Jimmy Carter’s favorite word when he was president was “sacrifice.” Using UC Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project database, I calculate that he uttered it 479 times in speeches and statements during his four-year term. According to the same database, John F. Kennedy, who famously advised Americans to “Ask what you can do for your country,” used it only 60 times in his own public pronouncements.

Surely the willingness to sacrifice is an admirable value, for individuals as much as for nations. But Carter made it a fetish. Armed with Benjamin Franklin–like adages (“Today’s sacrifice will bring tomorrow’s security”), he compulsively told Americans, who were facing 10 percent inflation and 20 percent interest rates, that doing without was something to cherish. At swearing-in ceremonies for agency appointees, he would boast that the gent standing beside him was choosing to serve the public “at some considerable sacrifice to himself, financially.” At state dinners, he would praise the various host nations’ ennobled citizenry for their stoic endurance of famines, upheavals, or war. At a time when the unemployment rate for African Americans was 14.6 percent, he perversely importuned economic sacrifice in speeches before Black organizations. “We’ve never acquired an additional element of fairness or equity or freedom or justice without sacrifice,” he told the National Urban League in one of the opening speeches of his 1980 campaign. Throughout his presidency, he frequently launched into passionate fits of nostalgia for World War II, when “the challenge of fighting Nazism drew us together.” In one of his most famous speeches, given in April 1977, he deployed the word “sacrifice” 10 times to enlist Americans against an “energy crisis” that he called the “moral equivalent of war”; in an even more famous one, 14 days into his term, he implored Americans to set their thermostats to 65 degrees during the day and 55 degrees at night as he sat in a sweater before a roaring White House fire. (First lady Rosalynn Carter complained that the typists in her East Wing office had to warm their hands with gloves.)

The striking thing was that, when he gave that last speech, the United States was not really in an energy crisis. The country had been, for several months following the 1973 Arab oil boycott, and would be again. But in the interim, the price of gas at the pump had held steady. It seemed as if Carter were seeking excuses to demand that Americans make do with less. And when oil supplies finally did contract following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, he sounded almost giddy: “I don’t look on conservation or saving energy as a burden or an unpleasant sacrifice. It can be an inspirational thing. It can be an enjoyable thing. It can bring families together. It can bring communities together. It can make us proud of ourselves.”

Yet there was one time during Carter’s career when he didn’t call for sacrifice: when he ran for president in 1976. In campaign position papers and interviews with journalists, he averred that while inflation “must not be ignored,” America’s “major economic problem” was “unacceptably high unemployment,” so “we must pursue an expansionary fiscal and monetary program in the near future, with some budget deficits if necessary.” He campaigned, in other words, as a Keynesian. Later in the campaign, he explained that the wave of inflation that the United States had suffered in 1974 and ‘75 had been the “transient” consequence of “the big jump in oil and food prices”—explicitly rejecting the regnant theory that it was caused by excessive government spending. He also promised to enlist the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and said that incoming presidents should get to appoint a new Fed chair who would be more aligned with the administration’s policies. But once in office, Carter changed his tune. When inflation again surged, he lectured that the cause was excessive government spending, to which the only appropriate response was… sacrifice. He quoted, over and over again, something Walter Lippman said in 1940: “You took the good things for granted. Now you must earn them again…. [Y]ou will have to sacrifice your comfort and ease.” As president, Carter successfully gutted a bill that he had run on: to create a federal guarantee of full employment. He also answered the clamor from Wall Street to choose an “inflation hawk” to chair the Federal Reserve. His appointee, Paul Volcker, then instituted—with Carter’s approval—a program of radical shock therapy intended to grind economic growth to a halt. Carter spoke of the necessity of “pain” so often during these years that the humorist Art Buchwald wondered whether Americans hadn’t voted in a sadomasochist. When inflation refused to budge, Carter replaced his original budget proposal for the fiscal year 1981, which he had previously boasted was “lean and austere,” with one that was $18 billion leaner, including a reduction of $1 billion in welfare spending. He also unveiled changes in bank rules to make it harder to use credit cards. (Volcker considered this a squeeze too far; Carter talked him into it.) Many complained, and reasonably so. But Carter’s response was to insist that those criticizing him were, as he told the National Urban League, “creating disunity among those who are on the cutting edge of progress and compassion and love.”

Politicians say things to get elected and then, once in office, do otherwise; that’s politics. But Carter demanded that we grade him on a curve. His signature campaign promise was “I’ll never tell a lie. I’ll never make a misleading statement. I’ll never betray your trust or avoid a controversial issue. If I ever do any of these things, then I don’t deserve your support.” And yet it was all a con.

Kai Bird’s massive new biography of Carter, The Outlier, never quotes him on the subject of sacrifice. Nor does it address the 39th president’s obsession with it, and it offers not a word on the essential bait-and-switch between his campaign and his presidency. These elisions make sense, in part, because of the book’s thesis: that Carter was not an austerity president who augured the coming of a new neoliberal age but rather a populist whose “instincts were always liberal.” Carter was also neither a mediocre nor a failed president, we are told by Bird, but a near-great one. He was not an entrepôt between political eras but rather a profoundly consequential leader whose “unbending backbone” advanced all manner of liberal goals as far as they could possibly go in a lowdown, dirty age. A foreign policy prophet who “refused to take us to war” or fall prey to what he called “our inordinate fear of Communism,” Carter birthed a human rights revolution in US foreign policy that “none of his successors” could “walk back.” Bird acknowledges the possibility that Carter ever indulged political expediency only once in the Oval Office—stopping to observe that, while he occasionally did so as governor, the presidency “unleashed Carter’s natural instinct to ‘do the right thing’ regardless of political consequences.”

There is a lot to disagree with, in whole or in part, in The Outlier’s depiction of Carter, but one of the reasons it is worth reading is that Bird, an accomplished and highly respected biographer who won a Pulitzer Prize for his cowritten life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, fair-mindedly sets down many of the counterarguments to his own case that Carter was a good president. That is why, reading The Outlier, this reader came away with a wealth of new reasons to confirm why he was, at least as president, often so bad.

immy Carter was born in 1924 in tiny Plains, Ga.—population less than 700, then and now. His father, Earl Carter, was a local agricultural baron. Earl died in 1953, and Jimmy abandoned a promising Navy career to take over his peanut warehousing business. While his father had been a conventionally parochial and racist figure in local politics, Carter’s mother was an astonishing woman about whom not a single thing was conventional. Lillian Carter was the only white woman for miles around who would go into a Black person’s home. She was a profoundly self-confident and inner-directed individual who in 1966, at the age of 67, volunteered to join the Peace Corps and be sent basically anywhere her nursing skills were needed. That was the year her youngest son, now a back-bencher in Georgia’s weak state senate, decided to run for governor—a decision surpassed in its ambitiousness only when, in 1972, with less than two years as governor under his belt after his second, successful run, Carter began laying plans to run for president of the United States.

People driven to become the most powerful person in the world are not normal people. Think Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy (as well as Bobby and Teddy), Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama: All had mothers who inculcated in them the conviction that they were so special that they could accomplish anything and should ignore what anyone else said on the matter. And also fathers who were either emotionally or literally absent, stern figures who haunted their sons with the nagging feeling that no matter how much they accomplished, it would never be enough to win them over. Jimmy Carter was no different. He once even wrote a poem about it: “And even now I feel inside / The hunger for his outstretched hand, / A man’s embrace to take me in, / The need for just a word of praise….”

A childhood like this is a pitilessly efficient machine for producing a preternatural drive for accomplishment: the sort of drive it takes, for instance, to run for president as a free-spending Keynesian and then to govern as a penny-pinching austerian, all while claiming utter honesty as your political calling card—and performing the claim so unflinchingly that much of the world still buys it.

Bird certainly does; it’s what, in his view, makes Carter the “outlier” of his title. Consider that crucial policy issue of what causes inflation and how to solve it. Bird summarizes Carter’s conclusion (at least his conclusion as president) as follows: “The right response was to prioritize the fight against inflation by cutting the federal budget deficit.” For the next several hundred pages, Bird gives the reader no reason to question that conclusion, let alone why Carter should have or why he had in the past. He does, however, report much later in the book that others did—and that they, in fact, told Carter he should as well: “In the spring of 1977, Labor Secretary [Ray] Marshall flatly told Carter, ‘Budget deficits do not cause inflation.’ Marshall pointed out that the fiscal deficit in 1974 was only $5 billion and yet the inflation rate was 9 percent. Two years later, the deficit had spiked to $66 billion and the inflation rate had fallen to only 5 percent.”

That Carter was presented with this data and then ignored it is an astonishing piece of information. He should have known better. Carter was famous—and sometimes infamous—for the ruthless, evidence-based analytical detachment with which he reached his policy conclusions. One observer compared this tendency to the way his early mentor, Adm. Hyman Rickover, approached matters relating to the Navy’s nuclear submarine corps: “[He] has to know how every single engine or pump works.” But when it came to inflation, Carter was anything but cool and empirical. He believed that stopping inflation required sacrifice, no matter what the evidence or data suggested.

This conviction would prove fateful in the decades to come: The next two Democratic presidents would sacrifice federal spending, especially on social programs, upon this same altar. All this sacrifice was great for the investor class, who kept getting richer, but terrible for the working class, whose stagnating wages could have used some augmenting by more aggressive social spending. The class-biased nature of the “deficits kill economies” cult was rendered explicit in Bill Clinton’s reaction to Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan’s advice to abandon the economic stimulus program he had promised on the campaign trail. Such spending, Greenspan claimed, would stoke inflation and spook the investor class, and the economy would spiral into the toilet. “You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” Clinton responded.

That claim was proved false beyond a shadow of a doubt in the Clinton years and again in the Obama years: Both presidents inherited massive deficits from their Republican predecessors, but inflation kept declining nonetheless. Yet the die had been cast: Carter’s economic policies on inflation and deregulation would set the standard for the Democratic Party. In his catalog of reasons why he considers Carter’s presidency so consequential, Bird notes that, thanks to a deregulatory measure that Carter championed, “Craft beer became ubiquitous.” What was most consequential—economic policies that turned the Democrats away from deficit spending and expansive social programs and toward neoliberal budgetary austerity and friendliness to Wall Street—goes unmentioned.

n the subject of what was perhaps Carter’s greatest achievement, however, Bird is outstanding. His freshly researched and detailed account of Carter’s brokering of the landmark peace deal between Israel and Egypt is nearly worth the price of the book alone. In it, Bird masterfully conveys how exquisitely intricate Carter’s long-term game planning was for those famous 13 days at Camp David—and how adroitly he improvised on the fly when those plans went awry. We also see Carter’s gift for reading fellow politicians and cutting to the quick of their psychological drives. When Israel’s intransigent prime minister, Menachem Begin, was on the verge of scuttling the negotiations altogether, Carter handed him pictures of the summit, individually inscribed to each of his grandchildren, and said he hoped to meet them someday and say, “This is when your grandfather and I brought peace to the Middle East.” Begin teared up and remained.

It’s remarkable to watch Carter knowing just when to risk a scathing remark and when to say nothing at all; when to horse-trade and when to hold fast, ever reassessing the balance between the visionary and the pragmatic; when to salve a tender ego and when to provoke; when to make an end run and when a direct charge. You realize, in other words, what a skillful politician Jimmy Carter could be.

But this display of political skill just makes it all the more excruciating to observe him, in almost every other project, refusing to do politics at all. The pattern is familiar to any student of Carter’s presidency. He would announce the most sweeping policy proposal imaginable—such as his original energy program, with each of its 113 interlocking provisions affecting some constituency somewhere in a different way, devised in secret over 90 days with his “energy czar,” James Schlesinger, a Republican. Every single member of Congress, including the leaders of his own party, learned about it at the same time as the American people did, and in the same way: on TV. Carter then expected them to pass it unchanged—accusing them of selfishness, a lack of patriotism, or stupidity, often publicly, whenever they balked. By the time he came up for reelection, Carter had pulled this sort of stunt so often, and had so adamantly held himself aloof from any process of negotiation, that he had barely any political friends left at all.

This is my Jimmy Carter—a kinder, gentler unitary executive, with solar panels; our first “I alone can fix it” president. The signs were there long before Carter won the nomination. He had a favorite formulation in the early months of the 1976 primary season, before he apparently banned the word “sacrifice” from his campaigning vocabulary: “There is only one person in this country who can speak with a clear voice to the American people, who can set a standard of morals, decency, and openness, who can spell out comprehensive policies and coordinate the efforts of different departments of government, who can call on the American people for sacrifices and explain the purpose of that sacrifice and the consequences of it. That person is the president.”

I see Carter’s self-regard as overwhelming; Bird sees things in quite nearly the opposite way. That comes across most strikingly in a chapter called “Troubles With a Speechwriter.” In it, Bird reviews a tense moment in the spring of 1979, when Carter’s approval rating was dipping down to 40 percent and an extraordinary cover article appeared in The Atlantic by his former speechwriter, James Fallows, then 28 years old, which explained why he had quit in disillusionment—a disillusionment that by then had become widespread.

What were the reasons, Fallows asked, for “the contrast between the promise and popularity of [Carter’s] first months in office and the disappointment so widely felt later on”? He came to a striking conclusion: that Carter was driven not so much to do good things as to be seen as a good person. Articulating his own goodness in contrast with the implicit deficiencies of everyone else—for instance, their reluctance to sacrifice—is something he seemed actively to seek opportunities to do.

Consider an example from the time when the endless lines to buy gas began snaking through Southern California’s streets. To grasp why Carter’s response was so odd, one must first understand a paradox of the 1979 energy crisis: The actual supply deficit was rather small. The reason the gas lines were many times longer than usual, even though supplies were never down more than a fraction, was psychological: Panicked drivers responded to news that gas was growing scarcer by keeping their tanks “topped off” at all times—which only produced more scarcity, much like what happened with toilet paper at the beginning of the Covid crisis. The most effectual response a leader can generally offer at times like this is to dial down the panic.

Carter could have implored people to stop topping off their tanks. But in a statement to Southern Californians, he mentioned that practical solution only briefly at the end of a very long lecture that began by exacerbating the panic by noting that the problem could be “maybe worse next year.” (In fact, it went away within months.) Carter then reminded Americans that he had warned them this fuel shortage would happen, though they had refused to listen, and that it likely wouldn’t have occurred at all if Congress had been willing “to vote for steps that may be a little unpopular.” (This is unlikely.) Then he dilated, in numbered points, upon the history that had brought us to this situation; they included: “My decision that priority in a time of shortage must be given to heat for homes, hospitals, etc., and to food production.”

I love that detail: While his constituents were greedily guzzling gas, Carter wanted to make sure they knew he was busy providing for the sick, the cold, and the hungry. It was a sacrifice sermon, at the expense of doing his job; instead of using the presidential bully pulpit to solve a discrete problem, he was preening. As Fallows put it, “Jimmy Carter tells us that he is a good man. His positions are correct, his values sound. Like Marshal Petain after the fall of France, he has offered his person to the nation.” (Oh, and about those solar panels: Carter’s energy policies were far more about economic nationalism than conservation; much more important than promoting renewable energy was promoting American coal to replace imported oil.)

Bird sees Fallows’s article differently than I do, and also differently than another Carter speechwriter, Hendrik Hertzberg, who called it “very, very accurate” and “very, very good.” For Bird, it was a series of cheap shots from a disgruntled employee and did more to tank Carter’s presidency than the behavior it describes. Bird, after all, sees Jimmy Carter as Carter saw himself: If the things he did didn’t work, the problem was everyone else.

That perspective emerges in repeated tell-tale tropes throughout the biography. Carter is always seeking to “do the right thing,” in contrast with every other elected official at the time. (“Once again, he was astonished at the pettiness of the key senators sitting on the fence. Carter just wanted them to do what they knew was the right thing.”) He is described in terms of his “instincts”—“liberal,” “populist,” and erring toward “boldness”—instead of his actions. We are told about his noble internal state at times when Carter does things that are not liberal, populist, or bold—such as when he praised the shah of Iran as an admirable leader, unceremoniously fired a feminist aide for perceived disloyalty, or ordered the CIA to prop up the anti-communist dictator of Nicaragua. His awful decisions happen “inexplicably”; the noble ones, on the other hand, are Carter “showing his true colors”—even when what’s described as “inexplicable” conforms to a pattern, and the “true colors” betray a far more muddled hue.

ird’s claims of Carter behaving inexplicably are most pronounced when he writes about foreign policy, a subject that poses a conundrum for the sympathetic liberal biographer. Carter began his presidency announcing that human rights would be the new benchmark for US foreign policy—to replace, as he put it in a glorious speech that first, hopeful spring of 1977, an “inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in our fear.” As his secretary of state, Carter appointed Cyrus Vance, a diplomat who enthusiastically supported this vision. But as national security adviser, he appointed Zbigniew Brzezinski, who despised it.

There’s really no way to simplify the complexity of the foreign policy that resulted, which included many remarkable and courageous breaks with Cold War orthodoxy but also some abject surrenders to it. Yet Bird manages to find a handy device: When it comes to the bad stuff, the buck stops with Zbig. This implacable Svengali repeatedly advised bloodthirsty and reckless solutions that Carter, with his “natural instincts,” tried to ward off, until finally Brzezinski—who somehow managed to snooker the president into meeting with him more than any other adviser, and certainly far more than his diplomacy-minded secretary of state—ended up “wearing him down.”

That comes in May 1979, as the Islamists were rising up against the Soviet-aligned government of Afghanistan and Brzezinski persuaded Carter “to authorize a covert CIA program to fund this rebellion and to supply nonlethal aid to these conservative Muslim tribesmen.” Bird repeats that word—“nonlethal”—when discussing Carter’s signing of a second authorization of this aid in July. Yet Carter himself proved to be considerably more revealing about the aid than his biographer in a note in the book version of his White House diary, published in 2010: He explains how the CIA scoured international arms markets for weapons of Soviet manufacture, which were then routed to Pakistan to pass on to the mujahideen. Yet even here, Carter was not so frank as to reveal why this subterfuge was undertaken: The Symington Amendment, signed by President Gerald Ford in 1976, had banned arms sales to countries involved in nuclear proliferation, as Pakistan was ruled to be by Carter himself.

Brzezinski, Bird duly notes, was also pretty clear with Carter about his hope that the aid might spur a decision by the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan. Despite knowing this, Carter expressed shock when the invasion took place. Then, in a State of the Union address that stated that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan “could pose the most serious threat to world peace since the Second World War,” he announced that the United States was prepared to go to war to protect Persian Gulf oil two countries away if it was ever threatened by the Soviets (something they had no intention of doing).

This promise to defend the Persian Gulf militarily became known as the Carter Doctrine. Bird says it “would have been more accurate to call it the ‘Brzezinski Doctrine’”—since these words were in the speech because Vance “had lost another skirmish in his bureaucratic warfare with Brzezinski.” A president’s poor judgment is apparently excusable if he is simply reading whatever words are set down in front of him on the podium. One should also not forget the timing of this State of the Union address. Carter was heading into a reelection race against an increasingly hawkish Republican Party, for which he replaced his 1976 campaign promise to cut the military budget with a promise to increase it. None of this is inexplicable; Carter had just made a similar decision with regard to Nicaragua and, a year earlier, had made noises about sending the CIA to intervene against the Cuban forces in Angola. He was stopped by a 1975 law specifically preventing that, which The New York Times reported he’d been lobbying senators to repeal.

ird is also confident about the nobility of Carter’s inner being when it comes to the subject of race. Yet here, too, Carter appears to be less noble than Bird allows. It’s true that, first in the Navy, then as a businessman in Plains, Carter often showed extraordinary courage when it came to the subject of racial equality, sometimes at great personal cost. Things grew muddy, however, when he made his second bid for governor in 1970. In his first try, he’d been defeated by the segregationist Lester Maddox. In his second run, he decided on a campaign strategy that included winning over Maddox’s segregationist base. The most notorious example was a leaflet that his campaign put out with a photograph of his opponent, Carl Sanders, celebrating a victory with Black members of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team, of which he’d been co-owner. This embarrassment became more broadly known when the journalist Steve Brill published a piece in the March 1976 issue of Harper’s, “Jimmy Carter’s Pathetic Lies,” which holds up quite well, prompting a series of threadbare alibis from Carter partisans about what actually happened in 1970—it all supposedly went on without his knowledge—which don’t hold up so well.

“Someone distributed leaflets” is how Bird puts it. He then reassures us that Carter “was indeed a liberal by any measure—but he was determined not to be labeled one.” And Bird goes on to tell a story about Carter’s closest friend and adviser, a corporate lawyer named Charles Kirbo, who advised him after his victory not to join those fashionable Southern politicians who made themselves publicly “critical of some of our traditions in an effort to make themselves acceptable on a national scale.”

Carter delivered a famous inaugural address as governor in which he chose not to take his best friend’s advice—intoning instead, to shocked murmurs (and to adulation that put him on the cover of Time), “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.” Concludes Bird, “Carter was showing his true colors.” But his true colors became far more challenging to discern a little more than a year later, when Carter led a bloc of Southern delegates seeking to sabotage the presidential nomination of George McGovern. Bird veritably glides over that part of Carter’s ascent to national prominence, in four short paragraphs aimed at establishing how Carter “kept his distance” from George Wallace and his followers. But this is not true. In fact, in 1972, Carter presented McGovern with an ultimatum that was very much in line with what Wallace and his followers thought and said about federal efforts to reverse some of those Southern traditions: He demanded that McGovern denounce what Carter called “that discriminatory provision of the Voting Rights Act” requiring the Justice Department to review the voting laws in Southern states to assure they wouldn’t disenfranchise Blacks. If McGovern refused, Carter continued, he would lead a delegate walkout at the Democratic National Convention.

We don’t hear about this episode in Bird’s new biography. Nor do we hear how, in his campaign for president against Gerald Ford in 1976, Carter used Wallace, who endorsed him, as a campaign surrogate—as well as two Mississippi senators, John Stennis and James Eastland, who were campaigning for their party’s presidential nominee for the first time in 20 years. Carter said it was a “great honor for me to be campaigning” with two “statesmen” who were “committed to absolute integrity,” only to see the two put that integrity on display in a different way: They wouldn’t let Carter lie about their records. When a reporter pointed out that he had just claimed that the two senators had accepted the “complete and total integration of the South” with “courage” but then noted that Stennis and Eastland had opposed every civil rights bill, Carter responded, “I doubt that that’s correct.” Stennis and Eastland, however, were quick to set the record straight: “I never voted for a civil rights bill in my life,” Stennis said. Eastland added, “Neither did I.”

hat’s politics, where true colors are hard to find. Yet Carter had some, I think. You can discern them in Bird’s most remarkable archival find: Kirbo’s memos to Carter from the 1960s all through his presidency, from which we learn, among other things, that Carter’s best friend was an abject racist. Nonetheless, Carter never seemed to have considered separating from him. Loyalty to those who were loyal to him was one of his true colors—a trait that could shade into something almost like cronyism.

About Brzezinski, we learn that “Carter did his best to resist [his] hawkish views, but he never considered firing him,” because “the personal chemistry was right.” Nor, until it was almost too late, did he distance himself from his second-best friend, a Georgia banker named Bert Lance, whom he appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget. Lance was so certain of his friend’s confidence that he expected to end up as the Federal Reserve chair—even though his only relevant experience was managing small Georgia banks, so corruptly, in fact, that he finally had to resign (but not before Carter stood by his side at a press conference after much of the relevant evidence was already on the record and intoned, “Bert, I’m proud of you”).

Or take another close Georgia friend, his louche White House science adviser Dr. Peter Bourne, who dispensed semilegal drug prescriptions to White House staff. Bird strangely says that Bourne was among Carter’s most “mature” aides, a judgment made easier by the fact that Bird neglects to mention the time Bourne snorted cocaine—which he called in a 1976 article “probably the most benign of illicit drugs currently in use”—at a Christmas party crowded with journalists and politicians. Carter was finally forced to push him out, too—but not Hamilton Jordan, another Georgia crony (there really is no more suitable word), despite his habit of missing meetings, insulting congressional leaders to their face, and never returning phone calls. Jordan’s top deputy described him as “a child.” At the nadir of his presidential popularity, Carter elevated Jordan to chief of staff.

There are many more such examples. In fact, one of The Outlier’s considerable strengths is that, as a result of Bird’s comprehensiveness and fair-mindedness, we are presented with so many counterexamples that disprove the idea that Carter was an outlier. Reading the book, we get to see arrayed in one place how many close advisers Carter kept around him mainly because of how comfortable they made him feel—many because, in Fallows’s shrewd assessment, they owed “their first loyalty to the welfare and advance of Jimmy Carter.”

The banality of Carter—who, like most politicians, preferred aides who sucked up to him—helps explain a finding I made during the hours I spent plowing through the 39th president’s panegyrics to sacrifice. When asked whether it was hard to be president, Carter would often reply, “It’s not a sacrifice to serve as president. It’s gratifying.” Indeed, separating himself from incompetent advisers whose presence made him feel good; accepting the normal give-and-take of politics as part of his duty to his country and his party; not scolding everyday Americans for being less noble than he—any of those things would have been hard. Ironically, the only person from whom Jimmy Carter rarely asked a sacrifice was himself.

What are corporations for? In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman gave a blunt answer: profit. “Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society,” he argued, “as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.” Almost two decades earlier, Karl Polanyi had a different answer. As he wrote in his 1944 book The Great Transformation, allowing profit

to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment would result in the demolition of society…. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized…. No society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organization was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill.

So who was right? Polanyi asked us to look all around us for the answer, at the innumerable laws, norms, and institutions that limit markets and at the destruction an economy without such limits caused in the past. His main examples were World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II, a chain of events that happened, he argued, because society had failed to contain the demons and dislocations loosed by 19th century industrialism. During American capitalism’s postwar golden age, most of the country’s elites agreed that unfettered markets were ruinous. The head of the US Chamber of Commerce in 1946 insisted that “collective bargaining is part of the democratic process. I say recognize this fact not only with our lips but with our hearts.” President Dwight Eisenhower boasted of using “every single force and influence” of government to stabilize the economy and wrote that only the “stupid” sought “to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs.” When Friedman started calling corporate social responsibility a cancer eating away at freedom, he sounded so off-the-wall that his remarks appeared to be little more than deliberate provocation—trolling, as the kids say now.

Then things changed. Starting in the ’70s, corporate profits began to fall. A dollar of capital that earned an average of 9 percent annually in 1966 earned 4 percent in 1977. American economic dominance began to fade. In 1971, for the first time since 1888, the United States ran a trade deficit with the rest of the world, at $1.3 billion; by 1980, it had approached $20 billion. Policy-makers decided to give laissez-faire a shot. Near the midpoint of his new book, Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream, Nicholas Lemann tells a story that helps illustrate this transformation. Robert Reich, the secretary of labor under Bill Clinton—the first Democratic president to occupy the Oval Office in more than a decade—uttered the phrase “corporate responsibility” in a speech and was summoned to the Treasury Department by Robert Rubin, the former investment banker who ruled over the administration’s economic policy, “for an in-person chastisement.” By the ’90s, Friedman had won: Corporations were assigned no responsibility other than to make as much money as possible. With the benefit of hindsight, one might add that perhaps Polanyi had won, too, for in the decades after Reich’s summoning, the economy collapsed, Donald Trump won the White House, and the kinds of calamities that Polanyi warned about began to happen as if on cue.

emann has been one of our wisest, clearest-thinking, and most learned commentators on American society since he began his journalism career at Washington Monthly in the 1970s. His books (The Promised Land, The Big Test, Redemption) all tackle moments of sweeping social transformation, offering compelling studies of the interrelation of ideas and institutions grounded in the experience of ordinary people. Transaction Man, which tracks how the United States went from a largely Polanyian society to one defined by ideas like Friedman’s, is his best—and most sweeping—yet.

Transaction Man’s narrative revolves around a concept that, at first glance, seems banal and of little consequence: The control of corporations has become separated from their ownership. In the late 19th century, the big companies that defined Americans’ lives, like Standard Oil, were extensions of the will of the men who founded them. But by the second third of the 20th century, they’d been transformed into massive bureaucracies “owned” by thousands of individual shareholders who possessed no real power to control them at all. Power, instead, belonged to hired managers, executives who understood the role of their companies as being far more than just maximizing profits for shareholders. They might even go so far as to keep the main factory in the community where it was born in order to sustain that community’s economic health. Which is exactly what got the likes of Friedman so mad: What gave them the right? It wasn’t their money, after all.

To tell this story, Lemann begins with a riveting portrait of Adolf Berle, the first thinker to grasp the significance of this transformation. Berle was born in Boston in 1895, at a time, Lemann observes, when a great transformation unleashed by the Civil War was at its height. A small number of businesses had become so enormous that they rivaled the power of the national government. The best minds of the age conceptualized this change as a threat to the idea of America as a society of free individuals. As Justice John Marshall Harlan explained in a 1911 Supreme Court decision that permitted the breakup of Standard Oil, the nation had rid itself of racial slavery, only to find itself

in real danger from another kind of slavery…that would result from aggregations of capital in the hands of a few individuals and corporations controlling, for their own profit and advantage exclusively, the entire business of the country, including the production and sale of the necessities of life.

When Harlan wrote this decision, Berle was 16 and in his second year at Harvard. By the age of 23, he’d served as an Army staff officer at the Paris Peace Conference, received his master’s and law degrees, and worked in the Boston office of future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis. Then Berle became a Wall Street lawyer, living next door to a settlement house whose founder, the progressive reformer and nurse Lillian Wald, became a mentor.

These identities were not as contradictory as they might seem. Wall Street was a useful crucible for Berle’s vision of social reform, in which the commanding heights of the economy would be organized to serve human needs first. He was learning something new and important from his work writing up stock and bond offerings: that with the passing of a generation of oligarchs like Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller, the ownership of corporations was becoming increasingly separated from their control—a fact that, as he studied it, Berle increasingly came to believe could be exploited to make the world a much better place.

What did the separation of ownership from control mean? In his book The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), cowritten with the economist Gardiner Means, Berle answered this question in an unforgettable way. Imagine a person who owns a horse: “If the horse lives, he must feed it. If the horse dies, he must bury it. No such responsibility attaches to a share of stock. The owner is practically powerless through his own efforts to affect the underlying property.” This is what happened at US Steel. At its founding in 1901, it was but the lengthened shadow of two men, Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan. By 1932, its shareholders numbered almost 175,000, with each individual “owner” controlling nothing. Many companies in the United States followed this pattern as robber barons died off and their corporations became bigger and more complex. Seeking outside investment, they took on thousands of stockholders, and ownership and management began to go their separate ways. The result, as Berle pointed out, was that “the power, the responsibility and the substance which [had] been an integral part of ownership in the past are being transferred to a separate group in whose hands lies control.”

Berle believed that this development could be used to benefit society as a whole. His very influential acquaintance Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 1932 Democratic presidential nominee, agreed: Since corporate managers’ compensation came in the form of salaries, they could be persuaded to act in socially responsible ways that oligarchs would not. In one of modern liberalism’s most famous speeches, given before the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, Roosevelt proposed a new “economic constitutional order” to restrain business and protect workers that came to include old-age pensions, bank deposit insurance, health and unemployment insurance, and regulations holding financial speculation in check. In short, a New Deal.

he paradigmatic moment of the new, more humane economy that Berle envisioned came in 1950, when the United Auto Workers and General Motors inked a remarkable settlement giving factory workers automatic quarterly cost-of-living increases, and company-provided health insurance and pensions. The Treaty of Detroit, as it became known, soon served as a national model. Within 15 years (as one learns in Matt Stoller’s Goliath, another excellent new book on the history of corporations), the percentage of Americans with surgical coverage went from 36 to 72 percent, and the reasons for it were Berle’s reasons. As he put it in a 1954 book, “Mid-twentieth-century capitalism has been given the power and the means of more or less planned economy, in which decisions are or at least can be taken in the light of their probable effect on the whole community.”

And why not? Blue-chip, market-defining firms were stable, perennially profitable, and practically impervious to economic downturns and so could afford to spread the wealth around. Without imperious oligarchs watching their every move or imperious shareholders threatening to pull out if eye-popping returns weren’t posted every quarter, managers could afford to think of the long-term well-being of everyone. It wasn’t their money, after all, and the agency of shareholders was so limited as to make opposition nearly inconceivable.

Examining this period, Lemann shows that the situation described above did not exist only because owners were so numerous and dispersed. Another product of Berle’s influence had made Wall Street finance decorous and staid: the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933, which barred commercial banks from underwriting or dealing in securities and so greatly reined in the sort of dangerous, hyperleveraged speculation that caused the financial system to crash in 1929. Now a small set of regulated investment firms handled the nation’s stock and bond offerings (Morgan Stanley, which broke off from J.P. Morgan for this very purpose, handled 25 percent alone by 1936), and American finance became a far more stable part of the US economy, almost more feudal than capitalist. This was partly for purely cultural reasons. It was the sole preserve of starchy old WASPs.

When a firm like General Motors required a chunk of outside capital (which was rare), a GM executive or two—relatively low-level ones—would meet with a Morgan Stanley partner, who would then convene the other partners and decide how to raise it: stocks or bonds? How many shares? How much per share? There was no competition; “no other banking firm,” Lemann explains, “could try to become the underwriter of that issue because the SEC could review only one firm’s request at a time.” Then they would decide, also unilaterally, which of the lesser firms would get to sell it and how much of the profit would trickle down to these syndicate partners, and the availability of the new stock or bond would be announced in a stark, simple display ad in The Wall Street Journal called a tombstone, which was often enclosed and put on one’s desk as a souvenir.

What might these days take place in seconds took weeks. The lower-level firms would then approach their clients, say a trust officer in Kansas City, who might buy a chunk “to hold on to it for a wealthy widow.” The widow might shake her fist, reading in the morning paper about how the execs at GM were surrendering their corporate liberty to that damned socialist Walter Reuther, but what could she do? “Owners” had no power—and the system wasn’t about to change to accommodate competitors who might devise faster and more flexible ways to move cash around and keep its recipients accountable. In 1947 the US government tried to sue Morgan Stanley as a trust, the judge in the case, after seven years of deliberations, declined to label it thus, ruling that the system worked perfectly well for all concerned and noting the “absolute integrity” of Harold Stanley, one of the firm’s founders.

orporate finance is rather different now. Turn on your TV, and one fictional corporation’s struggle not to be devoured by investors fuels enough cliffhanging melodrama to plot a soap opera. In one episode of HBO’s Succession, an executive addresses the employees of a hot website that his conglomerate purchased to signal to stockholders its hipness; he fires the entire staff to prove its ruthlessness. Not exactly the sort of capitalism in which decisions are taken in light of their probable effect on the whole community. In another episode, a young executive proudly announces a management efficiency he’s been able to realize. (He has stock options to worry about, after all.) “How many skulls?” his supervisor asks lustily.

How did the one regime transform into the other? As a quibbling historian, I sometimes find Lemann’s approach to the answer unsatisfying. In the manner of too many intellectuals, he privileges the role of intellectuals. He also gets the periodization wrong, granting great motive force to an academic paper published in 1976, even though the new phase of financialization was well underway in the previous decade. (Just read Stoller’s account of the financial chicanery that brought down Penn Central railroad in 1970.) And Lemann also prefers to focus on the personalities implementing these changes instead of the structural forces behind them. These include the decline of American corporate profitability, the way formerly colonized nations began withholding access to their resources until their demands for political consideration were met, and the rising industrial strength of Europe and Japan as they rebuilt from the ruins of World War II.

But the story Lemann does tell in this part of the book is so revelatory that I’m glad to put such pedantic concerns aside. He introduces us to the anti-Berle: Michael Jensen, the kind of University of Chicago–trained economist who insists that markets are the only fair way to apportion value in a society because they are the only institutions that are rational. Lemann illustrates the peculiar lunacy of this doctrine by relating how the psychologist Amos Tversky once asked Jensen to “assess the decision-making capabilities of his wife.” Jensen responded by contemptuously citing a series of economically irrational absurdities she indulged in. Then Tversky asked Jensen about his students,

and Mike rattled off silly mistakes they made…. As more wine was consumed, [Jensen’s] stories got better, [and] Amos went in for the kill. “Mike,” he said, “you seem to think that virtually everyone you know is incapable of correctly making even the simplest of economic decisions, but then you assume that all the agents in your models are geniuses. What gives?” Jensen was unfazed. “Amos, you just don’t understand.”

Behavior like this is why Jensen has had two wives and became estranged from his father and daughters. It also illustrates the sort of errant confidence that he and a generation of financial economists brought to arguments about funding corporations that eventually proved instrumental in so destabilizing the economy.

One of Jensen’s major influences was the free-market economist Henry Manne, whose most famous book, Insider Trading and the Stock Market (1966), contended that trading on nonpublic information—a crime—was economically efficient and so should not be illegal. The argument by Manne that Jensen seized on and pushed to its furthest extreme was that stockholders should be granted power to enforce on corporate managers the understanding that their very existence depended only on maximizing profits for stockholders. To encourage them to behave as full-time profit maximizers and nothing but, companies should take on much more debt. They should, in other words, be much, much more unstable, for well-funded corporate treasuries “permitted chief executives to relax,” Lemann writes, “rather than being incessantly, almost desperately worried, as they should be, about making the company more profitable.”

Jensen’s most influential statement of this idea was a 1976 paper, “Theory of the Firm.” Lemann describes it as “long, detailed, [and] formula-filled,” which gave it the appropriately cool aura of science, even if it was also a work of moral dementia. CEOs, the paper argued, were wasting far too many corporate resources on things like “the physical appointments of the office,” “the attractiveness of the secretarial staff,” and “personal relations (‘love,’ ‘respect,’ etc.) with employees,” all mere distractions from the only value that mattered. “Love,” “respect”—no wonder, you imagine Jensen tut-tutting, these irresponsible fools thought twice about decimating entire towns rather than just doing their jobs maximizing shareholder value.

But Lemann overstates the responsibility of Jensen and his colleagues in the changes that took place in the 1970s and ’80s. When corporate managers increased the number of workers illegally fired for union activity, from 3,779 in 1970 to 8,529 in 1980, their attention to articles in the Journal of Financial Economics likely had nothing do with it. But Lemann isn’t wrong in asserting that the “new financial economics” that Jensen and his peers helped launch undeniably contributed to it. They not only provided the intellectual justification for things like paying corporate officials in stock but also invented the sophisticated mathematics behind index funds that tracked the entire stock market, making it much easier to create a mass market for stocks and bonds, and greatly increased the number of people who had a stake in bigger corporate profits. And they innovated fancy computer-driven financial instruments that left the somnolent olden days in the dust. Just as Jensen wished, corporations learned to abjure stability and love exotic forms of debt, and the companies that sold debt—like Morgan Stanley, whose staff ballooned from 2,600 to over 60,000 between 1983 and 2018—rose to the occasion, providing ever more innovative ways to supply it (even as a skeptic of these developments, then–Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker, huffed in 2009 that there hadn’t been a useful financial innovation since the automated teller machine).

Lemann does a very nice job explaining many of these baffling innovations, taking us again inside Morgan Stanley’s offices to meet the men and now, mirabile dictu, the women at the controls. But he best illustrates the cult of instability behind these changes with a story. A top Morgan executive (an enlightened one, as it were: “he demonstrated his commitment to the advent of diversity at Morgan Stanley by offering free golf lessons to women and minority employees”) was rewarded, after a particularly lucrative transaction, with “a smashed telephone headset, of the kind an amped-up trader might create in the heat of a big trade, encased in Lucite as a parody of the old tombstone-ad souvenirs.”

This could not have happened without the dismantling of the regulatory regime that Berle and other New Dealers put in place in the 1930s—laws like Glass-Steagall, which Clinton signed out of existence with the announcement that “this is a very good day for the United States.” Its repeal opened a Pandora’s box, returning America to the pre–New Deal days when corporate finance was characterized, as one of Berle’s mentors put it, by “prestidigitation, double shuffling, honey-fugling, hornswoggling, and skullduggery.” The difference is that our new age of prestidigitation and honey-fugling was intellectually underwritten by a set of doctors of economic philosophy who managed to convince a generation of Democrats that all of this was not just lucrative but also progressive. The flow of dollars, they explained, was really the most democratic way to judge what was worthwhile in society. If dollars kept flowing toward something, that something must be worthwhile in and of itself, and if that something was an exotic financial instrument, its riskiness need not be of much concern because the risk was already priced into it—making it that much harder for them to anticipate the sort of cascading, system-destroying failure that happens when, as history shows they eventually always do, highly leveraged financial instruments fail.

Nowhere is Lemann more enraging than in his description of what he found deep in the bowels of the William Clinton Presidential Library. One example: an eye-opening memo from junior staffers at the Council of Economic Advisers, who were astonished by an Office of Management and Budget report that concluded banking regulation had “cost” the United States roughly $5 billion. “No attempt is made in the report or in the studies it cites to estimate the benefits of regulation of financial markets,” the memo states. Another memo recorded what happened after Brooksley Born, then the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, exercised her jurisdiction to regulate the new $28 trillion market in derivatives (another invention of Jensen’s colleagues in the field of financial economics). She pointed out that if the assets these derivatives were built on were not accurately priced (for example, dodgy home mortgages), the whole financial system could be destabilized. But she simply didn’t understand, then–Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan explained: “Economics should inform these decisions.” Treasury Secretary Rubin was recorded complaining that the “financial community” was “petrified” and that he would simply proceed as if she didn’t have the jurisdiction she claimed. His colleague Larry Summers followed up with a phone call to Born threatening that “if she moved forward…she would be precipitating the worst financial crisis since the end of the Second World War.”

emann grounds the consequences of all these high-flying transformations in the experience of a single Chicago neighborhood known as Chicago Lawn. This was where Martin Luther King Jr. was struck by a rock when he led marches for open housing in 1966. Subsequently, in Lemann’s telling, Chicago Lawn settled into a humble but stable existence as a mixed-ethnicity neighborhood that one of his guides, the former owner of a Buick dealership, remembers as being an “Eden”—but one that, in the wake of all this new financial prestidigitation, suffered decades of deindustrialization.

Was Chicago Lawn ever an Eden? Surely not; nostalgia is a kindness we overlay on a complicated past. But it’s hard not to be impressed by the scene that Lemann paints of one of its institutions, Talman S&L, a “grand block-long building at Fifty-Fifth and Kedzie that was the largest savings and loan office in the country,” on Friday nights. Payday was almost a party, a hive of convivial conversations carried out on couches that the owner provided for the occasion. Sometimes he even hired a band. Institutions like Talman filled out a virtuous cycle: Wages earned at the Chicago Lawn outposts of the great blue-chip corporations became savings; savings deposited at Talman were invested in mortgages, not dodgy financial instruments; and mortgages made for safe and stable neighborhoods that prospered and thrived. The reason this worked was government regulation—including one in Illinois that barred financial institutions from operating in more than one location in the state. This meant that banks served their communities, not transnational circuits of hot money.

Then what became of Chicago Lawn? Imagine Berle’s horse, boiled for glue. “The market for corporate control that Michael Jensen had promoted so enthusiastically affected all the major private employers in the neighborhood, always in the same way: fewer jobs.” An American Can Company factory, a Kool-Aid plant, one that manufactured water heaters, a Sears branch, a Nabisco cookie plant “whose towering factory on South Kedzie was a neighborhood landmark and the largest private employer”—all were victims of the age of transaction.

The Buick dealership, which boasted “an overwhelmingly black clientele, a black manager, and a union shop with lots of black employees,” survived for a time; the owner adjusted to the neighborhood’s straitened circumstances by selling more used cars and by putting up a basketball hoop for kids in the neighborhood. Then GM nearly went under, a victim of the credit crunch after the 2008 crash—and the fact that it had turned itself into one more company that relied for its health on selling debt. The Obama administration’s auto bailout was devised by financier Steve Rattner, who demanded the shuttering, without warning, of hundreds of dealerships around the country. Yet the owners of those dealerships successfully petitioned their congressional representatives for a reprieve, much to Rattner’s astonishment. Figures on a balance sheet aren’t supposed to talk back, and to see Congress pay so much attention to their pleas left him, as he noted in his autobiography, “mystified.” But the Chicago Lawn Buick dealership went under anyway, largely, it seems, because GM loaded it down with so many financial obligations (for example, demanding a redesign and renovation of the dealership by a GM-approved architect). So that was that. The neighborhood institution is now a Wendy’s, after years as a vacant lot.

The most moving parts of Transaction Man take us inside the struggles of Chicago Lawn’s priests, community organizers, and ordinary neighbors to manage the wreckage. Many of them not infrequently become wrecks themselves. Earl Johnson, the “unofficial mayor of the 6300 block of South Rockwell,” was almost arrested by cops demanding to know why he was sitting in his car. “Before it all died down, the police had beaten up Earl’s brother.” In another case, he was sitting in his backyard with neighbors when they were set upon by an armed young marauder, whom Earl attempted to subdue. In the midst of that, “one of the boy’s friends came up, plucked out the gun, and shot Earl in the back. “Between the gangs and the police,” he had finally had enough. He moved to a small town in Indiana and got a job at a plant that happened to produce police cars.

Jensen also undergoes a transition in the period covered by the book, although it’s almost too absurd to believe. After the economy collapsed in 2008 for many of the same reasons it did in 1929 (unregulated, hyperleveraged hornswoggling), he revisited his earlier academic work and decided that the only reason his theories didn’t work was that economic actors had not yet learned to act rationally. To remedy this, they must study, as Jensen now does with frantic devotion, the ideas of Werner Erhard, the founder of a 1970s self-help cult. If enough people internalized Erhard’s ideas—taught in seminars with titles like Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological/Phenomenological Model—then, as Lemann paraphrases his subject, there would be “a benign revolution in human affairs” and “soon people would prove, with rigorous, quantitative research, that companies adhering to [Jensen’s] idea of integrity performed far better economically than companies that did not. That this had not happened yet did not affect his certitude.”

