ‘True.’ ‘America’s most segregated city,’ I said. ‘A black man, Harold Washington, was just elected mayor, and white people don’t like it.’ ”

Obama got the job, of course, and moved to Hyde Park in 1985. He describes how, from the setting of his barber shop, “black people talked about Chicago’s mayor, with a familiarity and affection. His picture was everywhere: on the walls of shoe repair shops and beauty parlors, still glued to lampposts from the last campaign, even in the windows of the Korean dry cleaners and Arab grocery stores… ‘Had to be here before Harold to understand what he means to this city,’ Smitty said. ‘Before Harold, seemed like we’d always be second-class citizens.’…. Clumps of hair fell into my lap as I listened to the men recall Harold’s rise.”

What is fascinating, and telling, is how the rest of the story simply disappears from the book. Obama gets busy organizing in the decrepit far South Side community of Rolseland, suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous poverty, until his frustrations send him to law school to learn “things that would help me ring about real change.” The black mayor has a tiny, awkward walk-on role in a ceremony celebrating a small victory in a fight concerning asbestos; the broader context of the politics in the city Washington was trying to govern while Obama was there are nowhere to be found.

And what was that context? Municipal civil war. Washington came out of the box waving the good hand, the healing hand: “No one in this city will be safe from my fairness,” he said, with easy, witty aplomb. His people wore buttons bearing the word “FAIRNESS.” The twenty-nine organization alderman led by machine hacks Ed Vrydolyak and Ed Burke, turned a deaf ear. Domination was their game. Just like Republicans today.

Voting as a block but not with enough votes to override Washington’s vetoes, the Vrdolyak 29 destroyed the mayor’s ability to govern. The Wall Street Journal proposed Chicago’s informal motto, “The City That Works,” be replaced by “Beirut by the Lake.” City government practically ceased to function—though government also did manage to function, in some places, in the most perverse of ways. Here in Chicago, people tell stories about council wars. About how, if you lived in one of the “Vrdolyak 29” neighborhoods, somehow your garbage managed to get picked up. The councilmen and their ward bosses simply commandeered city garbage trucks—which they also deployed in creative ways, for instance dumping a heap of garbage in a parking lot, staged for a press conference in which Vrdolyak pointed to his fetid prop to demonstrate how Washington was failing as mayor.

Alderman would retreat into back rooms to negotiate peace. Writes Gary Rivlin in his definitive history, Fire on the Prairie, “A battery of reporters would camp outside their meeting room, waiting for word of any compromise. There never was any news to report…. If anything, they had only dug in deeper.” “You asshole,” one alderman would say to another. Or “you little pipsqueak.” Vrdolyak insinuated that Washignton was gay. (“To someone of your gender I should say ‘pretty please.’ ”) Whites and blacks attacked one another. Concluded the publication Chicago Reporter, “Firebombings throughout the Chicagoland area and a six-hour stoning attack on the home of a black family in ‘The Island,’ an all-white enclave…highlighted a year of racial violence.”

Barack Obama saw had front row seats for this. Though he’s never really said anything about it.

In retrospect, if the gods of political biography meant to devise a workshop to teach a budding politician about the blunt limits of a conciliatory attitude in making political change, they would have plunked that politician down in Chicago in the mid-1980s.

And this was where Barack Obama was plunked, in 1985.

Just as significantly, he saw how the council wars ended.

For if the gods of political biography meant to devise a workshop to teach a budding politician about how the way to end irreconcilable conflict between political tribes was not jawboning conciliation but blunt, mean shortcuts, administrative work-arounds to change the rules of the game, even if they might not look pretty in paper—think trillion-dollar platinum coins and filibuster reform—they would have made sure he lived in Chicago in 1986. Which was when Washington’s allies sued the city to invalidate the ward maps drawn up in the 1980 census (in a city 40 percent white, 40 percent black and 15 percent Hispanic there were thirty-three white alderman out of fifty and only one Hispanic). They won, got a 25-25 pro- and anti-Washington split, and, with the mayor casting the tie-breaking votes, suddenly majority ruled.

Obama said in the speech announcing his presidential run that in those years Chicago, he “received the best education I ever had.”

But what was that education?

It’s a question with two equally interesting possible answers. The first is that all this made not much of an impression at all—that perhaps he was so wrapped up in his ground-level antipoverty work that the big picture of City Hall politics didn’t much feel relevant to him, a distraction up at 30,000 feet; or maybe that he was in denial about the whole thing, cosseting himself in a political version of the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change…” Or maybe that he was just choosing his battles.

The second possibility is that it made an enormous impression on him—in fact redoubling his budding inclination to retreat into fantasies of conciliation: that maybe Washington was doing it wrong; that maybe if he had just been more rhetorically persuasive, more fair, he could have made lions lay down with lambs. Or something. That certainly seemed to be the the attitude he took to Harvard Law School—where he believed it to have been vindicated. Remember all those famous stories of how he healed the acrimony at the Law Review by convincing conservative members that he trusted and respected them. He “was a non-combatant. He was mature and held himself above the fray. He was courteous, decent, and respectful,” one of the conservatives on the Review later recalled. That worked out just fine, supposedly. So why shouldn’t it work in Washington?

But staying above the fray is a curious political strategy when civil wars are going down. Some of us find it the Achilles heel of the Obama presidency. But now that his second term is underway, it’s probably not going going away. It’s so deep in him. Maybe it has something to do with a particularly interesting interval in his childhood. I’ll be turning to that story next.

Precedent Ford

Rick Perlstein on January 20, 2013 - 7:41 PM ET

Ah, Algeria: thirty-two militants killed in a ill-advised raid of a hostage compound, but at the expense of twenty-three hostages’ lives (as of last count), saving face, posthaste, being judged more important than saving lives. What kind of testosterone-besotted incompetent fourth-raters could botch a “rescue” like that?

Why, our own beloved United States, of course, which once upon a time did something even more splenetically macho, unilateral, and stupid.

It was May 12, 1975. Not a fortnight earlier, the South Vietnamese army in whose cause America had bestowed hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and expended 56,000 lives, collapsed in the field and started randomly killing civilians and each other. A Viet Cong tank crashed through the gate of the South Vietnamese presidential palace in Saigon, immediately re-dubbed “Ho Chi Minh City.” A chaotic helicopter evacuation of 1,000 American diplomatic and security personnel and 5,500 South Vietnamese (supposedly loyal embassy employees and such, but mostly people with the money and savage cunning to bribe or force their way aboard), ended in that indelibly humiliating image of a line of teeming bodies snaking up a ladder to a precipitous shack atop the embassy roof, the embassy grounds having commandeered by what Henry Kissinger had once confidently dubbed a “fourth rate military power,” North Vietnam (now just “Vietnam”).

And two weeks before that, The Washington Post quoted a remark by Henry Kissinger that he thought had been off the record; “The United States must carry out some act somewhere int he world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.”

“Some act somewhere”: can you smell the liberty?

Then, on May 12, fortuitously, a rusty merchant tin can called the Mayaguez was captured somewhere off the coast of Cambodia, near the island of Koh Tang, having strayed, the new Communist Khmer Rouge regime claimed, out of international waters and into their territory. Cambodia being a nation in chaos (its pro-US government had fallen in the middle of April), communications were sketchy, negotiations difficult, but, as historian Dominick Sandbrook has written “these kinds of situations were hardly unknown and rarely made the headlines. Ecuador, for example, had seized American crews in disputed waters twenty-three times in as many years, and previous administrations had simply paid a fine to release them.”

But Ecuador was not Southeast Asia, and Southeast Asia had just wilted America’s dick.

At a National Security Council meeting, presidential counselor Bob Hartmann told President Ford, “We should not think of what is the right thing to do, but of what the public perceives.” Kissinger, perhaps salivating, said it was time to “draw the line”—and the next night, when no one still knew even where the ship’s thirty-nine crewmen were or whether they were in any sort of jeopardy, Kissinger averred, “I think we should seize the island, seize the ship, and hit the mainland.… people should have the impression that we are potentially trigger happy.”