Reading about Jensen moving around the globe preaching New Age babble in order to redeem the failings of another set of fraudsters his ideas helped enable in the first place, it’s hard to discern what is goofier: that or the ideas that made him one of the most influential economists on planet Earth.

ransaction Man has a final profile, of Reid Hoffman, the founder of the job seeker’s social network LinkedIn. This profile is incredibly illuminating. Better than I ever did before, I now understand how closely the Silicon Valley business model, whose architects somehow believe themselves to be leading us to a New Jerusalem, resembles what is politely referred to as multilevel marketing or, to put it more bluntly, a pyramid scheme. In this new iteration of corporate finance, investors shovel money to disrupters in fantastical amounts, even though the vast majority of them will fail. One study Lemann cites found that among venture capital recipients (who constitute the cream of the crop, since the vast majority of supplicants receive no funding), three-quarters will fail.

The only possible way such investing could make sense is if the venture capitalists are placing bets that they will someday buy into a monopoly; indeed, it is only at a monopoly-like scale of market domination that a social network company can hope to make money at all. So we’re back where we started: aggregations of capital in the hands of a few individuals and corporations controlling, for their profit and exclusive advantage, the sale of certain necessities of life—in this case, our social relationships, the ties that bind, the very stuff of psychic life itself.

Meanwhile, the material world grinds on. In destitute Chicago neighborhoods, social media has become one more factor in the world Polanyi warned we might get if society failed to restrain the destructive forces of the market and profit maximization. Two sample headlines: “Fatal Chicago Shooting Captured on Facebook Live” and “Chicago ‘Gang Member’ Streams His Own Shooting Death.” But after telling Hoffman’s story, the book does not take us back to Chicago Lawn. Instead, Transaction Man peters out with one of those short How to Solve It All chapters that publishers love to insist must be tacked onto books about social problems.

Perhaps the reason for this is that Lemann ran out of pages or, possibly, time. If so, it’s a bad break, because this summer, as his book went to press, history provided him the material for another, more interesting conclusion. The Business Roundtable, an organization founded in 1972 whose membership consists solely of the chief executive officers of some 200 of America’s biggest corporations (including Citigroup, where Robert Rubin went to work after his government service), announced that it was “modernizing its principles on the role of a corporation.” A press release noted that since 1997, each of the Roundtable’s periodic statements on the principles of corporate governance had insisted “that corporations exist principally to serve shareholders.” That, the Roundtable now claims, “does not accurately describe the ways in which we and our fellow CEOs endeavor every day to create value for all our stakeholders, whose long-term interests are inseparable.”

This new manifesto pledged the group to work toward an “economy that allows each person to succeed through hard work and creativity and to lead a life of meaning and dignity.” The bullet points enumerate the many goals that the signatories are committed to, such as “delivering value to our customers,” “investing in our employees,” “dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers,” “supporting the communities in which we work,” and—last and (we are very much meant to assume) least—”generating long-term value for our shareholders.”

Somewhere, Milton Friedman must be weeping. The Wall Street Journal certainly is: “These CEOs are fooling themselves if they think this new rhetoric will buy off [Elizabeth] Warren and the socialist left,” its editorialists replied. “It may even embolden them by implying that corporate rules that require a focus on achieving value for shareholders are somehow morally insufficient.” Whether the Business Roundtable can be trusted in these representations is, of course, the most open of questions. But in the meantime, I can’t imagine a better way to grasp the immense difficulties that will be involved in any thoroughgoing revision of the purpose of corporations than by reading this book.

Whatever Hillary Clinton meant when she said that half of Donald Trump’s supporters could be consigned to a “basket of deplorables,” everyone agreed the comment was, at best, maladroit. Four years ago Mitt Romney attempted to campaign with the unusual strategy of insulting a sizable fraction of the electorate to a room full of wealthy donors, and we know how well things turned out for him. Of all the gaffes in all the world, why’d it have to be this one?1

Even so, many on the left, including here at The Nation, noted that if her comment was wrong in any factual sense, it was only in its exaggeration of the percentage of Trump’s supporters that are, as Clinton put it, “irredeemable”—and even then, they said, she was not off by much. That being the case, perhaps Democrats should decide once and for all to call off all efforts to win over The Donald’s supporters, and instead focus on maintaining and expanding Barack Obama’s political base—people of color, the educated, and the young. But, came the rejoinder, what kind of vision of the national future does that provide?2

After circling around and around this question, we decided to submit it to the consideration of six writers on the left. Their responses are below.
—Richard Kreitner3

* * *4

Steve Phillips

The New Not-Silent Majority
5

Democrats absolutely should not waste time and resources over the next four weeks trying to get the votes of Trump supporters. After the election, however, they absolutely should seek their support for a policy agenda that addresses the profound wealth inequality plaguing our nation.6

Organizing, mobilizing, and investing in the New American Majority should be the primary political imperative of progressives across the country. Obama’s election and reelection proved that there is a New American Majority consisting of progressive people of color and progressive whites. Together, those constituencies comprise more than 51 percent of all eligible voters. There are 7.5 million more eligible voters of color today than there were in 2012. And 25 million eligible people of color didn’t vote in 2012. Together, these voters of color far eclipse the small number of potential convertible Trump voters.7

Political campaigns are zero-sum games involving the strategic allocation of two scarce resources: time and money. Mobilizing the New American Majority is labor and resource-intensive, so we should not be diverting any resources away from that imperative. Helping members of the New American Majority clear the myriad hurdles to voting requires more attention and resources, not less. For example, people of color are, on the whole, poorer than whites (the average black or Latino family has just one-tenth the assets of the average white family) and face more barriers to civic participation, such as the costs of childcare and transportation, and ability to get time off from work.8

Even if we were to pursue Trump’s supporters, the particular challenge of engaging them is that the animating principle of his campaign is racial resentment. If that’s what’s motivating his supporters (and it is), how do we appeal to that same constituency, and what could we say that would sway them if what compels them to vote are promises to build a wall and kick out people of color?9

From a cost-benefit perspective, targeting Trump voters also doesn’t make financial sense. Every black voter we turn out is 80 percent likely to vote Democratic (90 percent this year); every Latino and Asian-American is 73 percent likely to vote Democratic. Every dollar spent pursuing white Trump voters is highly speculative and much less likely to yield the desired result.10

Having said all that, there is a strong future basis for reaching out to Trump supporters and calling for unity with regard to economic inequality. The Occupy Wall Street movement’s slogan of “We Are the 99 percent” showed the potential of a cross-race, class-based campaign that targets the widespread economic inequality in America.11

But that’s after the election. Right now time is so short that nearly every dollar should be spent hiring community-based organizers in New American Majority communities to get their peers and family and friends to the polls.12

Paul Starr

We’re For You
13

Donald Trump’s supporters are lost to the Democrats—but not necessarily forever. In the long run, for both moral and political reasons, Democrats cannot give up on white working-class voters.2

Whites without college degrees—the core of Trump’s support—are experiencing a measurable decline in their life circumstances. As my Princeton colleagues Anne Case and Angus Deaton have shown, middle-aged whites, especially those with only a high-school education, have seen significant increases in mortality rates, primarily as a result of “deaths of despair” from suicide, alcoholism, and opioid addiction. The Democrats message for them has to be, “We’re for you even if you’re not for us.”3

Democrats have a strong case to make that they can help. Since 1948, working- and middle-class Americans have consistently done better during Democratic administrations, as data from political scientist Larry Bartels’s Unequal Democracy shows (see below). While income growth under Republican presidents has been concentrated at the top, it has been higher and spread more evenly under Democrats. “Stronger together” is not just a slogan; it has been the historical record.4

For their part, Democrats need greater support from white working- and middle-class voters to be able to carry out a coherent, sustained program. It will not be enough to just focus on building a coalition of people of color, the young, and educated, upper-middle-class whites.5

The geographic clustering of Democratic votes in cities is costing the party representation in Congress and state legislatures. The Democrats’ dependence on black, Latino, Asian, and young voters is a particular liability in off-year elections. When voter turnout falls, it falls the most for those groups. Even when Democrats have been winning the presidency, they have been losing Congress two years later. Now they will be lucky just to win the Senate. They’re not likely to overcome their deficits, especially in off-year elections, without more white support.6

For a different reason, Democrats should also be concerned about becoming too dependent on more educated, higher-income whites. Many of those voters may desert Democrats in the future if the Republicans tone down their extremism on cultural issues.7

We are now in the throes of a great white backlash against the growing diversity of American society and changing racial and gender relations. Eventually, as the older generation dies out, that backlash is going to subside, but the problems of economic inequality will persist, and on those distributive issues, the GOP has never served white working- and middle-class voters well. The Democratic Party has been their historic home, and if the Democrats keep the door open, the lights on, and hot food on the stove, many of those whites will find their way back.8

Arlie Hochschild

Forging a Common Cause
14

Not long ago, I visited Hungary, a country now ruled by the far-right leader Victor Orban, who since coming to power in 2010 has curtailed the freedom of the press, shuttered many NGOs, replaced statues of non-Hungarians with statues of Hungarians, barred all Syrian immigrants despite a labor shortage, and rebuilt memorials and museums to deny any Hungarian role in the extermination of the country’s Jews. My husband and I asked a member of the opposition, “How could this happen?” His answer was this: “Nobody thought Orban could win, and the left, self-absorbed and divided, didn’t vote.”15

With the rise of Donald Trump, we Americans find ourselves in a similar political moment. Unfortunately, our left fits the same description.16

Between now and November 8, the first order of business is, I believe, to set aside differences and get out the vote for Hillary Clinton and other Democrats. The alternatives—staying home, or voting for a third party—are luxuries we cannot afford. After Election Day, however, there must be a concerted effort to reach out to blue-collar and lower-middle-class whites who are abandoning the Democratic Party in droves—and even the ideals long associated with it. Five years of listening to such people—many of them complex, ambivalent, and thoughtful—has shown me that they feel like an ignored, ridiculed, unacknowledged minority group. For them the new N-word begins with an “R”—as in “redneck”—and it’s used far too freely by some on the left.17

There are, moreover, several crossover issues on which left and right can find common cause: getting money out of politics, reducing prison populations, cleaning up the environment. Almost all the people I interviewed will be voting for Trump. All of them felt distaste and contempt—some justified, some not—for Hillary Clinton. But, surprisingly, none of them showed the same visceral dislike for Bernie Sanders. They felt he was genuine, if eccentric and unrealistic.18

An insurance saleswoman, single mom, Tea Party advocate, and former chair of Republican Women of Southwest Louisiana who plans to vote for Trump has a 17-year-old son who greatly admires Sanders. To their credit, mother and son are talking through their differences. But no one else in this young man’s school or family shares his views, and neither mother nor son have experienced an open outreach from others willing to join their debate, seek common cause, and perhaps more. That has to be the left’s mission once the imminent danger of a Trump presidency has passed.19

Copyright © 2016 Arlie Hochschild

William Greider

The New Popular Front
20

Whatever the election results this year, political chaos is sure to continue. That’s because the two-party system will still be a confused jumble astride deeper contradictions.10

The working class is starkly divided by race, religion, and bitter regional history—rich states and poor states, progressive states and racially backward states. Yet despite their deep differences, the varied ranks of working people in blue states and red states share the same embittering experiences—the deindustrialization that killed jobs and suppressed incomes for a generation of blue-collar families; the great shift in wealth and family security that both political parties engineered in behalf of multinational corporations and international financiers.11

In the long run, the political party that succeeds in uniting working-class voters—white and black, North and South—will be the party that eventually secures majority status. That is my hunch about the future of our dysfunctional democracy—somewhat wishful, but not implausible. If neither party finds the courage to grasp the need for profound economic change, then the country needs a new party, or maybe even two of them.12

The hopeful factors Democrats could exploit include the shifting demographics that guarantee a multi-hued America and the distinctively more radical views that younger voters expressed this year. But the Democratic Party will be utterly unconvincing if its leaders continue to cling to the money and banking interests. The party’s current disregard for the white working class is condescending at best. Democratic leaders will have to relearn how to talk to working stiffs, or even better how to listen to them.13

Thanks to the great success of social-reform movements, we need not re-argue abortion or other settled issues. The reform message should instead focus on how we can overcome the dreadful realities that working people face. It should emphasize the imperative of creating the next economy—the profound reinvention of capitalism required to save the Earth and save all of us from the destructive forces of man-made production and consumption. There is no North and South in this new landscape, no white or black, no rich or poor.14

It sounds corny, but Trump drew a crowd this year when he started to tell folks the hard truth about the troubled American condition. People had suspected as much. They were grateful for a little honest talk, even if they knew that he was probably lying, too.15

Rick Perlstein

Women’s Rights Are Workers’ Rights
21

Leave aside the question of whether a Trump presidency would actually help ordinary Americans: Obviously, it would not. But what about Trump’s constituency? Should the left focus on regaining what has become known by shorthand as the “white working class”? Or should we stick to mobilizing what’s been called the “Obama coalition”—youth, minorities, college-educated professionals, women?22

Those arguing for the latter often make an important point: Whenever people talk about the “white working class,” they seem to refer only to white men. This is self-evidently ridiculous, but for some reason it endures. In an important recent book on the history of the culture wars, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s, the historian Robert O. Self explains how, prior to the 1960s, liberalism was built on a economic and social foundation we now would call sexist: The job of the state was to provide for the health of families by providing for men—who in turn would provide for their families. Self labels this “breadwinner liberalism.”23

Much of the work of feminism in the 1970s was an attempt to unyoke social provision from family status. In halting ways, it has enjoyed some success—but that has only helped provide access to a pie that itself has not grown in decades. Because breadwinner liberalism, never particularly strong in the first place (see: America’s inability to achieve universal healthcare), has obviously failed so many in the regions where Trump is doing best, white males there feel doubly dispossessed: in terms of both the economy and of gender. The failure of breadwinner liberalism unmans them.24

The right has an answer to this, what Self calls “breadwinner conservatism”: a politics of symbolic remuneration, the phony promises of mastery that Donald Trump grunts forth from the podium day after day. It hates those perceived as others because it has no genuine answer to the rage at this loss of mastery.25

Do we? A society that guarantees security for women as a right of citizenship, not as a reward for having a husband, should be a fundamental goal of any left worthy of the name. But that strategy has real consequences for those who once enjoyed a petty lordship just for being born with a penis. To understand is not to excuse. But the rage is real, and don’t think it will be easy to forge a politics to transcend it.26

Ian Haney López

What Hillary Clinton Should Say
27

A progressive coalition that includes a significant number of erstwhile Trump supporters is not only necessary but possible. Only a fragment of his supporters is beyond redemption; most are otherwise decent folks prone to fears about changing demographics and resentment over lost status. Building on a half-century of Republican dog whistling, Trump plays precisely to those fears and resentments, constantly nurturing them with outrageous racial provocations. 17

None of this should be news to Clinton. In the 1990s, Clinton followed her husband and the New Democrats in imitating the GOP’s use of coded racial messages. This was the era in which she stumped for an egregious crime bill by decrying “superpredators” who needed to be “brought to heel.” Along similar lines, in her 2008 contest against Barack Obama, Clinton touted her support from “working, hard-working Americans, white Americans.”18

Ironically, then, Clinton is just the person to reach out to racially resentful whites. Imagine a possible Clinton address along these lines:19

Donald Trump hopes to win office by dividing us by race and other false hierarchies. This isn’t new; it’s a 50-year-old tactic that encourages working people to fear each other while handing over power to economic elites. I should know because in the 1990s I did it myself. I was wrong, and I apologize. And today I’m here to fight against anyone doing this again. When racism becomes a political weapon, we build prisons and deport millions, wrecking communities of color. And we also let corporations and the selfish rich hijack the economy, harming every one of every race. To get government and the market back on the side of ordinary folks, we have to reject racial fear and build solidarity among “we the people.” We truly are stronger together.20

Clinton probably won’t give this speech in the final weeks of an election in which she holds a narrow lead. But if it’s risky to broach with whites how racism has betrayed them, the harm of not doing so is certain—and growing. As our demographics shift, and as power passes to the Obama coalition, a large part of the white population, likely a majority, will only become more racially anxious, and as a result more politically reactionary.21

Remaking our politics and economy depends on a broad coalition that must include substantial numbers of racially anxious whites. Ignoring their fears, or worse, pandering to them, further impoverishes all of us. Instead, we must have a unified message for whites as well as people of color: Fearful of one another, we too easily hand over power to moneyed interests, but working together, we can rebuild the American Dream.28

Scarcely a day goes by without political seismologists offering new evidence to suggest that the tectonic plates of American politics are on the verge of a profound and unsettling shift. Too much stress has built up along too many ideological and demographic fault lines for things to remain as they are. Will 2016 be the year of “the big one”—long feared by some, eagerly anticipated by others? Are we witnessing a fundamental realignment of political coalitions, perhaps even the birth of new parties? As part of “That’s Debatable,” our new series on issues that remain unresolved on the left, published on TheNation.com and occasionally in the magazine, we asked three scholars of American politics to consider these questions. A political theorist, a historian, and a political scientist, respectively, they approach the topic not as clairvoyants peering into a crystal ball, but as observers intent on identifying some of the subtler forces at work in this unnerving year in order to hazard a few guesses as to what it all means. —Richard Kreitner


Danielle Allen

Communications Breakdown

In 1999, the libertarian party helped transform American politics by launching a campaign that ultimately sent hundreds of thousands of e-mails to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protest its proposed “know your customer” banking regulations. The FDIC withdrew the rules, and the era of digital politics was born. Roughly a decade later, social media propelled “birtherism” to the forefront of the national conversation, reinstating nativism as an active ideology in the United States. In 2009 came the Tea Party movement, followed by Occupy Wall Street in 2011, both of which drew on new online organizing mechanisms to build solidarity networks around a particular analysis of social reality. The question for students of American politics now is whether these changes can drive a fundamental realignment of our political parties.

Transformations in communications technology have made it more possible than ever before for dissenters from the Democratic and Republican parties to find one another and to form sizable communities of interest. The result is lowered barriers to entry for the work of political organization, with consequences announced daily in headlines about the 2016 presidential campaign. Insurgent candidates in both parties have drawn on the organizational power that has developed over the past decade within ideologically defined communities: Donald Trump has summoned the anger and xenophobia of the birthers, Bernie Sanders has channeled Occupy’s critique of rampant inequality, and Ted Cruz has marshaled the forces of the Tea Party universe. By attaching other groups of voters to their original, more ideologically concentrated constituencies, these candidates have achieved greater success in their respective primary campaigns than anyone thought possible just one year ago.

Regardless of whether they succeed in taking over their parties, these new coalitions have the potential to remake American politics if either the insurgents or the party faithful are driven to seek refuge in existing third parties or to create entirely new ones. For the 2016 campaign at least, that latter possibility is already foreclosed, so a takeover (hostile or otherwise) of a third party seems more likely—both the Libertarian Party and the Green Party can place candidates on the ballot in a significant number of states. Even so, our first-past-the-post electoral system makes it very hard for third parties to challenge the top two. Barring the emergence of new habits of collaboration and alliance formation among small parties, only a fundamental change to our system of voting—the introduction of proportional representation, for example—would allow for a more fluid political system to develop.

Speculating on what the future holds for America’s political alignment requires thinking through a complex array of factors: voting rules, political egos, the time horizons of charismatic leaders, questions of succession, the intensity of various ideological commitments, and a famously mutable public opinion. What we are most likely to see is more of the new normal: incredibly bitter fights among plurality-sized groups for total—if temporary—control of one of the major parties. Will this also worsen gridlock at the national level, thereby exacerbating the intensity of those intraparty battles and further destabilizing our political system overall? If these dynamics play out simultaneously in both parties, the most unified side will triumph.

Rick Perlstein

It’s Happening Here

What are the prospects for a realignment of American politics? On the Democratic side, practically nil. The presidential front-runner—the one with the endorsements of 15 out of 18 sitting Democratic governors, 40 out of 44 senators, and 161 out of 188 House members—is running a campaign explicitly opposed to fundamental transformation. Her signature campaign promise—no new taxes on households making $250,000 or less—renders serious change impossible. The chance for her opponent to win the nomination approaches mathematical impossibility. He is running as a “revolutionary.” But governing is a team sport. If, by some miracle, Bernie Sanders entered the White House in January, he would do so naked and alone—in command of a party apparatus less prepared ideologically, institutionally, and legislatively to do great things than at any other time in its history.

One side promises competence. The other promises the impossible. This is the Democratic Party in 2016.

And the Republicans? Senator Ted Cruz, believe it or not, was also a candidate of continuity, the nearly pure product of a conservative-movement Petri dish. His father was an evangelical pastor from one of America’s most reactionary immigrant communities. Cruz received his tutelage in the thought of Milton Friedman and Frédéric Bastiat while still in high school; he also memorized the US Constitution, was a champion debater at Princeton, and worked as the conservative movement’s all-but-official Supreme Court litigator in his years as solicitor general of Texas. His creepy extremism is precisely the extremism we have known in the Republican Party ever since Barry Gold- water in 1964. His electoral coalition was Goldwater’s—which, blessedly, in our increasingly younger, browner, and leftward-leaning nation, means it was always going to be very hard for him to become president.

That leaves our orange-maned wild card—who, for the same reasons, will also have a very hard time winning a presidential election. But if there is any chance of a fundamental realignment in American politics, it would come from the candidate to whom none of the familiar rules apply. Donald Trump has primed millions of his followers to believe that a corrupt national establishment—a conspiracy of politicians, the media, and business—has stolen their birthright as Americans. The techno-sociology scholar Zeynep Tufekci, studying Trump’s social-media following, notes that his fans treat him as the sole source of truth and authority: In their view, “every unpleasant claim about Trump is a fabrication by a cabal that includes the Republican leadership and the mass media.” Recently, Robert Costa and Bob Woodward of The Washington Post asked Trump what he would do in his first 100 days as president. The candidate replied that he would focus on trade deals. “What about economic legislation?” Costa asked. Trump responded, “Before I talk about legislation, because I think frankly this is more important—number one, it’s going to be a very big tax cut.” He spoke, in other words, as if tax policy isn’t a product of legislation, but rather gets handed down by presidential fiat.

Trump has also announced the litmus test for his first Supreme Court nominee: a willingness to prioritize his crushing of a political rival. (“I’d probably appoint people that would look very seriously at [Hillary Clinton’s] e-mail disaster because it’s a criminal activity.”)

If Trump wins the presidency, we’ll have elected an aspiring dictator. In that event, speculation about the fate of the conservative movement, let alone the Republican Party, would be quite beside the point. But if Donald Trump loses the presidency, we’ll still be left with those millions of followers—many of them violent—trained by Trump to believe that their American birthright has been stolen from them once more. The only thing that will stand in their way is the strength of our constitutional system. One must hope it proves very strong indeed. The alternative is a sort of realignment that none of us want.

Daniel Schlozman

The Great Divide

Democrats and republicans will likely spend the coming decades as they have the last eight: fighting over the legacy of the New Deal, respectively defending and assailing its commitments to a robust welfare state and a mixed economy. In his 1944 State of the Union address, Franklin D. Roosevelt called for a Second Bill of Rights guaranteeing access to employment, housing, medical care, and education. A conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats stopped those plans in their tracks. Yet far more than in FDR’s time, the parties are divided sharply over his vision. That is likely to continue, whatever the shape of things to come.

Early in the Reagan era, James L. Sundquist, an influential scholar of partisan realignment, observed that “when the New Deal alignment is strengthened, the New Deal coalitions are weakened.” These fissures have only grown starker: The Roosevelt coalition broke apart as liberals and conservatives sorted between the parties. Minorities and “pink-collar” workers supplanted white Southerners and Northern ethnics in the Democratic fold. Party coalitions, now oriented largely around race, fight pitched policy battles around class. The Democratic Party has embraced a version of what Northern liberals hoped for in the postwar era—a party more diverse in its leadership and no longer cemented to the male family wage.

With their own house largely in order, the New Dealers’ proverbial grandchildren watch with both fascination and horror the lurid spectacle of a Republican Party whose contradictions have, in the unlikely figure of Donald Trump, finally come to the fore. That upheaval has loosed from their moorings three very different blocs of voters. Their allegiances, once the dust settles, will determine the balance of power in American politics.

If Trumpism prevails and the Republican Party becomes principally a vehicle for white nationalism, Democrats will welcome the refugees: affluent suburbanites who tend to be socially tolerant but skeptical about redistribution. For Democrats, such a coalition could bring back congressional majorities, but they would be unwieldy ones. A party swollen with economic elites would bring to the fore the vexed politics of revenue: Expanding programs for the Democrats’ disadvantaged constituents would cost the wealthier ones dearly. The usual work-arounds— employer mandates, tax credits, and the like—make it even harder to enact public programs further down the road.

If the Republicans retreat into a familiar shell that appeals only to the likes of Ted Cruz, the less-bigoted white losers from economic dislocation might switch to the Democrats. With congressional majorities supporting redistributionist policies, this new coalition could create a new class politics built on Rooseveltian universal programs, largely redeeming the New Deal’s unfulfilled promises.

Finally, if the Republicans’ existing power centers—K Street and the Koch boardroom—maneuver successfully to defeat the insurgency, the plutocrats will retain control of the party’s apparatus and agenda, even as they redouble their efforts to diversify its base, marketing aggressively to Latinos and Asians. Unfortunately for them, as the 2016 campaign has shown, the Republican base has other ideas. Yet even if the presidency remains out of reach, the party’s leaders might well be content to control the national purse strings in the House of Representatives and sow tensions among Democratic constituencies whenever priorities conflict: housing versus healthcare, young versus old, race versus class.

Given the pyrotechnics of 2016, these prognoses may seem mundane. A fundamental realignment along the lines of 1860, 1896, or 1936, however, would require not just movement in a few voter blocs or on issues such as trade, but a change in the basic divide between the parties’ competing positions. That’s a remote prospect. The New Deal still casts a long shadow, and party politics will likely remain a battle over the size and scope of government.

The first sign that this was no ordinary literary event was the lady wandering around with a sousaphone. But then there’s nothing ordinary about the literary career of George Scialabba.

Nation readers know him as the author of brilliant book reviews, going back to 1993, on a staggering number of topics and authors, from Edmund Wilson to Irving Kristol to Pier Paolo Pasolini to—just this past May—Steve Fraser. You might also know him for contributing masterpieces of the essay writer’s craft to publications like Agni and Salmagundi.

For 35 years, however, faculty members at Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies pretty much knew him as the dude who scheduled their seminars.

So when George finally retired from the 9-to-5 job that sustained him, John Summers, the editor of The Baffler, surveyed this gaping contradiction—on one hand, the towering scribe called by The New Yorker’s James Wood “one of America’s best all-round intellects”; on the other, the mild-mannered clerk in the basement—and came up with an inspired idea: As Summers put it in the invitation he sent to George’s friends this past July, he would organize a “Festschrift doubling as retirement party doubling as an act of social criticism.”

So here we all are: Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, Nikil Saval of the journal n+1 (who testified that when he was an office drone back in 2005, discovering Scialabba’s writings saved his life); a standing-room-only crowd at Cambridge’s Brattle Theatre; and that lady with the sousaphone, holding down bass for the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, which followed two hours of toasts and videotaped testimonials by leading us dancing into the moist Massachusetts night.

Tom Frank had concocted a hilarious presentation on this gentle socialist’s ironic near-collision with success in capitalist America. In 1983, in an article for the Harvard alumni magazine, George penned the memorable line, “Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun.” Mistakenly credited to Albert Einstein, it’s become a standby on coffee mugs, T-shirts, and in business books like Quality, Service, Teamwork and the Quest for Excellence. Thus the plight of the independent intellectual, according to Frank: “In exchange for letting us do the work we love—to be critics of ideas—the world swipes what we have to say, molds it into some kind of legitimation device having to do with the incredible and really innovative stuff they do on Madison Avenue, and then, for good measure, attributes it to fucking Einstein.” Hear, hear! (Each presentation was followed with a toast from plastic champagne flutes emblazoned with Scialabba’s image.)

Barbara Ehrenreich recounted years of correspondence with George via e-mail on every subject under the sun, from socialism to science and even religion, which was striking because it was only later, she admitted with embarrassment, that she learned the most unusual detail of ­Scialabba’s biography: He’d been a high-school recruit to the ultra-orthodox Roman Catholic sect Opus Dei. Which was the focus of my own remarks: As an intellectual-history major at Harvard, George was forced to submit his syllabuses every year to his confessor, a man he’s described in one of his greatest essays, “Progress and Prejudice” (one of 21st-century American letters’ greatest essays, I’d say), as resembling “my mental image of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor.” The cleric would check them against the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum to see which books, including the collected works of Hume, Milton, and Hobbes, he was not allowed to read.

George chose freedom instead. “Emulating the philosophes’ great refusal, I lodged my little one, enrolling timorously but proudly in what I had learned from Peter Gay to call the Party of Humanity.” Not so little. Not so timorous. Gargantuan. Thunderous. Just read the essays. Chomsky, one of George’s holy trinity of intellectual and political heroes—the others are Christopher Lasch and Richard Rorty—did, and fell in love with George’s writings. Eighty-six years old and radiant, Chomsky closed out the tributes, noting that because everyone else had lionized George, he’d take him down a peg by pointing out his mistakes: Harvard grads with intellectual ambitions were supposed to play the game, suck up to power, praise America’s ineluctable benevolence, and end up being rewarded with offices in distinguished Harvard research institutes—not underneath them. Poor George managed to bollix the whole thing up.

It was a funny evening. But serious. The plaque attesting to the Cambridge City Council’s official declaration of September 10, 2015, as George Scialabba Day, presented to George by his hero Chomsky, declared: “WHEREAS…George has spent thousands of hours pacing his apartment on Washington Avenue, gnashing his teeth over the sorry spectacle of American politics and the fearful mayhem of American capitalism, while himself hanging on by his finger tips.” And that’s not fair. But that’s America. George Scialabba has broken its rules. He has a new collection out this winter, Low Dishonest Decades: Essays and Reviews, 1980–2015 (Pressed Wafer). Read it. It’s written with a love of humankind so oceanic that its author sounds like the most religious atheist alive. As I put it a few Fridays ago in Cambridge, “My prayer is that this priest of ours, this sweet sacred monster, might in giving us another volume in his liturgy raise us a little closer to what he stubbornly believes we can be.” Hear, hear!

The terrorists attacked their target in New York on a sunny Tuesday in autumn—but not the sunny Tuesday we now commemorate. The year was 1981—a year in which, as Bryan ­Burrough observes in Days of Rage, his sprawling history of America’s post-’60s radical underground, the country had suffered the greatest number of fatalities from terrorism in that era of radical violence. That figure would not be surpassed again until the year the World Trade Center was bombed.

The 1981 attack is one of dozens of acts of cinematic violence narrated in Days of Rage, and it encapsulates some of the book’s key themes. A leader in the group that staged the attack was a man named Sekou Odinga. Born Nathaniel Burns, he had returned from Algeria, where he’d worked as a deputy for Eldridge Cleaver, who had established the Black Panther Party’s “international section” there (and was accorded official diplomatic recognition from Algiers). “We have a solidarity group in China,” Cleaver told a writer visiting his lair, which had a giant electrified map with colored lights that could be flicked on and off to represent revolutionary battlefronts all over the world. “Its chairman is Chairman Mao.” Cleaver also informally directed a new group from Algeria: the Black Liberation Army, a collection of terrorist cells that crisscrossed the United States, ambushing cops in cold blood. Upon its dissolution, Odinga helped start an even more shadowy and brutal organization, so informal that it went nameless, although its members referred to it as “the Family.”

The Family had an advantage over the Black Liberation Army, what its leaders called a “white edge”: a band of worshipful white fellow travelers who provided cover by renting cars and forging IDs. What the disciples didn’t know was that in the New York action, Mutulu Shakur and his comrades were going to carry out a “revolutionary expropriation” in order to buy cocaine. While two white accomplices, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, waited in a U-Haul truck, Shakur and two other men leaped out of a nearby van, shot a Brink’s guard to death, loaded $1.6 million in cash into the van, and sped off. Police officers intercepted the U-Haul vehicle and were about to release its white occupants—eyewitnesses had said the criminals were black—when Shakur’s crew sprang out of the rented truck and raked Rockland County’s finest with machine-gun fire, killing two. Boudin and Gilbert ended up holding the bag, which had been the plan all along.

If the attack proved anything, it was the extraordinary resilience of “revolutionary” violence in the United States long after it had any conceivable chance of bringing about social change (assuming that such a chance existed in the first place). It also drew attention to the cultish behavior of the Family, their systematic exploitation of revolution-­besotted acolytes, the incompetence of law-enforcement agencies in tracking them down, the underground network that assisted them, and the blood—barrels of it.

No less noteworthy is that even in our ­terror-obsessed era, the scale of this decadelong florescence of revolutionary domestic terrorism has been all but forgotten. “People always ask why I did what I did, and I tell them I was a soldier in a war,” Sekou Odinga told Burrough. “And they always say, ‘What war?’”

* * *

Burrough begins Days of Rage with the story of the New Left’s first convert to armed struggle, an oddball named Sam Melville, who started bombing random Manhattan banks shortly after enjoying the music at Woodstock and later died in the uprising at Attica. But the best history is always about the backstories—­the flashback reconstructions explaining how a mentality that may strike us as alien today made perfect sense in the minds of those who shared it at the time.

Consider Mutulu Shakur. Born Jeral Williams in 1950, he became an early proponent of the Republic of New Afrika movement. His career as a militant began in a hospital. In 1970, members of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican version of the Black Panthers that started as a street gang, occupied the auditorium of a tumbledown hospital in the South Bronx to protest its inadequacies. They demanded a heroin clinic. Harried hospital administrators were amenable; they needed a heroin clinic. So they let the Young Lords start one. Nourished with nearly $1 million in state and city funds, Lincoln Detox soon grew into the South Bronx’s largest drug-treatment facility.

Its program prescribed a theory popularized by Malcolm X: “that the plague of drugs was a scheme concocted by a white government to oppress blacks,” as Burrough puts it. Shakur started volunteering; his specialty was acupuncture. Another part of the treatment was studying a pamphlet subtitled “Heroin and Imperialism,” which advised that a commitment to armed struggle was a more effective analgesic than methadone. Lincoln Detox soon became what Burrough describes as “a kind of clubhouse for New York’s radical elite”; for instance, medical supplies purchased with government funds—“by the truckload”—were turned over to the Black Liberation Army to assist it in its campaign of murdering cops. Crazy stuff, to be sure. But in the South Bronx of the 1970s—where cops were heavily involved in the heroin trade, and building owners found it more profitable to torch their property for the insurance than to rent it out—it’s easy to understand why taking the fight to the police seemed a more realistic route to social change than voting for Hubert Humphrey had been in 1968.

Burrough draws an equally rich portrait of the prison solidarity movement of the 1970s. He traces it to innocent roots: the work in the 1950s of Caryl Chessman, a serial rapist who brilliantly focused the attention of the nation on the brutality of California’s prison system in a series of lawsuits and bestselling books that earned clemency appeals from the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt. Chessman was executed in 1960, but not before his activism had jump-started the legislative process that led California to outlaw capital punishment. It would be the prison solidarity movement’s high point. “By 1967, after a bloody riot at San Quentin,” Burrough recounts, “California prison facilities had embarked on a cycle of violent and retaliatory crackdowns that would endure for years. It brought racial polarization, along with an avalanche of legal challenges and, among black inmates at least, racial unity and a taste for open confrontation with guards and wardens.”

Prisoners with time on their hands read books. Two volumes popular among black inmates were Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, by the Brazilian Marxist Carlos Marighella, and Régis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution? Both spun fanciful notions of how a Cuban-style overthrow of government could be effected, even in industrial powers like the United States. In 1972, one incarcerated adherent of the theory wrote a book of his own, Blood in My Eye, in which he averred: “We must accept the eventuality of bringing the U.S.A. to its knees; accept the closing off of critical sections of the city with barbed wire, armored pig carriers crisscrossing the streets, soldiers everywhere, tommy guns pointed at stomach level, smoke curling black against the daylight sky, the smell of cordite, house-to-house searches, doors being kicked in, the commonness of death.”

A certain type of white radical accepted this conclusion, too. “All through 1965 and 1966,” Burrough observes, the members of Students for a Democratic Society “peopled myriad civil rights and antiwar demonstrations, hundreds of them, but a kind of malaise soon set in. Every month brought more and larger protests. Yet there seemed to be little improvement in black civil rights, and more American soldiers poured into Southeast Asia every day.” A spiral of militancy resulted. Some came to see America’s prisons not as marginal to the Land of the Free but as its naked essence. It was an idea pioneered by Eldridge Cleaver, Burrough writes, who argued “that the most genuine ‘revolutionaries’ were those who were most oppressed: black prison inmates and gangbangers—an idea that appealed strongly to white radicals yearning for a taste of black authenticity.” After all, if you were a Marx-minded revolutionary serially disappointed with the stubborn refusal of one designated oppressed class after another—­blue-collar workers, white students, Third World peasants—to rise up against the machine in precisely the way your theory predicted, where better to turn for salvation than the most wretched places in America?

Their favorite hero was the author of Blood in My Eye. George Jackson was 12 when he carried out his first mugging. At 15, he was locked up in juvenile detention, escaped, was arrested again after knifing a man, escaped again, was recaptured, received parole, and then, after one final arrest in 1961 for a gas-station stickup just before his 19th birthday, spent the rest of his life behind bars. There he thrived, because he was more ruthless, cruel, and violent than anyone his fellow inmates had ever seen. “And you want to know why he was what dumbass people call a prison leader?” one of them later reflected to Burrough. “’Cause everyone else was shit-scared of him.”

Liberals ended up lionizing Jackson. In January 1970, during a brawl between white and black prisoners at Soledad peniten­tiary, a white guard intervened on the side of the whites via four well-placed rifle shots—“justifiable homicide,” the grand jury ruled. Jackson led the gang that avenged the three deaths by throwing a rookie guard off a third-floor railing. The lawyer defending Jackson from the gas chamber, Fay Stender, fell in love with him, as she had with an earlier client, Huey Newton. As part of her public-relations efforts, she arranged for a collection of Jackson’s prison letters to be published as Soledad Brother (excising some, however, like the missive in which he speculated about the possibility of poisoning Chicago’s water supply). Jean Genet was enlisted to write the preface. In between the book’s conception and its publication, Jackson’s brother Jonathan led an armed raid on a Marin County courthouse, taking hostages in a bid to negotiate George’s freedom and, in a shoot-out with police, blowing a judge’s face off with a shotgun allegedly provided by the recently fired UCLA professor Angela Davis. A sensation was born.

The New York Times Book Review assigned Soledad Brother to the Black Power radical Julius Lester. Lester—who, in a column syndicated the previous year in underground newspapers, had applauded a sniper who’d cut down “known enemies of the black community” from a rooftop in East St. Louis as the moral equivalent of the Vietcong—praised Jackson’s book because it would make whites nostalgic “for the good old days when all they had to think about was Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown.” (The newspaper of record appreciatively subtitled the essay “Black rage to live.”) Christopher ­Lehmann-Haupt’s review in the daily Times was hardly less appreciative. The Book Review subsequently ran an interview with Jackson by Jessica Mitford, and later named Soledad Brother one of their notable books of the year. The New York Times Magazine profiled Jackson; the columnist Anthony Lewis praised him. After Jackson was cut down while attempting to take over a cell block (“The dragon has come!” he roared), 2,000 people attended his funeral. “During the services,” Burrough notes, “the Weather Underground detonated bombs in protest,” and San Quentin officials steeled themselves for what they feared would be an armed invasion.

The fawning coverage of Jackson in the Times continued, and Soledad Brother began appearing in anthologies. Autre temps, autre moeurs.

* * *

Ever since reading Days of Rage, I’ve been engaged in a lively online discussion with ’60s veterans over whether the events and beliefs described by Burrough should matter to anyone on the left today. American radicals aren’t robbing banks or planting bombs, and even when they were—in 1977, say, when the San Francisco Chronicle published a “box score” of bombings since 1971, including 23 at Pacific Gas and Electric (once with a demand for a 10 percent reduction in utility rates) and nine at area Safeway stores, and when more than 100,000 office workers were evacuated from their buildings in a single day because of bomb threats—the number of actual participants only reached the dozens. Even the veterans that Burrough interviews are hard-pressed to prove their activities accomplished anything. (There was, however, a knockoff effect. Have you ever wondered why restrooms are always locked in office buildings? Because in the 1970s, terrorists loved toilets: They frequently locked from within, and the stalls afforded privacy for setting a bomb.)

Myself, I do think these issues matter—­not so much for understanding the bombings and shootings themselves, but for grasping the significance of the support network that the perpetrators enjoyed, sustained by the ignorant good will of folks who’d never dream of picking up a gun.

Some of that support came from rank intimidation. The members of Lincoln Detox were able to liberate $1 million from New York’s dwindling coffers, largely to pay the salaries of people who did no work, with stunts like invading the offices of the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, barricading themselves inside, and smashing windows and furniture. But a lot of their power derived from the same sort of romantic infatuation with antiestablishment carnage that made Bonnie and Clyde a hit among radical college kids in the late 1960s.

Consider the reaction of Soledad Brother’s editor, Gregory Armstrong, upon meeting George Jackson: “Everything about him is flashing and shining and glistening and his body seems to ripple like a cat’s. As he moves forward to take my hand, I literally feel myself being pulled into the vortex of his energy. There is no way I can look away. He gives me a radiant smile of sheer sensual delight, the kind of smile you save for someone you really love.” Stender’s largely female public-­relations cadres, according to an observer quoted by Burrough, “each picked their favorite Soledad brother and were kind of ooh-ing and ah-ing over them,” as if with John, Paul, George, and Ringo five years earlier. “This was the revolution, baby,” recalled one lawyer to the underground, Elizabeth Fink—who was honorably self-critical in interviews with Burrough—“and they were the fighters.”

Sex was crucial currency within these circles. At meetings of the SDS, shortly before a radical faction of it became the Weathermen, ­Bernardine Dohrn “liked to wear a button with the slogan cunnilingus is cool, ­fellatio is fun,” Burrough writes. A member named Steve Tappis remembered “her blouse open to the navel.” Tappis had had enough. “Finally, I said ‘Bernardine! Would you please button your blouse?’ She just pulled out one of her breasts and, in that cold way of hers, said, ‘You like this tit? Take it.’” (“Weather crud”: n. genital infection incubated among Weather Underground cadres building revolutionary solidarity via compulsory orgies.)

A voyeuristic media exploited the underground’s glamour. One night in May 1973, a group of BLA soldiers traveling the New Jersey Turnpike were pulled over by troopers. One of the cops discovered an ammunition clip from an automatic pistol. A militant named Joanne Chesimard pulled a gun from beneath her right leg, shooting the cop at point-blank range (he survived). The gun battle that followed (in which another trooper was fatally shot in the head) was the subject of a breathless six-page spread in the next day’s Daily News, which labeled her “the high priestess of the cop-hating Black Liberation Army” and the “black Joan of Arc.” The power of that frisson has not faded. Currently, a group of Berkeley students is demanding that a campus building housing the Department of African-American Studies be renamed after Chesimard’s nom de guerre, Assata Shakur. “We want the renaming [for] someone, Assata Shakur, who we feel…represents us black students,” a spokesman for the Berkeley black student union said.

They’re kids. Excuse them their ignorance. It’s harder to excuse the aged Bay Area radicals who, Burrough points out, “hang George Jackson’s picture to this day.”

* * *

By January 1970, as Burrough tells the story, Weathermen cells were engaged in a manic competition to see which could execute the most lunatic action first—a race that ended when explosives intended for a massacre of soldiers and their dates at a Fort Dix dance prematurely detonated, and backhoes started scooping body parts from the ruins of a Greenwich Village townhouse that a Weatherman had commandeered from her out-of-town parents to serve as a bomb factory.

On February 12, 1970, according to new interviews and evidence gathered by Burrough, a Weatherman bomb went off in the parking lot of Berkeley police headquarters. A second bomb exploded 30 seconds later. Miraculously, no one died, even though it happened during a shift change—“frankly, to maximize deaths,” said a Weatherman involved that night. Then, four days later, a bomb packed with industrial fence staples went off just before a shift change at a station house in San Francisco, killing one officer. That crime was never solved. “Needless to say,” Burrough writes, “the Weathermen who were in San Francisco at the time all deny involvement.” (Burrough’s book is a useful primer on legal jeopardy, with otherwise forthcoming interviewees suddenly going silent when active, unsolved cases come up.)

James Weinstein, the late socialist historian and publisher of In These Times, had a cousin in the Weathermen named John Jacobs, known as “JJ,” whom Burrough describes as the most violence-besotted member of the group. JJ evaded arrest, dying in obscurity in 1997. I once asked Weinstein, who was a friend of mine, what he would have done had his cousin appeared on his doorstep in the interim. Answered this man who since the 1950s had devoted his life to radical politics: “I would have turned him over to the FBI for destroying the left!”

That’s a little much, perhaps. But it’s still remarkable how passions that could have been put to more productive ends were wasted abetting narcissistic violence—even in the boardrooms of liberal bureaucracies. The most remorselessly violent sector of the left underground were the fighters of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña—the FALN, which announced itself to the world by exploding five bombs in quick succession in Manhattan on a single day in 1974. The action was coordinated with the aboveground arm of the independence movement, which had staged a triumphant rally before a full house at Madison Square Garden, starring luminaries like Jane Fonda, the following evening. The bombings and the rally were planned by the FALN’s front group, the National Commission on Hispanic Affairs. The NCHA operated out of donated space in the national headquarters building of the Episcopal Church. Their executive director was basically “the quartermaster of the FALN,” Fink explained to Burrough.

Neither the revelers at Madison Square Garden nor the officers of the Episcopal Church had any reason to know that terrorists were exploiting their hospitality. But FBI agents investigating the FALN’s most horrifying act—the bombing of the historic Fraunces Tavern in Lower Manhattan, which killed four diners during the lunch hour—discovered evidence in the church’s basement that the FALN’s communiqués had been produced on an NCHA typewriter, and that the plane tickets for spiriting the bombers out of town had been purchased by the NCHA’s executive director. The Episcopal bishop of New York responded by calling the subpoenas for the records of the terrorist organization an attempt to “prevent the church from funding progressive Hispanic groups.” Progressive ministers across the country created a new group, Joint Strategy for Social Action, devoted to organizing against this “illegal campaign against the churches.”

* * *

I wanted to learn more about Joint Strategy for Social Action, but Days of Rage offered little guidance. There are only 85 endnotes for 548 pages of text. Burrough is an astonishingly resourceful reporter. The book teems with sentences like, “‘Marvin Doyle’ is a pseudonym…. [He] works for a Washington-area think tank, where no one knows his history as a 1970s-era radical.” But he owes us more documentation, perhaps on a website: He makes serious charges concerning serious crimes, and, too often, his sourcing is unclear.

Still, the amount of new information is astounding. Burrough paints a rich portrait of one key figure about whom, incredibly, there hasn’t been a single sentence written in all the reams published about the underground. His name is Ron ­Fliegelman, and he taught himself to become the Weathermen’s master bomb manufacturer. (“A grandfather with a patchy white beard, he can be seen most mornings walking a tiny white poodle through the streets of his neighborhood, which is called Park Slope.”) Here’s Burrough talking to Fliegelman’s former partner, Cathy Wilkerson, while she is walking their grandson:

“I’ve been told what your role was.”

Her eyelids flutter. She reaches down and begins to rock the stroller. “You think you know?” she says.

“Yes,” I say. “You were the West Coast bomb maker.”

There is a long pause. She glances down at her grandson. He begins to spit up. She reaches down, wipes off his chin, and takes him into her arms, gently sliding a bottle between his lips.

“Look,” she finally says. “I felt I had a responsibility to make the design safe after the Townhouse.” The bomb design, she means. “I didn’t want any more people to die.”

There’s material for a dozen screenplays in this book, and set pieces aplenty. At one point, an “expro” is foiled when one of the patients Mutulu Shakur, the acupuncture specialist at Lincoln Detox, recruited for the job suffers a back spasm; that scene writes itself. The movie I most want to see adapted from Days of Rage is of Burrough getting the story, tracking down all these long-forgotten graybeards and grandmas, his eyes growing wide as he learns the tricks of the trade, thereupon depicted in flashbacks. One sequence could be “Weatherman wanders a graveyard.” (That was how you established an ironclad fake identity: finding the name of someone born around the same time as you, and using the identity to get a replacement birth certificate.) Another could be “A Black Liberation Army cadre rolls down all the car windows.” (That was what you did when you were getting pulled over: “if you have to shoot, you don’t want glass exploding all over you.”)

But movies are made mostly to entertain. Burrough does more, offering lessons to absorb. One involves the inner logic that leads sensitive souls of various ideological predilections to embrace violence for political ends. The number of American leftists studying bomb-making over the last couple of decades may be vanishingly small, but the number of Americans is not: Timothy McVeigh and his drums of fertilizer; the Tsarnaev brothers and their pressure cookers; abortion-clinic bombers; young Minnesotans scouring the Internet for ways to travel to Syria to join ISIS—all of them are seekers of a certain kind of Dostoyevskian fantasy of communion. They are radical narcissists detached from reality, certain that their spark would ignite the great silent masses who share the same sense of futility and frustration. They see society as a powder keg almost ready to blow. The book provides rich raw material to draw these connections, even if Burrough’s own analysis, and his engagement with scholarship about what makes violent extremists tick, is thin. (“What the underground movement was truly about—what it was always about—was the plight of black Americans”: This is his reductive conclusion, when his own evidence points to much more.)

Another lesson is about the counterproductive patterns of thought and action recognizable on the left today, such as the notion that there is no problem with radicalism that can’t be solved by a purer version of radicalism, or that the participant in any argument who can establish him- or herself as the most oppressed is thereby naturally owed intellectual deference, even abasement, or that purity of intention is the best marker of political nobility. These notions come from somewhere; they have an intellectual history. The sort of people whose personal dialectic culminated in the building of bombs helped gestate these persistent mistakes.

Some of them are still making them today. “For the hundreds if not thousands of whites who engaged in some form of armed resistance,” former Weathermen member Cathy Wilkerson wrote to Burrough in a pathetic apologia, “it mattered that we chose to step out of the encasing, protective cover of privilege—­class and/or race—and take equal risk with those who had no choice but to fight for a better future.” She seems to think her biggest mistake was not abasing herself enough: “That our strategic choices were corrupted by the inherited arrogance of privilege is of secondary importance.” Above all, she boasts, it felt good: “To be complicit made us feel desperately unclean, rotting from within. While in retrospect our strategic choices were rooted in arrogance and ignorance, there are no regrets about the choice to do our best to acknowledge that rot and to rid ourselves of it.”

Bill Ayers, another former Weatherman, thinks this way too. In a creepily evasive 2008 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, in two memoirs, even in speeches to high schools, Ayers presents himself as an earnest antiwar activist who never committed an act of terrorism, never intended to hurt anyone. He wraps the US massacres in Vietnam around himself as if they gave him a snow-white blanket of moral innocence. He insists that “through most of my life…I’ve been engaged in direct, nonviolent action, to oppose injustice, to fight for peace.” But Ayers was not an antiwar activist. He was a war activist. The Weathermen literally did declare war on the United States. At a bizarre little conclave in Flint, Michigan, at the end of 1969 that they called the National War Council and nicknamed the “Wargasm,” they game-planned their silly little war out. (This was the event where Ayers’s present wife, Bernardine Dohrn, celebrated the Manson murderers: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”) Their original plan was to kill policemen, former Weatherman Howie Machtinger told Burrough—hence the bombings in Berkeley and San Francisco, which I doubt would count as activism intended to end a war.

“Part of the dishonest narrative that’s gone on,” Ayers unrepentantly insisted to Fresh Air host Terry Gross, “has been the idea, pro­moted by some people on Fox News and others, that we were involved in lots of killings, which is absolutely not true.” That’s law­yerly: not a lot of killings, necessarily. “Did you guys kill cops in the ’60s?” he describes himself being asked by a policeman friend, before answering: “Absolutely not.” And this is technically true: The Berkeley police-station bombing—where, Burrough argues, they only tried to kill some cops—was in 1970. As for Ayers’s own role, Burrough says it was managerial, “shuttling between collectives in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo.” In Detroit, for instance, according to FBI informant Larry Grathwohl, Ayers led a discussion at which he brought up the trial of several Detroit cops for killing three black men during the 1967 riot:

“Where did [those] pigs get the money to hire decent lawyers?” Ayers asked. “The Police Officers Association put up the money.” When someone mentioned that the association had a headquarters downtown, Ayers pounced. “We blast that fucking building to hell…. We wait for them to have a meeting, or a social event. Then we strike.”

Ayers then pulled out a hand-drawn map, Grathwohl said, and assigned tasks, while pooh-poohing Grathwohl himself for pointing out that a nearby restaurant filled with black customers might be collateral damage: “We can’t protect all the innocent people in the world.”

If nothing like this ever happened, Ayers should answer the evidence. He is reluctant to do so. The editor of Days of Rage, Scott Moyers, told me that Ayers and Dohrn refused all interview requests from Burrough over a period of years. The plan described by Grathwohl sounds a lot like the one that was hatched in New York to bomb a social event at Fort Dix, which led to the Greenwich Village townhouse tragedy, and which Ayers adamantly claims to have known nothing about in advance. Perhaps he didn’t—although Burrough writes that Ayers “almost certainly knew.”

And Burrough is thorough in laying out the anguished process in which, post-townhouse, the Weather Underground decided to turn instead to late-night bombings of property. “Weatherman, Weatherman, what do you do? Blow up a toilet every year or two,” ran the doggerel composed by the hapless and corrupt FBI squad charged with hunting them down. These bombings continued through 1975, two years after the Vietnam War ended, which makes it hard to see them as antiwar.

Speaking with Terry Gross, Ayers equivocated about being a “leader” of the Weather Underground: “We were a collective group.” Maybe so, but the leadership cadre of this “collective group” managed to live very well on the lam, while the foot soldiers existed in squalor. Among the latter was Ayers’s own brother, who at one point was so poor he had to sleep in a tent in a Los Angeles city park. And the leaders? To quote Rick Ayers on the crowd around Bill, “they always ate good food and they always slept between clean sheets.”

(Eugène Mihaesco)

This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here.

When Nikita Khrushchev sent tanks into Hungary to crush a grassroots uprising in 1956, many radicals chose that moment to stop apologizing for the Soviet Union. Ronald Radosh, a red-diaper baby who published seventeen articles in The Nation between 1966 and 1980, decided it was time to join the Communist Party USA.

Later, when sane people were celebrating the end of the Vietnam War, Radosh and those around him regarded the moment as “an occasion for deep melancholy.” They liked the Vietnam War, he explained in his memoir, Commies; it gave their lives meaning. Now that our country was no longer laying waste to Third World peasants, America, for these folks, “could no longer so easily be called Amerika.” And now that the exigencies of war could no longer excuse the communists’ human-rights abuses, their struggle could no longer be idealized as the heroic effort to create a model Marxist society: “The idea of an immediate, no-fault revolution, a fantasy of the previous decade, was no longer tenable.”

With that, Radosh doubled down again and traveled to Cuba with a group of revolutionary enthusiasts. One day, they visited a mental hospital. 
A doctor there boasted, “In our institution, we have a larger proportion of hospital inmates who have been lobotomized than any other mental hospital in the world.” Back on their bus, a flabbergasted therapist exclaimed, “Lobotomy is a horror. We must do something to stop this.” Another member of the American 
delegation shot back: “We have to understand that there are differences between capitalist lobotomies and socialist lobotomies.”

Radosh, of course, ended up on the political right. The final straw came when he published a book in 1983 arguing that Julius Rosenberg was indeed guilty of the crime for which he had been executed in 1953. Radosh found himself unfairly attacked from the left. Thus was he moved to “consider the ultimate heresy: perhaps the Left was wrong not just about the Rosenberg case, but about most everything else…. My journey to America was about to reach its final leg.”

But he notes something else in his memoir, baldly contradicting his earlier claim about the left being wrong about “most everything”: some on the left defended him, including in the pages of The Nation. He doesn’t note that two of his intellectual adversaries, Walter and Miriam Schneir, ultimately changed their minds about the case in the face of new evidence.

Radosh’s political journey follows a familiar pattern, well documented among Nation writers who end their careers on the right: a rigid extremist, possessed of the most over-the-top revolutionary fantasies, comes face to face with the complexity of the real world, then “changes sides” and makes his career by hysterically identifying the “socialist lobotomies” set as the only kind of leftist there is—ignoring evidence to the contrary that’s right in front of his nose.

* * *

One of the first leftists to abandon the tribe in the pages of The Nation was no less than the magazine’s longtime owner and columnist, Oswald Garrison Villard (1872–1949). Villard was such a doctrinaire pacifist that he resigned his column in protest in June 1940 because The Nation favored the United States’ rearming to fight Hitler. As he wrote in his valedictory, the magazine had abandoned “the chief glory of its great and honorable past”: its “steadfast opposition to all preparations for war.” He predicted that the course the editors were proposing would “inevitably end all social and political progress, lower still further the standard of living, enslave labor, and, if persisted in, impose a dictatorship and turn us into a totalitarian state.” Villard ended up starring in a 1975 book, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism, whose author happened to be Ronald Radosh.

The novelist and critic Granville Hicks (1901–1982) was an orthodox communist who in 1933 published a Marxist history of American literature. In 1940, however, Hicks published an essay in The Nation titled “The Blind Alley of Marxism,” in which he excoriated his comrades’ unexamined political assumptions. Why, for instance, should “the elimination of the economic contradictions of capitalism inevitably and automatically [lead] to the higher stage of social development?” And why, he asked—not long after the Moscow trials railroaded many of the founders of the Soviet state into gulags—do American radicals give “carte blanche…to a little group of men, five thousand miles away?” This was thoughtful stuff, but rather than sticking around to nurture a rich debate, Hicks became an eager namer of names to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The culture and history of the left, of course, is shot through with silly, ideologically driven absurdities (“socialist lobotomies,” to coin a phrase). There is, for example, the argument Radosh made in The Nation in 1966 that Henry Wallace, perhaps the furthest-left major public official in the history of the United States, was actually a capitalist sellout. Another part of the pattern: the tendency to depict ostensibly revolutionary societies as lands straight out of a fairy tale. Max Eastman (1883–1969), who ended up in the orbit of National Review, filed a dispatch for The Nation in 1923 on a rail journey through Russia whose childlike wonder rivaled a scene from Tom Hanks’s The Polar Express. The passport functionary “was almost magically friendly and gentle.” The cars were “wider than railroad cars in America.” The cabin had “clean white bed-linen at a mild price, and a friendly young host in a workingman’s shirt who came in every once in a while to know if we wouldn’t like some tea.”

Some radicals have no problem maturing away from fantasies absorbed at the height of their revolutionary fervor while maintaining the moral core of their commitment to the broader left. Eastman, Radosh and, most famously, Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961), who contributed occasional poems to The Nation in the 1920s, instead went “all the way.” Afterward, they projected their own extremism onto the entire left and thus became conservative heroes. This is because they performed a matchless service in letting conservatives ignore the evidence of their senses: that the actual left is thoughtful, humane and diverse. Even if you’re a confessed traitor like Chambers, your sins—provided you undergo the proper purification rites—are not an impediment to an embrace from the right, but an advertisement. By bearing witness to the myth that the right’s adversaries are more wicked than other conservatives could possibly imagine, you ritualistically renourish the moral Manichaeism without which no right wing worthy of the name can survive.

David Horowitz, for example, was an occasional contributor whose first Nation article was a 1964 essay about suicide in Scandinavia. In it, he argued it was no surprise that Swedes and Danes would want to kill themselves—because those countries were still, after all, capitalist nations. He now edits FrontPageMag.com, for which his friend Ronald Radosh publishes articles like “The American Left: Friends of Our Country’s Enemies.” In 1979, on the cusp of his own apostasy, Horowitz wrote an essay wondering whether the left could ever shed its “arrogant cloak of self-righteousness that elevates it above its own history and makes it impervious to the lessons of experience.” That essay, however, was published in The Nation—vitiating his very claim about the arrogant self-righteousness of the left.

J. Edgar Hoover once called communism “a disease that spreads like an epidemic, and like an epidemic, quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting the nation.” The apostate from the left adds another crucial detail to that etiology: the idea that the infection is all the more frightening and dangerous because it’s invisible, hiding within its host until it finds the opportune moment to do the most damage. Liberalism, like the devil, hides its true face. Thus the slogan of Horowitz’s FrontPageMag.com: “Inside Every Liberal Is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out.” That’s how conservatives can depict centrists like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton as aspiring commissars. Didn’t Clinton, after all, hire the “black Marxist Johnnetta [sic] Cole,” as Radosh describes the former president of Spelman College, to direct his transition team for education? Back in the days of Radosh’s trip to Cuba, Cole too had been a supporter of Fidel Castro. And so, wrote his friend Eric Breindel in the New York Post, the conclusion was “inescapable” that Clinton was not “interested in distinguishing between a left-liberal and someone who cast her lot with the cause of Communist totalitarianism.”

* * *

Of course, plenty of Nation writers traveled rightward with their honor intact. The sociologist Alan Wolfe, once a gentlemanly radical, is now a gentlemanly centrist. He helps to make my point: his contributions to these pages in the 1970s and ’80s were resolutely unsilly; he doesn’t have to despise leftists now because he never gave himself a reason to despise the leftist he was then. Max Lerner (1902–1992), a towering legend of American liberalism, published some forty-four articles here between 1936 and 1940. He became, in his late 70s, an admirer of Ronald Reagan—but his columns on the subject were full of thoughtful admonitions that liberals hurt only themselves by dismissing the fortieth president as a dunce. And the political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941–2013) made the same useful criticisms about the glibness of some radical feminists’ deconstructions of “the family” in 1979 that she did when she later aligned with George W. Bush.

Others, though, evinced one of the ugliest traditions on the left: revolutionary megalomania, the display of a will to power in which the writer embraces radicalism in order to aggrandize himself. A curious note emerges among the admirers of the Soviet experiment who wrote in these pages in the 1930s and ’40s. In the Soviet Union and Cuba, the intellectuals who harnessed themselves to the correct side in the battle between socialism and barbarism died as prophets (or, in the case of Trotsky, great martyrs). Back in the United States, writers could secretly imagine the same imminent fate for themselves: that when the revolution came in America, they would become its heroes—or even its leaders.

This grandiosity helps explain why apparently intelligent writers would sign on to a project so manifestly unintelligent as America’s invasion of Iraq, confident it would go exactly as planned. We find a clue in a children’s book published in 1982 by Paul Berman, The Nation’s onetime theater critic, who went on to a career as a self-described “liberal” booster of Dick Cheney’s adventure in Iraq, framing it as an existential struggle against Islamic fascism. It was called Make-Believe Empire: A How-To Book, and it is described by the Library of Congress as “A fantasy-craft book which tells how to construct a capital city and an imperial navy…. Provides instructions for writing laws, decrees, proclamations, treaties, and imperial odes.”

Left or right, it doesn’t much matter: it sure is a bracing feeling for the chair-bound intellectual to imagine himself the drivetrain in the engine of history. Or at the very least a prophet, standing on the correct side of history and looking down upon moral midgets who insist the world is more complicated than all that. Consider Christopher Hitchens: the former Trotskyist wrote, following his 2002 resignation as a Nation columnist, that by not embracing things like the Iraq War, “The Nation joined the amoral side…. I say that they stand for neutralism where no such thing is possible or desirable, and I say the hell with it.”

It is the turncoat’s greatest gift to his new hosts: the affirmation that the world exists only in black and white. They’re the good guys, we’re the bad guys. The rest of us can aspire to something better: no more socialist lobotomies.

Last November I received a friendly request from an editor at a political publication. A liberal himself, surrounded by liberal colleagues, he wanted to make sure that the journalists he was hiring were not drawn exclusively from the left. He wondered if I might help him out with a list of “conservative reporters, writers and commentators” whom I admired most. “Who on the right does the best job of covering politics or the economy or anything else, for that matter, in a thoughtful, fair and accurate way?”

Maybe if I had a time machine and could travel back to the 1970s or 1980s, I could name names. Now, though, I can’t think of a single one.

Sure, the right in previous decades was jam-packed with the same sorts of haters, hustlers, hacks and conspiratorial lunatics that are familiar to us now. But there were lively exceptions. George Nash, a still-active independent historian, celebrated The Conservative Intellectual Tradition in America in a classic book published in 1976, when that tradition was very much still alive and kicking. James J. Kilpatrick, editor of the Richmond News Leader, may have been an intellectual architect of the South’s “massive resistance” against integration in the 1950s, but he also wrote columns that were literary, politically independent and often wise. Kevin Phillips was an idiosyncratic conservative then who wrote brilliantly prescient articles with the same critical acumen and empirical ruthlessness he demonstrates nowadays as an idiosyncratic liberal. He published a piece in Harper’s in 1973 predicting that the Republican Party would “cement its coalition by creating a new managerial and communications establishment that merchandises the values that Middle Americans hold dear” and that “the liberal establishment of the Sixties will begin to wither.” A liberal columnist responded by calling Phillips’s argument “the most ludicrous political analysis of our time.” Knee-jerk inanities like that were one of the reasons it was so important to read conservatives back in 1973.

George Will, National Review’s Washington editor, won his Washington Post column that same year as part of a wave of contributors that evinced the success of an organized and underhanded campaign in the Nixon White House to scare mainstream (“liberal”) publications into hiring conservatives. From that privileged perch, however, he proved positively scathing as a principled critic of a White House that, during 1972, both believed “virtually every possible Democratic candidate was a garish sham who would destroy the country” but that they “couldn’t trust the American people to choose that way in a fair fight.” Thus they ended up destroying themselves via Watergate—and that there’s solid thinking.

Then there was William F. Buckley Jr., a problematic figure in so many ways: seriously proposing marooning welfare recipients on an island off Manhattan, tattooing AIDS sufferers on the buttocks, mentoring flock after flock of right-wing journalists who got stupider and lazier and more hawkish with each successive generation. But at least Buckley himself was intelligent and honest—and granted his adversaries on the left, like Noam Chomsky, the respect of debating them seriously on TV.

Now, however, Buckley is dead—very, very dead. Will, meanwhile, is ensconced exactly where he belongs, with the haters, hustlers, haters, hacks and conspiratorial lunatics at Fox News—but also, unfortunately, still at The Washington Post, enjoying a handsome living by making up things about Barack Obama and Benghazi and calling climate change a hoax.

That’s about the long and short of conservative “journalism” these days. Sure, if you put a gun to my head I could name some right-wing journalists who are, at the very least, as they say, “smart.” But every time I think I can sign on to the promise of one of these folks, they just end up disappointing me. The writer Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics wrote an impressive book debunking the idea—much as I have—that demographic trends make a Democratic majority a near-inevitability. Then, last summer, he published a four-part series arguing that Republicans could regain the majority, not by recruiting more Hispanics but by flushing out the “missing white voters” who didn’t go to the polls from 2008 and 2012. It sounded like an interesting argument—until Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz pointed out at ThinkProgress.org that the rate of “missing” minority voters who might have gone for Democrats was about the same as for whites who might have voted for Republicans. Trende simply cheated: “He adds back in all the missing white voters to the 2012 electorate while leaving out all the missing minority voters.” That, practically speaking, made his analysis as useful as cross-country skis at the beach—though it was ideologically useful to his team. Which is about as far as most journalists on the right care to go.

Trende’s about the best journalist they’ve got. And I wouldn’t wish him on an enemy, let alone to be hired by a friend.

The level of conservative stewardship of their “intellectual tradition” is even worse: just look at the 204-page “poverty study” published by the Republican Party’s supposed intellectual heavyweight, Paul Ryan, which as economist Dean Baker points out, informs us on one page that “child care subsidies have negative effects on child development,” and on the next that they have “significant positive effects…on children’s academic performance.” The problem with our media ecology is—just as the question from my editor friend suggests—that conservatives are protected from any consequence for their intellectual failings. That the Ryan report was a self-contradictory joke didn’t prevent The Washington Post from publishing what Baker aptly describes as an “unintentionally humorous puff piece” on it by a former National Review blogger.

Which returns us to the problem I have with my friend’s question to me in the first place: why is it that liberals and moderates and editorial non- and anti-ideologues of (too) good faith insist on making like the Greek philosopher Diogenes, scouring the horizon for the last honest conservative, instead of accepting the fact that there are virtually none to be found? Diogenes at least knew he was a cynic—a satirist. These editors, though, are entirely, pathetically, in earnest. It’s almost a psychological need—a neurotic refusal within in the reality-based community to accept the reality that conservative intellectualism is a tradition that quite nearly died. (But not entirely died: here, I want to single out the contributions of ISI Books, which among other things has published some genuinely scholarly biographies of important conservatives from a more serious conservative age like Brent Bozell Jr., Robert Nisbet and James Burnham.)

Some smart speechwriter for George W. Bush once came up with a rather brilliant phrase to describe what conservatives see as the moral failing of affirmative action: that it imposes a “soft bigotry of low expectations.” By patting under-qualified minority candidates patronizingly on the head and giving them jobs and educations for which they are not prepared, the argument goes, liberals supposedly do the objects of their tender concern more harm than good—and the greater public good a grievous harm as well. Time to stop the soft bigotry of low expectations toward the right. No more affirmative action for conservatives. It does no good for a right-wing literati that would be better served by a swift kick in the ass.

Al From makes two assertions in his new memoir. The first is announced in its title. The New Democrats and the Return to Power argues that the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the group he founded in 1985 to push the Democratic Party to the right, has won: the party has been reformed, and there is no going back to the dark days when, according to From, Democratic presidential candidates suffered humiliation after humiliation at the ballot box for the party’s thralldom to protectionism, isolationism, “constituency groups” and the dread leviathan Jesse Leo Jackson.

The second point is that From and friends deserve all of the credit for the Democratic Party’s transformation. Again and again, our hero narrates his arrival, just in the nick of time, to save the day: “My interjection had stopped the headlong dash into social democracy…. Hillary came over to me and said she and Bill had discussed what I had said and had agreed I was right.” And again: “In a cab crossing the Triborough Bridge in New York, I flipped open my cell phone and called the President of the United States…. [W]hen Clinton and I finished our discussion, I was confident that he would sign the bill.” According to Al From, if you favor NAFTA, tougher laws on crime, welfare reform and, above all, an economic policy focused exclusively on “growth” instead of distributional fairness, you can thank Al From.

Yet this memoirist has an imposing problem on his hands. In each and every case, the triumphs he trumpets have made America a worse place—objectively, empirically and on their own terms. But From is among the small minority of people they haven’t hurt. No one in the crowded field of Washington insiders has ever failed upward with such skill and aplomb.

Alvin From was born in 1943 into a Jewish family in South Bend, Indiana. He studied journalism at Northwestern, where he edited the newspaper. But what truly interested him, he says, was fighting poverty. So when a journalistic mentor told him in 1966, “You can write about poverty or you can do something about it,” he joined Sargent Shriver’s Office of Economic Opportunity and was assigned to the War on Poverty’s Southern front. His job was posting dispatches to Washington that, as he recalls with his customary immodesty, “read more like in-depth articles in the New York Times Magazine or New Yorker than stodgy government reports.”

From writes: “Contrary to the conventional wisdom today, the War on Poverty was not a big welfare program. Just the opposite: it was an empowerment program.” He’s right. Consider the establishment of Head Start. In keeping with the War on Poverty nostrum of “maximum feasible participation of the poor,” Head Start programs were to be locally run. In Sunflower County, Mississippi, fellow travelers of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee worked with an organization called the Child Development Group of Mississippi. One of its founders, a white psychiatrist, insisted that CDGM’s board should be peopled by field hands and maids instead of “respectable” members of the local, complacent black middle class. His beliefs resembled those of Polly Greenberg, author of a 1969 book on the project, The Devil Has Slippery Shoes, who explains that “what happens in the classroom in a brief preschool program, regardless of how good the curriculum and comprehensive services are, has far less impact upon a child’s lifelong trajectory than does what happens in his spirit and sense of possibilities when he watches the enormously disempowered parents with whom he is profoundly identified become competent, confident, and active in bringing him happy days, and in initiating constructive and fundamental change to the community and greater society in which he is growing up.”

In the most racially totalitarian county in the most racially totalitarian state in the Union, this could not be allowed to stand. Governor Paul Johnson Jr. said that he would never sign off on any Head Start programs for “darkies” in the state. (At the time, there were no publicly funded kindergartens in Mississippi, let alone preschools.) After CDGM’s founders used a loophole to defy him, a local thug fired shots from a .45-caliber pistol into the organization’s building. Meanwhile, in Washington, Senators John Stennis and James Eastland—fresh from working to sabotage the federal investigation into the murder of Congress of Racial Equality activists Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner in nearby Philadelphia, Mississippi—launched a Fox News–style national campaign to frame CDGM as a commie-infiltrated fraud, convincing a frazzled and weak-willed Shriver to cut his political losses. From the top down, Shriver set up a replacement program run by local segregationists.

Now here’s From’s account of that episode: “Shriver sent me to Sunflower County to investigate a dispute between two Head Start programs, one run with federal funding by the white powers of the county—the Eastland forces—the other run on a volunteer basis by civil rights activists…. Ostensibly fighting over control of the funded Head Start program, in reality the two groups were fighting for an important prize in the political balance of power in the county.” The political balance of power in the county—sort of like Nelson Mandela and Hendrik Verwoerd were fighting over the political balance of power in South Africa. “As long as Eastland forces administered antipoverty program funds, the civil rights activists, a major threat to the established political leadership of the county, remained in check.” And so, From relates, “I recommended to Shriver that OEO try to bring Hamer’s group into the county program with the responsibility of running a number of Head Start centers. Eventually, the two sides reached an uneasy agreement. As a result, all poor children in the county were able to benefit from the higher quality, federally funded Head Start.”

From makes it sound here as though he was an ally of the civil rights forces, when he was actually maneuvering to sell them out. The one time I interviewed him, From volunteered an even more effulgent (and slippery) account of the dispute in Sunflower County. He praised Eastland’s skill in co-opting the integrationists by planting “his closest political people” to control the Sunflower County Head Start board. The education of the county’s black preschoolers had been placed in the hands of the same racist economic elites who had kept them in poverty in the first place. From’s transformation of this unpromising material into a warm parable of reconciliation and progress is a master class in shameless audacity.

* * *

In the 1970s, From moved on to a job with the Senate Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations under Senator Edmund Muskie. He characterizes Muskie as a lone truth-teller who “sowed the first intellectual seeds of the New Democrat movement.” Ground zero, in his telling, was a dinner of the New York Liberal Party in 1975, when Muskie proclaimed, “Our challenge this decade is to restore the faith of Americans in the basic competence and purposes of government.” (Muskie also asked, in a line the memoirist deploys as his epigraph: “What’s so damned liberal about wasting money?”) Ronald Reagan used to like to say that “the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.” Let’s repurpose Reagan; it will spare the reviewer the incivility of accusing From of being either stupid or a liar. The notion that Democrats never thought to concern themselves with the basic competence of government before Al From started working for Ed Muskie is starkly absurd. John F. Kennedy was set to boast of his success at cutting government payrolls in the speech he never gave on November 22, 1963, at the Dallas Trade Mart. By 1975, such statements had become just about the hippest thing a Democrat could say.

There was Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, chair of the Joint Economic Committee and a former investment banker, who spoke of his fondness toward the founders of neoclassical economics in a 1972 profile in The New Republic, and who later singled out sixteen federal agencies that he wanted to eliminate, including the Interstate Commerce Commission (which “reduced competition” and protected “inefficient producers”). There were the “Watergate babies” swept into office in 1974 following Nixon’s resignation, many representing traditionally Republican suburbs. Their spiritual leader, Gary Hart, flayed “Eleanor Roosevelt Democrats” who “clung to the Roosevelt model long after it had ceased to relate to reality.” There was Michael Dukakis, who entered the Massachusetts State House in 1975 by running to the right of his Republican opponent and making a “lead-pipe guarantee” of no new taxes while also promising to evaluate programs “with the bottom line in mind—how much is it going to cost and can we get by without it?” United Press International reported that Dukakis was basically pledging to run the state “like a bank.” Ignoring this history serves From’s narrative purpose: that before the DLC, it was only Bolsheviks in the Democratic Party.

You would never know, reading From’s “history,” that Jimmy Carter ran in 1976 on turning welfare into workfare and slashing government bureaucracy; or that twenty years before Bill Clinton declared “the era of big government is over,” Carter proclaimed in his second State of the Union address that “government cannot solve our problems, it can’t set our goals, it cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy.” You would never know that Carter started a wave of deregulation and a defense buildup that Reagan continued; that he reinstated registration for the draft; or even that he was a Southerner, swept to power by a party that From accuses of abandoning the South. Yet in just the way conservatives define the words “conservative” and “liberal” as operational synonyms for “good” and “bad,” Carter cannot be a New Democrat avant la lettre for the simple reason that Jimmy Carter lost. From writes: “In the 1970s, the Democrats…lost credibility on the economy…. The failed Carter administration was a major culprit. In 1979 and 1980, the inflation rate increased by a total of 25 percent and interest rates rose to 20 percent.”

Those statistics are correct. But to grasp their origins, one must turn from From to Allen J. Matusow’s Nixon’s Economy: Booms, Busts, Dollars, and Votes, which explains how Nixon’s cynically political wage and price controls mortgaged the country’s economic future for political gain. Other contributing factors were Lyndon Johnson’s cowardly refusal to raise taxes to pay for the Vietnam War and, of course, the Arab oil shock of 1973 and the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979. To lay primary responsibility for the Great Inflation of the late 1970s at Jimmy Carter’s feet borders on mendacity. In fact, Carter had more to do with ending inflation, by appointing Paul Volcker as Federal Reserve chair in 1979 with a mandate to shock the economy into recession. Carter knew full well that he might be sacrificing his re-election chances with the appointment, and that the next president, not he, would reap the political credit. And the next president did: Reagan won re-election in 1984 with forty-nine states, excoriating his opponent as “Vice President Malaise.”

The “Volcker Shock” was a crucial episode in the cruel history of austerity that no progressive should cheer. And From might have interesting things to say about it, if he weren’t such a hack. After all, in the Carter White House he was deputy adviser to the president on inflation, but all he has to relate about the experience is a narcissistic anecdote about being the only person in the West Wing who cared about inflation. Unlike the others—“young, single, living in small apartments, and spending almost every waking hour working in the White House”—he was married, raising a family, paying a mortgage. “To me, our inflation policy wasn’t about memos or meetings or events to show we were working on the problem; it was about bringing down inflation. Nothing else mattered. But the Carter administration never understood that.”

From’s inaccuracy runs deep. He writes that “in the 1980 Democratic platform written by the Carter White House, every economic plank was a public jobs program.” Interested readers who can find the platform on the Internet will learn that the closest thing to a proposed public jobs program is a reference to “a $1 billion railroad renewal program which can employ 20,000 workers”—and that everything else on economics sounds downright Clintonian: an assertion that, in “regulated sectors of our economy, government serves too often to entrench high price levels and stifle competition”; promises of “new tax depreciation rules to stimulate selective capital investment”; five straight paragraphs on the necessity of tax cuts; and calls for “work incentives” for welfare recipients. Also this: “full funding of the counter-cyclical assistance program for the cities.” This is the very same proposal that From, on page twenty-seven of his own book, called “the quintessential New Democrat idea” when it was proposed by his boss, Edmund Muskie.

* * *

Democrats’ Platform Shows a Shift from Liberal Positions of 1976 and 1980. So read the headline of a New York Times article on the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, dated July 22, 1984.

Somehow, it always goes down the same way: Democrats move to the right and lose an election—and then pundits claim they lost it by running to the left. His platform, Walter Mondale boasted in his acceptance speech at the convention, included “no defense cuts that weaken our security; no business taxes that weaken our economy; no laundry lists that raid our Treasury.” He insisted that “government must be as well-managed as it is well-meaning” and that “a healthy, growing private economy is the key to the future.” Then he announced the supreme goal of a Mondale administration: deficit reduction. But he lost forty-nine states to Reagan. Therefore, he cannot be a “New Democrat.”

Why did Mondale lose, according to From? Working at the time as staff director of the House Democratic Caucus under Representative Gillis Long of Louisiana, From wrote a memo for his boss to deliver at a meeting convened by Virginia’s Chuck Robb, chair of the Democratic Governors Association, to discuss the party’s future. It said in part: “Putting together a coalition of liberals and minorities is not the way to win national elections…. [W]e must develop a message with national appeal; we cannot write off large areas of the country—such as the South and the West—and continue as a viable national party.”

Considering the lengths Mondale went to convince Democratic constituency groups to buy into deficit reduction as the key to the party’s political future, this is nonsense. But it apparently made sense to some Democrats—and to affluent funders from both parties. Within months, From was moving forward with the group he hoped would soon “simply assume the role and authority” of policy-making for the Democrats. At a dinner with Harriet Zimmerman of Atlanta (who, as I learned from my own research, was vice president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and a board member of the right-leaning Center for Strategic and International Studies), Zimmerman dashed off a $10,000 check before the hors d’oeuvres were even ordered. “That was the biggest check I’d ever seen,” From boasts. “Without a pause, Robb wrote a $1,000 check. I now had seed money to get started”—in what the privatization fetishist notes would be his first nongovernment job. “I couldn’t just find furniture in the hall and move it into our office. And there was no federal deficit to cover the payroll.”

From somehow prevailed. His book’s acknowledgments list only sixteen politicians but identify twenty people “whose support and generosity…made the DLC story possible.” Among them are Jon Corzine, the disgraced financier and former New Jersey governor; Michael Steinhardt, a hedge fund manager, major Republican donor and founder of the defunct neoconservative New York Sun newspaper; and Rich Richman, who recently gave $10 million to Columbia University for a research center directed by R. Glenn Hubbard, former chair of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors. (A Newsweek investigation in 2000 turned up some DLC underwriters that From doesn’t mention: Du Pont, Philip Morris, Merck and the Koch brothers.)

On the subject of fundraising, the author proves defensive: “We did raise a lot of corporate money, but there were never any quid pro quos, implicit or explicit. When creating the structure of the DLC, I had purposely created a firewall between those who gave money and those who made organizational decisions.” But isn’t that precisely the evidence for the indictment? Steinhardt and others gave anyway, and kept giving, trusting that the return on investment would be worth it without any intervention on their part being necessary.

What were they buying? For one thing, a respectable front for the obsession that Jesse Jackson and those whose interests he represented must be destroyed. From was never as blunt as Harry McPherson, the old Democratic hand who complained to The Washington Post after Mondale’s defeat that “blacks own the Democratic Party…White Protestant male Democrats are an endangered species.” From prefers the dog-whistle phrase “constituency groups.” He’s also prone to using unconsciously racially charged language, quoting himself being quoted in The Wall Street Journal at the 1988 convention: “We’ve erased the graffiti from the wall. Now we have to paint the mural.”

That convention, of course, ended up nominating Michael Dukakis. As Sidney Blumenthal wrote in his book on the 1988 election, “Dukakis’s very inability to offer any definition of liberalism was taken as perhaps his most encouraging trait” by Democrats that year. “It was seen as an enormous shrewdness, a form of wisdom. Dukakis’s politics of lowered expectations, his career of slashing budgets and tax cuts, made him seem a new kind of Democrat, a man of his time.” But he lost. Therefore, he cannot be a New Democrat: “Dukakis was clearly to the left of the DLC,” From writes.

Here Bill Galston enters the story. He is a curious figure. These days, Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in spraying “New Democrat” nostrums at Wall Street Journal readers with all the freshness of one of those Japanese soldiers in World War II who would emerge from a cave twenty years later not knowing that the war was over. Back in 1984, however, he was Walter Mondale’s issues director. Five years later, he sent From an analysis asserting that the Democrats had succumbed to “liberal fundamentalism.” And From fell in love: “I told Galston I would make him famous.”

I am keen to know Galston’s explanation for how he came to believe, as he argued in “The Politics of Evasion,” a famous 1989 DLC paper written with Elaine Kamarck, that by 1984 “the dynamic of the nominating process (coupled with the deep 1981-1982 recession, which rekindled the classic Democratic desire to rerun the campaign against Herbert Hoover) led Mondale to reaffirm most aspects of the [liberal] conventional wisdom.” How can he say that about a campaign that, under his design, made a Hoover-style fetish of deficit reduction? It’s hard to see how such confusion could have spread very far, beyond the initial pundit enthusiasm. “Over the next couple of months,” From writes of the founding, “we were virtually ignored in the national press.” Does he know that people can look these things up? The New York Times ran six articles about the DLC in its first three months of existence; The Washington Post ran seven in the same period—and another four before it was even officially announced.

* * *

Hard to see, that is, until a charming young teddy bear from Arkansas bursts onto these pages, takes From’s bland formulations and turns them into poetry. Clinton spent the eighteen months leading up to his fall 1991 presidential candidacy announcement as the DLC’s chair. But it would be wrong to say that his presidential campaign followed a DLC script. It was a mélange. Clinton promised to realize a 3 percent across-the-board savings in every federal agency and, yes, to “end welfare as we know it.” But he also pledged $50 billion more for education per year, $20 billion per year for infrastructure spending and “healthcare that’s always there.” That’s another story you won’t learn from From. Nor that Clinton promised to end corporate deductions for salaries over $1 million, telling a gathering of business leaders, “I want the jet-setters and feather-bedders to know that if you sell your companies and your workers and your country down the river—you will be called on the carpet.”

Once in office, though, Clinton largely let economic populism fall by the wayside. From doesn’t acknowledge one of the main reasons why: Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan told the new president that if he kept his populist promises, interest rates would rise and he would lose the confidence of investors. (“You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” was Clinton’s famously incredulous response.) There is no acknowledgment, either, that the Clinton era’s prosperity was owed to an unrepeatable asset bubble in the tech industry, or of the roles played by a new class of huckster fundraisers—Tony Coelho, Terry McAuliffe, Rahm Emanuel—who made the Democratic Party safe for billionaires. No, for From it’s all “ideas”—his ideas.

Bill Clinton, in his foreword to From’s book, graciously lists some of them: “to expand opportunity, not government; to recognize that economic growth is a prerequisite for expanding opportunity; to invest in the skills and ingenuity of our people in order to build shared prosperity; to expand trade, not restrict it; and to reform welfare and reduce crime.”

But welfare reform has been a political and policy disaster. Rather than opening a political space for regaining the public’s trust to help the less fortunate, as New Democrats claimed it would do, the 1996 welfare reform law is now deployed by Republicans in order to argue against the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. And the “reduction in welfare rolls” hailed as heroic in boom economic times has turned catastrophic now that the economy has gone south. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, in 1995, Aid to Families With Dependent Children—the program that Clinton replaced—lifted 62 percent of the nation’s poorest children out of “deep poverty”; in 2005, under Temporary Aid to Needy Families, the same thing could be said for only 21 percent, raising the number of children living at half the poverty line or less from 1.4 million to 2.4 million. Meanwhile, between December 2007 and December 2009, the number of unemployed doubled—while the number of people receiving assistance from TANF increased by only 13 percent.

The New Democrat project of decoupling economic growth from redistribution has also been an utter failure by just about any measure. Inequality for All, Robert Reich’s new film, documents how 95 percent of the returns in our recovery have gone to the top 1 percent of income earners. As a TED Talk by Richard Wilkinson that has gone viral put it, “If Americans Want to Live the American Dream They Should Move to Denmark”: America’s “relative mobility” ranks below that of France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark—all countries that have increased “equality of opportunity” by stubbornly linking it to “equality of outcome.”

The benefits of investing in skills and education have also been paltry. Between 1975 and 2004, real earnings for college graduates have risen less than 1 percent a year. Insisting on logic rather than ideology, the Economic Policy Institute report The State of Working America concludes, “It is especially hard to attribute any of the growth of wage inequality since the mid-1990s to skill shortages or the education divide, as wage inequality rose rapidly but education-based wage gaps grew very modestly.”

From is especially ecstatic about his role in helping Clinton pass NAFTA: “Of all the opportunities you have this fall,” he wrote in a 1993 memo that he reproduces uncritically here, “NAFTA represents the greatest. Passing NAFTA can make your presidency.” On the contrary, NAFTA’s role in demobilizing the Democratic base (including the promise Republicans were able to extract from Clinton: that he would “personally repudiate” any campaign attacks on members of Congress for voting it through) is one of the reasons the Democrats lost the House of Representatives in 1994. It then cost the United States a net loss of 1 million jobs (From: “A victory of NAFTA will both create real jobs and demonstrate that you have the vision to lead our country into the world economy at a defining historical moment”); turned America’s trade surplus with Mexico into a deficit; and was a cause of the very flood of undocumented immigrants that New Democrats customarily abhor.

Another of From’s prideful boasts concerns helping Clinton pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which “changed the entire system of policing in America and resulted in a decade-long reduction in crime.” Virtually no expert attributes the decline in crime to the policy of mass incarceration that this law ushered in: the incarceration rate at the end of Clinton’s two terms was 476 per 100,000 citizens, compared with 247 at the end of the Reagan administration. Even the 2012 Republican platform admitted that the policy has been a moral and civic disaster: “Prisons should do more than punish: they should attempt to rehabilitate and institute proven prisoner reentry systems to reduce recidivism and future victimization.” (One of the more striking cruelties of the 1994 crime law was ending Pell Grants for prison education.) Even Newt Gingrich now says, “There is an urgent need to address the astronomical growth in the prison population, with its huge costs in dollars and lost human potential.”

From, however, is not chagrined. The “core principles of the New Democrat movement…are as viable and useful for meeting today’s challenges as they were for meeting the challenges of the 1990s.” For instance: “we need to adopt and enforce a blueprint that will cut the deficit and build confidence in the private marketplace.” Does he care that, as President Obama constantly boasts, the rate of budget growth is now lower than at any time since the 1950s? Or that the stock market is higher than it has been since the 1990s? No, he does not. Nor, surely, have the jet-setters and feather-bedders who feted his new book at a party hosted by the powerful DC law and lobbying firm Akin Gump—for which From serves as a “consultant”—at the shimmering new Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park. “As Bill Clinton would often remind me,” From writes, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity.” Yet the formula has worked well enough for From: he’s been wrong in the same way over and over again, and for him, things have turned out just fine.

So now comes President Obama, proposing “reforms” for the National Security Agency. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones summarizes them as “weak tea.” Obama is responding, of course, to the advisory panel he appointed that released its recommendations about a month ago—which Drum has described as slightly-less-weak tea. Though even that report—for instance, the conclusion that the current system of storing bulk metadata “creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty,” and that “Americans must never make the mistake of wholly ‘trusting’ our public officials”—must have been pretty damned humiliating to President Obama, who has consistently preached to us we have nothing to fear from trusting our public officials at all.

Me being, well, me, when the Obama panel released its recommendations about month ago, I immediately thought to pull down from my shelf the Church Committee’s final report from 1976 on spying on Americans to see how its thirty-six page section about the NSA’s abuses of power, and the government’s investigation of them forty-seven years ago, compares to what we’re seeing today. It certainly makes for an interesting study.