“You must establish a reputation for being too tough to tackle. If you use force, it should be ferociously.”

Someone asked about the War Powers Act, which required consultation from Congress in the event of military action. Ford responded, “I would hit, and the deal with the legal implications.”

And so he did. A Marine landing party stormed the beaches of Koh Tang—and, meeting heavy resistance, lost fifteen men and eight helicopters. American forces boarded the Mayaguez; it was abandoned. A navy pilot spotted white flags waving from a fishing boat—the Mayaguez crew, safe and sound, ready for rescue. Victory, right?

Not for the newly minted 1974 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Henry Alford Kissinger. “Tell them to bomb the mainland,” he said. “Let’s look ferocious.” So they did, with B-52s. (I love that this dialogue is in Kissinger’s memoirs. He’s proud of it!)

The final score: forty-nine American military deaths. Eighty-two total casualties. Eighty helicopters destroyed. Thirty hostages “rescued”—though it had never been established that they was ever any intention by the Cambodians to keep them (this makes this botch different than Carter’s in Iran; at least then people knew there were hostages). “They were so nice, really kind,” a crew member said. “They fed us first and everything. I hope everybody gets hijacked by them.” He should have hoped that nobody got rescued by Ford. As Sean Wilentz wrote, “Subsequently declassified documents revealed that Ford approved bombing missions which, for all he knew at the time, might easily have killed them men he was trying to rescue.”

Conservatives loved it. “It was wonderful,” Barry Goldwater said. “It shows we’ve still got balls in this country.” National Review’s Jeffrey Hart read Christopher Lasch dare excoriate the raid in The New York Review of Books (“an influential barometer of left-academic opinion”) as a “panicky and premature American resort to force out of proportion to the stakes involved,” and countered that “most people…knew instinctively…that details are irrelevant. It proved that the US government is not paralyzed, and that, in particular, President Ford is capable of acting decisively and with broad support.” Yippie!

But then, most of America loved it, too. Newsweek, the most liberal of the newsmagazines, called it “a daring show of nerve and steel.” Time’s cover pictured the president looking resolute, and exulted, “Ford Draws the Line.” His approval rating shot up eleven points. He started getting standing ovations on his travels.

So today we read, “Western leaders have criticized the Algerian government for failing to consult them before the military action.” Maybe they know what they’re doing. Once upon a time, the United States showed them the way.

Queer Abby

Rick Perlstein on January 18, 2013 - 11:43 AM ET

Abigail Van Buren. (AP Photo/Doug Pizac.)

Sometimes we feel so alone, we liberals, in this country where a massacre of children wins 100,000 new members for the National Rifle Association, where politicians and pundits’ answer to a middle class drowned in predation by plutocrats is to preach a squeeze on government spending, where a president heard in the voices of 3,000 people slaughtered by Al Qaeda an injunction to invade Iraq. The beacons, however, are out there—everywhere, and sometimes where we least expect them. I’m not saying Pauline Friedman Phillips, who published her advice column in some 1,400 newspapers under the pen name Abigail Van Buren, was some Emma Goldman or something. But for millions of ordinary Americans who trusted her, she was frequently a voice of progressive decency on the cutting edge of subjects on which most voices of authority were saying very different things indeed. We lost her yesterday. So here’s an example of what I mean.

In August of 1980 the director of the ballet company of which Ron Reagan, son of the presidential candidate, was a member for some reason felt moved to put out a standement that Reagan and all the other men in his group had “nice girlfriends.”

In the notion that ballet dancers must be gay, and that this was a shamefully horrible thing, he spoke to a fear shared by Ron Reagan’s father, who when Ron dropped out of college in 1977 to become a dancer immediately phoned up Gene Kelly to ask if that meant he was gay. Later, his adopted son Michael helped him process a disturbing discovery: he caught Ron with a woman in his and Nancy’s (gross!) bed. Said Michael, “The bad news is that you came home early and you caught him. The good news is that you found out he isn’t gay.”

“Dear Abby” had a different view. Of the ballet director, a reader wrote in to decry the “sad commentary on our society’s attitude toward human sexuality that such a statement was made at all. Implicity in that announcement were the following erroneous assumptions: 1) That male partification in ballet requries lengthy justification lest it threaten our traditional views of mascuilinity; 2) that all male ballet dancers are suspect and therefore proof of their masculinity is required—i.e., having girfriends; 3) that without proof of their manliness, people might think they were gay; and 4) that being gay is bad.”

The reader asked Abby if she had anything to add. She didn’t. She just wrote, “No. Right on!” (And: “Readers? Write on.” She was democractic that way.) The same column (August 20, 1980) printed a letter of thanks “for your explanation as to why the ERA is a national need,” noting that still, in 1980, the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women’s sufferage was still ritually voted down every year in the Mississippi legislature.

Good thing Mississippi newspaper readers could read Dear Abby. Good thing Mormons could, too; indeed the link to the August 1980 column above is to the Deseret News—Salt Lake City’s Mormon-owned newspaper. Abby blazed trails for liberalism in the most reactionary precincts. People trusted her that way.

And by the way, let’s not forget her twin sister Eppie Lederer, who wrote as “Ann Landers.” She kicked some serious wingnut ass, too. Here she is in 1973 on a subject of current topical interest. A reader, incidentally a chauvenistic douche, writes in, “Annie Old Kid: Here we go again. I refer to your nutty views on guns. I have hunted since I was 12. I have never shot a gun carelessly or caused an animal to suffer.… Give us hunters equal time. Don’t take our guns away.” Ann gave back as good as she got: “Relax, Sport. I don’t want your hunting guns. I’m after the Saturday night specials, the handguns that are killing thousands of innocent people. Those are the murder weapons I’d like to see melted into scrap iron.”

Both of them, no apologies, no hemming and hawing: just straight up, unapologetic moral force. May Annie and Ann rest in peace.

Rick Perlstein last wrote about Barack Obama's rush to compromise when he should push ahead with his platform.

Our Obama Bargain (Part 1 of 3)

Rick Perlstein on January 16, 2013 - 11:49 AM ET

(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais.)

We have on our hands a President Groundhog Day. Tom Tomorrow nails it in this recent cartoon, as he so often does: regularly, and regularly and regularly, Obama initiates a negotiation; finds his negotiating partner maneuvering him into an absurd impasse; then “negotiates” his way out of a crisis with a settlement deferring reckoning (in the former of further negotiation) to some specified time in the future, at which point he somehow imagines negotiation will finally, at long last, work—at which point the next precipice arrives, and he lets his negotiating partners defer the reckoning once more.

First, it was his first failure to repeal the Bush tax cuts. He promised he’d really fight to get it done next year (he didn’t).

Next, in the summer of 2011, stung by his self-proclaimed Tea Party “shellacking” in the midterm elections (compare that to Ronald Reagan’s radically un-conciliatory response to his own shellacking in 1982), he promised to negotiate a deal to reduce the debt by $4 trillion. Then, once he lured John Boehner to the table, the Republican announced as his terms holding the full faith and credit of the United States hostage by threatening not to raise the debt ceiling. The president reportedly thought he and Boehner were working together—“to freeze out their respective extremists and make the kind of historic deal that no one really thought possible anymore—bigger than when Reagan and Tip O’Neill overhauled the tax code in 1986 or when Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich passed welfare reform a decade later.” He also believed, somehow, that Boehner could whip the gang of congressional lunatics he supposedly “led” into obedience. Silly Obama, who ended up with…this year’s debacle, as Tom Tomorrow’s dialogue between Bohner and Obama relates. December: “The arbitrary deadline is almost upon us! We’re about to go over the fiscal cliff!” (Bohner: “Who could have forseen it?) January: “Postonponing the threat of sequestration will buy us a little more time…before the next arbitrary deadline!” (“Sounds like a plan to me!”)

That time he went into those negotiation, of course, with four aces in his hand: the sovereign will of the American electorate, following a comfortable re-election victory borne aloft on the campaign promise to fight for tax hikes for those making over $250,000. Somehow the final disposition ended us up with a tax hike only for those making over $450,000 and left 82 percent of the Bush tax cuts in place permanently. A friend of mine called it the biggest betrayal of a winning coalition by a president since LBJ ran on not sending our boys to Vietnam.