I’ve written before about how an investigation of the NSA ended up being tacked onto the Church Committee’s probe of the CIA and FBI. The most interesting takeaway for our own moment is that the investigation was quite nearly accidental. It was then fought tooth and nail by an intelligence agency that insisted that merely being called to explain itself before Congress would invite catastrophe; and then, when its principals were finally compelled to testify, defended their questionable activities with unfalsifiable boasts like, in the words of then-NSA chief General Lewis Allen, “We are aware that a major terrorist attack was prevented” by the activities under question.

Sound familiar? So what did we learn then, and what have we forgotten about what we learned then, now?

The basic problem, the Church Committee explained, was that “NSA has intercepted and disseminated international communications of American citizens whose privacy ought to be protected under our constitution.” Most dramatically, the congressional investigators discovered—again, almost accidentally—that the NSA had carried out a government program, begun in 1945 (seven years before the NSA was invented and then subsumed under its management), that collected at the end of every work day every single wire sent to or from a foreign country by the three telegram corporations. Practically no one knew about “Operation SHAMROCK”—not even the top executives of the companies. “No witness from the telegraph companies recalled that there had ever been a review of the arrangements at the executive levels of their respective companies,” the document reads.

In one eye-popping passage, the Church investigators write of how, in 1968, a vice president of the telegraph company Western Union “discovered the existence of NSA’s Recordak (microfilm) machine in the Western Union transmission room. The machine was reported to the company president, who directed his employees to find out to whom the machine belonged and what the basis for the arrangement was.”

The basis was meetings between the Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and the companies in 1945 and again in 1947, when the executives agreed upon the program once they were assured by Attorney General Tom Clark they would not suffer criminal liability for participating. The courier, though, who lied that he was from the Department of Defense, said he didn’t know what the basis was, or what was done with the material. The story concludes blandly, “The documents do not reflect whether the machine was removed.”

Wild stuff, right?

What was done with these telegrams was a dragnet—a technologically primitive version of what goes on with “telephonic metadata” now. Then as now, the investigators acknowledged that protecting the secrets of “NSA’s vast technological capability,” if placed under proper supervision, “is a sensitive national asset which ought to be zealously protected for its value to our common defense”—but that “this same technological capability could be turned against the American people, at great cost to liberty.” And then as now, the spooks said if any innocent Americans had their communications spied on, it was only an accident, incidental to the noble work of spying on the bad guys. The Church Committee thundered back, “To those Americans who have had their communications sent with the exception that they were private intentionally intercepted and disseminated by their government, the knowledge that NSA did not monitor specific communications channels solely to acquire their messages is of little comfort.”

And in a related program, carried out between 1967 (when Lyndon Johnson became convinced that antiwar activity just had to be directed by our enemies abroad) and 1973, the NSA received “watch lists” from the FBI, CIA, Bureau of Narcotics, Secret Service and Department of Defense that included “[l]ists of names and phrases, including the names of individuals and groups.” There were 1,200 names in total, with most of the groups “nonviolent and peaceful in nature.” Again, the NSA attempted to drag evidence of foreign influence on dissident activity and civil disturbances out of the various sorts of communications they intercepted. The 1967 riots, and the intensification of antiwar demonstrations, was that era’s 9/11: “A senior NSA official…testified that such a request for information on civil disturbances or political activities was ‘unprecedented’…. It is kind of a landmark in my memory; it stands out as a first.” All told, 2,000 reports were disseminated to other agencies by the friendly NSA, an estimated 10 percent “derived from communications between two American citizens.” But, concluded the Church Committee, “No evidence was found, however, of any significant foreign support or control of domestic dissidents…most…involved rallies and demonstrations that were public knowledge.” Just like President Obama’s panel says they found no evidence that “telephonic metadata” stopped any terrorists plots now.

And, of course, this stuff was carried out with pathological secrecy—in order to protect operational viability, I’m sure the spies reassured one other, but probably as much to hide the serial failures. Who knew if they were breaking the law? Or, as the Church investigators archly asserted, it was “not due to the nature of the communications intercepted (most were personal and innocuous) but to the fact that American citizens were involved.” Communications between two Americans “were classified Top Secret, prepared with no mention of NSA as the source, and disseminated ‘For Background Use Only.’ No serial number was assigned to them, and they were not filed with regular communications intelligence intercepts.”

And as is so often the case, sins begun under Johnson metastasized under Nixon: beginning in July of 1969, all NSA “watch list” information was handled that way.

Another parallel was the poor caliber of excuses once the sins were exposed. Dave Eggers has characterized what the national security priests are saying now: “First of all, we’re searching everyone’s home, so you’re not being singled out…. All we’re doing is searching every home in the United States, every day, without exception, and if we find something noteworthy, we’ll let you know.” The fact that they were running a dragnet was the excuse. And it’s one they’ve apparently been keeping around in the files, waiting for the right moment to spring it once more. As FBI director Clarence Kelley (a top customer of NSA intercepts) “explained” back then, in a memo to the Justice Department in September of 1973:

“We do not believe that the NSA actually participated in any electronic surveillance, [sic] per se of the defendants for any other agency of the government, since under the procedures used by that agency they are unaware of the identity of any group or individual which might be included in the recovery of national security intelligence information.”

(The Church investigators had something to say about that: “This position is difficult to defend since intelligence agencies, including the FBI, submitted specific American names for watch lists which resulted in the interception of Americans’ international communications.”)

So the excuses were similar. But there’s a difference, and it’s a doozy. It suggests the title of a book John Dean wrote years back about the abuses of the Bush administration, Worse than Watergate: what we have today is worse than Nixon, too. For within days of that 1973 memo, the head of the criminal division of Nixon’s Justice Department decided this all was of questionable legality and recommended that “the FBI and Secret Service cease and desist requesting NSA to disseminate to them information concerning individuals and organizations obtained through NSA electronic coverage and that NSA should be informed not to disclose voluntarily such information…unless NSA has picked up the information on its own initiative in pursuit of its foreign intelligence mission.”

In other words, the responsible officials stopped the dragnet of their own accord, policing itself. They didn’t, as under Obama, circle the wagons, wave their arms, and keep on keepin’ on, Constitution be damned. Those were the days. Now, we’re worse off than we were under Nixon—and the responsible officials seem to prefer making up snuff porn about Edward Snowden.

Bill de Blasio was swept to the New York mayoralty on the promise of getting Gracie Mansion out from under the thumb of corporate elites. So how worried should you be that he listened to Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel and is now getting advice on his transition from Emanuel’s corporate consultants.

The story first broke three weeks ago in the web publication Capital New York. “De Blasio’s Shadow Transition” cited an unnamed source (I know who the source is, and can vouch for his trustworthiness) who said that following a November meeting between de Blasio and Emanuel, the nonprofit group Civic Consulting USA “has ‘embedded’ into the process a team drawn up from the ‘creme de la creme of big New York consultants.’ This group has shaped the process by organizing the original transition team into a number of topic-specific committees and then bringing in an even greater number of other people onto those committees to participate in the search for future administration members.” Civic Consulting USA is an offshoot of a Chicago group, the Civic Consulting Alliance, which provides opportunities for corporate executives to do pro bono work on municipal affairs. And in Chicago, where CCA was also instrumental in staffing Emanuel’s transition, their record has been creepy.

Regular readers of my work for The Nation are familiar with my reporting on how Mayor Emanuel rammed through the nation’s largest school closing. Because the move so plainly defied common sense, democratic procedure, empirical honesty, racial and class equity, safety and sound educational policy (see my reporting here, here, here, and here), the plutocrat-heavy school board Rahm personally appointed faced the problem of how to sell it. That’s where the Civic Consulting Alliance came in—and also the Walton Family Foundation, the right-wing group controlled by the family that owns Wal-Mart, who are rather gung-ho to close public schools in order to turn them over to charter school operators.

According to the outstanding Chicago-based independent schools publication Catalyst, that sales job

is being underwritten by the Walton Family Foundation (a foundation run by the founders of Wal-Mart). The Walton Foundation has fueled the expansion of charter schools across the country and, in January, announced that CPS was the largest recipient of charter school grants in the country.

The Walton Foundation agreed in November to provide CPS with a grant for the community engagement process around the “utilization crisis,” according to the CPS communications office. The foundation lists a $478,000 grant to the Children First Foundation, a not-for-profit set up by CPS…

The district had not budgeted for a “rigorous community engagement effort” and therefore needed to reach out for funding, notes spokeswoman Becky Carroll. CPS is using the grant to pay for the “independent facilitators” from the Loran Marketing Group, which is running the breakout sessions at the community meetings.

The content of these breakout sessions is not clear. CPS has banned the media from attending them.

The School Utilization Commission that is advising the district on closings is staffed by the Civic Consulting Alliance, a not-for-profit that does business consulting for city government. The Civic Consulting Alliance is housed in the same office as New Schools for Chicago, an organization that funds and advocates for charter schools. New Schools for Chicago also received a $220,000 Walton Family Foundation Grant….At community meetings that have already taken place, attendees have repeatedly accused CPS officials of wanting to close schools in order to make way for charter schools.

Now, the Civic Consulting Alliance is is not all bad, their work not inherently controversial; this piece by a CCA fan boasts how it corralled free labor to help “redesign workflow for the police department that resulted in the equivalent of adding dozens of officers to the force.” And in this piece Cook County Board president Toni Preckwinkle, a genuine progressive (who would make a great mayor; run, Toni, run!) hosannas CCA for helping “county agencies to establish county-wide goals and metrics in areas such as public safety and economic development.” Hurray!

But in America, policy preferences are deeply divided by class. A study by political scientists Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels and Jason Seewright, for instance, found that 68 percent of the general public believed “the government in Washington ought to see to it that everyone who wants to work can find a job,” versus 19 percent of the wealthy. That is why any arrangement that gives the rich special entry into the halls of government cannot be a merely technocratic act. And when you consider the kind of plutocrats helping run the Civic Consulting Alliance in Chicago, the problem looks even worse. Consider a fellow named Ty Fahner, who sits on CCA’s board. Consider it, and prepare to be shocked.

Recall the basics of Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine” idea: because hollowing out the state in is not popular, elites have to manufacture crises in order to get it done. Now listen to Ty Fahner. Fahner is a former Republican attorney general of Illinois and president of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago—basically the star chamber for executives at Chicago’s biggest employers. He spoke last summer to a meeting at the tony Union League Club on the “urgent need” to cut the pensions of government employees. His presentation was broadcast on C-Span. At forty-six and a half minutes into the presentation, an unidentified audience member, apparently an executive at Kellogg, said:

Maybe sometimes you gotta be irresponsible to be responsible. If a political solution really doesn’t produce a favorable outcome, maybe you really need a market solution. And a market solution, I don’t mean bankruptcy, I mean actually talking down the state rating even further so the state’s bonds essentially become below investment grade. And it drives up the borrowing cost to the state and all of us to a significant level enough that you really feel the public pressure. I mean, that’s somewhat irresponsible…but there has to be a market pressure that is overwhelming.

To translate: Why don’t people like Fahner use their influence with bond rating agencies to try to make it harder for the State of Illinois to borrow money?

Here’s how Fahner replied:

The Civic Committee, not me, but me and some of the people that make up the Civic Committee, some of the same names I mentioned before, did meet with and call—in one case in person—and a couple of calls to Moody’s and Fitch and Standard & Poors, and say “How in the hell can you guys do this? You are an enabler to let the state continue. You keep threatening more and more and more.”

And I think now we’ve backed off. We don’t want to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. But if you watch what happened over the last few years, it’s been steadily down. Before that, it’s been the blind eye…we’ve done all we can do on that…we’re trying to work the political process…rattle the sabers and call everyone and tell them.

Again, translating: “We” already tried that. Then we stopped. Not because it was unethical, or undemocratic. But because we wanted plausible deniability if anyone (correctly) accused us of sabotaging the full faith and credit of Illinois government. And, hey! It worked.
(Subsequently Fahner claimed he “misspoke” and that nothing of the sort ever went down. Apparently he got the message that you didn’t admit to stuff like this in public.)

Now, I’ve found no evidence Fahner himself is involved with Civic Consulting USA—just the original Chicago version, CCA, from which CCUSA sprung. The bottom line here are the questions. The ties between the original and the spinoff are close; CCA provided CCUSA’s CEO, who is still listed as a CCA principal. Fahner is still on CCA’s board. Here is CCUSA’s board. Is there a Ty Fahner–style shock-doctrineer among them? And why couldn’t de Blasio staff up City Hall without messing around with people the Walton Foundation trusts enough to grant half a million dollars? Gracie Mansion: let’s hear what you have to say. With friends like these, the danger is that Bill de Blasio’s revolution might end before it has chance to begin.

On Friday I posted a short piece in which I said that (1) Benjamin Wittes, co-director of the Harvard Law School–Brookings Project on Law and Security, has been blogging at his website Lawfare “on the report on the abuses of the National Security Agency just out from the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communication Technologies, in terms highly favorable to the super-secretive and media-shy agency”; (2) that The New Republic’s website republishes his posts and others from the Lawfare group blog in a project titled “Security States” that is sponsored by Northrop Grumman, a major NSA contractor; and (3) that Wittes and his colleagues enjoy extraordinary access to the NSA, as suggested by a series of interviews they’ve published on the site with top NSA officials. I drew a connection between all of these things. Then I sent the post to TNR’s editor Franklin Foer and to Wittes, promising to publish their responses. What I learned was that the problem isn’t as bad as I originally described. In fact, it’s worse.

* * *

Here is what Franklin Foer, who is an old friend (I hired him for his first journalism internship) wrote back to me:

We’ve been running pieces from Lawfare for many months—and we’ve been running pieces by Ben and Jack for many years. They are valued contributors, sharp minds, genuine experts, and ideologically unpredictable. (Jeff Rosen, another treasured contributor and our legal affairs editor, has long been one of the most important critics of the surveillance state.) When our collaboration with Lawfare was sponsored by Northrop—which was just the month of October—it was clearly disclosed on each article page.

I spent Monday researching Foer’s claim of full disclosure of Northrop Grumman’s sponsorship. Let’s not bury the lede here: what Foer said does not seem to be true.

An announcement of the new collaboration between TNR and Lawfare on September 30, 2013, at Lawfareblog.com (“Coming Tomorrow: Teaming Up With The New Republic”) stated, “We are calling the project, which is being sponsored by the Northrop Grumman Corp, ‘Security States.’ ” An announcement under Wittes’s byline at NewRepublic.com on October 1 says nothing about any sponsorship, and a third announcement, a press release on the same day at NewRepublic.com, concluded, “This partnership is made possible by Northrop Grumman, a leading global security company.” That is the only mention of Northrop Grumman sponsorship of TNR content I can find on its website—ever. Going through each online page with posts tagged as part of the “Security States” series in October, I find that the sponsorship was not “clearly disclosed on each article page.” As this forlorn little Googlewhack reveals, it was in fact revealed on none of them.

I sought clarification from Foer: Did I misinterpret his response? He wrote back, “Northrop doesn’t advertise with us on our site now. That was a month-long deal that ended.” I took him to be saying, perhaps, that the posts published under the “Security States” tag during the period of sponsorship mentioned the sponsorship, but only while that sponsorship was ongoing. However, using the Internet Wayback Machine, I checked for how a post made on October 17 showed up the next day, on October 18—and could find no indication of sponsorship there, either. I followed up by asking Foer about that, too. He replied, “”Northrop was an advertiser. They were promised nothing, other than prominent placement on Security States pages.”

He had appended to his original response “what I hope would be obvious: Nobody from our staff or Lawfare ever had any contact with this specific advertiser; and advertisers never have any say in what we produce.” That’s fine. I don’t doubt him. But to summarize, there was no way to know the arrangement had ended; so Wittes is off-base for knocking me for not knowing the arrangement had ended. Indeed there seems to have been no way, really, for most of The New Republic’s readers to know it ever began. Trusting New Republic readers consumed prose sponsored by Northrop Grumman, concerning issues in which Northrop Grumman had a direct financial interest, without being aware of the fact. I’ll have more to say about that below—because the stuff about the NSA is only the beginning of the problem. The drones are the bigger issue.

* * *

First, listen to Benjamin Wittes:

My response is that this is really goofy for someone of your very considerable talents—and that it would have been worth checking with someone who knows something this subject before writing it up, rather than after.

The Northrup [sic] sponsorship was for one month only—the month of October. Not a dime of the money from that sponsorship has been paid to Jack [Goldsmith, about which below] or anyone else for writing for Lawfare, Lawfare being a tiny non-profit that does not pay its writers. What’s more, our content-sharing arrangement with the New Republic, in any event, has nothing whatsoever to do with the “Inside NSA” podcast series, which developed—as we made very clear on the site—out of dialogues Bobby Chesney has been organizing between the agency and academics.

On a more personal note, I might add that our characterization of me as ‘blogging on the report on the abuses of the National Security Agency…in terms highly favorable to the super-secretive and media-shy agency’ is simply indefensible. I have written exactly one post on the subject, and it contains no evaluation on the merits of the review group findings at all, merely the political observation that the report is very awkward for the administration.

You got one thing right though. I am, in fact, not a lawyer.

Wittes subsequently wrote me, and wrote a post elaborating further, that Northrop Grumman “had no oversight over content with respect to Security States and was not promised pieces on drones or NSA matters either.”

It’s odd. Soon after my post, Wittes blogged that the Lawfare/TNR partnership no longer had “active sponsorship from Northrop, though I sincerely wish we did and look forward to working with them (or other companies) in the future.” Yes, that’s right: his defense against the accusation of taking money from a defense contractor while producing journalism that specifically impacts that defense contractor was to publicly solicit more money from more defense contractors. Lawfare is published by a nonprofit, the Lawfare Institute. It is read by a few thousand people, among them the most powerful decision-makers in the Washington, DC, firmament. It leans right. It likes drones and the NSA. It is also full of smart analysis, valuable analysis, that nonetheless becomes the less valuable the more doubts persist about the independence of its publishers. So who are its funders? Indeed, why does it need funders? Publishing a blog doesn’t cost a penny.

But Lawfare solicits sponsors nonetheless. And maybe a super-human being would be able to do that without the temptation to self-censor—without refraining from publishing the sort of content that would make that stated priority difficult. But unless you believe Benjamin Wittes is a super-human being, it’s hard take Lawfare seriously as an impartial source of analysis. Writing bad things about the sponsor’s products is bad for business; that’s why serious publications maintain a rigid wall between ad sales and editorial—and don’t try to sell sponsorship in the very pieces in which they defense their editorial independence!

Consider, too, what with Wittes describing his outfit as a tiny nonprofit: these guys are not just some random dudes blogging out their idle thoughts out into the Internet ether. According to a feature in CQ Weekly this past spring, “When the House Judiciary Committee summoned experts in February to testify about the legality of drone strikes on U.S. citizens, all of them came from one blog: Lawfare. And when California Democratic Rep. Adam B. Schiff wanted to draft legislation creating a court to oversee such strikes, he consulted with one of the founders of Lawfare, Jack Goldsmith. It’s a common phone call from Capitol Hill to experts who write for the blog.”

A tiny nonprofit? Sure, why not. But here’s another fascinating detail in the CQ piece: the site gets only 2,000 to 3,000 visits a day, but “[a]mong the top six cities reading Lawfare in 2013 are Washington; Arlington, Va.; and McLean, Va., the latter two the neighborhoods of the Pentagon and the CIA.” (I wonder if traffic of late has increased from Laurel, Maryland, the site of the NSA’s Ford Meade headquarters.) The writers may not get paid. But they certainly earn plenty of political capital from the association—specifically with the national security state’s reigning right-leaning powers that be.

The CQ Weekly piece cites Andrew Prasow, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, who “criticizes Lawfare for its authors’ frequent defenses of surviving elements of Bush’s anti-terrorism policies.” The joint Lawfare/TNR project also, it’s true, publish great stuff that does not—even left-leaning stuff. For instance, there’s this outstanding five-part series on why corporations should be liable for design flaws in their software that make customers vulnerable to cybersecurity breaches. But (concern-troll alert) good dissenting writers won’t publish stuff there for long if their editors keep squandering credibility by selling themselves to the highest defense-contractor bidder.

For guess what else Security States publishes? A piece, during that golden month underwritten by Northrop Grumman, headlined “Armed Robots: Banning Autonomous Weapons Systems Isn’t the Answer.” In it, authors Matthew Waxman and Kenneth Anderson, two members of the right-wing Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law, argue that armed drones “programmed under certain circumstances to select and fire at some targets entirely on their own” are “not inherently unethical and unlawful, and they can be made to serve the ends of law on the battlefield…through existing normative framework,” and that to “preemptively ban the development and use of autonomous weapons systems” would be “unnecessary and dangerous.”

Now, for all I know, they have a point. (It sounds nuts to me, but hey, I’m not the expert.) And I’m sure these cats are sincere in their belief. But I’d still trust them more if the conclusions weren’t so, um, salubrious to a certain corporate sponsor. For a global ban on drones that deal death via artificial intelligence algorithms would be pretty damned inconvenient for a company racing to complete something called the X-47B, “also known as as the Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstrator (UCAS-D),” according to the breathless prose of the tech site CNet this past month. The X-47B, CNet continues, “has put a gleam in the Pentagon’s eye about someday equipping carrier strike forces with autonomous aircraft.”

That would be very sort of aircraft that Lawfare/TNR says don’t need no stinking regulation.

Northrop is drone central. Ran a Fortune web headline from last week: “How Northrop Grumman Is Winning the Military’s Super-Stealth Drone Race: Northrop Grumman signs yet another major drone contract from the DoD.” And, from NextGov from a few months back: “Northrop Grumman and Carter Aviation Technologies have been hired for a $9 million effort to conceptualize an armed drone that will launch from a small ship to strike as far as 900 nautical miles away.”

Wittes drone-defense central—a leading advocate of drone warfare as “ethical and effective.”

Maybe that’s why Grumman found him worthy of their sponsorship.

In any event, in October, under that sponsorship, we find Wittes criticizing an Amnesty International report on drones.

At this point, let me cop to it. It was wrong of me to write piece titled, “Why Is &lsdquo;The New Republic’ Taking Money From an NSA Contractor to Run Defenses of the NSA?” That was unfair. Much more accurate would have been to write, “Did &lsdquo;The New Republic’ Take Money From a Drone Manufacturer that Wanted It To Run Defenses of Drones?”

The timing was certainly auspicious: last autumn was precisely when Northrop Grumman would want Lawfare’s small but influential band of readers to be thinking warm thoughts about its drone program—especially the ones on congressional staffs. Another of their unmanned planes, the Global Hawk, was slated by the Pentagon for termination in January of 2012. According to an AllGov.com report, “The Air Force determined that Global Hawk cost too much and was too limited in its ability to fly during stormy weather, among other reasons for killing the drone.” (Originally budgeted at $35 million each, each plane will now cost an estimated $220 million.) Then Northrop “made it rain on Congress to the tune of $31 million in lobbying spending since the beginning of 2012, and in return Congress has passed legislation ordering the Air Force to purchase the arms maker’s RQ-4 Global Hawk.”

There is no evidence here of causation here, or collusion—just the appearance of impropriety. But Wittes doesn’t believe in the appearance of impropriety, does he? “I sincerely wish we did and look forward to working with them (or other companies) in the future.” What kind of serious scholar says that???

* * *

Now, as to issue (2), the podcast series with NSA principals, which Wittes says I misidentified as part of the joint project with TNR. I didn’t. I just said the podcasts prove he “enjoys extraordinary access to the NSA.” Which he and his colleagues indisputably do. He retorts that their podcasts were just something that “developed—as we made very clear on our site—out of dialogues Bobby Chesney [one of his blogging partners] has been organizing between the agency and academics.” And that all sounds very kumbaya, but I’m not sure this makes a point any different than the one I did. The NSA chooses the kind of scholars they can prefer to dialogue with. They are people who write like… Ben Wittes.

Wittes wrote to me that, to bring us to issue (3) characterizing him as “blogging on the report on the abuses of the National Security Agency…in terms highly favorable to the super-secretive and media-shy agency’ is simply indefensible. I have written exactly one post on the subject, and it contains no evaluation on the merits of the review group findings at all, merely the political observation that the report is very awkward for the administration.” And, yes, it’s true he’s only done one post on the new panel’s review, which, after all, had only been out a few days when I wrote. And he’s right: what I wrote was a stone mistake. The post I linked to was indeed neutral concerning the report, merely making the (correct, useful) point about its political awkwardness to the president. It turns out I confused that post with another one by Wittes that was highly favorable to the NSA.

The subject was Judge Richard Leon’s opinion calling bulk metadata collection by the NSA under Section 215 of the Patriot Act unconstitutional. In it Wittes calls metadata collection “a major intelligence program that administrations of both parties have insisted represents a crucial line of defense against terrorism.” He thinks this, though the panel appointed by Obama would soon announce pretty authoritatively that this just wasn’t so. That—to quote—“the information contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of section 215 telephony meta-data was not essential to preventing attacks.” Now, NSA chief General Keith Alexander and others have, it is true, bamboozled “administrations of both parties” into accepting this claim. But as has been understood for a while now, General Alexander is a liar. But apparently Ben Wittes trusts him. Which is precisely my point. People who publicly profess trust in the NSA and disparage its critics—another Lawfare post describes the new review as “sloganeering” and “scandalously slender” and calls its recommendations “extreme”—are more likely to get close to the NSA, and enjoy the favor of its contractors.

So: wrong post, right conclusion. Lawfare is largely a pro-NSA blog. And a pro-drones-that-shoot-missiles-from-the-sky-without-human-intervention blog. Which may be why Northrop Grumman likes it so much, and why it likes TNR for partnering with it.

* * *

This is getting long. But stick with me. For the next part just gets more embarrassing for our hapless interlocutor.

Turn first, though, to issue (4) in Wittes’s response. When he notes that Jack Goldsmith wasn’t paid for his posts, he’s referring to these words from me: “Let’s hear from Professor Goldsmith as to whether he is paid by Northrop for his posts at Lawfare, and whether he thinks he has disclosed that to his Harvard employers, and whether he should make the arrangement public.

Here was Goldsmith’s response:

Dear Rick

You write such great books—surely you have better uses of your time.

I have not disclosed any conflict of interest for writing on Lawfare because I do not have one to disclose. I am not (and have never been) paid by anyone for my posts at Lawfare.

What is your next book about? I loved the last two.

Glad for the compliment, professor, and for the clarification. I accept it, while adding that I still would like to ask you, and Wittes, the fundamentally question: Why do you think it’s appropriate to solicit money for a journalistic project from a party that has a such a direct financial interest in that project? And I’d add that, Professor, you’re wrong: this has been a far better use of my time than I ever dared dream. My favorite part was learning that one of the national security state’s most respected intellectual mandarins on questions of technology and security doesn’t understand how websites work.

Check this out. Among his tweets on my short little piece, Wittes offered the following piece of text, presented as a smoking gun: “Turns out The Nation isn’t above putting advertising from defense contractors on the front page that blasts us for it. pic.twitter.com/f400Js8Zjx.” It presents a screenshot of TheNation.com with an ad for United Technologies tucked on the right side.

Oy.

TheNation.com, like most online magazine sites, sells part of its advertising space to digital ad networks like Google AdSense who in turn auction it to their own, third-party clients. These ads then show up on users’ computers according to algorithms based on their own web usage. The fact that a defense contractor showed up on Ben Wittes’s computer screen simply means that… defense contractors frequently show up on Ben Wittes’s computer screen. Which I guess in the end sort of proves my point.

The National Security Agency has a friend at the Harvard Law School. And at the Brookings Institution. And at The New Republic. And at The Washington Post.

Benjamin Wittes, who is not a lawyer, is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, where he is “Research Director in Public Law, and Co-Director of the Harvard Law School-Brookings Project on Law and Security.” He also has a Web site, Lawfare, where he’s been blogging on the report on the abuses of the National Security Agency just out from the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communication Technologies, in terms highly favorable to the super-secretive and media-shy agency. He also enjoys extraordinary access to the NSA, for instance in this series of podcasts with its top officials. (“We Brought In a Recoding Device So You Don’t Have To,” the series is titled—cute!)

Why is Lawfare the NSA’s media portal of choice? Well, consider this. Lawfare, in turn, partners with The New Republic, where this post was republished in its entirety. The joint Lawfare/TNR project is titled “Security States,” and it is sponsored, Wittes proudly notes, by the Northrop Grumman Corporation. Grumman, in turn, is a major NSA contractor—see this $220 million deal it scored with the NSA “to develop an advanced information management and data storage system that will support efforts to modernize the nation’s electronic intelligence and broader signals intelligence capabilities,” a fact TNR does not disclose to its readers.

And the NSA is apparently well-pleased with the arrangement. “Check out Lawfare’s interview with NSA’s acting Deputy Director Fran Fleisch,” the agency enthused today, one of the NSA’s public affairs office’s six breathless tweets booming “Lawfare” over the past five days. Surely they also enjoy the laundering of the content of “the indispensable Lawfare blog” through The Washington Post, courtesy of its hack right-wing blogger Jennifer Rubin. (“The NSA will falter unless Obama does his job.”)

Meanwhile, Wittes’s Lawfare co-blogger Jack Goldsmith, late of George W. Bush’s Pentagon and Justice Department, is a professor at the Harvard Law School, but does not disclose any conflict of interest, as most Harvard Law professors do, for being part of such a project sponsored by a commercial entity.

Let’s hear from Professor Goldsmith as to whether he is paid by Northrop for his posts at Lawfare, and whether he thinks he has disclosed that to his Harvard employers, and whether he should make the arrangement public. Let’s hear from The New Republic. Why is it taking money from an NSA contractor to run defenses of the NSA? I’ll be sending this post straightaway to TNR editor Franklin Foer, an old friend. And I’ll e-mail it too Professor Goldsmith, too. I’ll let you know what they say.

The serial failures of Chicago’s new “smart card” public transportation fare collection system isn’t really a Chicago story—any more than the dark, satanic mills of nineteenth-century England were a Manchester story, or impoverished temp workers risking life and limb packaging iPads is a story about California’s Inland Empire. This is a tale about the world taking shape before us now, everywhere: public provision being turned over to private interests, subverting democracy and all economic good sense in the (terrible) bargain.

RFID fare-collection systems implemented by the San Diego–based defense contractor Cubic have caused public outcry wherever they’ve been introduced, across all four corners of the globe. London is Cubic’s biggest customer, accounting for 33 percent of their transportation business. There, “Oyster” smart cards were introduced in 2003 via what is known in England as a Private Finance Initiative. The parties were a consortium including Cubic and EDS (formerly Electronic Data Systems, a subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard), and London’s transport agency TfL; the seventeen-year contract, signed in 1998, was worth £1.1 billion. The system began with a modest range of features and slowly expanded; but according to Wikipedia, in “August 2008, TfL decided to exercise a break option in the contract to terminate it in 2010, five years early, this followed a number of technical failures.” And yet a subsequent contract with Cubic lasting through 2015 was inked nonetheless.

And the failures went on.

There were 190,0000 complaints about overcharging in 2008 (only 46 percent of complainants had their money refunded)—with the pace accelerating month by month. In 2010, with Londoners still baffled by a confusing system that required them to “tap out” their cards upon leaving a station lest they get hit by the maximum fare, TfL responded by blaming the customers. The next year, the maximum fare was increased; overcharges thus added £61.8 million to the consortium’s coffers. This year, a transportation watchdog group reported that of the Oyster machines “almost no one they interviewed understood how they worked.” The Guardian reported that authorities knew the system was overcharging some users. The paper continued, “Transport for London (TfL) has been made aware of the glitch but is not going to fix it until September at the earliest—because it only updates the Oyster system three times a year.” One of the most embarrassing problems in Chicago—machines charging the wrong customer card—is rampant in London, according to a report in the excellent local Chicago news site Gapers Block. Another system glitch reported by Gapers Block was that vendors were able to receive money from customers, then void the transaction and still keep the cash. Meanwhile customers are owed some £53 million in unclaimed refunds; but there is “no easy way to reclaim the funds.”

The system is up for rebid in 2015. Trouble for Cubic stockholders, right? Not so much. Observed a Credit Suisse equity report, “it is a longstanding relationship that is likely to be renewed.” Nice work if you can get it.

You could enjoy a nice around-the-world tour just traveling to cities where Cubic has screwed up fare collection. Gapers Block documented them: double-charging in Atlanta. Twenty-fold charging in Brisbane, Australia. Miami-Dade’s “Easy Card” system was dubbed “Easy Fraud”: this fall, “a 22-year-old man has stood trial over a a glitch allowing him (and members of a WSVN Channel 7 News team) to load money onto Easy Cards for free.” In San Francisco, “Cubic disclosed it received 38,000 customer service phone calls in August 2011.”

And then Los Angeles: in spite of “nearly consistent one-star reviews on Yelp, Cubic still got a six-year, $545 million contract extension.”

None of this bothered the city fathers of Vancouver, British Columbia, apparently. Their Cubic-built system “Compass” comes fully online this January. A large-scale Beta test, though, has already enraged citizens who realized that buying a fare through the traditional system, which will continue on buses, forced you to pay twice when transferring to trains, which only accept the new cards.

And so Cubic continues to thrive and grow, much to Wall Street’s delight. Wrote security analysts of Cubic’s military subsidiary, “2013 is likely to be a year of flattish revenue and lower earnings owing to tight defense budgets.” But “[t]here is no pure-play publicly traded fare-collection competitors,” so “[w]e see a solid growth story/existing backlog in Transportation,and believe that CUB’s efforts to expand its addressable market…. Scope for smart card penetration in existing U.S. transit systems is another growth lever.”

Let’s pause and reflect on what’s going on here.

“Privatization” isn’t new in Chicago’s fare-collection system; indeed the two components of the system being replaced, semi-smart preloaded “Chicago Cards” and dumb old magnetic-strip cards, were also devised under contract to Cubic. What we now see in Chicago, however, is an intensification of the logic of privatization. A publicly traded company succeeds—attracts more investors—only if it grows. The equity reports from the investment banks are telling in their ruthless focus on this fact: “flattish” grown is veritable death. It is not enough to “saturate” an old market. It is instead crucial to devise new ones—even if the old products don’t need fixing.

That is one of the reasons turning over public municipal services to private interests is so dangerous: the exploitative logic of planned obsolescence. The watchword: If it’s not broke—fix it! Or, as we’ve seen, don’t fix it. Just change it, even if what replaces it is worse.

What does it mean when a new product that fails and fails and fails, frustrating customers everywhere, continues to enjoy sales growth? It means that the customer isn’t actually the customer. The politicians are the customers. And they’re plainly getting something out of the deal whether Joe Public gets double-charged for a ride downtown on the No. 6 route or not. Consider: one of Cubic’s biggest institutional owners is Blackrock, the biggest investment fund in the world; and Blackrock’s CEO gave $25,000 to Rahm Emanuel’s mayoral campaign, then enjoyed a rare half-hour sit-down with him. Was transit fares one of the things they talked about? Wouldn’t it be nice to know.

Another danger is that private companies see the Internal Revenue System as a machine to repurpose our cash into their pockets. Reported Cubic to investors after the 2012 transportation bill was signed into law, “of significance to Cubic Transportation Systems in that all of our transit agency customers in the United States currently receive federal funding, and this bill will continue to provide them with the funding that they need to start new projects themselves as well as any prospective clients who may have needed funding.” Tellingly, you see no talk here of efficiency, or cost-savings, or market-enforced accountability, all those boons privatization is supposed to deliver to citizens. It’s just—here’s a new revenue stream. It’s just—time to call up “prospective clients.”

There is no market-enforced accountability here. How could there be, when the contracts last ten years and are all-but-automatically renewed, due to (telling language!) “longstanding relationship[s]”? How could there be “competition” when the assets in question are natural monopolies? (What’s a competitor supposed to do, build their own subway routes?) And yet, maddeningly, the fallacy of the “efficient” private sector endures—helped along by those who ought to know better. Like when President Obama promised to bring healthcare.gov up to the standard of “private sector velocity and effectiveness.”

Somehow, failures in the public sector are always judged as systematic. The private sector thus exists to ride to the rescue—and their failures are only judged anomalies. A pretty nice arrangement for investors. The only people who suffer are the citizens. As Credit Suisse reports, “90%+ off Cubic’s cash on the balance sheet is held offshore.”

So that’s how it works: we shovel them boatloads of money. They stick us with substandard products. We fuss and holler, to no avail. Then they shelter the money they’ve just Hoovered from our pockets in offshore accounts. Maybe it’s time for activists in Chicago, Vancouver, Atlanta, Miami, Brisbane and London to get together, raise their collective voices and demand some of that money back.

This is part two of a series on the perils of privatization. Read the final installment here. Read the first one here.

On Tuesday I quoted Chicago anti-privatization activist Tom Tresser about why corporate America is falling in love with cities: “We have a massive global movement of capital which, because they’ve burned their own fucking houses down through their own greed, don’t have the gilt returns that they’re used to receiving…. So the new guaranteed annual returns that big business and big capital are looking for is our assets.”

Consider the very model of the modern major municipal contractor: Cubic. Trading on the NASDEQ with a market capitalization of almost a billion dollars under the adorable stock symbol CUB, Cubic earns over 99 percent of its revenues from government contracts, according to a Credit Suisse equity research report. When it’s not mismanaging urban fare-transit collection systems like Chicago’s Ventra, it does a once-pretty trade as “the leading pure-play provider of [the] defense training and mission support service areas which stand at the heart of modern military practices.” But, as we’ll see, defense isn’t offering the gilt-edged returns it once did. So look for Chicago’s very stupid smart cards to come soon to a city bus near you. Look, in other words, for Cubic to be picking your pocket, too.

Cubic was founded in 1951 in a San Diego storefront as a modest electronics company specializing in precision distance-measuring equipment. In 1966 it developed the first electronic stadium scoreboard. Then it gained worldwide recognition for the first satellite-based surveying system—expertise that turned out to be useful for getting its foot into the door where the real money was: defense. Tracking systems for military aircraft. Measurement apparatuses for missile ranges. “These core technologies,” Credit Suisse’s analysts explain, “led to the development of combat training instrument displays.” By 1973 it had created the “world’s first Top Gun ACMI system for the Marine Corps Air Station at Yuma, Arizona,” whatever that is; “Later, Cubic pioneered the world’s first turnkey ground combat/instrumentation system at Hohenfels, Germany. The same technologies were incorporated into Cubic’s broadcast data links and combat personnel recovery system, which were used successfully during Operation Desert Storm and in peacekeeping operations in Bosnia.”

Its “best known products” now, according to a JPMorgan report, “are laser engagement simulation kits used to conduct realistic war games…communications products, such as data links, power amplifiers, avionics systems, multi-band communications tracking device, and cross-domain hardware solutions for multi-level security requirements.” Their subsidiary NEK Special Programs Group, LLC “[o]ffers special training services in the areas of combat marksmanship, close quarter battle, sniper and survival training, tactical evasion driving, tactical life saving, military freefall and winter warfare, mountaineering operations, and medical training and services…. Cubic supports three of the four U.S combat training centers as a prime contractor (e.g. Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk), and serves as a subcontractor on the fourth.”

Which used to be a damned reliable customer base. But listen to the advice of the analysts at the House of Morgan: “The threat of sequestration continues to hang over defense segment funding, and we think Mission Support will be under pressure owing to DoD scrutiny of contractor sources.” They predict “flattish growth for these businesses.”

Good thing, then, that Cubic has a diversified product portfolio.

The San Diego company first got into the municipal fare-collection business when it bought a company called Western Data Products in 1971. Soon, it invented the world’s first plastic magnetically encoded tickets for Pennsylvania’s Port Authority. It is now the only publicly traded company in the business of providing RFID fare cards, like those used in Chicago's new system. And unlike with the defense stuff, when you’re part of the municipal-industrial complex, everything’s coming up roses.

A chart in the Credit Suisse report tells the story: “Smart Fare Card Penetration” was 9 percent of public transportation systems in 2007, 18 percent in 2009 and 22 percent in 2011. “The company is aggressively aiming to expand its addressable market from its current estimate of $2bn to $5bn,” says Credit Suisse. “The key driver in this segment is municipal transportation investment.” Investors are advised that “low smart card and growing magnetic reader penetration in the United States” is “a further positive in the long term.” Better yet, “aggregate passenger spending on public transportation shows little sensitivity to economic downturn and has increased every year.” Flat-lining defense spending? No worries. Cubic is covered. With guaranteed returns. Buy! Buy! Buy!

And so investors have bought, bought, bought. One of them, Blackrock, the largest investment fund in the world, owns 78,809 shares of CUB. Is it a coincidence that Blackrock CEO Larry Fink is a member of what Chicago Reader reporter Ben Joravsky calls Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s“ Millionaires Club”? I cannot firmly say. What I can say is that it makes perfect sense for the same sort of companies that once gave us the $500 hammer and the $750 toilet seat via “cost-plus” contracts that guaranteed gilt-edged returns, whether they did a good job or not, to keep mayors like Emanuel (who earned $18.5 million in two and a half years doing very little as an “investment banker”) on speed dial.

I wrote about the serial disasters of Chicago’s smart cards. But Cubic has the problem covered. The public relations problem, that is. Read one internal corporate communication: “The open payment system is likely at some point to be subject to criticism, so it’s important that all possible points of contention be considered and prepared for.” By making sure the problems are addressed? Not so much. “Spin,” a memo instead explains (emphasis added), “needs to be heavily positive.”

Speaking of spin, the Chicago Transit Authority’s head, Forest Claypool, has explained to the public that the horrific glitches have not yet cost the city anything because the CTA is holding back payment until the problems are fixed. He’s dissembling. As Credit Suisse’s analysts explain to investors (though I’ve never seen Chicago citizens get the same sort of straightforward explanation; telling, no?), “Most transport contracts are taken over ten years,” with almost half usually paid out up front: Vancouver paid Cubic 40 percent in advance for its smart-card system; Sydney, Australia, laid out 45 percent. Contrariwise, “for the Chicago project, revenue will be taken entirely over the ten-year span of the contract.” What seems to be happening here is that Cubic knew that Chicago’s rushed implementation, without a testing phase, would make for horrible botches and built that into the deal. They can’t be punished by getting money taken from them because there isn’t yet any money to take.

Once the kinks are worked out, though, and the problems are forgotten—that’s when the money rolls in, as if nothing untoward had ever happened. Indeed the public relations memo I quoted says as much, referencing the “need to spin the transition away from the [old] cards, and the fact that there are dates certain for that to happen.”

Indeed, it looks like the perfection of Cubic’s evolving business model. Consider another revealing chart in Credit Suisse’s report on Cubic for investors, in the “Sales Growth Outlook” section. It shows “Backlog as % of Forward Two-Year Sales” over a four-year period. That’s a way of describing projected payments in a contract that are guaranteed down the line, but can’t yet be counted as revenue. The chart has three lines. Two of them, for Cubic’s Defense Systems and Mission Support divisions, turn worrisomely south. Like the man said, “The threat of sequestration continues to hang over defense segment funding, and we think Mission Support will be under pressure owing to DoD scrutiny of contractor sources.” But the Transportations Systems line, conversely, shoots promisingly skyward.

And once more Chicago’s City Hall gives away the store to Big Money, slicing its citizen on the cutting edge of the municipal privatization grift.

This is part one of a series on the perils of privatization. Check back soon for the next installment.

Riding the buses in Chicago has been awfully fun this busy Christmas Season. Half the time, it’s been free.

This fall, you see, after a series of delays, the city brought online a new fare payment system called “Ventra” in which customers tap “smart cards” against electronic readers at bus entrances and train station turnstiles. Only it turns out these cards are not so smart. Half the time, tap after tap after tap, the damned things don’t work, and the bus driver just exasperatedly waves you through. Although it hasn’t been as much fun for the passengers who exited the bus through the front door and discovered that, if their purses or backpacks brushed too close to the reader, they were charged twice. Or for a guy named Al Stern who became a local celebrity after receiving an e-mail on Friday, September 6, informing him he’d be receiving a Ventra card in the mail soon to replace his “Chicago Card,” which was the previous prepayment system (which worked fine). Four minutes later he got the same e-mail, then four minutes after that, then four minutes again after that, and so on and so forth all the way until the next morning. Twenty-four days later he arrived home to a pile of 91 envelopes shoved through his mail slot, each holding a Ventra card; the next day, 176 more arrived, each one, he later discovered, canceling the last. “You have to call and activate it,” he told Crain’s Chicago Business, “but I’ve been afraid to do that.”

The goofs accelerated, like Lucille Ball working at the assembly line, or Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. At the end of November federal workers discovered they could “pay” fares by scanning their employee IDs. (“Please be advised that intentional misuse of federal credentials is prohibited,” the local EPA office wrote employees.) Other customers reported being double-, triple- or even quadruple-billed. At the end of October the Chicago Tribune reported, “CTA employees are being ‘verbally attacked daily by angry riders’ who are blaming them for problems with the new transit-fare payment system”; their union called on the Chicago Transit Authority to scrap Ventra until the bugs were worked out. The city started charging the vendor for the proliferating lost revenue, while that vendor kept promising serial “software fixes” that never seemed to do anything but introduce novel problems. At the end of November came news that when people tapped their wallets, like they used to do without problem with their old Chicago Cards, random credit or debit cards were charged. Then, last week, the “CTA: Ventra Glitches Mostly Gone But Delays Remain.” Rush-hour outages began, and some buses stopping accepting fares altogether. That came two days after the headline, ""CTA: Ventra glitches mostly gone but delays remain."

It’s been our own municipal version of the Obamacare rollout—which means everyone should pay attention. For the root problem is exactly the same. Congressman Henry Waxman argued about glitches in the ACA, “if anybody’s head should roll, it should be the contractors who didn’t live up to their contractual responsibility.” But that’s only half right. Consider the sign Harry Truman used to keep on his Oval Office desk: “The buck stops here.” The problem is not just the profusion of private contractors who do the public’s business so poorly; it’s the fact that the public’s business is being so relentlessly privatized by the government executives in charge. Slowly, the perceived imperative to privatize has become the political tail that wags the policy dog. The results are before us.

Why, indeed, was this massive change in how Chicagoans pay for their bus and train fares initiated in the first place? “What was wrong with the old system? It worked fine,” ran the first comment on the Chicago Tribune’s article on all the abuse the poor bus drivers are facing from frustrated customers. Ran the second, “I have never even heard a compelling argument as to WHY we needed a new system to begin with.”

Well, my friends, here’s your compelling argument: under the old system, rich investors didn’t get a piece of the action. Under this one, they most decidedly do.

The contract to replace Chicago’s fare payment system was awarded to the publicly traded corporation Cubic in 2011 by the previous mayor, Richard M. Daley, for $454 million, and implemented with alacrity by the current mayor Rahm Emanuel. I’ll have much more to say about this company and its many dubious works in the next part of this series. For now, consider this. In a separate part of the project, Chicagoans are offered the following opportunity, as advertised on the back of their Ventra cards: “Go beyond transit. Call or go online to activate your Money Network® MasterCard® Prepaid Debit Account and use your Ventra Card for purchases, direct deposit, bill pay, and at ATMs.” This is how the City of Chicago intended to turn its millions of captive citizens over to the commercial banking industry: hoovering spare change from the pockets of Chicago’s marginal communities into corporate America’s overstuffed coffers.

Chicagoans who choose to turn bus cards into bank cards will be socked with hidden fees: $1.50 every time they withdraw cash using your bus-card-cum-bank-card from an ATM,$2.95 every time they add money using a personal credit card. Two dollars for every phone call with a service representative (or, oops, each “Operator Assisted Telephone Inquiry”). Two bucks for a paper copy of their account. An “account research fee” of $10 an hour.

At which point, learning about all that, they might cry, Help! Let me out of this “deal”! Well, that’ll cost them $6—a “balance refund fee.”

Now, turning your bus card into a bank card is optional—a program supposedly intended to help Chicago’s underbanked poor. I liked this observation, however, from a Tribune article last March: “It may be a tough sell, some experts said. Many low-income individuals are cash-centric in their spending habits because they are wise to the way of credit-card charges.” But not to fear, if you’re a Master of the Universe investing in one of the participating multinational banking concerns—Mastercard, First Data, or MetaBank—backing the play. Even though Chicago’s impoverished might not make ready marks for the scam, Chicagoans who don’t choose the banking option will suffer hidden charges. There is, for instance, a $7 “dormancy” fee if you don’t use your transit card for eighteen months, with another $5 charge tacked on for every dormant month after that.

Note that I said hidden fees. How hidden? Well, the only reasons Chicagoans learned about them was that the Chicago Tribune pored through over 1,000 pages of legal boilerplate (for more on how impossibly complex user contracts rip off consumers generally see my reporting here) and discovered them.

The reporters at the local CBS affiliate, meanwhile, reported that First Data got an “F” rating from the Better Business Bureau, with ninety-seven complaints filed against it over the past three years. MetaBank was recently ordered to pay $5.2 million by federal regulators for another public/private hustle, a now-discontinued program of issuing debit cards funded by tax refund loans at interest rates between 120 and 650 percent with a fee of $2.50 per $20 loaned.

The Trib noted, “Neither the CTA nor Cubic…nor MasterCard; nor MetaBank; nor First Data, which will issue the prepaid debit accounts, have disclosed the extra charges or how consumers can avoid them.” The city promised, though, that a “CTA public education campaign on all aspects of the Ventra card, including the fees, will start soon.” I must have missed it. Another fee which all transit users will have to bend over backward to dodge is the $5 it costs to get a transit card in the first place. That $5 is supposed to be refunded if you register your card online or by phone. I didn’t learn about that until I began researching this piece, though I was unable to make the site work on my decrepit old computer. Then they decided to waive the $5 fee, but only if you buy your card via phone or online, not at vending machines—which sort of compounds the insult against less-savvy customers or those with decrepit computers, doesn’t it?

Now, you might think poorer Chicagoans without even decrepit old computers should be able to hobble along paying for their fares like they always have, in cash. But single-ride tickets are going to be $3, instead of the normal $2.25—with what the CTA calls a seventy-five-cent “convenience fee” tacked on.

Chicagoans, these are the business partners your city has chosen. And this is the man in charge of protecting you from them: Forest Claypool, president of the Chicago Transit Authority. Some protector. Claypool wrote that “the ‘convenience fee’ covers the cost of producing the disposable tickets and is ‘entirely avoidable to any and every customer’ so long as they purchase and register Ventra cards.’” But as I noted above, poor people tend to use cash because they don’t trust cards—reasonably enough. But the black-hearted bureaucrat “bristled at the characterization by many critics that cash-payers are being penalized…’There is no $3 cash fare,’ he said. ‘The $3 is if a person chooses a disposable, one-ride ticket. It has nothing to do with cash.’ ”

The editors of Crain’s Chicago Business, no Bolsheviks they, disagree with his blithe assessment. They say “the embedded fees could prey upon the least financially savvy among us, those for whom a $5 charge here and a $7 fee there add up to real money… They rely on people’s ignorance to take in money. And that’s not the kind of business our public servants ought to be in.”

So, so naïve, Crain’s Chicago Business. That’s precisely the business our public servants want to be in—“public” servants like Mayor Emanuel. As Chicago anti-privatization activist Tom Tresser explained to me last summer, “We have a massive global movement of capital which, because they’ve burned their own fucking houses down through their own greed, don’t have the gilt returns that they’re used to receiving…. So the new guaranteed annual returns that big business and big capital are looking for is our assets.”

Next time, I’ll focus on the particular big business behind the fare collection system in Chicago—and in Sydney, Vancouver and London, too. I guarantee it will be eye-opening.

It’s one of the most frequent questions people ask me about conservatives: “When they say X, do they really mean it?” Does, for example, Rick Santorum really mean it when he says about Nelson Mandela, as he did in a recent interview with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, “He was fighting against some great injustice, and I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever-increasing size of government that is taking over and increasing people’s lives—and Obamacare is front and center in that.” And I have to answer that largely, as astonishing as it may seem, they do.

Never mind that the size of government is not “ever-increasing” (see here). Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state—that devouring leviathan—will soon swallow up all traces of human volition and dignity. The conclusion is based on conservative moral convictions that reason can’t shake.

Recently the outstanding political reporter Brian Beutler, now writing for Salon, wrote in a piece headlined “Right-Wing Extremists Face New Moral Conundrum” that as long as Healthcare.gov isn't working like it is supposed to, Republicans could “ignore the moral imperative they face” to help their constituents get healthcare. “A working site that can service a million people a day destroys that excuse. Some conservative groups have been craven and reckless enough to actively discourage people from enrolling in Affordable Care Act coverage.” I guarantee, though, that few or no conservative politicians are losing sleep over this. Instead, they judge themselves heroes. Waylaying their constituents’ ability to avail themselves of federally subsidized healthcare is not a “moral conundrum” for them. It is a deeply moral project. The immorality, as they see it, would be to allow people to become dependent on the state for their health.

I’ve been repeating myself, but clarity is very important here: know thine enemy. (OK, we’re liberals; we don’t have enemies. Know thine adversary.) Theirs is a morality entirely incommensurate with liberalism—but it is a morality.

One of its theorists was the Christian reconstructionist theologian Dr. Rousas J. Rushdoony. He wrote in his 1972 book The Messianic Character of American Education that since “the nuclear family is the basic unit of God’s covenant,” undermining the vaulting ambitions of the secular state was a godly duty. But you don’t have to be a Christian Reconstructionist or advocate, as Rushdoony did and his followers do, returning to biblical punishments like stoning to share the same intuition. Even mild-mannered Gerald Ford, usually not judged a frothing right-winger, used to love the nostrum “A government big enough to give everything to you is big enough to take everything away.”

Relying on government is slavery: it’s a consistent trope within modern conservatism. We see it today from the extremist doctors who refuse to “submit” to being reimbursed for their services by Medicaid, or even the government-tainted private insurance companies. They’re organized in a 4,000-member group called the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons. Senator Rand Paul is a member; its website features him asserting that if you believe in a “right to health care,” then “you believe in slavery.” And what kind of moral person believes in slavery?

Then there’s the old saw that the deal the Democrats supposedly offer African-Americans—you vote for us; we give you free stuff—returns them to “slavery.” The first use of that metaphor I’ve identified was by Ronald Reagan in 1968. A black reporter asked him why there were so few blacks at Republican events. The California governor politely but forcefully replied that it wasn’t Republicans who were racist but the supposedly liberal Democrats who “had betrayed them…. The Negro has has delivered himself to those who have no other intention than to create a federal plantation and ignore him.” The New York Times reported, “Reagan handled the situation so smoothly that some of the newsmen aboard his chartered 727 suggested, half-seriously, that the Reagan organization had set up the incident.”

What does this insight—that conservatives are immune to charges of “immorality” when it comes to denying citizens government services because they believe “hooking” people on government services is profoundly immoral—mean in terms of practical politics? For one thing, that Democrats will never get political credit from conservatives for downsizing or “reinventing” government. Just to speak of the state as something other than the source of all evil is enough to send chills down right-wing spines. Had JFK lived to give the speech he was scheduled to give at the Dallas Trade Mart on November 22, 1963, he intended to set conservatives straight: “At a time when the national debt is steadily being reduced in terms of its burden on our economy, they see that debt as the greatest single threat to our security. At a time when we are steadily reducing the number of Federal employees serving every thousand citizens, they fear those supposed hordes of civil servants far more than the actual hordes of opposing armies.” But I don’t think Texans were going to turn in their John Birch Society membership cards, the scales falling from their eyes, when they learned of the facts.

And given the rank anti-empirical irrationalism that undergirds such convictions, it’s not like the White House can now avoid brickbats by somehow “submerging” progressive action by the state. Which, unfortunately, is what the Obama Administration has habitually tried to do. "Design of the Affordable Care Act,” as The Washington Post reported in a major investigation last month, “was hampered by the White House’s political sensitivity to Republican hatred of the law—sensitivity so intense that the president’s aides ordered that some work be slowed down or remain secret for fear of feeding the opposition. Inside the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, the main agency responsible for the exchanges, there was no single administrator whose full-time job was to manage the project.”

But it’s not like their overabundance of caution earned a single Republican vote in Congress, or kept Republican attorney generals from suing to end its implementation, or four conservative Supreme Court justices from seeking to strike down the entire act (and a fifth, John Roberts, from ruling on its legality in away that set a precedent that might make future major government initiatives harder to constitutionally defend). It couldn’t have. Conservatives’ deepest moral convictions determined their reaction in advance. Anything liberals do to use the government to help people will be judged by genuine conservatives as an abomination; always have, always will. But genuine conservatives are in the American minority, as I wrote here last month. Isn’t it better to simply sin boldly and let our conservatives devils have the hindmost? Use the state to make people’s lives better. Do it without apology. That’s our moral imperative that should be beyond compromise.

In Part Five of this series, Rick Perlstein discusses conservatives' complicated relationship to the truth. 

On November 20, hundreds of unionized graduate student instructors at Berkeley went on a 24-hour solidarity strike to protest the university’s intimidation tactics against university support staffers who’d gone on strike this past spring. An e-mail from a mathematics faculty member to his grad instructors explaining why he was crossing the picket line and why they should too went viral. For the prof, named Alexander Coward, also saw reason to protest: to dissent against the silly notion of solidarity in the first place.

He wrote: “Whatever the alleged injustices are that are being protested about tomorrow, it is clear that you are not responsible for those things, whatever they are, and I do not think you should be denied an education because of someone else’s fight that you are not responsible for.”

So what are they responsible for?

You need to optimize your life for learning.

You need to live and breath [sic] your education.

You need to be *obsessed* [sic] with your education.

Society is investing in you so that you can help solve the many challenges we are going to face in the coming decades, from profound technological challenges to helping people with the age old search for human happiness and meaning.

That is why I am not canceling class tomorrow. Your education is really really important, not just to you, but in a far broader and wider reaching way than I think any of you have yet to fully appreciate.

Society, and one’s education, apparently have nothing to do with issues of decent wages and working conditions and keeping higher education affordable and its institutions accountable. Good to know.

There is something about the very grown-up action of sacrifice for the sake of solidarity that turns some professors into patronizing asses. For Professor Coward also wrote, “All this may sound like speaking in platitudes. However it is a point worth making to all of you because you are so young. One of the nice things about being young is that your thinking can be very clear and your mind not so cluttered up with memories and experiences. This clarity can give you a lot of conviction, but it can also lead you astray because you might not yet appreciate just how complicated the world is.” According to his CV, Coward was born in 1981. That makes him a grizzled thirty-one or thirty-two years of age.

Coward, I’ve found, has plenty comrades in anti-comradeship who are old enough to know better. I’ll never forget the first time I heard the argument that, “even though I support unions I don’t support graduate students unions,” since graduate students were “apprentices,” not “workers.” It was over dinner with an Ivy League professor (not this one, another one) whose writings had taught me a great deal about what union solidarity was and why it mattered in the first place.

Then there’s this letter I was shown, sent by a political science professor at the University of Chicago, answering a public letter from students in his department about why they were working to organize a union. The professor’s response began this way: “First off, let me preface these remarks by saying that when I was in graduate school at Berkeley in the 1990s, I was very active in the graduate student unionization movement. I was shop steward for the political science department for several years and was very active in a three week campus wide teaching strike we held in the fall of 1992. It may also be worth mentioning that I come from a working class family (I was the first and only person in my family to go to college) and I grew up around a lot of issues of collective bargaining. So I’m highly sympathetic to issues of collective action.”

Just not your collective action. For he continued, “That said, I found your co-signed letter to be naive, unconvincing, and, quite frankly, kind of offensive. It is naive in that you seem to really think a union would not change relationships between graduate students and the faculty. I don’t know if either of you have ever been members of a union or worked in a unionized environment, but unions inevitably alter the relationships between union members and the people the interact with, be they management, clients, customers, or what not. The formalization of such relationships is, in fact, the central goal of a union. Your letter says ‘Our goal is simply to gain a voice in the decisions that affect our working conditions.’ Well, these decisions are largely made by the faculty. Thus, if you want a collectivized voice in these decisions, you will be unavoidably shaping your relationships to faculty members.”

God forbid!

He then claimed, “Let’s say each quarter of being a teaching intern requires about 200 hours of work (which is a high estimate), as graduate student ‘employees’ you are effectively making at least $300 an hour for the limited amount of time you are ‘working.’ What’s more egregious is the fact that most of the faculty I know do not think of interns [the University of Chicago’s term for teaching assistants] as employees but think of the internship as another educational experience.”

He also said the grad-student-union organizers’ arguments were “unconvincing because you do not specify any significant hardships regarding your ‘working’ conditions”—that word, working, was in quotes—and that he found the letter “off-putting in the tone of entitlement that rings through it. Every year there are hundreds of applicants for a very small number of slots to study here. You are very lucky to be here, just as I am very lucky to teach here. When you were admitted to the university, you were not hired. You were offered a spot as a student. The university owes you nothing beyond what it initially proposed and what you accepted. To call yourself an employee and complain about an absence of cost-of-living adjustments, health insurance, or the burdens of being a graduate student…sounds both presumptuous and petulant.”

Nothing off-putting, entitled, presumptuous or petulant about that.

It’s interesting to consider such arguments, which are common among faculty, in the context of a brilliant analysis of what this supposedly entitled life of the aspiring scholar actually looks like in the real world. It appeared during the Berkeley strike, and argues that the process of winning a tenure-track job, and then earning tenure, resembles nothing so much as climbing the greasy pole in a drug gang.

If you take into account the risk of being shot by rival gangs, ending up in jail or being beaten up by your own hierarchy, you might wonder why anybody would work for such a low wage and at such dreadful working conditions instead of seeking employment at McDonald’s. Yet, gangs have no real difficulty in recruiting new members. The reason for this is that the prospect of future wealth, rather than current income and working conditions, is the main driver for people to stay in the business: low-level drug sellers forgo current income for (uncertain) future wealth. Rank-and-file members are ready to face this risk to try to make it to the top, where life is good and money is flowing.

Likewise,

What you have is an increasing number of brilliant Ph.D. graduates arriving every year into the market hoping to secure a permanent position as a professor and enjoying freedom and high salaries, a bit like the rank-and-file drug dealer hoping to become a drug lord…. Because of the increasing inflow of potential outsiders ready to accept these kind of working conditions, this allows insiders to outsource a number of their tasks onto them, especially teaching, in a context where there are increasing pressures for research and publishing. The result is that the core is shrinking, the periphery is expanding, and the core is increasingly dependent on the periphery. In many countries, universities rely to an increasing extent on an ‘industrial reserve army’ of academics working on casual contracts because of this system of incentives.

And indeed this analysis notches perfectly with the stories I solicited for my series—here, here, and here—on the plight of young aspiring scholars. I still get responses, including one from a junior professor, rated one of the best in the history of Indian River State College by students. He was assigned six classes to teach. He asked the school’s human resources manager how to apply for health insurance. “I lost all my classes as the college avoids the Affordable Care Act in contempt of Congress.
 So I established the Adjunct Faculty Union at Indian River State College (AFU-IRSC). The college blocked my e-mail access to the Campus Coalition (Student) Government in violation of Section 7 of the Labor Management Relations Act. Adjuncts teach 75% of IRSC classes for $1600/16 weeks, about the lowest in the state. Admin treats adjuncts like we are invisible, refusing to talk to us or give us job security for doing a great job. Corrupt patronage has replaced merit in higher education.” He offered the story in memory of the now-famous adjunct professor of French Margaret Mary Vojtko, who died from inadequate medical care. Vojtko never earned more than $25,000 a year and received no health benefits despite her twenty-five years of loyal service to a Catholic University, Dusquesne, which argued that its “religious beliefs” should exempt it from federal labor laws.

I also got responses from tenured professors. And their dominant tone was that same clueless arrogance we see above. One, a philosophy professor at a small liberal arts college in the Northeast, allowed that while things could be improved, and “I would like to see more tenure-track jobs and fewer adjuncts,” academia was still after all a meritocracy. He argued that “[f]riends like your autodidact”—he was referring to the example I gave of a recent PhD from one of the greatest universities in the world, who wrote brilliantly and insightfully, was a natural-born teacher and applied to a hundred jobs to no avail before realizing “tenured employment is almost unimaginable” because of his undeveloped suck-up skills—“will slip through the cracks if, despite actual excellence, they can’t muster what the academy considers evidence of excellence…. I think of a tenure-track job like an actor getting a job at a repertory company, or a baseball player being hired to play baseball full-time—there are just too many people lining up to do such jobs to give them to everyone.”

This was supposed to be a defense of the system.

Another, who teaches at one of the nation’s largest, richest and best public universities, complained that after renting a conveniently located house, paying for daycare and servicing his student debt, “groceries end up on the credit card by the 20th of every month.” As a result, “my credit rating is just above Charles Manson’s and my hair is falling out.”

A sad story, but not quite at the level of Margaret Vojtko’s, is it?

Rick Perlstein on the death of Margaret Mary Vojtko.

Correction: This post has been updated to indicate that the University of California strike lasted 24 hours, not three days. 

Yesterday came news that my home state, Illinois, is preparing for its twenty-sixth annual ceremony this Saturday to honor the “66 Illinoisans listed as MIA or POW in Southeast Asia.” I absorbed this development the same week I had occasion to attend an internment at a military cemetery in Washington State, over which flew, alongside the banners of all of America’s military service branches, the familiar “POW/MIA” flag with the forlorn, hangdog prisoner silhouetted in the foreground and guard tower and barbed wire in the back. Given the scale of national problems we’re facing these days, this one hardly registers a dent. But it creeps me out all the same. And if you deplore jingoistic, racist propaganda, it should creep you out, too—so, this afternoon, let me unburden myself.

When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, US policy became pretty much to ignore them―part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public. Then, one day in the first spring of Richard Nixon’s presidency, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announced the existence of from 500 to 1,300 of what he termed “POW/MIA’s.” Those three letters—“MIA”—are familiar to us now. The term, however, was a new, Nixonian invention. It had used to be that downed fliers not confirmed as actual prisoners used to be classified not as “Missing in Action” but “Killed in Action/Body Unrecovered.” The new designation was a propaganda scam. It let the Pentagon and State Department and White House refer to these 1,300 (later “1,400”) as if they were, every one of them, actual prisoners, even though every one of them was almost certainly dead. “Hundreds of American wives, children, and parents continue to live in a tragic state of uncertainty caused by the lack of information concerning the fate of their loved ones,” Secretary Laird said. That was part of an attempt to manipulate international opinion to frame the North Vietnamese Communists (against whom, of course, America was prosecuting an illegal and undeclared air war against civilians) as uniquely cruel, even though fewer men were taken prisoner or went missing in Vietnam than in any previous American war. (From 1965 through 1969, they were tortured, at least if you believe American prisoners at Guantánamo Bay were tortured; the techniques were essentially the same.)

During the Johnson years, Sybil Stockdale, whose husband James (Ross Perot’s unfortunate running mate in 1992) was the highest-ranking and one of the earliest POWs, had organized a “League of Wives of American Prisoners of War” (later the National League of Families of Prisoners of War, then the League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia) which agitated for attention to the prisoners’ plight—against the Pentagon’s wishes. Under Nixon, the Pentagon co-opted it, sometimes inventing chapters outright, as useful to their propaganda barrage. Their families showed up on newsmagazines and TV; “POW bracelets,” invented by the future wingnut congressman “B-1 Bob” Dornan, then a local Limbaugh on Orange County radio, were unveiled in the spring of 1970 at an annual “Salute to the Military” ball in Los Angeles. (Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan presided, and Hollywood choreographer Leroy Prinz, who had worked with Reagan on the 1942 film Hollywood Canteen, choreographed a splendid pageant.) Bracelets soon sold at a rate of 10,000 a day; Sonny & Cher wore them on TV; some people, the The New York Times reported, believed them to “possess medicinal powers”―and not just the children who displayed them two, ten, a dozen to an arm. A Wimbledon champ said one cured his tennis elbow. Lee Trevino said his saved his golf game. Matchbooks, lapel pins, billboards, T-shirts and bumper stickers (POWs never have a nice day!) proliferated, fighter jets made thunderous football stadium fly-bys, full page ads blossomed in every newspaper urging Hanoi to have a heart and release the prisoners for the sake of the children.

Jonathan Schell, then of The New Yorker, observed that the American people were acting “as though the North Vietnamese had kidnapped…Americans and the United States had gone to war to retrieve them”—martyrs to an enemy so devious, as the Armed Forces Journal put it, that they denied hundreds of little boys and girls “a right to know if their fathers were dead or alive.” Ross Perot testified to Congress that when he visited North Vietnam to plead for their release they were incredulous at all this concern over “just 1,400 men.” Americans were plainly more morally sensitive than Communists. Though in fact our South Vietnamese allies held some 100,000 prisoners, many of them Buddhists monks guilty of nothing except pacifism, in a prison complex of American design that was so inhumane that Time’s correspondent described the captives as “grotesque sculptures of scarred flesh and gnarled limbs. They move like crabs, skittering across the floor on buttocks and palms.”

Already, the issue made for “a lunatic semiology,” as the historian Richard Slotkin later described it, where “sign and referent have scarcely any proportionate relation at all.” But it sure was heartily useful to the national security state. When America’s involvement in the war ended in January, 1973, Nixon told his secretary of defense that the military-orchestrated celebration of their return, dubbed “Operation Homecoming,” was "an invaluable opportunity to revise the history of this war.”

This is when the story got even nuttier—when the propaganda slipped the bounds intended by its authors, and became more like the brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The scholar H. Bruce Franklin of Rutgers tells the story with elegant economy in the book M.I.A., Or Mythmaking in America; Northwestern’s Michael Allen tells the story in more detail in Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and America’s Unending Vietnam War.

Operation Homecoming returned 587 American prisoners of war—but Nixon had by then settled on the number “1,600” as the number of Americans as “POW/MIA.” So where were the other 1,013? The brigadier general who supervised the repatriation announced that he “did not rule out the possibility that some Americans may still be held in Laos.” The secretary of defense promised, “We will not rest until all those still known captive are safe and until we have achieved the best possible accounting for those missing in action.” Holding the government to that pledge had now become the raison d’être of the League of Families—an organization now all the stronger, thanks to its recent history as a veritable White House front group. Bracelets continued to be sold, now with the names of MIA on them. Next came that flag—pow-mia: you are not forgotten—soon flying over VWF and American Legion posts across the fruited plain. And barely months after the Operation Homecoming propaganda triumph, Chicago MIA families declared that the administration was “abandoning” men “seen in photos coming out of Indochina or who have been reported alive by returning POWs.”

The issue came to define the diplomatic relationship between the United States and Vietnam, a subject of considerable exasperation for Vietnamese officials now being called on to “prove” they held no more prisoners. As one of them reasonably exclaimed, “We have not come this far to hold onto a handful of Americans.” A congressman from Milwaukee, Clem Zablocki, opened hearings that fall to debunk the spreading absurdity. He assured concerned families, referring to the testimony both of American returnees and the North Vietnamese, “There are no missing in action or prisoners of war in Southeast Asia at this time that they believe are alive.” Which only meant, to many POW-MIA families, that Congress was just part of the cover-up. “Why are you willing to believe the enemy on this subject when they do not tell the truth on any other subject?” the Corpus Christi chapter of the National League of Families soon raged in a letter to the Pentagon. “The fact is, you have no proof our men are dead.” (Her emphasis.)

But how could there be proof that men shot down over jungles or the Gulf of Tonkin or the South China Sea were “really” dead? And so the “issue” endured. Governor Ronald Reagan, in Singapore as a special presidential representative for a trade deal, said that if North Vietnam didn’t return the POWs and MIAs supposedly still being held, “bombing should be resumed.” He accused liberals in Congress seeking to ban further military action in Southeast Asia of taking away “the power to sway those monkeys over there to straighten up and follow through on the deal.”

Here was the right-wing variant of the Watergate-induced dread about whether anyone in Washington could be trusted. It took on a life of its own. In 1975 a conservative Democratic congressman from Mississippi, Gillespie “Sonny” Montgomery, empaneled a House Select Committee on Missing Persons in Southeast Asia. He was initially sympathetic to the families’ claims of Communist perfidy. Then he led a delegation there which found their hosts warm, accommodating—and, once more, befuddled at what it was they were being asked to account for. (Just about every Vietnamese family had relatives who had disappeared in the war or whose remains could not be returned to the ancestral village—a sacred duty in Vietnamese culture.) Montgomery concluded that the existence of American prisoners in Vietnam was almost certainly a myth. As a CIA pilot captured there in 1965 testified at one of the subcommittee hearings, “If you take a walletful of money over there, you can buy all the information you want on POWs on the streets” but “when you try to run them down they fizzle out somewhere down the line.” They also turned up evidence that China had manufactured stories of MIA’s still in prison camps in order to keep the US from normalizing relations with their Asian rival. Reagan, however, remained adamant: “If there is to be any recognition,” he boomed on the campaign trail in the spring of 1976, “let it be discussed only after they have kept their pledge to give a full accounting of our men still listed as missing in action.”

Henceforth paying ritual obeisance, hat in hand, at meetings of the League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia became presidents’ annual ordeal. Read the section in Allen’s book about George H.W. Bush’s manhandling at the 1992 conclave. Read here about how Nixon’s long-lived propaganda goof delayed normalization of relations with Vietnam until 1995. And click here to see how this absurd cult still endures. The 9/11 Truthers don’t enjoy official government sanction. But if you happen to live in Illinois, you can roll with your very own “POW/MIA Illinois Remembers” license plate for your car. The “66 Illinoisans” apparently still imprisoned in Southeast Asia hardly deserve less.

Rick Perlstein questions whether John F. Kennedy would have ended the Vietnam War. 

It’s a rough for too many families this Thanksgiving. With an unemployment rate of 7.3 percent, with nearly a million of discouraged no-longer-job-seekers, ashamed and invisible, not even showing up in that total; with an unemployment rate for black teenagers of 36 percent and, as The Nation’s George Zornick points out, the season of feasting a season of fasting for too many families on food stamps—cheer can be hard to find.

Keep our suffering neighbors in your thoughts as you celebrate. And for a possibly cheering contrast, consider a time when things were even worse: 1973, which I’ve researched for my upcoming book on the 1970s, when it was oh-so-much harder to head over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house because the Arab oil embargo quadrupled the price of a barrel of crude.

October was rung in with biblical prophecies from an assistant secretary of the interior. “With anything less than the best of luck,” Stephen Wakefield announced, “we shall probably face shortages of heating oil, propane, and diesel fuel this winter.… I am talking about men without jobs, homes without heat, children without schools.” In Los Angeles the Department of Water and Power predicted a 35 percent energy shortage by April. It came the day after the President’s Cost of Living Council set a new ceiling on the price of domestic crude; the major oil companies responded by raising the prices they charged their affiliate service stations by about a penny a gallon. In San Francisco 3,000 service stations shut down for three days in protest—street corners became ghost towns in the beautiful City by the Bay. And all this was before the Arab oil embargo.

That began October 17, after America decided to airlift weapons to Israel in its war with Egypt and Syria. A Watergate-scarred president went on TV and announced “a very stark fact: we are heading into the most acute energy shortage since World War II.” Americans, he said, would have to cut back: “less heat, less electricity, less gasoline”—almost stop being Americans at all. He called for shorter school and factory hours. And the cancellation of 10 percent of jet flights. The federal government would provide an example by setting thermostats to sixty-eight degrees or less, he said (“and that means in this room, too, as well as in every other room in the White House”); government vehicles would be limited to fifty miles an hour. He told governors to pass laws mandating fifty miles per hour for everyone, Congress to pass an emergency statute returning to year-round daylight savings time and to relax environmental regulations. Start carpooling, he recommended: “How many times have you gone along the highway,” he quizzed, “with only one individual in that car?”

Thousands, of course—for wasn’t zooming alone across endless vistas of highways supposed to be the most American pastime of all? Not any more, apparently. What he was describing, he allowed, sounded “like a way of life we left behind with Glenn Miller and the war of the forties.”

Honoring a non-binding presidential request, gas stations began closing down from 9 pm Saturday through midnight on Sundays. So people began “topping off”—filling their tanks every time they passed a gas station, leading to hours-long lines in which idling cars… just wasted more gas. Everyone wanted to get to a pump before the last drop was gone and one of the ubiquitous sorry, no gas signs was hoisted up. Then, they would have to return the next day—when prices were usually two-cents-a-gallon higher. Tempers flared, no architect having thought to design a corner gas station for the eventuality of dozens of angry motorists cutting fellow motorists off on street corners like it was the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Time called the energy crisis the “most serious economic threat to face the nation since the Depression.” Cities began reducing bus service. Schools in Massachusetts and Connecticut, states reliant on oil for heat, announced Christmas break for the entire months of December and January. At the New England School of Art, heated only to sixty-five degrees in the Boston chill, nude models were afforded the comfort of roasting in their own body heat in a clear plastic tent. In Rhode Island, a prize high school composition was customarily chosen to be signed by the governor as the official state Thanksgiving proclamation. The governor refused to sign this year’s winner, in which a 17-year-old wrote, “Thanksgiving seems to be pretended, a farce, little more than an outdated tradition no one has yet found time to discard.”

Time’s Thanksgiving cover had Archie Bunker in his trademark easy chair, stalactites of frost hanging from his cigar and winter cap—he couldn’t afford home heating oil. Plastic bags, made with petroleum, became prohibitively expensive; petrochemicals were also ingredients in many lifesaving drugs—so pharmaceutical executives projected a shortage. Twenty-five New Hampshire towns suspended police, fire protection, garbage pickups, road repair and school transportation.

The mayor of Rensselaer, Indiana, turned off the city’s 425 street lights, until a rash of burglaries forced him to turn them on again. In an interview he revealed his motives as less than Christian: “If everyone in the country would make this kind of effort, we could tell the Arabs to go to hell.” Unchristian motives were everywhere. A gas station owner stopped letting owners of big cars buy more than a dollar of gas at a time—“just enough to keep them off the road.” People started driving with a full can of gas in the trunk, which turned them into inadvertent firebombs. The Senate came within eight votes of passing a law rationing gasoline, and the White House ordered the Bureau of Engraving to prepare by printing over 10 billion ration coupons.

A coffee table book, They Could Not Trust the King, with text by William Shannon of the New York Times editorial board, went to press. It called Watergate “a complex and far-reaching political plan that could serve as dress rehearsal for an American fascist coup d’état.”

Then December, and the presidentially mandated closing of service stations from Saturday evening until Monday morning. A Hanford, California, gas station owner shot up six of the pumps of a rival who stayed open across the street. A Miami man yelled to a gas station attendant who wouldn’t sell to him on a Saturday night, “I am going to get some gas even if I have to kill somebody”—and then, waving a pistol, almost honored his pledge. Auto supply houses ran out of siphons, tools of the new street crime of choice—and locks for gas caps. More ambitious crooks started hijacking petroleum trucks. Brooklyn motorists filled up with “Gambinoil”—oil the Gambino stole from bulk plants in the area and sold to area dealers at 70 percent more than legitimate distributors.

A cheap paperback came out, Predictions for 1974, starring a panoply of psychics with names like “Countess Amy, the Gypsy Seeress,” and “Aquarius, Campus Clairvoyant.” It featured, alongside news-to-come about traffic accidents (“A submarine and a UFO will collide off the Aleutian Islands”), the occult (“reincarnation will be espoused by more and more young people as a valid explanation for the dislocations in modern society”), celebrities (“Dean Martin may have a health problem and definitely should be careful of his nose”), and celebrities and the occult (“A youthful female actress of sudden fame will publicly announce that she used witchcraft to obtain her current level of success and happiness”), prediction after prediction about how of the world would collapse. That was what the future looked like now. Deaths from record bitter cold. Deaths from a “nerve gas leak” off the coast of Florida. A 1929-style stock market collapse. A declaration of bankruptcy by New York City—“the first tangible sign of the collapse of our entire civilization.” Single people banned from buying big cars. Locusts and floods, “like the plagues of Egypt,” worldwide droughts, rising sea levels “inundating all coastal areas throughout the world.” Rationing of every staple, urban blackouts, riots, martial law. “Disaster will hit one of New York’s skyscraper landmark buildings." "Man is an endangered species,” as one soothsayer put it. It was a map of the dreads of a nation.

Good times. Let us cherish what we have, and what we have transcended before. Love, and let yourself be loved. Fight injustice, that our children might be blessed. Happy Thanksgiving, dear readers; you help make my life immeasurably meaningful and rich.

For families on food stamps, traditional Thanksgiving meals are out of the question.

Journofolks are talking a lot about the Heritage Foundation these days. The narrative is that a once-august right-wing research shop has gone all hackish on us since being taken over by former Senator Jim DeMint and his fearsome 31-year-old deputy Michael Needham. “The Fall of the Heritage Foundation and the Death of Republican Ideas,” is how the The Atlantic’s Molly Ball tags it. In The New Republic, a profile of Needham, whom The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank labeled “The Shut-Down’s Enforcer-in-chief,” quotes Republican legislators lambasting him for “his ideological inflexibility and aggressive zero-sum tactics.” A bitter Senator Orrin Hatch is quoted in The New York Times: “Is Heritage going to go so political that it really doesn’t amount to anything anymore? I hope not.”

Of course, for a movement supposedly devoted to conserving the past, conservatives are oh-so-splendid at forgetting their own past. The notion of Hatch as the high-minded conservator of the scholarly temper would have been pretty laughable when he won his Senate seat in 1976 as the first major feather in the cap of the nascent New Right fundraising machine captained by Richard Viguerie. Back then, his campaign served as a pass-through for all sorts of Long Con hanky-panky. But never mind. The notion of Heritage’s fall from some noble intellectual golden age has been so ably debunked by historian Jason Stahl that I have little to add.

But not nothing to add. First, some more historical detail. I’ve written here before about the extraordinary events of 1974–75 in Kanawha County, West Virginia, when the school board encompassing the state’s biggest city, Charleston, voted to adopt textbooks Christian conservatives insisted endorsed miscegenation, “secular humanism,” and other assorted alleged sins, ended up dynamiting the school board building. But not before the brand-spanking-new Heritage Foundation rushed to aid the folks laying the dynamite.

In one of the first forays of this “scholarly” organization into national politics, Heritage sent sent two staffers to West Virginia. James McKenna, a lawyer who had won a string of cases defending the rights of parents to homeschool their children, came to defend the activists under indictment for violence. Connie Marshner was a young University of South Carolina graduate who had accepted a job in 1971 on Capitol Hill as a plain old secretary for Young Americans for Freedom, which was where she quietly transformed herself into an expert on Senator Walter Mondale’s bill to establish a national system of federal childcare centers—the “therapeutic state invading the home,” Marshner said. On her own, she started a letterhead organization to fight the bill. When Nixon vetoed it, calling it a threat to “the family in its rightful position as a keystone of our civilization,” she claimed victory, and was hired as Heritage’s first director of education. Soon she was soon hard at work finding “little clusters of Evangelical, fundamentalist Mom’s groups,” and transforming them into troops for the conservative movement army. She ended up writing a book called Blackboard Tyranny as her lasting contribution to the “parents rights” movement’s scholarly legacy. Based on the ideas of the Christian deconstructionist Rousas J. Rushdoony, the book argues that education professionals began their plot to replace Christianity with the “messianic” religion of secular humanism when they started teaching that education should indoctrinate children into democracy, and that parents’ right to oppose this “came from God by way of the natural law.” Scholarly!

The Heritage Foundation saw the Kanawha incident as an opportunity to build strategic capacity. “If you pick the right fight at the right time,” McKenna explained, “[y]ou can make your political points, you can help the people involved, and you can become a force in the political community.” Conservatives used to call people like this “outsider agitators.” On October 6, 1974, they were among the featured speakers at a rally before 8,000 textbook activists. One preacher cried, “If we don’t protect our children we’ll have to account for it on the day of judgement!” The next day this same preacher was among the twenty militants arrested at a garage for sabotaging school buses; the following day, two elementary schools were firebombed. Scholarly!

And now, some personal anecdotage. I’ve visited the Heritage three times for research purposes. My host was Lee Edwards, who in the service of the Heritage Foundation writes hagiographies of conservative institutions and luminaries; nice work if you can get it. Edwards is a friendly guy, generous with his time and recollections, but for all that, as a conservative-movement lifer, someone also implicated in the Long Con: in 1972 he was one of the principles in a hustle called “Friends of the FBI,” to which gullible folks at the grassroots funneled cash that mostly ended up going back to the hustlers; their front man, TV star Efram Zimbalist, withdrew from the project after saying its three founders, including Edwards, were guilty of “fraud and misrepresentation.”

Anyway, on one of these visits, the foundation was fulsomely hosting some Asian dictator, holding him up as a tribune of freedom. On another, one Heritage fellow, a superannuated former Reagan UN ambassador, told me stories about Barry Goldwater “chasing pussy.” On a third, Edwards led me to Edwin Meese’s office for an interview. We passed through a room dedicated to Amway, with a full complement of their products on display—some think tank! (Regular readers of this blog know what I think of Amway, a seriously scholarly outfit…). Once there, the former attorney general of the United States told me no one had ever complained about racism in the Oakland police when he was the Alameda County DA in the 1960s. I told him I knew of some fellows who would have disagreed. He looked at me like I was nuts.

Yes, it used to be a such high-minded, intellectually serious place. Nowadays: What hath Jim DeMint wrought?

Katrina vanden Heuvel on the irrelevanceof the Heritage Foundation.

The Life magazine dated November 22, 1963, which would have arrived on newsstands around November 15, featured a terrifying story by Theodore White, author of the groundbreaking bestseller The Making of the President 1960. Titled “Racial Collision,” and subtitled “the Negro-white problem is greatest in the North where the Negro is taking over the cities—and being strangled by them,” it was a terrifying intimation of an imminent racial holocaust. The first of two parts, the conclusion ran in the issue dated November 29—which ordinarily would have appeared on newsstands on November 22 but was held back to put the martyred President Kennedy on the cover, and to include, inside, several thousand words of what must have been some very speedily written copy about his death. That second part was even scarier. It reported terrors like Adam Clayton Powell’s call for “ ‘a Birmingham explosion in New York City’ this fall”; Communist infiltration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s inner circle; a civil rights group’s fears that it would be labeled “a front for the white man” unless a peaceful march was turned into “a violent putsch on government offices”; and some protesters&rssquo; demand for cash reparations for slavery—“There is a warning if such sin-gold is not paid by white Americans to black Americans, the ‘power structure’ is inviting ‘social chaos.’ ” And it quoted James Forman of the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee reaching the following unsettling conclusion: “85% of all Negroes do not adhere to nonviolence.”

Such foreboding was entirely typical of that very tense summer and fall—and the culmination of fears that had been mounting ever since the Bay of Pigs and the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban missile crisis and the Oxford, Mississippi, crisis of 1961 and 1962. The fear escalated after Bull Connor’s fire hoses in Birmingham in the spring of 1963 unleashed what felt to whites like an uncontainable torrent of black rage across the country: in Columbus, Ohio, two men chained themselves to furniture in the state Capitol; in Boston, a black parent told the segregationist city school board “it is too late for pleading, begging, requesting, or even reasoning.” Whites thereby reacted against the rage: George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama. Medgar Evers was shot. Barry Goldwater began looking good to Republicans—and rival bands of Goldwaterites turned the Young Republican National Federation’s convention into a near-riot.

It felt like riots were breaking out everywhere.

On September 15, Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed by Klansmen, killing four little girls.

In Dallas, on October 24, United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson was shouted down, spat upon, and physically assaulted on the street by right-wingers.

In Saigon, on November 2, South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated in a US- backed coup.

And in Dallas, on November 22, President Kennedy was supposed to give a speech addressing the widespread feeling that America had become a very scary place, specifically as regarded the 1963 version of Tea Partiers, who had become so scary that many people presumed that they had been the ones that shot him. “In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations,” ran the text he was killed before he could deliver, “voices are heard in the land…preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality, wholly unsuited to the sixties, doctrines which apparently assume that…vituperation is as good as victory and peace is a sign of weakness…. At a time when we are steadily reducing the number of federal employees serving every thousand citizens, they fear those supposed hordes of civil servants, far more than the actual hordes of opposing armies.”

This was the world that Theodore White, in his next article in Life after his near-prediction of race war proclaimed, until the day John F. Kennedy was killed, “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”

* * *

The story of how the myth of Camelot was invented is wonderfully told in a great little book from 1995 that I’ve never seen referenced before, Theodore H. White and Journalism as Illusion, by media scholar Joyce Hoffman. It begins:

Theodore H. White was in a dentist’s chair on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on a Friday morning in late November 1963, when he learned that Jacqueline Kennedy had telephoned to say she needed him. One week had passed since President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, and now his widow was beseeching the journalist, whom she considered an old friend, to come to Hyannisport. She had something she wanted Life magazine to say to America, and White, she insisted, had to bear the message…. She had summoned White because she was angry, very angry. All week newspaper pundits had served up their instant appraisals of the brief and abruptly ended Kennedy administration. Arthur Krock’s New York Times column had especially rankled her…a lament about the failure of ‘even advanced democracy and self-government to extirpate in mankind the resort to anarchy…. Walter Lippmann’s “Today and Tomorrow’” column just four days after the assassination had spoken of the forces of hatred and ungovernability and how “habit of intemperate speech and thought had become deeply ingrained. It is deepened by the strains of war and the frustrations of this revolutionary age.”

In other words, commentators commentated accurately on the mood of the country. But “Mrs. Kennedy wanted White to rescue her husband’s memory from these men. History should celebrate the Kennedy years as a time of hope and magic, she insisted. White sat mesmerized for more than two hours, listening to the rambling and disjointed monologue…. She sneered at the ‘bitter old men’ who wrote history.” (That’s me!) “Finally, she came to the thought that had become her obsession, a thought embodied in the lyrics of the the Broadway musical—Camelot. Over and over again, she and the president had listened to the words sing out of their ten-year-old Victrola…”

What came next is pretty damned astonishing, a nadir in the history of court journalism, something that better belongs in the annals of the Kremlin. White retreated around midnight to draft his article in the maid’s room, “mindful that Life was holding its presses at a cost of $30,000 an hour. When he finished, Mrs. Kennedy took a pencil to White’s work, crossing out some of his words and adding her own in the margins. She hovered near the kitchen telephone—adamant that her Camelot portrayal remain the dominant theme—as he dictated the revised version to his editors.” The article came out. Arthur Schlesinger, baffled, said, “Jack Kennedy never spoke of Camelot.” One Kennedy hand said, “If Jack Kennedy heard this stuff about Camelot, he would have vomited.”

The whole thing is a great object lesson in the horrors of access journalism—and access history. (“The notes of White’s interview with Jacqueline Kennedy,” writes Joyce Hoffman, “known as the ‘Camelot Papers,’ which White donated to the John F. Kennedy library in 1969, remained under restriction until May 19, 1995, one year after the death of Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis.”) If you hate the kind of writing Bob Woodward does now; if you hate Politico or, going back further, if you hate the kind of things Sally Quinn wrote on Monicagate (“ ‘He came in here and he trashed the place,’ says Washington Post columnist David Broder, ‘and it’s not his place.’ ”), or the childish abuse and systematic distortions meted out to Al Gore in 2000 because he didn’t fit into the Washington insiders’ village, blame Camelot—or “Camelot.” If you heard the public radio documentary this morning We Knew JFK: Unheard Stories from the Kennedy Archive and were as astonished as I was at how many journalists blithely based their admiration for the thirty-fifth president on the nice cocktails he and “Jackie” poured in the White House, or if you’ve seen David Auburn’s neat Broadway play from last year, The Columnist, which depicts the incestuous coziness between Joseph Alsop and John F. Kennedy, you know what I mean.