But not to fear: he promises yet once more another bite at the apple: “The new new deadline will solve everything,” he says in Tom Tomorrow’s paraphrase, as Boehner, looking on at the sublime sucker in his midst, exhales contentedly, “Of course it will.”

As Paul Krugman put it, the bad taste in progressives’ mouths “has less to do with where Obama ended up than with how he got there. He kept drawing lines in the sand, then erasing them and retreating to a new position. And his evident desire to have a deal before hitting the essentially innocuous fiscal cliff bodes very badly for the confrontation looming in a few weeks over the debt ceiling. If Obama stands his ground in that confrontation, this deal won’t look bad in retrospect. If he doesn’t, yesterday will be seen as the day he began throwing away his presidency and the hopes of everyone who supported him.”

But he never really stands his ground, does he?

Or to put it more accurately, he continues to presume good faith on the part of his adversaries by deferring the reckoning for the next negotiation. He imagines they’re playing the same game as he is: struggling nobly toward the goal of a “Grand Bargain,” each side giving up something of their cherished shibboleth—Democrats, spending and entitlement programs; Republicans, tax cuts. Even though in real life Boehner’s minions have already pledged never to revisit the tax question ever again—on the Sunday shows on January 6 Mitchell McConnell confidently announced, “The tax issue is finished, over, completed. That’s behind us"—and see ahead of them only a grand opportunity to confront “the biggest problem confronting our country…our spending addiction.”

In Groundhog Day at least Bill Murray learned something by the last reel. Not him. In our last reel with Obama we’ll still be in purgatory. Because the world simply doesn’t work in the way that he thinks it does. And yet he insists that it must.

We’ve arrived at a question of character, or deep psychological disposition. I’ve always thought of Barack Obama’s obsession with a “Grand Bargain”—Democrats give something on spending, Republicans give something on taxes—as having very little to do at all with concrete policy questions. After all, the austerity Obama seems to want has more and more been revealed as bad policy. Bad politics, too, of course. More and more, in fact, I wonder whether in some deep wellspring of his being this isn’t ultimately the point: if it’s bad, then it must be good. After all, he’s always said such deals should “hurt.” In the rhetoric of hurt lives the magic thinking: that the pain in itself makes for noble transcendence. In itself—not in the policy outcome.

There’s something so arbitrary about it, so cliché: pick the one thing that Republicans are supposed to cherish most (tax cuts!). Pick the one thing Democrats are supposed to cherish most (spending!). If you get both to give up what they cherish, something transcendent has occurred; something mystical; something deep, deep inside America’s soul—healing!

It’s almost as if, were the Democrats’ most cherished nostrum was that the sky is blue; and if the Republicans’ most cherished nostrum were that the sky is red, Obama somehow imagines that if he can somehow get both to agree that the sky is purple, lo and behold, America will finally be a warm and conciliatory place.

But guess what! The sky is blue!

To cash out the allegory: Guess what! Spending more during a recession, and keeping faith with Medicare and Social Security, which are not in imminent crisis anyway, is great for the well-being of the country!

And guess what! Even if feckless Democrats are glad to entertain the notion that the sky just might be purple, pronouncing themselves as eager to cut spending as Republicans (vitiating, by the way, the very premise that big spending is some sort of hard-shell Democratic shibboleth), insane, Leninist Republicans will never, ever, ever, ever, ever stray from their conviction that it is red—in other words, that tax cuts magically create prosperity, always and everywhere, every time. Why, here’s Rush Limbaugh braying that very thing the other day.

And yet, for Obama work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die—that we can, all of us, some day, agree about things that are not true, that really help no one, but that, by mere virtue of the agreement, will render us no longer Red America and Blue America but the United States of American. And the sky? Everyone will say it is purple. And this will be counted as a great victory.

To be continued. Next time I write about Barack Obama’s biography—and try to puzzle through where this perverse conception of the ways of the world comes from.