Teddy White, about whom I have complicated feelings, was a crucial conveyor belt in advancing this awful cultural trend—“High Broderism,” some of our better bloggers used to call it—and Hoffman’s book is an important primer for anyone who wants to learn how it happened. A child of Boston’s Jewish ghetto, Teddy (or, in his parents’ Yiddish-speaking mouths, “Tuddy”) White made his way as a scholarship boy to Harvard, where he came to identify with the clubby culture of the WASP with the zeal of the convert, with all the pseudo-aristocratic abuses of democratic culture that entailed. “White’s style of journalism,” Hoffman explains, “fit a model established by a generation of influential column and reporters who had functioned as a subsidiary of government during World War II and the postwar years…a patriot first and a journalist second.”

Twenty-five years before his “Camelot” coup, she notes, “he had written stories from China that had portrayed Chiang Kai-shek as a similarly heroic character.” Then he realized he was wrong, but it was too late—he had helped create the Frankenstein’s monster’s of America’s romance with Chiang, and thus the McCarthyite reaction to China’s fall to Communism, too; he then had to watch helplessly as that reaction devoured some of his friends. Hoffman argues White then helped created the myth of the presidency itself as some sort of American regency. He was the first to capitalize “Oval Office.” She tells an amazing story of how an interview with Kennedy there, for the last chapter of Making of the President, in which the new president, in his underwear being fitted for a suit, gossips altogether un-presidentially, coarsely insults Nixon and obsesses over how much money White will make on his book. Out of that unpromising raw material, White crafted a panegyric to a godlike man who commanded the eighteen-button telephone console on his desk like “the sword and the mace in the politics of the middle ages.”

White had identified so closely with JFK on the 1960 campaign trail that he wore a Kennedy campaign button. When the manuscript was complete, he showed it to both “Bobby” and “Jack,” acceding to RFK’s requested revisions. He didn’t extend the same courtesy to Nixon. But then again, Nixon didn’t invite Teddy White to his cocktail parties. Here’s a diary entry from 1962: “Mad night at Bobby’s great fun. He set the Caroline [the Kennedys’ pet name for their private plane] up from Washington, we got aboard at 5:00 followed by Harry Belafonte and his wife Julie…”

This sort of thing had real consequences for the country. It is one of the Big Ideas of my first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, that just this sort of consensus-besotted denial of the roiling tensions beneath America’s consensus facade in the early 1960s—the time “before the storm”—made the storms of the later 1960s so much nastier than they would have been, had Americans been better been prepared to accept the ineluctably divisive reality of American life. Instead, the tension burst forth like the return of the repressed.

Anyway, here’s a new Big Idea: journalist sycophants like White helped give us Watergate.

Consider: White felt so guilty at having slighted Nixon in Making of the President 1960 that he turned Making of the President 1968 into a virtual love letter to him, and sent him the book with a fulsome apology. Making of the President 1972 sucked up to Nixon even worse. But then, oops—I discovered this in research for the book I’m finishing now—White had to postpone publication so he could tack on a chapter about a little thing called Watergate, whose seriousness caught him completely by surprise.

Indeed, it was largely the clubbiness of the Washington village press corps that let Nixon get away with Watergate and still win his landslide in 1972. (Read Tim Crouse’s Boys on the Bus for the full story.) Call it Camelot’s revenge: the class of court scribes who made it their profession to uphold a make-believe version of America free of conflict and ruled by noble men helped Nixon get away with it for so long—because, after all, America was ruled by noble men.

Don’t let that be forgot. For who knows what latter-day sycophants and suck-ups in the media might let our leaders get away with next.

“Rick,” a Facebook friend writes, “curious to see what you make of the old debate (which may have some new evidence, see Galbraith II) re JFK and Vietnam. Would we have gone or stayed if JFK lived? Or was he the fervent Cold Warrior some paint him as? (My dad marched in his inauguration, and was almost killed six or seven years later.)”

The argument that John F. Kennedy was a closet peacenik, ready to give up on what the Vietnamese call the American War upon re-election, received its most farcical treatment in Oliver Stone’s JFK. It was made with only slightly more sophistication by Kenneth O’Donnell in the 1972 book Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, in which the old Kennedy hand depicted the president telling him, “In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m elected.” O’Donnell also claimed that in an October 2, 1963, National Security Council meeting, after debriefing Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor on their recent trip to Saigon, “President Kennedy asked McNamara to announce to the press after the meeting the immediate withdrawal of one thousand soldiers and to say that we would probably withdraw all American forces from Vietnam by the end of 1965. When McNamara was leaving the meeting to talk to the White House reporters, the President called to him, ‘And tell them that means all the helicopter pilots, too.’ ” Promptly, wrote O’Donnell, McNamara double-crossed the president, giving the reporters merely a prediction of the end of America’s war, not Kennedy’s prescription of the end of America’s war: McNamara merely said they thought “the major part of the the U.S. task” would be completed by the end of 1965, nothing about the president’s intention to complete the task by the end of 1965.

O’Donnell was seeing the world through Camelot-colored glasses. As the historian Edwin Moise demonstrates in A Companion to the Vietnam War (2002), NSC minutes are a matter of record, and the notes show the president himself approving a statement that was only a prediction that things would be over by the end of 1965, framed merely as the observation of Taylor and McNamara. (“They reported that by the end of this year, the U.S. program for training Vietnamese should have progressed to the point where 1,000 military personnel assigned to South Vietnam can be withdrawn.”)

Now, on the broader claim that Kennedy truly intended to end the war by the end of 1965, things get more interesting, and that’s where the case recently made by James K. Galbraith, son of the famous Kennedy hand and economist John Kenneth Galbraith, comes in. As he put it categorically in a letter to The New York Times, “President Kennedy issued a formal decision to withdraw American forces from Vietnam.” Is that true? Only literally, which in the end adds up to mostly nothing.

Kennedy, of course, was the first president to send soldiers to Southeast Asia, 16,732 of them, supposedly as mere “advisers,” but many of them actually combatants. As Kennedy had told famously told The New York Times’s James Reston late in 1961 after the failure at the Bay of Pigs and the erection of the Berlin Wall, “Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.” And a damned good place, his military men kept telling him: early in his third year as president, his Vietnam commanders reported that “barring greatly increased resupply and reinforcement of the Viet Cong by the infiltration, the military phase of the war can be virtually won in 1963”—an opinion he continued hearing repeatedly. That’s important context, for whether JFK’s plans on what to do in Vietnam were contingent on military success in Vietnam—as opposed to cutting and running even if that meant leaving the country to the Communist insurgency—is key to this debate.

As Edwin Moise notes, though, “President Kennedy also read much more pessimistic evaluations. These were written mostly by civilians—some by officials in the State Department, others by journalists like Malcolm Browne and David Halberstam. Kennedy did not openly commit himself to either the optimists or the pessimists.” What he did do was insist publicly that he would never cut and run. July 13, 1963: “We are not going to withdraw from that effort…. we are going to stay there.” September 2: “I don’t agree with those who say we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake.” September 26: “We have to stay with it. We must not be fatigued.”

And what of privately? Bug-out plans were indeed drawn up. Galbraith points to an October 4 message from General Taylor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “Program currently in progress to train Vietnamese forces will be reviewed and accelerated as necessary to insure that all essential functions visualized to be required for the projected operational environment, to include those now performed by U.S. military units and personnel, can be assumed properly by the Vietnamese by the end of calendar year 1965. All planning will be directed towards preparing RVN forces for the withdrawal of all U.S. special assistance units and personnel by the end of calendar year 1965.” (Galbraith himself adds the emphasis.) “Execute the plan,” the memo continues, “to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963…”

Noam Chomsky ably took on this claim by pointing out that the withdrawal plan in question, labeled NSAM 263, included language Galbraith conveniently omits, for instance, “It remains the central object of the United States in South Vietnam to assist the people and Government of that country to win their contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy. The test of all decisions and U.S. actions in this area should be the effectiveness of their contributions to this purpose.” And that supporting texts included phrases like “without impairment of the war effort,” and that “what furthers the war effort we support, and what interferes the with the war effort we oppose,” and “our actions are related to our fundamental objective of victory.” Moises points to language in minutes from the October 2, 1963, NSC meeting: “President Kennedy indicated he did not want to get so locked into withdrawal plans that it would be difficult to cancel them if the war did not go so well after all.”

In other words, whether John F. Kennedy’s formal decision would be carried through in the interim between October 1963 and January 1966 was contingent on what happened in the future. One day this summer I issued a formal decision to go the beach. Then it rained. And so I did not go to the beach.

And as anyone who knows anything about the Vietnam War knows, the people funneling intelligence to the president were alarmingly adept (“the military phase of the war can be virtually won in 1963”) at claiming the sun was shining when it actually was pouring down rain. In fact, when it came to America’s military prospects there, it was winter in Seattle just about all the time. But tomorrow was always going to be sunny, if you asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The best evidence that this “formal decision” by JFK lacks forecasting power is the actual outcome of phase I of that selfsame formal decision: to remove 1,000 soldiers from Vietnam by the end of 1963. Only 432 were actually removed by the end of 1963 (“although,” writes Moise, “some sources give lower figures,” and even that may have merely been the result of shifting deployment schedules). Sometimes war is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.

And that’s not because there was a new president by the end of 1963, at least if you trust Galbraith, who cites as clinching his argument (though it actually proves his argument is wrong) that a December 11, 1963, memo noting that the plan to withdraw 1,000 soldiers was still in force, “with no reference to the change of commander in chief.” Through the rest of 1963, in other words (Galbraith’s words), America’s Vietnam policy was still Kennedy’s, not LBJ’s. The policy, as articulated two days before Kennedy’s death by Henry Cabot Lodge, America’s ambassador to Vietnam: “We should continue to keep before us the goal of setting dates for phasing out U.S. activities and turning them over to the Vietnamese…. We can always grant last-minute extensions if we think it wise to do so.”

Finally, consider context. We all know how the Cold War worked: Republican claims about “losing China” motivated a generation of Democrats into pants-pissing fears about not looking tough enough on the reds. Writes Moise, “It is hard to believe that Kennedy as a man who had spent so much effort cultivating an image of machismo and youthful vigor would not have cared about being thought a Communist appeaser.” He observes, with subtly and sharp historical acumen, “It is not at all unusual in Washington for people to write plans based on a ‘best-case’ scenario. It also seems possible that when Kennedy based plans on the optimists’ projections, he was using this as a way of putting pressure on senior military officers to be realistic in their reports. They might be less inclined to write inflated claims of progress if they were clearly told that such claims would be treated as justifications for troop pullouts.”

He concludes archly, “To have reached a firm decision to withdraw, so long in advance, he would have to have felt that no possible new development, between 1963 and 1965, might create a prospect of an acceptable outcome of a continued struggle. To have thought the situation was such an unmitigated and unmitigatable disaster, he would have had to think that most of what was being said about he Vietnam War in the National Security Council was nonsense, and that his top military and foreign policy advisors were fools or liars. If he felt that, he did an extraordinary job of concealing it.” I agree wholeheartedly.

So what would have happened in Vietnam had JFK lived? Let the man who knew him best have the last word. Asked in 1964 whether America would have “go[ne] in on land” if the South Vietnamese were about to lose, Bobby Kennedy answered, “Well, we’d face that when we came to it.”

Part II of this series considers whether JFK’s assassination influenced the passage of LBJ’s sweeping social reforms.

A Facebook friend writes: “To what extent did Dallas factor into LBJ’s agenda getting through?”

That’s an easy one: quite nearly one hundred precent. There’s no question that Kennedy was an utter failure as a passer of laws during his proverbial thousand days. I wrote about that in Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus: “His only real legislative victory had come in the second week of his term, when the House voted to enlarge the size of the Rules Committee to dilute the power its reactionary majority of Northern Republican and Southern Democrats had used to bog down…social legislation. But he won the victory by only a single vote.” (Those interested in more detail should seek out a 1968 book by Tom Wicker, JFK and LBJ: The Influence of Personality upon Politics.) And that victory, I wrote, “availed him nothing.” His bill to commit major federal funds to education for the first time failed; a bill for aid to depressed areas was watered down; a minimum wage increase was tiny, the number of workers it covered decreased. As for his heroic introduction of the sweeping civil rights bill, Robert Caro suggests that at the time of his death he was apparently ready to trade away its signature provision, the ban on discrimination in public accommodations. A housing bill and what would become Medicare were on the verge of failure—all this despite an approval ratings in the 70s during the spring before his death.

Then, the assassination. Then, Teddy White’s proclamation that America had just been deprived of “Camelot” (more on that later!). Lyndon Johnson stood before a joint session of Congress and said, in words scripted by Kennedy’s great speechwriter Ted Sorensen, “All that I have I would have gladly given not to be standing here today…. On the 20th day of January, in 1961, John F. Kennedy told his countrymen that our national work would not be finished ‘in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetimes on this planet. But,’ he said, ‘let it begin.’ Today, in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans, let us continue!’ ”

Then came the legislative deluge. Same Congress; the only difference was the blatant and skilled manipulation of the memory of the fallen martyr by LBJ. Medicare. Medicaid. Civil Rights, without a single serious change from draft to passage. Federal aid to education. The tax cut I wrote about yesterday (he threatened to keep legislators in Washington through Christmas unless they passed it). Authorizing legislation for an “all-out war on human poverty,” claimed as an inheritance from Kennedy, though it had been Kennedy’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers’ idea to divert money to merely eliminating “pockets of party,” an idea tabled because Kennedy decided reaching out to suburban voters for 1964 was the more important priority.

Part 1 of Kennedy Week focuses on JFK’s legacy as a nuclear strategist and symbol of liberalism.

This week I threw it to the friends in my Facebook community (join us!) for requests about what I should write about for the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s death, which falls this Friday. I got a massive response—scores of questions. All this week I’ll be addressing the most popular and interesting ones.

The very first reply that came in was this: “I can never hear enough about how a liberal Massachusetts Democrat used intelligence and creative intelligence and creative diplomacy to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis and saved us all from nuclear annihilation.” With all due respect to the questioner, a smart and experienced liberal activist, plus the five folks who gave the question a thumbs-up on Facebook, I wondered initially whether his question wasn’t meant as snark—that he might be referring to Garry Wills’s very convincing argument that the Cuban Missile Crisis was all Kennedy’s fault. As it happens, I agree with Wills: I don’t think Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis is something we should celebrate at all.

Wills made the case in the final section of his 1982 book The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power. Early in his term Kennedy fell in love with a plan, left over from Eisenhower’s administration, to send exiles to invade and overthrow Castro via a landing at the Bahía de Cochinos—the Bay of Pigs. He liked it so much because it was Kennedyesque: “A James Bond exploit blessed by Yale, a PT raid run by PhDs.” A failed invasion, his fault; then, despite the conventional wisdom that he learned from the failure, rather than leave well enough alone, Kennedy’s CIA kept on proliferating increasingly knuckle-headed schemes (exploding cigars!) to assassinate Castro, some using Mafia operatives. One set of plans on the drawing boards: “Operation Northwoods,” which proposed, among other ideas, creating the pretext for another American invasion. James Bamford wrote that the goal of the project was “for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro.”

We sometimes hear the argument that Kennedy never knew how about the depths to which such madcap plotting sunk, which were indeed always devised to protect the president via maximal “plausible deniability”—but what is undeniable is that the ultimate aim, overthrowing Castro, came straight from the top. The American people didn’t know about any of this, but the Cuban government did. So no wonder they wanted nukes. But there are also outstanding arguments that JFK’s admittedly outstanding and mature diplomacy once the missiles were placed in Cuba did not save us from nuclear annihilation at all. The logic of deterrence rendered those missiles virtually useless. For if a Communist first strike was launched from the Soviet Union, America could destroy the Cuban missiles before they could be used during this long time window; if the missiles from Cuba struck first, the president would have time to push the proverbial button and annihilate the Soviet Union. The only thing those Cuban missiles were useful for, in fact, was preventing America from illegally overthrowing the Castro government. So if you think that’s a splendid thing, yes, celebrate Kennedy for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Otherwise: not so impressive.

* * *

Next up! “I’d love to read your take on Ira Stoll’s book arguing that JFK was actually a conservative.”

The book is JFK, Conservative. Here’s the blurb: “[B]y the standards of both his time and our own, John F. Kennedy was a conservative. His two great causes were anticommunism and economic growth. His tax cuts, which spurred one of the greatest economic booms in our history, were fiercely opposed by his more liberal advisers. He fought against unions. He pushed for free trade and a strong dollar. And above all, he pushed for a military buildup and an aggressive anticommunism around the world…. Not every Republican is a true heir to Kennedy, but hardly any Democrats deserve that mantle.”

I have, of course, heard such claims for ages. What to make of them? Granted, I haven’t read the book, and maybe Stoll’s supporting arguments are so subtly brilliant that he’s suddenly rendered them convincing. But he’d have to be smarter than Einstein to do so. It’s not a great start that the blurb advertising his book contains a basic logical error. One can’t be a conservative “by the standards of both his time and our own,” the space in between being some fifty years filled with massive social changes on virtually every front, any more than something can be simultaneously matter and anti-matter. What is considered “conservative,” and what is considered “liberal,” changes in any given era. Calling tax cuts “conservative,” as such, is shockingly historically ignorant: the idea of tax-cutting as a signature conservative gesture dates only to the late 1970s and the arguments of supply-siders like Jude Wanniski. When Wanniski made his arguments to Ronald Reagan’s very conservative adviser Peter Hannaford in 1976, Hannaford looked at Wanniski like he was crazy and walked away; the previous year, liberal Democrats were the ones pushing a $29.2 billion permanent tax cut as against President Ford’s wish for $16 billion in temporary tax cuts.

As for Kennedy’s tax cut specifically (which was actually Johnson’s tax cut: it went through early in 1964, and are conservatives now claiming Johnson as one of their own?), the historian David Greenberg niftily put paid to that in a piece Stoll must have missed when it came out ten years ago. Yes, the law that passed ended up lowering the top marginal tax rate from 91 to 70 percent, and if Stoll is willing to join the Kennedy-Johnson bandwagon by bringing back that top rate, I’m glad to join him. But the blunt fact of the matter was that the tax cut was designed to create a deficit, and designed to mostly put money into poorer consumers’ pockets: it was explicitly Kenyesian, through and through—the opposite of Reaganite “supply-side” thinking. Businessmen—conservatives—mostly hated it. Because, back then, it was “conservative” to favor fiscal probity even if it took higher taxes to do it.

OK: “He fought against unions.” Um, he fought against union corruption. If Stoll thinks liberals prefer corrupt unions, I don’t know what to say to him. That’s generally the conservative line. As Barry Goldwater said during the hearings Kennedy helped run in the late 1950s that took on Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters, “I’d rather have Jimmy Hoffa stealing my money than Walter Reuther stealing my freedom.”

Free trade: yeah. Democrats hate that.

What about Kennedy’s anticommunism? Was that “conservative”? Sure, if you’re stupid beyond stupid. Anticommunism in its modern form was invented by liberals like Harry Truman, the architect of the national security state. The proportion of the voting population that was not anticommunist in 1961 was miniscule. Here’s another, related, question from one of my Facebook friends, another five-thumbs-up popular favorite: “I’d love a perspective on his brand of liberal anticommunism and how it fit in to the era.” What did it mean to be a conservative anticommunist during that time? Mostly, it meant being idiotic. Barry Goldwater’s 1962 book on the subject, Why Not Victory?, built on the argument in the last chapter of Conscience of a Conservative that it should be America’s foreign policy to blithely welcome nuclear war if that was what it took to “advance the cause of freedom.” Yes, literally.

Conservatives like Goldwater (not to mention conservatives in the John Birch Society, who believed the most important thing to know about Communism was that its denizens had infiltrated the federal government all the way to the top, but maybe Ira Stoll agrees?) also believed it was futile to negotiate with the Soviet Union about anything. Why was this especially idiotic? Because historically, relaxation in tensions between the US and the USSR had always been the variable most likely to weaken the hold of totalitarianism with the Soviet Union, opening space for the dissidents whose courage eventually brought down the system. (Conservatives habitually travesty both historical fact and the courageous legacy of these dissidents when they argue otherwise.)

Now, as I noted above, Kennedy’s anticommunism could be stupid, too. But it was most stupid when it was most conservative—see above.

So why is it accurate to say that Kennedy was affirmatively liberal—if too often, as we’ll examine next time, a timid one? For one, because he said he was, out and proud, for instance in this most useful of utterances: “If by a ‘liberal’ they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties—someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad—if that is what they mean by a ‘liberal’ then I’m proud to say I’m a liberal.”

The proof was in the pudding. His first debate with Richard Nixon in 1960, remembered now because Kennedy looked hale and ruddy and Nixon looked sweaty and haggard, should also be remembered for Kennedy’s central policy argument: free medical care for the aged, what would later come to pass as Medicare, as an affirmation and extension of the New Deal legacy:

“I want the individuals to meet their responsibilities. And I want the states to meet their responsibilities. But I think there is also a national responsibility. The argument has been used against every piece of social legislation in the last twenty-five years. The people of the United States individually could not have developed the Tennessee Valley; collectively they could have. A cotton farmer in Georgia or a peanut farmer or a dairy farmer in Wisconsin and Minnesota, he cannot protect himself against the forces of supply and demand in the market place; but working together in effective governmental programs he can do so. Seventeen million Americans, who live over sixty-five on an average Social Security check of about seventy-eight dollars a month, they’re not able to sustain themselves individually, but they can sustain themselves through the social security system.”

Kennedy went on, slapping Ira Stoll down from beyond the grave:

“[W]hat is the party record that we lead? I come out of the Democratic party, which in this century has produced Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and which supported and sustained these programs which I’ve discussed tonight. Mr. Nixon comes out of the Republican party. He was nominated by it. And it is a fact that through most of these last twenty-five years the Republican leadership has opposed federal aid for education, medical care for the aged, development of the Tennessee Valley, development of our natural resources. I think Mr. Nixon is an effective leader of his party. I hope he would grant me the same. The question before us is: which point of view and which party do we want to lead the United States?”

That’s why John F. Kennedy was a liberal, which happens to be why I am a liberal too.

Wendell Berry commemorates the assassination of JFK in his poem “The Light of all His Last Days.”

At the close of the 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City, after President Gerald Ford barely squeaked out the nomination against Ronald Reagan, the Reagan aide David Keene gave a revealing interview to The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew.

Keene is a conservative movement lifer. In college he was national chairman of Young Americans for Freedom. He ran for public office only once, for Wisconsin state senate, in 1969, and lost, then worked for Spiro Agnew in the White House back when the loud-mouthed vice president was the conservatives’ Great White Horse for president (“Spiro of ’76”). He became an assistant to the conservative senator James Buckley (William F.’s brother). He was chairman of the American Conservative Union from 1984 until 2011. At the time Drew spoke with him, Keene had been the head of Reagan’s presidential campaign in the South. In my Nation cover story last week about the Tea Party’s continuities with conservatism past, when I wrote about the right’s “ideological entrepreneurs” who work to leverage grassroots outrage into conservative power, Keene is exactly the sort of figure I had in mind.

In Kansas City, Keene spoke to Drew of the anger against Reagan among conservatives for his last-minute gambit to save his failing presidential bid by choosing a liberal running mate, Senator Richard Shweiker of Pennsylvania, who had received a 100 percent rating from the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education. Reagan had defended his decision by stressing Schweiker’s agreement with him on abortion and gun control. Carped Keene, “These are all window-dressing issues. What about the economy?” Keene insisted that it was “economic issues” that conservatives really cared about. He explained, “The picture of hardhats taking to the streets over abortion and gun control is misleading. Those issues aren’t what people care about. What it really comes down to is the economic system and the theory that the government is too big. The big things that thinking conservatives think about involve questions of economics and questions of freedom. They draw on the frustration in the country from the increasing feeling that people can’t do anything about anything.”

He was wrong—as the organizers of the nascent New Right would soon be concluding en masse. Yes, people were feeling plenty of frustration about not being able to do anything about anything when it came to their economic lives. But conservative leaders proved entirely ineffectual at “drawing on that” to get people to believe conservative solutions were the answer to their economic frustrations.

It is, in fact, a truism, confirmed by nearly half a century of political polling, a fact brilliantly explained in a must-read article at Salon.com from Paul Rosenberg. It was true even after Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential victory, and his 1984 landslide reelection. Consider the statistics compiled in the perennially useful 1986 study Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics, by Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers. One poll they cite from Opinion Research Corporation asked voters in 1980 whether “too much” was being spent on the environment, health, education, welfare and urban aide programs. Only 21 percent thought so, the same percentage as in 1976, 1977 and 1978. The amount saying the amount spent was either “too little” or “about right” was never lower in those years than 72 percent. The number favoring keeping “taxes and services about where they are” was the same in 1975 and 1980—45 percent. The pattern continued well into Reagan’s presidency. In 1983 the Los Angeles Times found that only 5 percent of Americans found regulations “too strict,” while 42 percent called them “not strong enough.” Between 1978 and 1982, according to surveys from the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, the number of voters who wished to “expand” rather than “cut back” not just social spending in general but the dreaded “welfare” programs, increased by 26 percentage points. And finally, in 1984, when Reagan’s approval rating was 68 percent, only 35 percent favored cuts in social programs to reduce the deficit, which of course was their president’s strenuously stated preference on the matter. Sixty-five percent believed such cuts were imminent—and, of course, that November, well over 60 percent of them voted for Reagan instead of the Democrat Walter Mondale.

So how did the New Right ever manage to achieve its political thunder? How did they help elect Ronald Reagan when so few Americans, despite Keane’s confidence in 1976 they could be swayed, proved to be economic Reaganites? It was by selling what Keane called those “window dressing” issues—over which people suffering “the increasing feeling [they] can’t do anything about anything” were willing to follow conservatism’s lead.

Richard Viguerie once reflected on his and his New Right comrades’ frustration at their inability to get Christians to care about the Washington Marxists’ stealing their freedom—until Jimmy Carter’s IRS commissioner took away the tax deduction for Christian schools that served the cause of school segregation. “It kicked the sleeping dog….  it was the real spark that ignited the religious right’s involvement in politics.” (Then, incidentally, leaders like Viguerie lied so as not to make their constituency sound racist by retroactively claiming that it was Roe v. Wade that had done the trick.) An activated religious right helped put Reaganism over the top—after which Reaganites retroactively claimed a mandate to push economic conservatism.

It’s not that these conservative leaders didn’t care about about what were then called the “social issues”—in addition to abortion and gun control and keeping the IRS out of Christian schools, the ones that counted back then included the Equal Rights Amendment, gay rights and “secular humanism” in the public schools. It’s just that, in their heart of hearts, just like David Keene said, they cared about helping business more. I always found it revealing that, both times I sat in Richard Viguerie’s private office to interview him about the history of conservatism, the books that sat on his coffee tables were not about abortionists or secular humanists or other ungodly creatures, but about the evils of unions. Business, in turn, eagerly lapped up the help on offer.

This is the context we need to understand as we evaluate the question of whether the romance between the business lobby and the conservative movement, in its current Tea Party incarnation, can ever really cool. I don’t think it will. And it’s true that there are many different kinds of corporations, with all sorts of social agendas and interests. The sort of political division among capitalists I described in the first part of this series still obtains in various forms; Tom Frank writes, for example, about the “cool billionaires”—hedge fund folks, tech wizards—and “square billionaires”—resource extractors like the Kochs—the first preferred by corporate Democrats, the second by corporate Republicans. But you only need to consider the outrage of corporate executives over that one little time Obama used the phrase “fat cats” to know toward which side the ledger truly tips. And when it comes to business and conservatism, though some disciplining from the big-money boys might occur around the edges, they’re just too organically intertwined, in the ways I wrote about in my second part, to effect a divorce.

One of the most important things liberal don’t understand about conservatism, obscured by too much lazy talk about conservatism’s various “wings,” is that its tenets form a relatively organic base for its adherents, where “traditional morality” serves the interests of laissez-faire economics and vice-versa. This holds true whether the individual conservative in question is a sincere “traditionalist” or not. Howard Phillips, who died this year, was certainly a sincere traditionalist: he eventually became an outright Christian Reconstructionist, a fan of returning to the punishment of stoning for those who flout Leviticus’ codes. Both the thought of right-wing intellectual guru Leo Strauss and the neoconservative tradition itself as exemplified by a figure like William Kristol (“thinking conservatives,” in Keene’s revealing phrase) have a quiet tradition of allowing that religious orthodoxy is crucial to keeping society orderly and the masses in line, but something they’re far too smart to subscribe to themselves. (This tribute that the right paid to virtue was brilliantly flushed out eight years ago when The New Republic’s Ben Adler asked ten leading conservative intellectuals what they really thought about Genesis’ account of creation.) A similar perspective holds true for corporate masters of the universe as well: “tradition” keeps the worker bees tractable, after all. If you’re a capitalist, or just capitalism’s biggest fan, conservatism works.

The best writing about this ironic organic unity between “traditional morality” and tradition-wrecking capitalist creative destruction comes from the University of Georgia’s Bethany Moreton, in To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, and, approaching the issue from the other side of the business-conservatism/Christian-conservatism divide, the University of West Georgia’s Daniel K. Williams. Williams argues that laissez-faire was a perfect fit for a figure like Jerry Falwell, too: after all, it was only natural for a Sun Belt entrepreneur like himself, the proprietor of a media network, to preach “that capitalism was a divinely ordained system and that hard work was the key to success, and he exemplified those virtues by logging ninety-hour workdays to turn his church into an ecclesiastical business empire.”

This marriage works so well (for them; not so much for us) because conservatism provides such a great way to manage the very anxieties capitalist creative destruction engenders: convince folks the true threat to families is “liberalism,” not licentious corporate greed, and you’ve worked a pretty neat trick—if you’re a capitalist. What’s more, it’s a great way to get scared victims of capitalism to the polls. The incomparable journalistic chronicler of the religious right and its corporate entanglements, Adele Stan, now of RH Reality Check, unearthed a luminescent recent example:

There is little doubt that the rash of anti-choice measures that flooded the legislative dockets in state capitols in 2013 was a coordinated effort by anti-choice groups and major right-wing donors lurking anonymously behind the facades of the non-profit “social welfare” organizations unleashed to tear up the political landscape, thanks to the high court’s decision in Citizens United….

Helping to drive the right-wing offensive in the states and in Congress is a network of deep-pocketed business titans convened by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, principals in Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held corporation in the United States. Like the Kochs themselves, many of the donors in the brothers’ networks signal disinterest in fighting against women’s rights or LGBTQ rights, yet anti-choice groups have seen their coffers swell with millions of the network’s dollars.

“If you want to promote a pro-corporate agenda, you’re only going to get so far,” Sue Sturgis, the Durham, North Carolina-based editorial director of the progressive website Facing South, told RH Reality Check. “But when you start weaving in these social issues like abortion and other reproductive rights issues, then you’re gonna appeal to a broader range of people, and a very motivated voting bloc. They will turn out. So it serves your larger cause.”

That explains why David Keene has finally come around. A past master at exploiting conservatism in the service of corporate cupidity—review if you dare the extraordinary story of how the American Conservative Union under his reign sold itself to the highest bidder in a trade dispute between FedEx and UPS—he’s now one “thinking conservative” who knows that social conservatism is no longer “window dressing.” Nope: he’s now president of the National Rifle Association—the poster-child organization (read our own Lee Fang) for the proposition that scaring people over culture is a splendid way to keep the capital flowing.

Social conservatism, business conservatism: the one side constitutes the other, like some infernal Mobius strip. Let’s not mistake the growls from the US Chamber of Commerce about taking on some Tea Partiers as signs of an imminent divorce. I suspect it’s more more like a lovers’ quarrel.

In the second part of this series, Rick Perlstein explains how conservatives came to embrace Wall Street in the 1970s.

Yesterday, for the first of three posts on the romance between business and the political right, I wrote about what some historians call “the golden age of capitalism,” which, as far as our governmental arrangements are concerned, was also a golden age of liberalism. In the years after World War II, coincident with America’s decades-long economic boom, even the nation’s top corporate executives seemed to buy into the Keynesian consensus that the best way to assure their own firms’ prosperity was to put money in the pockets of ordinary Americans.

Then, suddenly, they didn’t—my subject for today.

Here’s an irony of the history of conservatism’s relationship with business and business’s relationship with conservatism: “Wall Street” used to be the right-wing industrialists of the forties and fifties’ greatest term of derision. (Wall Street was the place that humiliated them by forcing them, hat in hand, to beg for capital.) Phyllis Schlafly wrote of the “Wall Street kingmakers” who controlled the Republican Party like dictators, forcing on it “liberal” nominees (like the financier Wendell Willkie), the kind of people who read the liberal Republican flagship organ the New York Herald-Tribune. Wall Street liked Lyndon Johnson. It tolerated unions. And, as long as the postwar boom was still booming, it accepted business’s relatively subordinate role in federal policy making. Which of course drove the 1950s and ’60s versions of Tea Partiers—I’ve called them “Manionites.”

Then, lo, the boom bust.

The 1970s was a time of falling rates of profit due largely to fallout from the Vietnam War, from the Arab oil embargo, and lots of successful labor militancy. A reaction was not long in following. And the leaders of the new business reaction now came from Wall Street and the blue-chip companies that had only a decade earlier formed the core of the postwar golden-age corporate-liberal bargain. The romance between business and conservatism entered a new phase: white-hot and smoldering.

Its leaders were people like William Simon, who made a pile of money lending money to New York as senior partner in charge of government and municipal bonds at Solomon Brothers. Then, when New York needed a federal bailout to pay back those loans when banks like Solomon Brothers greedily called them in (they could make more money now loaning to the same resource-rich Third World and Middle East nations who crushed the boom by using oil as a weapon), he did everything he could, as Gerald Ford’s secretary of the Treasury, to block it, making liberalism out to be the only reason for the nation’s every problem. As he wrote in a book modestly titled A Time for Truth, published by Reader’s Digest Press, “The philosophy that had ruled our nation for over forty years had emerged in large measure from that very city which was America’s intellectual headquarters, and inevitably, it was carried to its fullest expression in that city. In the collapse of New York those who choose to understand it could see a terrifying dress rehearsal of the state that lies ahead for this country if it continues to be guided by the same philosophy of government…. Nothing has destroyed New York’s finances but the liberal political formula…. Liberal politics, endlessly glorifying its own ‘humanism,’ has in fact been annihilating the very conditions for human survival.”

And they were people like Bryce Harlow, who became a confidant of both Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon while on leave from Procter & Gamble’s pioneeringly aggressive Washington lobbying shop, which he himself established in 1961. Now back in harness at P&G, he drafted himself as field general for just the kind of organizing called for in the now-famous Lewis Powell memo. Powell, another establishment mandarin who a decade earlier might have been counted on to buy into corporate liberalism, instead became a leading activist against it in his role as a top lawyer for the tobacco industry. Tobacco companies were still smarting from Congress’ passage of the Public Health Smoking Act in 1970, banning cigarette advertising on TV and mandating health warnings on cigarette packs—the kind of regulation big business had previously learned to take in stride. In 1971, Powell, as chair of the “education” committee of the National Chamber of Commerce, argued “the American economic system is under broad attack,” that business had to learn the lesson “that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary it must be used aggressively and with determination… Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”

And so Harlow went into battle as one of the new movement’s generals. Alarmed at the election of an apparently overwhelmingly liberal Congress following Watergate in 1974, he recalled: “We had to prevent business from being rolled up and put in the trash can by that Congress.” Even though that Congress was not all that economically liberal, actually, just Democratic. In actual fact the number of Senate votes the AFL-CIO said they could count on in that Congress decreased from thirty-eight to thirty; “The Freshman Democrat today is likely to be an upper-income type,” a labor lobbyist said. “I think a lot of them are more concerned with inflation than unemployment.”

Another of the establishment-cum-insurgents was a dude named Charls Walker, a former Treasury undersecretary. In 1975 he took over a foundering organization for estate tax recipients and turned it into a turbocharged lobbying shop dedicated to the proposition that the American economy was foundering for a lack of “capital formation”—that business literally did not have enough money, largely because the government extracted too much from it in taxes, which it then distributed downwardly to Americans who were not capitalists. This was precisely the opposite of Keynesiansm—and a proposition that proved attractive enough to several formerly Keynesian Fortune 500 corporations that they each contributed $200,000 to make Walker’s “American Council for Capital Formation” a juggernaut.

Groups that had always done this kind of work became more explicitly political during this period. The National Association of Manufacturers had been aggressively fighting liberalism for decades, but from New York; in 1972 the group (and their political arm, the Business and Industry Political Action Committee, or BIPAC) moved house to Washington, DC—because, a spokesman said, “the thing that effects business most today is government.” The budget of the United States Chamber of Commerce doubled in size between 1974 and 1980.

Here’s why figures like Harlow and Walker were so important. Corporate lobbyists had plied the halls of Congress since forever. But they did so exclusively as representatives of their companies’ own interests, seeking advantage over other companies. Now, they lobbied for capitalists as a class. Capitalists, in other words, were forming unions, with a solidarity unmatched in the labor movement they opposed. They foreswore competition in the name of defending competition.

Consider the formation of a group like the Business Roundtable, formed in 1972: its membership is literally the CEOs of America’s biggest corporations, meeting around a round table. Wikipedia: “The Business Roundtable played a key role in defeating an anti-trust bill in 1975 and a Ralph Nader plan for a Consumer Protection Agency in 1977. And it helped dilute the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act. But the Roundtables most significant victory was in blocking labor law reform that sought to strengthen labor law to make it more difficult for companies to intimidate workers who wanted to form unions. The AFL-CIO produced a bill in 1977 that passed the House. But the Roundtable voted to oppose the bill, and through its aggressive lobbying, it prevented the bill’s Senate supporters from rounding up the 60 votes in the Senate necessary to withstand a filibuster.”

Wikipedia is precisely correct. For more detail you can read great books like Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America, by David Vogel; Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson; The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust, by John Judis; or The New Politics of Inequality, by Thomas Byrne Edsall, which is my favorite.

Next time: what all this history means for the Tea Party here and now.

Part 1 of Rick Perlstein’s series traces the origins of the cozy relationship between conservatives and big business.

Allow me a further deepening of my Nation article, reposing now on newsstands, on the continuities between conservatives of decades past and today. It concerns the historic entanglement of big-business and conservatism. A recent media narrative suggests signs of a divorce between the these longtime lovers. “Business Groups See Loss of Sway Over House G.O.P.,” reports The New York Times—so they’re thinking about primaries against Tea Party congressmembers. “We’re looking at ways to counter the rise of an ideological brand of conservatism that, for lack of a better word, is more anti-establishment than it has been in the past,” says a lobbyist at the National Retail Federation. “We have come to the conclusion that sitting on the sidelines is not good enough.” ThinkProgress broke out the champagne: “GOP CIVIL WAR ERUPTS!!!!”

Just kidding. No all-caps, and no exclamation points. But still: calm down. The Nation’s magnificent Lee Fang has ably debunked the growls of these paper tigers: the big-money boys said the same thing in 2011 during the first debt-ceiling standoff, and did nothing except spend untold millions electing and reelecting Tea Partiers, and there’s no evidence that anything different will happen in 2016. And yet our media elites, ever scanning the horizon for sensible, moderate “adults in the room,” have alighted this time on the pirates running the United States Chamber of Commerce—yet one more frightening indication of how far to the right America’s ideological center has become.

The fact of the matter is that the relationship between business and the modern right has never been simple—and yet, despite some stutter steps backward, it has always advanced in the exact same basic direction: toward romance.

Let’s go back to the Progressive Era, when industrial capitalism was entering its period of maturation. What were once known as “robber barons” were making their accommodations with an increasingly liberal, activist state, but in a way that historians on the left taught us to distrust. Books like the late historian and publisher James Weinstein’s The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 (1969) and Martin Sklar’s The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (1988) argued that corporate owners and managers and high government officials cooperated more than they clashed. Rather than despising regulation as such, business “captured” the regulators, creating a smoothly functioning integrated economy relatively free of ideological conflict.

Thus, even the baseline condition for a business community out of sync with the laissez-faire right is still pretty conservative. At the same time, these historians missed or exaggerated the extent to which large pockets of business were outright reactionary.

Consider the former president of the US Chamber of Commerce who wrote in The Nation’s Business in 1928 that “a thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive…. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger.” Not a big fan of state power, that guy—and his type never went away, even after the Great Depression ushered in the New Deal with major buy-in from the biggest American corporations, first in the National Recovery Act, which appointed businessmen as active partners in a “corporatist” scheme of regulation before it was outlawed by the Supreme Court, then in any number of state initiatives after that. But as the political scientist Thomas Ferguson has argued for decades, generally speaking, it was certain kinds of businesses—big capital intensive multinational corporations and the investment bankers who financed them—who bought into the new liberal center. Another type—smaller, more labor-intensive, less cosmopolitan, often family-owned companies—never did. As I wrote in Before the Storm, imagining the world from the perspective of one of these latter sort of businessmen,

the New Deal threw money at everyone and everything—everyone and everything, that is except you and your plants. You thought it was a godsend to industrialists who managed thousands of workers, instead of hundreds, and their friends on Wall Street. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration authorized executives in every industry to regulate their own. The men he picked were inevitably from the biggest companies, no one you knew. You had no say when they set floors so high that they destroyed the only edge you had over in accessing the market—you could no longer undercut their prices. You had no say when your taxes ballooned to pay for Roosevelt’s deficits, which you knew would only bring inflation.

Bigger companies licked at your heels all through the Depression. Government regulations—whose application was the same for large and small firms, but which invariably fell heavier on the small—began to feel more burdensome to you…. You felt like a victim.

By no means were these whiners the wretched of the earth. Many had towns named after them—like Kohler, Wisconsin, where the famous bathroom fixtures manufacturer fought a 1950s organizing drive so viciously the Senate Labor Committee sent a team of investigators. It wasn’t about money but, as it were, dignity. Men of great possessions who feel dispossessed, powerful men feeling suddenly less powerful, can generate some pretty wing-nutty resentments—Tea Party–level resentment. Like this imperishable quote in a fundraising pitch from their political mastermind, radio broadcaster and former Notre Dame law dean Clarence Manion: “Many gigantic fortunes, built by virtue of private enterprise under the Constitution, have fallen under the direction of Internationalists, One-Worlders, Socialists and Communists. Much of this vast horde of money is being used to ‘socialize’ the United States.” Remember that, because it will be important when we get to the 2008–09 bank-bailout part of the story.

Folks like these got even more resentful as the culture, and the masters of the political economy, came to see them as less and less relevant to the main direction of American economic development—as big business began to accept negotiating with big unions as a matter of course, as a good way to keep their workforces disciplined and efficient. They more and more bought into the Keynesian consensus that government social spending goosed the consumer economy in ways that redounded to their own bottom line. But the other guys, the conservative industrialists (I call them “Manionites” in my book), only got madder—and formed the core of the coalition that nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964. Even as big business formed a crucial part of the coalition that crushed Barry Goldwater in the general election. (If you’re interested in hearing just how copacetic the relationship was, listen to Lyndon Johnson’s conversations that year with Robert B. Anderson, the former Eisenhower Treasury secretary from Texas who was the president’s political liaison to big business.) They loved Johnson, even with his War on Poverty and Great Society, and feared Goldwater; at a LBJ speech to the US Chamber of Commerce, he was interrupted by applause sixty times. Can you imagine that happening to Barack Obama?

But plenty of big businessmen never got aboard the Great Society-Keynesian bandwagon and never would. The finance chairman of Goldwater’s campaign, for example, Ralph Cordiner, was the recently retired CEO of General Motors.

Soon enough, though, by the 1970s, the liberal center in corporate America no longer held, and most multinational executives started feeling and acting like Manionites. It followed a period of extraordinary liberal hegemony in the federal government, even, famously, under President Nixon. A bill he signed in 1969 increased the tax burden on businesses, and not just by a little bit; The New Republic called it “far and away the most ‘anti-rich’ tax reform proposal ever proposed by a Republican president in the fifty-six years of the existence of the income tax.” One of the things the new government revenue was being spent on was new regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety Commission, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (created by the most stringent federal mining legislation in US history) and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Aggressive Naderite advocates—whose “brilliant young staff members who mistrust or totally disbelieve the attributes of the enterprise system,” Barry Goldwater said in 1974—shuttled up and down Capitol Hill, testifying before congressional committees, as often as not tying up their business adversaries in knots. They were winning.

Tomorrow I’ll write about what happened next with business’s relationship with the right: flaming hot romance, accompanied by public displays of affection unlike any Americans had ever seen.

Rick Perlstein notes the parallels between today's Tea Partiers and conservatives of decades past. 

A friend pointed me to a letter to the editor published in the Badger Herald, an independent newspaper published at the University of Wisconsin , widely tweeted with such comments as “Motherfucker, what the fuck” and “how do people like this actually exist?” It argues that rape culture is, in the writer’s words, “non-existent.” I provide the link for documentation purposes only; you should most decidedly not click on it, especially if you are a woman vulnerable to rape-trauma triggers, or a woman, or, actually, if you are a human being. The letter, from a junior majoring in political science, goes on to say that the term “rape culture” merely “aggressively paints men as dangerous and as the root of evil,” and complains “women feel the need to exploit anything that may be rape for publicity.”

I’ll say no more about this “argument.” I bring it up to make a broader point about right-wing rhetoric. It is this: Have you ever noticed how conservatives who say the most controversial things imaginable consistently frame such utterances as self-evident, as simple “truth,” explaining with unshakable confidence that anyone who disagrees with them… no, scratch that. Start over:

Have you ever noticed how conservatives who say the most controversial things imaginable think no one actually disagrees with them?

They will admit that, yes, people might claim to disagree. But they will explain, if pressed, that those who do so are lying, or nuts, or utter the non-truths they utter out of a totalitarian will to power, or are poor benighted folks cowed or confused by those aforementioned totalitarians. (Which, of course, makes the person “finally” telling “the truth” a hero of bottomless courage.) Or the people who disagree are simply stupid as a tree stump. This is why “agree to disagree” is not a acceptable trope in the conservative lexicon. A genuine right-winger will be so lacking in intellectual imagination—in cognitive empathy—that imagining how anyone could sincerely reason differently from them is virtually impossible.

Here’s what that kid from Wisconsin, whom I won’t even dignify with more publicity by typing his name, writes of what he’s about to argue: “I know that people are out there on the fringe of reality who are going to criticize me for what I’m about to explain—but somebody has to explain this.” He also says, “if you put a spotlight on rape, you don’t understand the real issue.”

You could disagree. But that would place you on the fringe of reality. Someone who doesn’t understand the real issue.

Put aside what he thinks that “real issue” actually might be (he’s a sufficiently crappy writer that a coherent explanation of what that might be never arrives). Forget that we’re talking about some 20-year-old intellectual brat. Focus on the rhetoric, which I find merely a convenient iteration of a consistent right-wing style, from the grassroots all the way up to the commanding heights.

When in 1978 the right-wing former Ford administration Treasury Secretary William Simon published a book arguing—no, asserting—that liberalism was responsible for all of America’s problems, he called it, naturally, A Time for Truth. That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. The book was actually full of, ahem, untruths. He wrote, of the New York fiscal crisis, “those who choose to understand it”—note the language—“could see a terrifying dress rehearsal of the state that lies ahead for this country if it continues to be guided by…the liberal political formula…. Liberal politics, endlessly glorifying its own ‘humanism,’ has in fact been annihilating the very conditions for human survival.” He went on to offer, as an example, the extravagant pensions its public employees enjoyed even though those were about half or less than those in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Detroit and a third less than in Chicago, and lower than those provided by such blue-chip corporations as GM and Citibank.

Stephen Colbert has usefully labeled this sort of stuff “truthiness.” Indeed Simon’s ghostwriter, a forgotten right-wing hack named Edith Efron, had a well-established gift for truthiness by the time he hired her. Her book The News Twisters purported to be an objective study proving the networks followed “the elitist-liberal-left line in all controversies”—or actually 80 percent of the time, according to her scientific-sounding methodology, which, to give one example of her rigor, counted the time Hubert Humphrey excoriated “extremists of the left and of the right” on the 80 percent side of the ledger.

A time for truth indeed.

How characteristic is this of the right-wing mind? Consider that it was the entire point of Barry Goldwater’s election slogan “In your heart you know he’s right.” And consider a 1956 circular for Human Events: it read, “conservatives are already in the majority—in your state, in almost every state.” The third-party candidate Human Events backed that year, T. Coleman Andrews, who was campaigning to ban the federal income tax, got only 6.1 percent in his best state. But that must have been because the liberals were just that perfidious. Such was the argument, in 1964, of Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice, Not An Echo, about why a conservative had never won Republican presidential nominations. In their heart, everyone knew conservatism was right. If Gallup polls said otherwise, that was only because, Schlafly wrote, Gallup “asked a lot of questions of a very few people” in order to “come up with answers that pleased the New York kingmakers.” (Her insight has proven an imperishable one on the right, as Mitt Romney learned to his detriment.)

I witnessed the radicalism of conservatives’ lack of cognitive empathy firsthand in, of all places, William F. Buckley’s dining room. Not from Buckley himself, he of relatively blessed memory, considering the conservative competition these days—he was one of the few conservative thought leaders with a history of treating liberals, including me, with intellectual respect. From another of Buckley’s guests, a National Review donor who honestly looked a little bit like this guy. I had been invited to dine (I was served by a butler!) at one of Buckley’s fortnightly “stag” dinner parties, and hold forth on my book about Barry Goldwater. Old Moneybags buttonholed me on the way out. The dialogue honestly went like this:

“So—you’ve read Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative?”

“Yes. I have a whole chapter about it in my book.”

He looked at me searchingly. The sincerity, really, was aching. “And it didn’t make you a conservative?” He honestly couldn’t believe it could be so. It was beyond his poor powers of epistemological empathy to comprehend.

Indeed such epistemology had its own philosopher—proving “epistemology” is no mere metaphor here. It is Ayn Rand, who wrote, in Atlas Shrugged:

A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it….Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too….All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders’ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.

The blogger and political theorist Corey Robin recently unearthed a rebuttal to such a proposition from none other than the great Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote in Philosophical Investigations (which, to be fair, came out in 1953, before Atlas Shrugged, which arrived in 1957, thus Wittgenstein did not have the benefit of Rand’s superior intellect to set him straight), “‘A thing is identical with itself.’—There is no finer example of a useless proposition.”

But it’s hardly useless if you’re a truly hard-shell right-winger. For it is fundamental to maintaining your psychological sense of yourself. It keeps you healthy and sane.

Or at least sane enough to write insane things. To take the example of another text from our friend at the University of Wisconsin who’s arrogated himself the responsibility to truth-shower us on the subject of the nonexistence of rape culture, here is an astonishing example of the existence of rape culture: a tweet that he identifies as the “funniest pickup line I’ve ever heard,” “How do I know we’re going to have sex tonight? I’m stronger than you.”

And how do I know about that tweet? Because it turns out the kid is no ordinary anonymous undergraduate. He’s the publisher of the right-leaning gossip site UW Madison Confessions, which, The Daily Beast reported, made enough of a stir to get noticed by The New York Times. I predict big things for this guy in modern conservatism’s literary firmament. He got exactly what it takes—from the epistemology to the misogyny to the stupidity. The whole package, all the way down.

Dave Zirin on the links between rape culture and jock culture.

A Democratic president begins a new term in the White House. Two years later, America votes a cadre of aggressive conservatives into Congress, loaded for bear. At first the Republican establishment, thrilled to have the Democrats on the run, puts its wariness about the fire-breathers aside. Within a few years, though, the new guys throw out all the old rules of consensus and compromise, and the establishment shows signs of buyer’s remorse. One of the new conservatives, a bulky, take-no-prisoners senator who sees socialist quislings everywhere, takes control of the agenda and threatens to drive the GOP into the ground. 

But this is not 2008 or 2013. It’s the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the senator is not Ted Cruz but Joseph McCarthy.

A new sort of conservative has taken over the Republican Party from the ground up—and they don’t give a goddamn about anything the US Chamber of Commerce says. They want a total divorce between capitalism and the government, and whoever disagrees can go straight to hell. Business people, above all else pragmatists, are alarmed at the prospect of losing control of “the party of business” and hatch schemes to take it back. The Democratic president, for his part, declares a White House open-door policy for business leaders and makes maintaining a climate favorable to business a keynote of his administration. Suddenly, the direction of the Republican Party itself seems to be at stake.

But this is not 2013. It is 1964. The business-friendly president is Lyndon Johnson, and the Republican insurgents are followers of Barry Goldwater.

Moderate Republicans are on the run. The most powerful establishment Republican in Washington is by most measures a conservative. He argues in his speeches that the nation’s economic problems “bear a label: Made in Washington, DC.” He proclaims “a crossroads in our history”: whether America will continue on the path of “bigger government” and “higher taxes” or take a new direction to “halt the momentous growth of government.” But that’s not enough for the leader of the grassroots conservatives, who proclaims the establishment leader a sellout. But even more rabid conservatives distrust the conservative leader and call him a sellout as well. They hatch an insurgency against the insurgency. 

But the establishment leader is not John Boehner. It is Gerald Ford. The conservative leader is not a Tea Partier but Ronald Reagan. And the insurgents—led by Jesse Helms, fresh from an effort to start a conservative third party—insist that Reagan’s campaign strategy isn’t conservative enough. So they effect a boarding party and attempt to turn the Republican platform into a full-on extrusion of right-wing ideological rage—“a reminder,” a columnist then opined, “that Helms belongs to that rabid band of committed conservatives who stop just short of conceding that they are willing to kill the party if they can’t control it.” Sound familiar?

I could proliferate the analogies endlessly: the New Right ideologues who called the newly elected President Reagan a sellout (a 1982 article in Richard Viguerie’s Conservative Digest devoted two pages to attacking the establishment cast of White House state dinners); the Gingrich revolutionaries who horrified establishment Republican leaders by squandering the party’s historic 1994 takeover of Congress with their insistence on shutting down the government. Each and every time, the right-wing fire-breathers insist that the only reason their insurrection failed was that they hadn’t been conservative enough.

No historical analogies are exactly precise. I offer these to drive home a point. The phrase “Tea Party conservatives” is on everyone’s lips these days. And because the movement has a new identity (although if I were being pedantic, I’d point out that conservatives in 1975 called for citizens to staple tea bags to their IRS returns to protest high taxes, even though President Ford, like President Obama, had just lowered taxes), the temptation has been to depict the Tea Party’s brand of reactionary extremism as a new thing, too. Their radicalism this fall has indeed been breathtaking. But understanding today’s right-wing insurgency as a new phenomenon only weakens our attempts to defeat it. Grasping it instead as the product of a slow, steady evolution is our only hope of stopping the cycle before it repeats itself anew.

* * *

First, a conceptual distinction. there is in-deed little new under the wingnut sun; if studying the right full time for sixteen years has taught me anything, it is that. But the structural context for their attempts to get what they want is different from what it was in previous decades. 

The reactionary percentage of the electorate in these United States has been relatively constant since McCarthy’s day; I’d estimate it as hovering around 30 percent. A minority, but one never all that enamored of the niceties of democracy—they see themselves as fighting for the survival of civilization, after all. So, generation after generation, they’ve ruthlessly exploited the many points of structural vulnerability in the not-very-democratic American political system to get their way. For McCarthy, that meant using the rules of Senate investigations—in which the accused enjoy few of the procedural protections of the courtroom—to shape the direction of the government through the sheer power of intimidation. For the Goldwaterites, that meant flooding low-turnout party caucuses at the precinct and county level to win control of the Republican nomination process. In the past, such minoritarian ploys were stymied in the end by bottlenecks. For McCarthy, it was the canons of senatorial courtesy. For the Goldwaterites, it was the necessity of actually winning general elections. Now, however, the bottlenecks against right-wing minoritarian power are weaker than ever; America’s structural democracy deficit has never been greater. And that’s the biggest difference of all. 

For example, the Citizens United decision opened the floodgates for reactionary political money, and as a result, billionaires have become increasingly brazen in their exploitation of campaign finance loopholes. In September, The New York Times discovered that the Koch brothers and their allies gave $236 million more than had been previously known to conservative groups during the 2012 election, simply by registering a new organization as a “business league” instead of a “social welfare” group. This enabled its 200 “members” to make contributions of $100,000 or more as “dues,” which not only hid the donations but potentially qualified them as deductible business expenses.

Then there’s been the steadily increasing sophistication of the independent conservative infrastructure funded by such donations. Since the 1970s, these groups have followed a similar trajectory: ideological entrepreneurs like Viguerie or Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus (in the ’70s) or Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks (these days) spy some localized outrage attributable to liberal perfidy on the horizon. They then leverage the outrage for the greater conservative movement. “We organize discontent,” Phillips once explained, by which he meant he turns it into money, movement and political results. These operatives then retroactively label the outcome of their organizing as a “spontaneous” uprising, a story line that gullible reporters eagerly lap up.

I watched the process happen a decade ago during the 2003 California gubernatorial recall campaign. Talking to citizens on the ground, I discovered that their anger centered on two grievances: the possibility that undocumented immigrants might be issued driver’s licenses, and a new car tax. These grievances were then leveraged by hustlers into the successful crusade that overthrew Democratic governor Gray Davis. I interviewed one of those hustlers, Sal Russo, in his luxuriously appointed Sacramento office plastered with portraits of Ronald Reagan. He told me he considers right-wing talk radio hosts his “ward bosses.” Another consultant named Phil Paule explained to me, “We found an opponent with a really weak hand; we just kept raising and raising the stakes.”

In 2009, the weak hand held by Barack Obama was the bank bailout inaugurated by George W. Bush, which Obama was left to administer. The entrepreneurs got to work. As Thomas Frank points out in Pity the Billionaire, most participants at the sparsely populated (but overly covered) early “Tea Party” rallies were either staffers from conservative groups or congressional offices. The grassroots came later, at which point the entrepreneurs raised the stakes by launching congressional campaigns. Russo trademarked the phrase “Tea Party Express” and organized the Senate campaigns of Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware. Americans for Prosperity funneled some $40 million to rallies, phone banks and canvassing for the 2010 campaigns, including for five of the six newly elected Republicans who found their way onto the House Energy and Commerce Committee. And in 2012, AFP piloted charter buses around Wisconsin for “educational” rallies in support of Tea Party Governor Scott Walker. While reporting from there, I collected a flier with the following revealing typo: “We are gathering citizens together from across Michigan…. Join forces with Americans for Prosperity to defend the Wisconsin Way and fight back against the failed policies of Barack Obama.” This year, the strategy to shut down the government was driven by Heritage Action, the political wing of the Heritage Foundation think tank, which has been playing this game since 1973.

The engineers of the shutdown were aided by the final structural component that makes the current conservative push different from right-wing crusades of the past: the aggressive gerrymandering of Congress by conservative state legislatures. To take one infamous example, Pennsylvania has thirteen Republican and only five Democratic members of Congress, even though 52 percent of the state’s voters chose Barack Obama in 2012. That had been the plan all along: as a Texas Republican operative close to Tom DeLay said about their redistricting work following the 2000 Census, “This has a real national impact that should assure that Republicans keep the House no matter the national mood.” It has also meant that Republican seats have become so safe that the remorseless far-right ideological entrepreneurs have been able to run further- and further-right candidates in primaries against establishment Republicans. It’s a win-win strategy: even if their candidates lose, they manage to drive incumbents far to the right to save their seats; and if they win, Tea Party representatives can rest secure in the knowledge that their re-election is safe no matter how recklessly they “govern.”

Presto: after decades of trying, the reactionary tail finally wags the establishment dog. The recklessness of the goals, however, have always been the same. 

* * *

Read the paper trail. Barry Goldwater in Conscience of a Conservative (1960): “I have little interest in streamlining government…for I mean to reduce its size…. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.” The “Leninist strategy” for undoing Social Security, published in The Cato Journal in 1983. Grover Norquist in 2001: “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years,” to “get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Why wouldn’t conservatives shut down the government? They hate it. They’ve just been biding their time, waiting for the opportunity.

One mistake of the establishments past and present has been to fail to take seriously the apocalypticism of conservative insurgencies: They couldn’t possibly mean it, could they? So the policy wizards in the Obama White House build a Rube Goldberg healthcare law that relies on states to expand Medicaid and create healthcare exchanges, and then are utterly blindsided when red-state legislatures and governors decline. Haven’t they heard the news that conservatives don’t like it when people benefit from government? Likewise, the White House offered up cuts to government programs popular with both the left (social programs) and right (the military) in the last round of budget negotiations, confident that Republicans would never let the sequester actually come to pass—blindsided again.

Another mistake has been to ignore the organizational capacity of reactionaries. In 1976, an anonymous staffer of Gerald Ford’s presidential campaign, startled at having lost the Texas primary to Ronald Reagan in a landslide and dumbfounded that Republican turnout in some cities in various states had doubled since the last election, circulated a fascinating memo. “Turnout is very high,” the staffer wrote. “The people coming to vote or to the caucuses are unknown and have not been involved in the Republican political system before; they vote overwhelmingly for Reagan.”

The memo continued, “A clear pattern is emerging; these turnouts now do not seem accidental but appear to be the result of skillful organization by extreme right-wing political groups in the Reagan camp.” They were “operating almost invisibly through direct mail and voter turnout efforts conducted by…a loose coalition of right-wing political committees. Many of these committees are set up by or in conjunction with Richard Vigurie’s [sic] political direct mail firm. Others have been funded either by a wealthy sponsor (Joe Coors) or by a special interest group like the NRA…. They have been raising money for many years, and have extensive mailing lists made up of people interested in these issues.” The groups included the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the Committee for the Survival for a Free Congress, the Heritage Foundation, the American Conservative Union, the NRA’s “Campaign 1976” and anti-abortion groups. “Many of the members of these groups are not loyal Republicans or Democrats. They are alienated from both parties because neither takes a sympathetic view toward their issues. Particularly those groups controlled by Vigurie [sic] hold a ‘rule or ruin’ attitude toward the GOP.” 

The memo also noted the Reagan supporters’ novel methodology: “They can target an effective direct mail campaign based on response to fund raising mail using outrageous literature designed to motivate people interested in a right wing cause…. The mailing lists can be turned into telephone lists and door-to-door canvassing lists and used to turn the vote out…. In caucus states where few people attend the county caucuses such an effort can control the state conventions.”

It was an accurate assessment—but a conspicuously belated one. These forces had been organizing assiduously from the time Goldwater was defeated in 1964. Viguerie had been raising millions for conservative candidates and causes ever since going into business for himself in 1965. The memo was written in May 1976. A couple of months earlier, the Reagan campaign had been so weak it couldn’t even afford fuel for the candidate’s charter plane; the Republican establishment was begging him to quit. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Reagan came back from the dead with a resounding victory in North Carolina. 

That triumph amounted to a veritable hinge in US political history: under the noses of the press, Senator Jesse Helms had all but kicked the official Reagan campaign committee out of the state, instead running the election via his own National Congressional Club, a Viguerie-style organizing machine that soon dwarfed the budgets of the state’s Republican and Democratic parties. Patiently  combing the attics and back rooms of county courthouses for months, volunteers headed by a young Helms staffer pulled together a roll of 80,000 names of Republican voters—the first such list in the state. Those 80,000 voters were bombarded with direct mail depicting the far-left horrors afoot in the Ford White House (“Do you plan to continue to lead our country to full socialism?” a questioner asked the president at one of his rallies). 

Outsiders at the time failed to understand how Reagan won North Carolina and revived his campaign. Somehow, the details of these far-right organizing coups only seem to emerge later—no one on the other side ever sees them coming in the moment. Case in point: in early October, The New York Times ran a story titled “A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning,” which described a secret meeting in which the plotters, including Ed Meese, conspired to exploit the House’s power of the purse to threaten a government shutdown unless Obamacare was defunded. “To many Americans,” the Times continued, “the shutdown came out of nowhere. But interviews with a wide array of conservatives show that the confrontation that precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort to undo the law, the Affordable Care Act, since its passage in 2010—waged by a galaxy of conservative groups with more money, organized tactics and interconnections than is commonly known.”

That last clause is so telling. Why wasn’t it “commonly known”? It’s not 1976 anymore. We can’t be flies on the wall in the rooms in which right-wing cabals plot—but we surely should know by now that any advance for liberalism will be subject to a vigorous effort to undo it. In the bowels of the White House, within the corridors of the Democratic National Committee, the AFL-CIO, what strategic counter-plotting was in effect? It’s OK if “to many Americans, the shutdown came out of nowhere.” Democratic professionals in Washington, on the other hand, should have seen it coming. Perhaps, though, their vision is too occluded by the example set by President Obama, who continues to see Republicans as responsible negotiating partners despite all evidence to the contrary.

* * *

This time, liberals are also making a new mistake. Call it “racial defeatism.” Folks throw their hands up and say, “Of course reactionary rage is going to flow like mighty waters against an African-American president! What can we possibly do about that?” But it’s crucial to realize that the vituperation directed at Obama is little different from that aimed at John F. Kennedy, who was so hated by the right that his assassination was initially assumed by most observers to have been done by a conservative; or Bill Clinton, who was warned by Helms in 1994 that if he visited a military base in North Carolina, he’d “better have a bodyguard.”

All right-wing antigovernment rage in America bears a racial component, because liberalism is understood, consciously or unconsciously, as the ideology that steals from hard-working, taxpaying whites and gives the spoils to indolent, grasping blacks. Racial rhetoric has been entwined with government from the start, all the way back to when the enemy was not Obamacare but the Grand Army of the Republic (and further in the past than that: Thomas Jefferson, after all, was derided as “the Negro President”). When former IRS Commissioner T. Coleman Andrews ran for president in 1956 on a platform of abolishing the income tax, it was no accident that his war cry—he was fighting against the “degeneration of the union of states into an all-powerful central government!”—was indistinguishable from that of the Southern governors enacting a policy of massive resistance against Brown v. Board of Education. Every time the government acts to expand the prerogatives of citizenship and economic opportunity to formerly disenfranchised groups, a racism-soaked backlash ensues. Defeatism—or ideological accommodation—only makes it worse.

Ironically, liberals of previous generations understood this better than we do now, despite decades more experience watching how the right’s game is played. For a Partisan Review symposium in 1962, Harvard sociologist David Riesman advised that the Kennedy administration “can gain the leeway on the domestic front…only by combatting the radical right rather than seeking itself to move onto rightist ground—an illusory operation since the right can always go still further right and will.”

Well, we’re on rightist ground now. Listen to Norquist in a recent interview with The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein: “We won in 2011 and then again with the president making 85 percent of the Bush tax cuts permanent. We really did get caps and sequestration that limits government spending. If we just went home and put the government on autopilot, it would be a win. This Republican Congress has made a fundamental shift in the size of government equation.”

Note, though, he said it in an interview meant to excoriate Ted Cruz and his strategy to defund Obamacare by holding the continuing resolution funding the government hostage. “And people went out on talk radio and said if you’re not for this you’re a coward, you’re a RINO [Republican in Name Only].” This was stupid, said Norquist. But how stupid? The continuing resolution that eventually went through, with Democrats everywhere declaring victory over Tea Party intransigence, cuts spending at a faster pace than the budget Paul Ryan proposed in 2011—$217 billion less in discretionary spending than the budget Obama proposed. They’ve also made crisis governing the new normal, as the deal that the two sides struck funds the government only until January; then we get to enjoy the whole melodrama over again. 

And here, finally, is a pattern to sear into your brain, too. They’re revolutionaries—they say so themselves. Revolutionaries, we all know, eat their children. When Goldwater broke with Reagan in favor of negotiating with Panama over the future of the Panama Canal, he got such angry hate mail he told an interviewer, “I didn’t realize Western Union would send telegrams like that.” He complained, like today’s establishment Republicans talking about Tea Partiers, “Reagan has some of those people, the really ideological ones who won’t change.”

Now this: Grover Norquist, last year’s revolutionary, is the responsible one, complaining about radical right intransigence. Scary times. At least we have a road map to navigate it. It’s the right’s own history, which doesn’t change much. They’re maximalists. They want it all. And the bigger our democracy deficit, the more they’ll be able to get.

Check out Rick Perlstein’s series on “Thinking Like a Conservative”: Part One: ”Mass Shootings and Gun Control,” Part Two: “Biding Time on Voting Rights,” Part Three: “On Shutting Down Government,” Part Four: “Goalpost Moving” and Part Five: “Epistemology and Empathy.”

This past weekend I was thrilled to attend the second annual Great Lakes Bioneers conference in Chicago, which has been a wonderful introduction for me this year and last to the remarkably dedicated work citizens are doing around the concept of “resilience”—a word frequently used in psychology to refers to people’s ability to bounce back in the face of life challenges and which environmentalists have adopted into an umbrella term for practices centered around how communities can create a sustainable future within an unsustainable present—to build a new world in a shell of the old. In 2012, I learned about one of the movement’s coolest big ideas, “biomimicry”—the concept of better design through imitating nature. This year I learned about “food forests,” which is amazing stuff too—“a gardening technique or land management system that mimics a woodland ecosystem but substitutes in edible trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals.”

I also learned something horrifying. Please allow me to share.

You know something about tar sands, those petroleum deposits sedimented within mineral layers, concentrated in the Canadian province of Alberta. They can be converted into crude oil via a highly disruptive refining process, then transported to market via a process that is even more disruptive: overland and underwater pipelines. You know about tar sands, no doubt, because of the Keystone XL controversy. At Bioneers yesterday I attended a strategy session led by tar sands activists who were glad that the Keystone XL controversy has focused attention of the whole ghastly business; XL, because it crosses an international border, requires presidential action, which has provoked activists to launch a highly visible pressure campaign aimed at the White House. But they were worried about that attention, too—because “XL” serves a distraction from other, more proximate pipeline crises unfolding now, today, perhaps beneath a waterway or across a county near you, that you might be able to help stop now, through grassroots action.

It’s not just the record number of pipelines that are being built. There is also the newly flourishing and massively risky practice of reversing the directional flow of existing pipelines, often in conjunction with massive increases in pressure that the pipes were not designed to withstand (here’s a story about a pipeline reversal in which the volume will almost triple). That was almost certainly a major reason for the disastrous rupture of ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline last March in Mayflower, Arkansas, which you may have heard about—or which you may not have heard about, given that the Federal Aeronautics Administration, in a suspicious move made in cooperation with ExxonMobil, immediately banned flights above the spill from descending below a floor of 1,000 feet, while inquiring reporters on the ground were told by local sheriff’s deputies, “You have ten seconds to leave or you will be arrested.”

One of the most monumental reversal-and-construction projects is taking place on a 485-mile pipeline that used to transport petroleum drilled in the Gulf of Mexico to the Midwest—but beginning in the spring of 2012 began moving tar sand-derived crude from Cushing, Oklahoma (the “Pipeline Crossroads of the World”), to the Gulf Coast for transportation onto the world market (a key concept—the world market; none of this has anything to do with American “energy independence”). It’s called the Keystone Pipeline Gulf Coast Project, and it has been the obsession of one of the remarkable panelists I heard last weekend. Earl Hatley, a Native American from Oklahoma and legendary environmental activist, was a principal in a lawsuit, dismissed by a federal judge last month, to keep that monstrosity from being completed. An exceptionally experienced observer of the wicked ways of the corporate carbon cowboys now deforming the North American landscape, he offered some shrewd assessments of the current state of play based on what he learned from that process.

The clever lawyers for the pipeline company TransCanada, you see, had devised a shifty way to get pipelines reversed, built or both, before opposition can have time to gel. They get a special kind of expedited permit from the Army Corps called “Nationwide Permit 12,” which is supposed to be limited to projects that disturb less than a half-acre of wetland in a “single and complete project.” But companies claim, in clear violation of the intent of the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, that each crossing of a body of water (there are more than a thousand for the project in question, adding up to 130 acres of high-quality forested wetlands) is a “separate” project, each falling below the threshold of scrutiny. That way they can avoid public hearings, avoid filing a environmental impact—can avoid any accountability at all, really. “It’s not a public process,” explains Hatley. (Nope. Only the lands are public.) Or, actually, processes—for what the NWP 12 scam allows is for pipeline companies to overwhelm the system, as the legal complaint from the Sierra Club and Clean Energy Future Oklaho ma explains, by “piecemealing” what is obviously a single project (even though you obviously can’t have a pipeline if it’s in pieces), “into several hundred 1/2-acre ‘projects’ so as to avoid the individual permit process.” So it is that Army Corps of Engineers, the named defendant in the suit, gets to mete out little chunks of permission every eleven miles or so, in secret, the public and the planet be damned.

The plaintiffs be damned, too. In a ruling early last month that is simply staggering in its bald deference to dollarocracy, an appeals panel ruled that because “the harm an injunction would cause TransCanada was significant,” and because $500 million had already been spent on the project, it was “undisputed that further delay [would] cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each day.”

That’s right: the plain intent of US environmental law could be contravened because it would cost a corporation. A court actually said this.

And get this. The court also said that the plaintiffs, the Sierra Club and Clean Energy Future Oklahoma, couldn’t have their injunction because—well, there’s only one way to put it: because they weren’t wealthy enough. As the AP article on the decision put it, it was impossible for the lawsuit to go further because “the Sierra Club and the other groups could not post a bond to cover TransCanada’s losses if the pipeline builder ultimately wins the lawsuit.”

For activists like Hatley, it was back to the drawing board. Sad news? Of course. You see why expedited permitting and construction are so important to oil companies: like Israel’s occupation on the West Bank, once they establish their “facts on the ground,” the process feels impossible to reverse. This process, by the way, was personally endorsed by President Obama, who traveled to Cushing last year to sing hosannahs to building more pipeline. (After all, the National Security State needs tar sand crude to maintain a viable imperial presence around the globe. That’s why they call oil a “strategic commodity.”)

But look here: there is (as a certain presidential candidate used to like to say) hope. You can’t have a pipeline, after all, if it’s in pieces. What if We the People found a way to break the chain? To, as it were, perforate the pipe?

That was the most exciting part of the Bioneers session for me. Look at the map above. That’s the Flanagan South pipeline project being planned by TransCanada’s rival Enbridge (slogan: “Where energy meets people”), set to run 600 miles from Flanagan, Illinois, to Cushing, Oklahoma, sending some 600,000 barrels a day across states of Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma. Which makes for lots of disrupt-able links in the chain. And here’s where the disruption could come from. A model one of the activists in the audience at the session pointed to, the Tar Sands Free Town campaign, “[builds] on model resolutions already adopted in Bellingham, Washington, [in which] individual municipalities can pass resolutions that keep fuel from tar sands refineries out of their towns.”

Those burgs that dot the map from Flanagan to Cushing: Caney and Humbolt and Lynn in Kansas; Gum and Concordia and Key and Shelby in Missouri; Goodfield and Florence and Rush and Quincy in Illinois—those are the towns Enbridge will be eyeing for colonization-via-fossil fuel pump stations and refiners. What will happen when the colonizers arrive? Hatley described his own observations from Oklahoma: arrogant out-of-town oil men will refuse to patronize local businesses, break promises to provide local jobs, condescend standoffishly to local citizens. “You go through the cafes…. You stand up, and you start having rallies. You let people know.” And, he said, people respond.

Another panelist, MacDonald Stainsby, who is based in Vancouver, told an extraordinary story about the time he visited a village in Africa. The people there were amazed when he recited to them, as if he were a clairvoyant, exactly the history of double-dealing and mendacity and environmental abuse they’d suffered when an oil multinational came to town. How did he know? they asked. Because, he replied, that was exactly what they did to towns in Canada—and everywhere else. Which is why, Hatley explained, activists should try to “catch the process before it goes forward,” from the bottom up. That is where the hope lies.

Organize with these facts from the pipeline-rupture epidemic, which have flown largely below the media radar. A Koch-owned pipeline spilled 400 barrels in Texas last week. “Details are scarce regarding the cause of the spill,” Alternet reports, but that’s nothing compared to what happened a few weeks earlier: “a pipeline that spewed over 20,000 barrels of crude oil into a North Dakota wheat field went unreported for eleven days until it was discovered by a farmer harvesting his wheat. A subsequent Associated Press investigation found nearly three hundred oil 300 oil spills and 750 oil field incidents have gone unreported in the state since January 2012 alone.” According to a report from the watchdogs at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the office at the Department of Transportation in charge of regulating 2.6 million miles of pipeline spends three times more hours hobnobbing at industry conferences than it does responding to spills, explosions and other incidents on the ground.

And how do the companies respond when evidence of a crisis emerges? Hatley said that when the monitors at Enbridge’s far-off headquarters spied low pressure in their pipe flowing below Mayflower, Arkansas, they didn’t shut down and look into the possibility of a rupture. They amped up the pressure instead—three separate times. Meanwhile a pipeline safety expert with forty years’ experience predicts that the chance of rupture of a pipeline repurposed for tar sands that runs through the most populated part of Canada and crosses waterways providing drinking water for millions of Canadians is… “over 90 percent.”

And last summer, the National Wildlife Federation sent divers down to inspect the sixty-year-old pipelines Enbridge operates beneath the Straits of Mackinac—a major tourist area in Michigan—after the company (and the federal government’s Pipeline Hazards Safety Administration) refused for two years to release information about their safety and integrity or even their location. You can watch the video here to see what they found: “pipelines suspended over the lakebed, some original supports broken away (indicating the presence of corrosion), and some sections of the suspended pipelines covered in large piles of unknown debris.” Among the cities with refiners that receive tar sands from this eminently admirable company, according to Clean Energy Future Oklahoma, are Joliet, Illinois; Whiting, Indiana; St. Paul, Minnesota; Toledo, Ohio (they have two); and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Enbridge began construction this summer on Flanagan South, using the obnoxious Nationwide Permit 12 process. The fact that you’ve heard of Keystone XL but not this, even though the route might nearly snuggle up to your front porch—it comes within twenty miles of Peoria, Illinois, to take one example—has nothing to do with size: according to Midwestern Energy News, the project will carry “600,000 barrels a day initially for the Flanagan South, and 783,000 barrels per day once combined with the Spearhead, an existing pipeline that largely runs parallel to the proposed Flanagan route,” compared to 830,000 barrels for Keystone XL.

Midwesterners, let’s get to work. It won’t be easy: reports the NWF of its underwater adventure, “despite having cleared our dive work with the U.S. Coast Guard, several Congressional members, and Homeland Security, our staff and the dive crew had uncomfortable interactions with Enbridge representatives. As soon as our team set out on the water, we were quickly accompanied by an Enbridge crew that monitored our every move. This monitoring did not stop at the surface: Enbridge also placed a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) into the water to watch our team.”

I’m sure Enbridge had only the most public spirited of intentions. Reports the company website, “Government regulations for the approval and maintenance of pipelines are transparent and rigorous. With our focus on safety, and our commitment to adopting state-of-the-art technology, Enbridge meets and often exceeds those regulations—and that has earned us recognition as an industry leader. But we know that’s not good enough. Nothing is more important to us than the safety of our pipelines, our communities, and the environment. We continue to strive in the areas of monitoring, prevention, response, and new technology for a delivery record of 100%.”

What liars. Sounds like a villain worthy of your most mighty attention.

Zoe Carpenter highlights another under-reported environmental crisis: coal mining in the Powder River Basin.

I’ve been blogging here at the Nation since January, in sheer delight at being given free rein by outstanding editors to pursue my interests wherever they take me, even more delighted to see my work absorbed by outstanding readers who respond to it with generosity and critical acumen—thanks all! Plenty more in the months to come. Meanwhile, this: one of my habits has been to put out little series, for instance the one I wound up Wednesday on the conservative passion for pyramid schemes. Being a fellow of distracted mind, though, and faced with the distraction of explaining a political universe that stubbornly refuses to stand still, months can pass between episodes in these series. And sometimes I accumulate reflections on a certain theme that only end up smelling like a series in retrospect. So today, allow me to corral some of this stuff together into something like an organized index—a Rickipedia, if you will.

Want to know about the right and pyramid schemes? You can find the four parts here, here, here, and here.

The hard-working PhDs teaching our children as adjunct professors for poverty wages? Read about it here, here and here—with more to come: you’ll be fascinated to see the insensitivity of responses from some of the tenured professors, I’m sure.

Then there has been my reporting on what’s going on in Chicago, and the rule of the stubby-fingered vulgarian mayor Rahm Emanuel who is selling off the city to his investment-banker buddies: my Rahmanyana. My first on the subject, “Rahm on the Ropes,” has been my most-”liked” Nation post so far. I next wrote three serial accounts of citizen action against Rahm’s ghastly planned shock-doctrine school closings: here, here and here. Then, as the day of the closings approached, I explained with the help of Chicago’s legendary social justice lawyer Tom Geoghegan why they were against the law (a judge, alas, disagreed). I wrote about how the Chicago Public Schools bureaucracy treats hero teachers who resist it. And I wrote about Chicago’s parking meter fiasco, the most egregious privatization deal in the country—coming soon to a city near you! Expect more of my reporting from Chicago soon: about the corporate giveaway of its new transit-fare system, and the predictable disasters that the school closings have wrought.

Last winter, I wrote about what happened to two kids—here and here—who decide they’re Republicans in college, then get mugged by reality, becoming liberals when they realize conservatism is based in fantasy. Send ‘em to your College Republican cousin!

We’re used to blaming our current tragedy on Tea Party lunacy and crisis governance, in which the federal government seems on the verge of shutting down every other week, and a debt default looms ever month. In a series on “Our Obama Bargain,” I explored Obamaism’s complicity in the tragedy, beginning with his stubborn insistence that extremists and reactionaries can be negotiated with in good faith despite all evidence to the contrary. The series chronicled two biographical episodes that suggest why Obama really ought to know better than to believe human beings are entirely reasonable creatures: his childhood in post-genocide Indonesia, and his adult experience organizing in Chicago during the “Council Wars,” in which white aldermen sabotaged the government of the city’s first black mayor.

And speaking of Obama, I’ve been snarling back at the glib presumptions that a future Democratic majority is some kind of demographic inevitability. Read my debunking here, here, here, and here. The only inevitable way for Democrats to win and keep winning, by my lights, is to restore the party’s historic reputation as the guarantor of middle-class economic stability—not an easy thing to do when Democrats like Obama and Emanuel cozy up to corrupt plutocrats like the new Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, whose family fortune, I documented in a two-parter, is not unrelated to their historic closeness to organized crime figures , and their continued mastery of barely legal tax scams.

I’ve also been endeavoring to instruct you all in a skill I fear Obama will never be able to master: entering the mind of conservatives, understanding the deep wellsprings their absolutism sincerely derives from. On gun control. On the inherently long-term, goalpost-moving orientation of conservatism strategizing that renders utterances like “but the healthcare exchanges were invented by the Heritage Foundation!” meaningless. On how the right is always ready to snap from evolutionary tactics to revolutionary ones whenever the time is judged ripe—for instance, on matters like shutting down the federal government. On why conservatives genuinely believe the ends justify the means (this one inspired the most comments of any of my posts). On how the ethic of Christian forgiveness can serve as an endlessly renewable alibi for what might otherwise be career-ending sins.

And I’ve catalogued the eternal return of certain right-wing political scripts—study them well, they’ll be back, nothing new under the wingnut sun: doomsday survivalism. The liberal conspiracy to poison children’s minds through the textbooks they read. Reckless lust for spending cuts. Exploiting municipal financial distress (like, these days, in Detroit) to push shock-doctrine schemes against the public sector. Excoriating spying by the national security state when Democrats are in charge and ignoring it when Republicans are in the catbird seat.

Ah, history. I’ve been researching and writing a book about the rise of the right in the 1970s for five years. Among the original research finds I’ve shared here, tying them to developments in our own time, are the roots of American Legislative Exchange Council in an illegal tax dodge; the intelligence community’s derailing of reform in a way that shockingly parallels our own time (here and here and here); the madcap 1975 Oscar ceremony in which a winner read a telegram from the Communist victors of the Vietnam War and Frank Sinatra went utterly berserk; the late surgeon general C. Everett Koop’s contribution to the right’s move to anti-abortion extremism; and the Democrats’ history of pro-corporate conservatism (and the media’s history of labeling even pro-corporate Democrats left-wingers).

And, being the only historian I’m aware of to have listened through the radio broadcasts Ronald Reagan made between his retirement as governor of California and his presidential runs in 1976 and 1980, I’ve shared with you some gems: his passion for the fascist Chilean president Augusto Pinochet; his gift for mocking serious scientific research as taxpayer-funded boondoggles; his goofy but very politically effective rhetoric of racism as something easily trascended through individual goodwill—and a two-parter, one of my most widely read, here and here, on Reagan’s contribution to the National Rifle Association’s ideology of armed vigilantism.

Here are some greatest hits: Why I am liberal—my first post—and my eulogy for my friend Aaron Swartz.

And finally, here’s a series I didn’t know was a series until I put this here post together. I compared the cool, non-hyperactive response to a terror bombing at La Guardia Airport at Christmastime 1975 to the frantic shutdown of a major American city following the Boston Marathon bombing. And the time a lone mentally ill White House intruder was shot dead in 1975, just like this year—only in 1975, they didn’t descend a hoard of law-enforcement officers, some in hazmat suits, to shut down the victim’s block and treat the whole thing like a national security emergency. I wrote about how Hollywood used to celebrate the heroes of police procedurals precisely because they followed the civil liberties rules—whereas now, in movies like Zero Dark Thirty, they become heroes by flouting them. It’s our culture: fear, fear, fear, all the time—as revealed in trade magazines like Emergency Management, which celebrates how security at the Mall of America was transformed to match that at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, with no evidence it’s caused anything but wasted time and useless trauma. If I’ve made any sort of useful contribution these last ten months, it may be this: a record of how our post–September 11 culture of crippling, lo these many years later, still so deforms our civic life. Thanks for reading. We’ll see what I manage to come up with next.

This summer I put together a three-part series on American conservatism and its passion for “Multi-level marketing” (MLM) systems like Amway—pyramid schemes, in so many words. I promised a fourth part as a conclusion but never got to it—other issues pressed. (A wingnutologist’s work is never done….)

Here was part one, on how MLMs (don’t) work.

And part two, on how the Bush administration crushed the regulation of Amways et al by hiring one of Amway's lawyer to the post in charge of regulating Amway.

And part three, on how MLM fleecers saturate conservative politics, buying off, for example, the state attorneys general responsible for (not) prosecuting the frauds.

Allow me to return to the series, belatedly, for part four—on why this all matters for understanding the American right as such. It might not seem topical, now that conservatives in Washington are so busy preparing the next chapter in their project to bring the nation once more to the brink of fiscal apocalypse unless their lunatic vision of the American economy is given full rein. Indulge me, though: that is why understanding the right-wing affection for pyramid schemes is so important right now. It helps explain where those lunatic economic visions grow out of: the fantasy about how the world works that beats in right-wingers’ hearts, from Main Street all the way to United States Capitol.

I’ll start with a story. When I was in Tampa, Florida, reporting on the 2012 Republican convention for The Nation, I happened upon a nice fellow, a Mormon, named Walt. (Utah has the most network marketers per capita by far; “MLM,” Utahans joke, stands for “Mormons Losing Money”; Mitt Romney is implicated in the hustle from his Mormon head to his Mormon toes.) He spoke of his affection for Romney and the Republican Party (he’d seen my press pass, and asked how he, a lowly cellphone salesman, could get inside the convention); he talked about Obama’s passion for giving free money to lazy, shiftless slackers (“That’s Obama’s thing: entitlement.”). We reached an impasse when I tried to argue him out of his Fox-fed propaganda, and we started talking about taxes instead. That was when he told me, “Anyone who doesn’t have a home-based business is ignorant.” I asked him what kind of home-based business he had, which was when he revealed himself as a passionate MLM devotee.

Ignorant? Oh, really. As I quoted in part one of my series, according to a study of 22,281 distributors for an MLM company called Trek Alliance, “Under several optimal scenarios in which the distributors do exactly what is needed to obtain the rewards proposed by the Pay Plan, approximately 98.8 to 99.6 percent fail to achieve any earnings,” and “in all likelihood more than 96 percent of Trek distributors experience business failure.”

So why do MLM distributors do it? And why do they proselytize that you should, too? Well, it’s easy to explain the proselytization piece, in part: recruiting new distributors is what old distributors have to do in order to try to make money. But I don’t think my friend Walt in Tampa had any illusions about recruiting me. His passion came straight from the heart. And where did this passion come from?

Walt was wearing his work uniform: he was a middle-manager at a a major national cellphone company. But when I returned to the arena for the evening’s convention session, I heard nothing that might speak to cubicle drones like Walt. Or at least it seemed that way, on the surface. Instead, I heard the same theme over and over again from the Republicans onstage—deconstructing Obama’s famous, out-of-context line, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” Remember?

A small-town mayor (from Utah!) running for Congress: “This is the America we know, because we built it.”

A country singers crooning a brand-new ditty he wrote for the convention: “I Built It.”

Janine Turner, who played Maggie on the TV show Northern Exposure, saying “President Obama, I’m here to tell ya, government didn’t build it. God and the American people built it!”

As I wrote from Tampa, according to its entire rhetorical thrust, “If you’re not among the small percentage of Americans who own a business, or don’t aspire to become one, you were invisible to that convention.” You had no moral claim the rest of us were bound to respect. Indeed you were hardly American at all. And this, as much as the false get-rich-quick promises companies like Trek and Amway”—short, naturally, for “American Way”—offer, is why they prove so seductive to those of a right-wing bent: by letting folks like Walt “buy” a “home-based business” off the shelf, MLMs let nine-to-fivers style themselves as members of the only caste of Americans that matter on the right—entrepreneurs.

As critic Robert Fitzpatrick, author of False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverence in Multi-Level Marking and Pyramic Schemes, told me this summer, “MLM is presented as an ‘alternative’ to the conventional economy that is portrayed as entrapping, uncaring or closed off, a place for losers and wage slaves.” (That’s my friend Walt all over: a wage-slave, struggling to escape.) Fitzpatrick continues, “Conservative ideology of the Randian bent has a lot in common with the culture of MLMs. Both fail to acknowledge that such a thing as privilege exists, and perpetuate the fiction that someone’s success is only due to their gumption and their willingness to work hard. No, success in their world has nothing to do with the wealthy, educated family they were born into, or their inborn privilege of the ‘right’ race or sex, or any other type of help, most especially not governmental help such as Social Security death benefits. In MLM, this translates to ‘anyone can be successful!’ And if this rich dude trotted out in front of the crowd at every MLM convention, and on every piece of their promotional material can do it, so can you! Except that rich dude? Yeah, he doesn’t earn most of his money the way you would have to. But they never tell anyone that.”

In other words this is right-wing economic ideology in its purest, heroin-like form.

And it is at the same time such a nice con. As another accomplished MLM critic, Douglas Brooks, told me, “One of the paradoxes of MLM is that many of the victims do not complain. We speculate that among the reasons are the sense of shame, that the MLM conditions participants to believe that if they fail it will be their own fault.”

Sound familiar? “Beyond sucking $10–$20 billion out of Main Street each year,” says Fitzpatrick, this industry’s “main impact is intellectual and political. MLMs promote a radical individualism, hatred of government and a strange twist on economics in which preying on a neighbor is called ‘marketing.’”

Does the notion of such an intimate connection between the grifters and the mainstream conservatives sound a bit far-fetched? Consider that the DeVos family, the owners of Amway, all but owns the Michigan Republican Party. And consider this goofy little detail. In 1982, Amway funded a traveling puppet show to teach kids about the virtues of “free enterprise.” A UPI article at the time described it: “The tale has Tom Smith, a successful hard-working bread-maker in the land of Mist and Myth, battling meaningless fees and excessive taxes and regulations imposed by the Chancellor of Rules and the Ambassador of Gobbledygook. Smith is forced to raise prices so high he goes out of business and lands in jail. Children viewing the film are told their applause will save him. Saved, Smith not only succeeds in making bread to feed the hungry but also turns enough of a profit to take the honeymoon he never had.”

I thought that story sounded familiar. Then I realized I’d heard it from the mouth of Ronald Reagan—who told it (and re-ran it often) when he did a daily radio show in the 1970s, which I researched at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. But you don’t have to travel to Stanford. You can watch a film version of “The Incredible Bread Machine” on YouTube, introduced by no less than former Treasury Secretary William E. Simon.

America is a strange place. The American right is stranger. These are the people who shut down our government and almost caused the United States Treasury to default. These are Barack Obama’s negotiating partners.

The shutdown of the federal government continues into its second week. (Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

Some thoughts today on the apocalyptic horror that envelops us this week, thanks to our friends on the right. Last week I noted that conservatives are time-biders: “The catacombs were good enough for the Christians,” as National Review publisher William Rusher put it in 1960. That’s their imperative as they see it: hunker down, for decades if need be, waiting for the opportune moment to strike down the wickedness they spy everywhere—in this case, a smoothly functioning federal government. “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years,” Grover Norquist said in the first part of the quote, whose more famous second half is “to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Twenty-five years. Given that sedulous long-termism, conservatives are also, it is crucial to understand, inveterate goalpost-movers—fundamentally so. Whenever an exasperated liberal points out that the basic architecture of the Affordable Care Act matches a plan drawn up by the Heritage Foundation in the 1990s, I feel a stab of exasperation myself—with my side. Theirs is not a clinching argument, or even a good argument. It means nothing to point out to conservatives that Heritage once proposed something like Obamacare. The Heritage plan was a tactic of a moment—a moment that required something to fill in the space to the right of President Clinton’s healthcare plan, an increment toward the real strategic goal of getting the government out of the healthcare business altogether… someday.

I am never more exasperated than when Barack Obama makes such arguments. He loves them! This week it was his observation, “The bill that is being presented to end the government shutdown reflects Republican priorities.” So why can’t they see reason?

Never mind the damage such pronouncements do to the president’s status as a negotiator, a point we’ve all discussed to death, though I’ll reiterate it anyway: even when Obamaism wins on its own terms, it loses, ratifying Republican negotiating positions as common sense. As that same conservative theorist William Rusher also put it, the greatest power in politics is “the power to define reality.” As I wrote last year, “Obama never attempts that. Instead, he ratifies his opponent’s reality, by folding it into his original negotiating position. And since the opponent’s preferred position is always further out than his own, even a ‘successful’ compromise ends up with the reality looking more like the one the Republicans prefer. A compromise serves to legitimize.”

No, these days I’m worried about something worse: that Obama might not grasp the fundamental nature of the entire modern conservative project. They really do believe that a smoothly functioning federal government is the enemy—a Satanic enemy, for the more theologically minded among them. “Republican priorities”? Those were their priorities then. They have new ones now, and they’re not looking back. That’s just how they think.

A friend of mine has been arguing with me about this point. She says Obama is obviously too smart to not understand something as basic as this. Ah, but isn’t it the smartest people who are frequently the most stupid? Or at least the most myopic. Presidents, especially—they have a horrible history of locking themselves into insipid assumptions, stubborn in the belief that they must be right because they never would have become so powerful otherwise. John F. Kennedy, newly installed in the White House, didn’t think civil rights would be a big deal (he at least was smart enough to shift course on that one). Lyndon B. Johnson thought he’d have the boys home from Vietnam by Christmas—for four Christamases in a row (he never shifted course, and lost his presidency for it). Henry Kissinger (not a president, but as powerful as a president in many ways) couldn’t “believe a fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point.” Then there was his boss—so smart! so myopic! Richard M. Nixon honestly believed in his bones that an organized conspiracy of liberal media insiders had literally been plotting against him ever since he broke Alger Hiss in 1948 (he never shifted course, and lost his soul).

And Barack H. Obama thinks he can reason with the right. Still. What will he lose for that myopia?

Remember how he used to talk back on the campaign trail? Republicans “drove the country into the ditch,” and “now they want the keys back.” It was a very telling formulation. He thought—thinks—Republicans are bad drivers: that the problem is competence. But Republicans are great drivers. They drive exactly where they want to go, pedal to the metal. Or—time-biding, again—they creep along, should traffic conditions dictate; then, the moment comes—and zooooom. The moment in 2005, for instance, was Hurricane Katrina. It was a “golden opportunity,” Jack Kemp wrote, to suspend “burdensome federal regulations.” Tod Lindberg, of the now-defunct journal Policy Review and the Heritage Foundation, literally rejoiced: here was the chance for President Bush to “make demands in the name of New Orleans, including demands for substantive policy changes that he could never obtain in the absence of a crisis.”

They didn’t get far with that then, thank God. But in the fullness of time, the willingness to imagine boldly, the time-biding, goalpost-moving, works. Read Digby:

“Republicans are perhaps the most effective opposition party[,] well… ever. It’s not that they win all their battles by any means. They lose a lot. And now they finally seem to have even lost much of the political establishment which took decades to notice that they’d become a bunch of radical cranks. But that isn’t going to stop them because even though their wild-eyed followers may be unhappy that they didn’t get the magic pony they were promised, the real strategists like the moneybags Koch brothers and Pete Peterson, along with smart operatives like Norquist and Ryan, know that they can advance their agenda no matter who is in power. The tactics shift depending on the circumstances, but the overall strategy never changes: drown the welfare state in the bathtub.”

They’re effective. Think about it. Obama now admits it: his compromise—the left wing of the possible—is to lock in “Republican priorities.” Let’s hope he doesn’t make the same move in, say, twelve months, locking in “Republican priorities” from now, the ones even further to the right. You see the problem?

I’ll close today with another quick gripe: the one about Democrats’ “winning” this hostage-taking horror show because the Republicans now have a 28 percent approval rating, lower than during the shutdowns in the mid-1990s. Well, in 1975, only 18 percent of Americans were willing to call themselves “Republicans.” Internally, the talk was whether the party should change its name. George Will said visiting Republican National Committee headquarters was like visiting “the set for a political disaster flick, a political Poseidon Adventure.” The bank holding the mortgage on the Capitol Hill Club, the private retreat where Republicans took their refreshment, was threatening to foreclose on the place. The party’s pollster, Robert Teeter, explained that a majority of Americans considered Republicans “untrustworthy and incompetent.” A desperate RNC commissioned a series of three TV programs called Republicans Are People Too!, which ended with a pitch for contributions. The second episode cost $124,000 to produce. It brought in $5,515. The announced third episode never ran.

They came back in 1978—too late for the political scientist Everett Carll Ladd to save face, for his book Where Have All the Voters Gone? had just come out, arguing, “The GOP is in a weaker position than any major party of the U.S. since the Civil War…. We are dealing with a long-term secular shift, not just an artifact of Watergate. The Republicans have lost their grip on the American establishment, most notably among young men and women of relative privilege. They have lost it, we know, in large part because the issue orientations which they manifest are somewhat more conseravtive than the stratem favors. The party is especially poorly equipped in style and tone to articulate the frustrations of the newly emergent American petit bourgeoisie—southern, white Protestant, Catholic, black and the like.”

They did pretty good in 1980, too. Don’t gloat.

In part three of this series, Rick Perlstein discussed the historical roots of the government shutdown.

Michael Sheen as Dr. William Masters and Lizzy Caplan as Virginia Johnson in the new Showtime series "Masters of Sex." (AP Photo/Showtime, Craig Blankenhorn)

“Sexual intercourse began/ in 1963/ (which was rather late for me)/ Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP"  goes a famous little ditty by Philip Larkin. Maybe in Merrie Olde England. But a better argument can be made that sex was invented in 1966. The milestone was the publication of a book by two scientists. Two married scientists. Two married scientists whose research involved watching people have sex in laboratories—and then describing precisely what gave people pleasure, and how women could more efficiently do unto themselves, and couples unto one another.

How big a deal was William Masters and Virginia Johnson’s Human Sexual Response—and the 1970 followup Human Sexual Inadequacy? Well, early in 1973, when the Vietnam War ended and hundreds of prisoners of wars were repatriated from Hanoi, the Today show devoted its entire two-hour program to what a POW Rip van Winkle who went to war in 1965 and returned in 1973 would have missed: from feminism (“They walked in picket lines, they badgered congressmen, they formed pressure groups”) to the “federal legislation [that] brought the vote to 2 million more blacks,” to the serial assassinations of politicians and civil rights leaders—and, getting pride of place with all of that: Masters and Johnson. Yes, the invention of oral contraception in 1960 made it possible to women to have sex absent the consequence of pregnancy. But only to have sex. For women to demand sex as something to be enjoyed—that was Masters and Johnson’s veritable invention, and thank the Goddess for that.

I loved Thomas Maier’s dual biography of the couple Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of Wiliam Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love when it came out in 2009. I’m thrilled that Showtime has now turned the book into a miniseries. Tonight is the second episode, and in an interesting marketing strategy, you can watch the entire premier from last week on YouTube. (Viewer discretion is advised!) I loved the Maier book so much, in fact, that for the volume I’m finishing now on the politics and culture of America in the years between 1973 and 1976, I made it a priority to convey his most important theme—how profoundly his subjects changed what sex could and should mean in the contemporary world, and how much that in turn changed expectations about the balance between such fundamental issues as liberty and duty, pleasure and sacrifice, in people’s everyday lives—a real historical shift, and one that we are still reckoning with all the time.

I use those returning POWs as a case study. On the front page of The New York Times on February 5, 1973, you could meet Alice Cronin, dressed in faded hip-hugging bell-bottomed jeans and no shoes, smoking cigarettes, hair flopping loose, posing outside her San Diego home as movers unloaded the fashionable puffy white leather couch she bought “for the return of her husband, a Navy pilot held by Hanoi for six years.” But she was worried: “Mike married a very traditional wife…. Now my ideas and values have changed…. I can’t sit home and cook and clean house. I’m very career oriented, and I just hope he goes along and agrees with that…he’s missed out on a lot—liking a more casual lifestyle, being nonmaterialistic.” She hoped he understood why she didn’t trust a single thing the administration said about Vietnam. She also hoped he would go along with something else: “shifting sexual mores, the whole thing about relationships not necessarily being wrong outside of marriage. I know myself really well sexually, and he’s missed out on a good deal of that.” Knowing myself really well sexually: an unimaginable utterance before the publication of Human Sexual Response.

In the interim, thanks largely to Masters and Johnson, America had gone orgasm crazy—a development, it turned out, quite salubrious to the publishing industry. Dr. David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask was only the first pedagogical bestseller of many. (Its areas of instruction included something called “69”: “She feels the insistent throbbing of the organ against their lips and experiences a slightly salty taste, as well as the characteristic but not unpleasant odor of the sudoriferous glands of the area…. By simultaneous cunnilingus and fellatio every possible sense is brought to a fever pitch and a mutual orgasm occurs rapidly.”) Other volumes littering the bedside tables of suburban couples: The Sensuous Woman, by “J.” (it was parodied in newsweekly ads for the Japanese automobile manufacturer Datsun: “The Sensuous Car, by ‘D.”), “the first how-to book for the female who yearns to be all woman.” My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies, which consisted of the answers its author, Nancy Friday, had received from an advertisement she took out reading, “female sexual fantasies wanted by serious female researcher. Anonymity guaranteed.” Chapter titles included “Insatiability,” “Pain and Masochism, or, ‘Ouch, Don’t Stop!’ ” and “The Zoo.”

Couples flocked to films like Deep Throat (it made $25 million showing in seventy-three cities, despite or perhaps because of the criminal court judge in New York City who proclaimed it a “feast of carrion and squalor”), and Behind the Green Door, which began its run as the highest-grossing sex film ever at a gala Manhattan premier, the social event of the season (the projectionist showed the reels out of order; no one noticed). The cover of a book called Loving Free advertised, “For the first time, a real couple tells how they broke through their inhibitions to develop sexual excitement and joy in marriage.” Not to learn do so, men discovered, was to risk being drummed clear out of the marital bed, perhaps via a no-fault divorce. The authors had first published Loving Free anonymously, the preface explained, “because of the effect this frankness might have on the lives of their children” (“Making love standing up kills your arches!”… “Now that we’ve mentioned vibrators…”). Then they changed their mind, surprised to learn none of their children’s friends cared—being of a generation that had already relieved themselves of their sexual innocence by sneaking copies of said volumes from the nooks where their parents believed they had hidden them so well. They undertook a publicity tour, beginning in their conservative home town of Milwaukee, where they gave presentations in living rooms—what I hope were chaste presentations, for I learned from an inscribed copy (forgive me, dear siblings, for revealing this) that one of those presentations took place before my own quite square parents and their friends.

For some of those POWs it was agonizing. Sex: who could have imagined its verities could change? One of them, in an op-ed, described revisiting his old favorite cocktail lounge one Friday afternoon. “The couple at the next table were having a heated discussion which ended abruptly when the woman shouted an obscenity and commanded, ‘Buster, get out of my life.’ The red-faced dude and the attractive, though somewhat foul-mouthed, young lady turned to me…. ’You look like a nice guy. Want to come over to my apartment for a little while?’ ”

“‘I’ve got a date in an hour,’ I said.

“‘Hell, that’s plenty of time.’”

But Captain John Nasmyth was out of step in his perturbation. Researchers at the Kinsey Institute had carried out a massive new survey in 1972, learning that four-fifths of men surveyed—and no less than 100 percent of women—thought the idea of the woman initiating sex was just fine. They also found 75 percent of men and even more women thought schools should teach sexual education, that only 8 percent abjured masturbation, 85 percent approved of cunnilingus and only 5 percent of men over the age of 24 were virgins.

The aim of their work, Masters and Johnson explained in an interview the following summer in the Los Angeles Times, was to disassociate sex from sin; sexual pleasure, they said, was simply, “natural.” By 1976, even evangelicals had come (Beavis and Butthead: heh heh heh…) to agree. Beverly and Tim LaHaye (author, later, of the “Left Behind” series) published The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love, still in print and selling in the millions, which explained of the clitoris that God “placed it there for your enjoyment,” and excoriated the husband “who told his frustrated wife, ‘Nice girls aren’t supposed to climax.’ Today’s wife knows better.”

Showtime subscribers: learn how “today’s wife” learned—even the square ones. The rest of you: read the book.

Jessica Valenti speaks out against parental consent laws and the war against young women's bodies.

Members of the media interview neighbors near the home of relatives of Miriam Carey in New York, October 4, 2013. (Reuters/Keith Bedford)

It’s something I’ve been writing a lot about over the past six years: our culture of fear, and how much more frantically we respond to scary stuff than we did in decades past. In 2007, it was the bed-wetting response to a visit from Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, when, for instance, the Democratic leader in Albany threatened to pull grants from Columbia University if he was allowed to speak there. I compared that to the 1959 visit of Nikita Khrushchev, who got a twenty-one-gun salute and a state dinner. This year it was Boston Marathon, when two kids with a home-made bomb shut down an entire American city. Compare that to Christmastime 1975, when a terrorist bomb killed twenty-four civilians, no one was ever found responsible—and life almost immediately went on. Andrew Sullivan calls it “Our Collective 9/11 PTSD.”

Now the shooting of the dental hygienist who seemed to be trying to ram the White House with her car. Almost the exact same thing happened thirty-seven years ago. The difference in the response between then and now is staggering.

On July 25, 1976, a 31-year-old part-time taxi driver named Chester M. Plummer scaled the Executive Mansion fence bearing a three-foot length of pipe while President Ford was inside, ignored guards’ warnings to halt, advanced sixty feet inside the perimeter and was shot to death—the first shooting on the White House grounds in history. There’s not much more for me to say about the incident, because not much more was said. The New York Times had three articles within the week, the first one way down in the corner of the front page (and it was a slow news day at that, and a slow news week). The third was on the clearing of the guard who did the shooting, and the second—“Motive of Intruder Eludes Police,” on page nine, was practically curt. “He was just a quiet guy. He never made threats,” was pretty much the only thing anyone learned about the guy. Then, the story was gone. Chester Plummer has been forgotten, but for seventy-eight words on Wikipedia.

Now? There’s already been three articles in the Times about poor Miriam Carey, only within the day—on one of the busiest news days of the year. We can know everything about her, if we choose to: her postpartum depression. Her mental health evaluation. (And, indeed, that her apparent schizophrenic delusions bore the impress of 9/11 PTSD: she “told police in December that she was a prophet, that President Obama would place the city of Stamford under a “lockdown” and that he had her and her residence under electronic surveillance.”) How the melodrama went down, second by second. Her educational history. The fact that police had been called to her Stamford, Connecticut apartment before, but not for criminal reasons. Her annoyance at taxes, and the lack of security cameras. That, “She was really just a sweet and nurturing person.”

Yes, some of this has to do with our new 24/7 news culture, always greedy for yet more filler. But it also has to do with our 24/7 policing culture—our hair-trigger sense of all-pervasive threat. Dig this, from The Washington Post: “About 100 law enforcement personnel from the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI, Connecticut State Police and Stamford police searched Carey’s apartment in the Woodside Green complex in this New York City suburb overnight, removing boxes, bags and at least one computer.”

What the hell? She’s dead. She suffered from mad delusions. She had a 1-year-old child in tow. What did they think they were going to find, evidence of credible plans for a coup d’état?

“The search,” the Post continued,

involved hazardous material teams, a bomb squad and a robot, Stamford Police Chief Jonathan Fontneau said. Operating under the assumption that something inside the apartment might pose a threat, police sent a robot through a window first, and meticulously decontaminated people who went in and out of the unit, Fontneau said. In the end, they found just a “typical” first-floor two-bedroom apartment with “nothing out of the ordinary,” Fontneau said…. As of 7 a.m. Friday, police declared the complex safe and allowed evacuated residents to return.

Which, some think, is at it should be. There’s terrorism now, they say. But there was terrorism then, nearly every month—eighty-nine bombings attributed by the FBI to terrorism in 1975, culminating in that awful LaGuardia bomb; and a veritable wave in the winter and spring 1976, much of it around the trial of Patty Hearst: of an FBI office in Berkeley, Standard Oil of California headquarters in San Francisco. Americans didn’t freak out, or shut down, or exhibit symptoms of PTSD. They had a massive outdoor national 200th birthday party.

There’s the threat of presidential assassinations, they say. Of course there is: then, too. In September of 1975 President Ford weathered two attempts on his life in two weeks—the first from a madwoman who claimed her International Tribunal now marked 3,000 people for execution, “if they didn’t stop harming the environment and projecting distorted sex images into the media”—though their wives would be “hacked to death” first. Prior to the second one, Ford had taken off his bulletproof vest because he found it too confining. How did he respond to the attempts? He chose to go out in public more. On the second day of Ronald Reagan’s campaign to replace him, that November, a 20-year-old from Pompano Beach who had already threatened the lives of the president and the vice-president pulled out what turned to be a toy .45 caliber pistol and was wrestled to the ground by three Secret Service agents.

The following spring the Associated Press reported that the FBI and Secret Service were investigating the testimony of an undercover informant that a “commando-style assassination team” from the San Francisco Bay area was planning attempts on candidate Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford’s lives at the Republican convention in Kansas City, “designed to throw the convention into complete chaos.” The Chicago Tribune’s report contributed the detail, “From the intelligence we have been able to gather, the terror groups want to move their emphasis from bombings to other violent acts in the urban guerrilla handbook, like assassinations and kidnappings.” And yet the two party conventions came and went without any particular extra security.

That’s then. This is now. Read the outstanding Chris Bray in the Baffler on Boston:

In the aftermath of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1996 bombing at the Atlanta Olympics, and the paired 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, here’s what didn’t happen: whole cities weren’t locked down, armored personnel carriers with police logos didn’t rumble in, and SWAT teams in combat uniforms and body armor didn’t storm through the suburbs for a loosely ordered set of (ultimately hapless) house-to-house searches. Somehow, though, 2013 was the year it became appropriate to close cities, turning off taxis, buses, and trains and telling residents that the governor was suggesting—okay, strongly suggesting—that they not leave their homes until the police said so. One of those familiar moments in which officials ask the public to be on the lookout turned into a remarkable new moment in which officials ask the public to cease to exist in its public form so that the police can have the streets.

And you’d better believe they had the streets. News photographs showed Boston emptied like the opening reel of The Last Man on Earth. The quaint idea that cities can be made safe by sharing public burdens in public space—by, in Jane Jacobs’s words, neighborly ‘eyes on the street’—vanished into an annihilated space in which the only players with a role in the maintenance of order were the mandarinate that makes social control its profession: the helicopters flying overhead, the military police conducting block-by-block inspections, and the local media relaying their instructions…. How routine it felt—how uncontested it was—when the pluralism of the human world was simply told to go indoors until further notice.

The disease of police militarization is usually diagnosed as a pathology of the political right…. And look how the right-wing project came to fruition this year, as a New England Democratic governor and Democratic mayor turned metropolitan Boston into cop Disneyland. Spot the place of the political right in the following sentence: Cambridge, Massachusetts, was locked down and filled with police and military personnel dressed for combat, a set of actions that occurred under the executive authority of governor Deval Patrick. And here you thought Americans were divided by their differences.

A final thought. That the 1976 madman Chester Plummer had been able to get to the White House fence: can you even imagine that being possible now?

Greg Mitchell analyzes the media's response to the Miriam Carey incident.

Former Massachusetts Governor and Democratic Party presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 2009. (AP Photo/Angela Rowlings)

There will be many lessons to learn from the government shutdown, however it ends. Here is one of them: from the punditocracy, Democrats will never, ever, ever get moral credit for “moderating” their ideology. To the guardians of our political discourse, their leaders will always represent but one of the “extreme” poles in the false-equivalence game.

Here’s Joe Nocera in The New York Times this past Monday, affecting to call out “those Banana Republicans,” which according to the rules means he has to say something mean about Democrats too: “A party controlled by its most extreme faction will ultimately be forced back to the center. The Democrats learned that when Walter Mondale was losing to Ronald Reagan, and Michael Dukakis to George H.W. Bush. Now it is the Republicans who don’t seem to understand that their extreme tactics are pleasing a small percentage of their countrymen but alienating everyone else.”

Leave aside Walter Mondale, who actually lost because the incumbent Republican enjoyed an economic boom that had much more to do with Jimmy Carter’s actions than his own. Let’s talk about Michael Dukakis, that poor hapless fellow who saved Massachusetts from fiscal perdition but ended up as one of history’s pathetic losers, the mousy man in a military helmet on the tank. What was the entire rationale for his successful 1988 nominating campaign? That he was anti-ideology, all the way down. The signature line from his acceptance speech was, “This election isn’t about ideology; it’s about competence. It’s not about meaningless labels; it’s about American values.” The son of Greek immigrants, absent an iota of ethnic color, he was mocked as “Zorba the Clerk.” (I learned from Wikipedia that composer John Williams wrote a “Fanfare for Michael Dukakis,” which is too funny for words—like “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dishrag,” or “Dimanche apres midi sur l’Île de Rikers.)” He forced the second-place candidate, Jesse Jackson—the ideological guy, the guy whom the party actually would have nominated if it had been “controlled by its most extreme faction”—to wait in the convention parking lot before he would meet with him. (Even his praise for Jackson in his acceptance speech was anti-ideological: “a man whose candidacy says…to every American, you are a full shareholder in our dream.” A shareholder!) His campaign slogan was “good jobs at good wages”—aux armes, citoyens!

His governorship certainly seemed to qualify him to make the argument. He first won, in 1974, campaigning from the right, against a Republican incumbent, Francis Sargent, best known for aggressively pushing racial integration of Boston’s schools. A UPI political reporter analyzed his victory: “In the upside down world of Massachusetts politics it makes sense that Republicans are liberals, Democrats are conservatives, and that Michael S. Dukakis of the New Deal and Great Society party is going to run the state like a bank.” He made a “lead pipe guarantee” of no new taxes; his win, said UPI, was “a statement by the voters that they were tired of the Sargent administration’s emphasis on costly human service programs which caused the state’s budget to triple during his tenure in office….While he will be committed to implementing the social welfare programs of the Sargent years, Dukakis will do so with the bottom line in mind—how much is it going to cost and can we get by without it?” And so he did, at least in his second chance in the office, from 1983 to 1991 (he lost the first time in a primary in 1978). This time, he prospered as the consummate “technocrat,” winning recognition in 1986 from the National Governor’s Association as the most effective state executive in the country, presiding over an economic boom nicknamed the “Massachusetts Miracle.” Some extremist.

Then Lee Atwater successfully painted him on behalf of George H.W. Bush as a flag-hating, rapist-loving Bolshevik, which is apparently all the likes of Joe Nocera, disgracefully, cares to believe of him.

Don’t count on historical memory from the guardians of our political discourse—leastwise concerning Democratic presidents and presidential candidates. Remember the reaction when Bill Clinton declared, “The era of big government is over?” What news! What novelty! What Democratic president had ever before said such a thing? The answer, of course, was: the last Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, who in his 1978 State of the Union said, almost identically, “Government cannot solve our problems, it can’t set our goals, it cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy.” Of course government can eliminate poverty and reduce inflation and provide energy—but that’s not the point.

My point is that each new Democratic president and presidential nominee who tries to roll that same mossy old rock up the hill will get bonked by some dumbass columnist hurling it back—and the tragic figure here won’t be the columnist, who’s just doing his job as assigned by America’s ideological fates, as predictable as the sun and the moon and the sand. It will be the next Democrat who tries, confident in his or her belief that this time the job can finally get done once and for all. Their tragedy will be that, in aiming to get that job done, he or she won’t do the real job, one that is actually much more attainable, the task appointed to Democrats by history: making America a more fair and decent and sustainable place, via unapologetically liberal policies—which are the only ones that ever actually work, no matter what some dumbass columnist says.

Zoe Carpenter draws attention to the real victims of the government shutdown.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz is among the group of congressional Republicans pushing for the overturn of the Affordable Care Act. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

What the hell is going on? What could House Republicans possibly be thinking?

You’re not the only one asking. On Facebook, I read many questions: Where’s the logic? Do House Republicans see a government shutdown as but a small price to pay for a chance to enter a sweepstakes for the biggest possible prize, the actual repeal of Obamacare? What’s the calculation—that stodgy Republican Senators finally come to their senses and vote for repeal after a government showdown? Do they believe Obama will fold, and actually agree to sign a bill defunding his signature initiative? That tough old Harry Reid will blink? And what’s up with the “you delay Obamacare for one year, we agree to let the government run for another ten weeks and won’t let the nation default” compromise? Do they actually think that proposal is for real? Who are these people?

Come back with me to 1964. Barry Goldwater has won enough delegates for a first-ballot nomination victory at the Republican National Convention. But according to the Gallup Poll, by a margin of 55 to 34 percent, Republican voters—Republican voters; the percentage of all voters would have been much, much higher—preferred his opponent for the nomination, William Warren Scranton. What the hell was going on? What were the people who thought Goldwater could beat Lyndon Johnson thinking? Well, as I wrote in Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, Phyllis Schlafly was thinking this: that Gallup just asked “a lot of questions of a very few people” in order to “come up with answers that pleased the New York kingmakers.” Delegates for Goldwater, meanwhile, pressed to see reason and nominate a candidate who could actually win, wrote telegrams of reassurance to Goldwater: will vote for you if my vote alone is the only vote you obtain… i am prepared to stand by you as resolutely as did general thomas for the union at chicamauga… i have been, and will be, subject to pressures of tremendous force. however, i will be able to stand up to this and come out of the convention with a clear conscience to face our god and our people. Young Republicans in Wisconsin wrote to delegates from their state: “Vote our wishes in San Francisco or continue westward.”

And then, two months later, in September, when all the polls predicted exactly what ended up happening—Goldwater losing in a landslide—William F. Buckley addressed a convention of Young Americans for Freedom, and shocked them. He spoke, in his bizarrely orotund way, of the Goldwater campaign: “A great rainfall has deluged a thirsty earth, but before we had time to properly prepare for it. I speak, of course, about the impending defeat of Barry Goldwater.” As I wrote in Before the Storm, “His heresy sucked the air out of the room. The silence was broken by the sound of a single woman sobbing.”

They couldn’t believe what they were hearing. One of the distinguishing features of belonging to a movement is hoping against hope; perhaps you have been there yourself.

Now this. It has been a slow, steady process, one beginning with the Goldwater years and all but completed now, with the Tea Party ascendency: in the Republican Party, the conservative movement rules. One of the founders of that movement, Bill Buckley, was also one of the movement’s crucial counterweights as an occasional, and lonely, voice of temperance. But William F. Buckley is dead now. It is not an accident that the Tea Party madness coincided not merely with the rise of Obama but with the death of Buckley. Rush Limbaugh used to refer to Buckley as “Mr. Buckley”—he didn’t thus honor anyone else, let alone the politicians who pay him sycophantic court. It’s not hard to imagine Buckley placing discrete phone calls to Rush telling him he was going too far, and Rush respecting his counsel. No counterweights any longer. And so the day after Obama’s triumphant first State of the Union Address, which won a 68 percent approval rating from the public, Rush went further than he’d ever gone before, mimicking John Birch Society founder Robert Welch’s “principal of reversal” about how you were supposed to interpret Communists: “Pay no attention to what he says. He means the opposite in most cases. What he says is irrelevant.”

That was the political culture of the conservatives controlling the Republican Party—before there was such a thing as a “Tea Party.” Recall how, within a fortnight of Obama’s inauguration, House Republicans held a retreat at which organizer Mike Pence of Indiana screened the scene from Patton in which George C. Scott barked of “the enemy:” “We’re going to kick the hell out of him all the time, and we’re going to go through him like crap through a goose.” No different, really, from last week’s meeting in which the same lovely gang, according to the testimony of Representative John Culberson of Texas, shouted, “‘Let’s vote!’ and I said, you know like 9/11, ‘Let’s roll!’” They were, he said, “giddy.” They were the French Resistance. They were the men plotting to decapitate Hitler. They were the Southern governors pledging massive resistance (read historian Nelson Lichenstein on the subject; it’s fascinating; he nails it)—though they were also, naturally, Martin Luther King. Even if they lose they have won; they have made their heroic stand. And if they win, they… win. (Either way, living in safely gerrymandered Republican districts, they win re-election, and, sanctified as “true conservatives,” can’t be primaried from the right. But can enjoy boatloads of Kochtified “dark money” too.)

This is war for them, folks. Stop pretending to try like it isn’t. William Baroody, head of the American Enterprise Institute, October 1972: conservatism is a “war for the minds of men.” Ralph Reed, November 1991: “I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag.” And now the estimable Representative Culverson, in an article on his “100 percent united!” caucus and their euphoria at what they about to attempt: “Ulysses S. Grant said, ‘Quit worrying about what Bobby Lee’s doing and let’s focus on what we are doing. We are focusing on what we need to do and not worrying about what the other guy is going to do…. That’s how Ulysses S. Grant won the war.”

And the Republican “establishment,” the folks who are supposed to be holding these forces in check, the guys like Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, calling the proposal to defund Obamacare a “silly effort”? Thank of them like shabby gentility. You know the concept: the folks depicted in Chekhov’s plays and many of his short stories; in Visconiti’s filmic masterpiece The Leopard; or, more recently, in the narrative arc of Downton Abby. The class whose vestments of power are now merely formal, their actually command of events nugatory, trying to hold on to scraps of dignity and self-respect as they negotiate their uneasy peace with the bourgeois louts who don’t just misunderstand the old rules of civility but actively flout them.

In this case, they do it on “principle.” So here’s a good question I’ve seen: If this is a “principled” stand, what is the principle? It’s not hard. As movement conservative Brent Bozell Jr. ghostwrote for Barry Goldwater wrote in 1960’s Conscience of a Conservative, “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.” If you believe that, why would a government shutdown be all that undesirable? Listen to Buckley again from that September 1964 speech: “Any election of Barry Goldwater would presuppose a sea change in American public opinion,” as if American society, “prisoners of all those years, succeeded in passing blithely through the walls of Alcatraz and tripping lightly over the shark-infested waters and treacherous currents, to safety on the shore.”

Yes: if you were a conservative, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society—Medicare,the National Endowment for the Arts, etc.—was the equivalent of incarceration in Alcatraz. And this was conservatism’s grown-up.

There’s something worse now. Many movement conservatives are driven, if implicitly, by a terrifying intellectual foundation not even present in Goldwater’s day: the Christian Reconstructionist view that, since the family is the basic unit of God’s covenant, the secular humanist state is a false idol held up by minions like Obama (and you) in order to mock all that is godly—a well-nigh Satanic rival for the redemption of the world. Though there is also, if you’re not a particularly theological conservative (or if you believe theology, Leo Strauss–ishly, is bread and circuses for the rubes), a pragmatic motivation to draw from as well. Consider William Kristol, in his infamous 1993 memo “Defeating President Clinton’s Healthcare Proposal.” As I wrote a couple of years ago, for Kristol “the notion of government-guaranteed health care had to be defeated, he said, rather than compromised with, or else: ‘It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.’ Kristol wrote on behalf of an organization called the Project for a Republican Future. The mortal fear is that if government delivers the goods, the Republicans have no future.” Even their pragmatists are nuts.

Midnight deadline. Let’s hope reason prevails.

In part two of this series, Perlstein deconstructs Republican efforts to restrict voting.

In part one of this series, Perlstein discusses the static position of conservatives on gun control legislation.—

A supporter of the North Carolina NAACP holds stickers protesting the passage of new voter identification legislation. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

When the Supreme Court decided the case of Shelby County v. Holder last November, severely limiting the sweep of the Voting Rights Act in Southern states with a history of racial discrimination, here’s what you heard from all the reasonable folks: soon, very soon, Congress would draft legislation restoring said sweep, in ways that honored the new guidelines written into the new Supreme Court decision. They would surely do so in rare bipartisan fashion. After all, the last time the VRA was renewed was for a twenty-five-year extension signed by President Bush in 2006, passed in the House by a vote of 390-33, with the Senate passing the House bill unanimously and without amendment. The “Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006” had been introduced by James Sensenbrenner, one of the most conservative of House veterans. Which means Republicans, and conservatives, must like the Voting Rights Act—Remember that whole “nothing to fear” rap?

Well, that redrafting hasn’t happened yet. Instead, it’s been what Josh Marshall has called “Open Season On Non-White Voting.” Said the AP, “Across the South, Republicans are working to take advantage of a new political landscape after a divided U.S. Supreme Court freed all or part of 15 states, many of them in the old Confederacy, from having to ask Washington’s permission before changing election procedures in jurisdictions with histories of discrimination.” Polling restrictions began passing Republican-controlled legislatures with breakneck speed, like mighty waters once held back by now-crumbling dams. Texas, Mississippi, and South Carolina passed strict voter ID laws. North Carolina passed not just a voter ID law but redrew its political maps and reduced early voting. Georgia redrew its county commission districts to dilute minority power.

But what about that 98-0 Senate tally, and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King and moonbeams and unicorns and sunshine in 2006? Were conservatives crossing their fingers when they cast that vote?

Look. Conservatives are time-biders. And they understand, as Corey Robin explains in his indispensable book The Reactionary Mind, that the direction of human history is not on their side—that is why they are reactionaries—because, other things equal, civilization does tend towards more inclusion, more emancipation, more liberalism. They could not survive as a political tendency unless they clothed reaction in liberal raiment. You’ve seen that happen over and over again—like when people like Grover Norquist, whose aim is to roll back the entire welfare state, including Social Security, says what he’s really trying to do is save Social Security.

But they also can be quite plain about what they ultimately want and how to get there, in documents meant to be read by other conservatives—documents shot through with language about biding time, preparing the ground, going to the mattresses: of tactical patience in the service of strategic ends. “Hell,” as National Review publisher William Rusher put it in 1960, “the catacombs were good enough for the Christians.”

Consider, for example, the 1983 paper from Cato Journal “Achieving a Leninist Strategy.” The subject was Social Security, and it proposed “what one might crudely call guerrilla warfare against both the current Social Security system and the coalition that supports it,” to “cast doubt on the picture of reality” promoted by that coalition. (These cats adore imagery of guerrilla warfare, a concept that precisely privileges patience, sedulousness, stealth, misdirection.)

When conservatives talk to one another, pay attention: they say what they want to do, and mean it. And will do just about anything to get there—even, or especially, claiming that they don’t want to do the thing they want to do, until the time is ripe, and they can do it. (See also: here). I’ll never forget the time I was on the radio with Grover Norquist, and pointed out that he hated Social Security and wanted to get rid of it. He shrieked like a stuck pig that he loved Social Security and that he had never wanted and would never want to get rid of it. He freaked out even further when I pointed out that he admired Lenin as one of history’s great time-biders—he kept a portrait of the Soviet strategist on his wall; and don’t forget that he liked Stalin too, precisely because he was a sedulous burrower from within: Stalin “was running the personnel department while Trotsky was fighting the White Army. When push came to shove for control of the Soviet Union, Stalin won. Trotsky got a pick a through his skull, while Stalin became head of the Soviet Union. He understood that personnel is policy.”

Now, on voting rights, the personnel are in place. The time has been bided. The Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King masks fall away off, and reveal Theodore Bilbo, Lester Maddox and Leander Perez underneath. The catacombs were good enough for them.

In part one of this series, Perlstein discusses the static position of conservatives on gun control legislation.

Attendees at a vigil for victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, plead for legislative action on gun control. (The Nation/George Zornick)

Allow me to remove this rhetorical club I keep in a sheath alongside my waist and beat some of my liberal friends with it, because I’m getting frustrated, frustrated, frustrated, and I can’t hardly take it no more. Despite a continuous flow of examples to the contrary this spring, summer and, now, autumn, our side keeps on wishfully, willfully and rather ignorantly denying the plain evidence in front of their faces about how conservative politics works. Namely, I keep seeing predictions that this, that or the other signal from polls or the political establishment or a traumatized public will “finally” “break the spell” of right-wing extremism on a certain issue, or even on all issues—and then we see that prediction spectacularly fail.

We can’t keep on going this way, my friend. You have to finally come to terms with how conservatism works. Now, that guy in the White House, Obama—I’ve given up hope that he’ll ever get it. I still have faith in you, though. Stop judging conservative by the logic of “normal” politics, or by the epistemology of the world as you, a liberal, understand it. Or as Poli Sci 101 understands it. Every time you do that, you denude us of strength for the fight. Grasp the right on its own terms. Stop trying to make it make sense on your own.

Here’s one example of what I mean. More tomorrow and Friday.

Consider the tragedy at Sandy Hook, the twenty dead children and six dead teachers and staffers, and the subsequent call for “common-sense” gun legislation that might ban assault weapons and extended magazine clips and strengthen background checks to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the insane. Common sense for us, but for them? I remember a loved one asking me how many dead children it would take for conservatives to finally see reason on the subject—fifty children, 500, 5,000 children? I reiterated my response to her when I appeared on Up With Steve Kornacki on MSNBC on Father’s Day, and Kornacki presented the heart-rending campaign of the anti-gun group NoFathersDay.org, which had volunteers send “Father’s Day” cards to members of Congress depicting families whose dads have been claimed by gun violence. Due respect to Kornacki and his outstanding production team, but when this was presented as a frightfully clever campaign to change the hearts of conservative legislators, I fingered my rhetorical beat-down stick. I explained my frustration thus (edited for continuity): “It’s really important to understand that Republican voters and Republican politicians are not necessarily persuadable on this issue by these kinds of arguments…. The mindset is completely different. I mean, a liberal looks at a card like this and says, ‘Isn’t it awful, these school shootings that keep on happenings? Let’s bring those to the forefront, because that helps us, and makes more people want gun control.’ But if you think like a conservative, and you think in terms of good people and evil people, the predominance of evil people makes you want less gun control, and more guns. And if the bad guys have a machine gun, you need a bazooka.”

The host got it: he replied, “The bad guy with the gun needs the good guy with the gun. And so every act of violence actually makes [more guns] more necessary.”

Yes: more mass shootings make right-wingers more attached to arming themselves yet further, yet more impassioned about defeating gun control, yet more paranoid about those who would “disarm” them and render them more vulnerable to the scary scary scary everywhere around them. If you don’t understand that, you can’t contribute to winning the gun control debate. And you may, like the sweet, blessed folks at NoFathersDay.org, channel precious financial and activist bandwidth to a strategy that will actually only make a conservative politician more determined to help his or her hard-working, honest, God-fearing constituents by preserving their unimpeded right to have bigger guns than the bad guys, lest their children face a fatherless future.

To beat conservatism, grasshopper, learn to think like a conservative. Now run off and nurse that rhetorical lump I’ve deposited upside your head. Next time: thinking like a conservative on the Voting Rights Act.

Katrina vanden Heuvel argues in favor of gun liability laws.

(Creative Commons)

The proletarianization of higher education, according to the associate general counsel of the United Steel Workers Union, has now claimed a life. In a moving op-ed published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Daniel Kovalik, wrote this week of Margaret Mary Vojtko, a French teacher at Pittsburgh’s Dusquesne University whose tenure there—though it was, of course, a tenure without tenure—lasted twenty-five years, who just died at the age of 83. Receiving radiation therapy for cancer, living in a house that was nearly collapsing in on itself, and in receipt of a humiliating letter from Adult Protective Services informing her she had been referred to them as not being able to take care of herself, she turned to her union for help, because that is what unions do. Kovalik helped, despite the fact that the Steel Workers did not, officially, represent her: Dusquesne adjuncts had voted overwhelmingly for the USW to represent them a year ago, but the Catholic university has fought the certification of the election tooth and nail ever since, claiming its school’s religious beliefs should exempt it from federal labor laws. “This would be news to Georgetown University—one of only two Catholic universities to make U.S. News & World Report’s list of top twenty-five university—which just recognized its adjunct professors’ union, citing the Catholic Church’s social justice teachings, which favor labor unions.”

She called Kovalik in a panic about the letter from Adult Protective Services, and he tried to connect her with a caseworker. “I said that she had just been let go from her job as a professor at Dusquesne, that she was given no severance or retirement benefits”—after twenty-five years of loyal service; something for today’s adjuncts to look forward to, should they decide to stay in the grueling game—“and that the reason she was having trouble taking care of herself was because she was living in extreme poverty. The caseworker paused and asked with incredulity, ‘She was a professor?’ I said yes. The caseworker was shocked; this was not the usual type of person for whom she was called in to help.”

I predict in the future caseworkers won’t be so shocked at all. Notes Kovalik, “Margaret Mary worked on a contract basis from semester to semester, with no job security, no benefits, and with a salary of between $3,000 and just over $3,500 per three-credit course…. Even during the best of times, when she was teaching three classes a semester and two during the summer, she was not even clearing $25,000 a year, and she received absolutely no health care benefits.” So, soon, if you’re a graduate student and you’re reading this, might you.

“Finally, in the spring, she was let go by the university, which told her she was no longer effective as an instructor—despite many glowing evaluations from students. She came to me to seek legal help to try to save her job. She said that all she wanted was money to pay her medical bills, because Duquesne, which never paid her much to begin with, gave her nothing on her way out the door.”

Compare that, Kovalik says, to Duquesne’s president, whose pay package adds up to upwards of $700,000—you know, the guy with the pauperization of a dead 83-year-old on his conscience. “Duquesne knew all about Margaret Mary’s plight, for I apprised them of it in two letters. I never received a reply, and Margaret Mary was forced to die saddened, penniless and on the verge of being turned over to Orphan’s Court.”

I’m still collecting adjuncts’ stories. Here is one I’ve recently received from a psychology teacher in New Jersey. She told me what she loves:

“I get to stay informed about research, go to conferences, and have access to academic materials….

“I LOOOOOVE teaching my students.

“I experience a tremendous feeling of accomplishment when they come to me rather than their advisors because they trust me, not that I want to usurp the advisor.

“I jump for joy along with them when they get into a Ph.D program, law school, or just get the job they applied for. I cry with them when they don’t.

“I love that three years later when my students run into me in some random place in NYC they remember me and are happy to see me. I love when they tell me how much my class meant to them.

“That my class is safe enough for a young man to ‘come out’ and for a young girl to talk about a sexual assault and my students show compassion to them.

“That when I get a ton of email most of them are just saying ‘thank you’ for something I said in class or a response to a previous email sent earlier in the day.”

And here is what she doesn’t: “I don’t love that my salary is less than what most welfare recipients receive and I am permitted to teach only two classes…. I also don’t have office hours. Yet I make myself available to my students, I help them wherever they need help, and though this is my choice I know that I am doing more than many tenured professors at my university.”

The only wrong note in the Pittsburgh piece is that he says adjuncts make up “well over 50 percent of the faculty at colleges and universities.” It’s well, well, well over 50 percent, in fact—more like 66–75 percent. Expect more cases like that of Margaret Mary Vojtko. Social service agencies, be prepared.

David Kirp discusses the impact of massive open online courses on higher education.

Peter Beinart (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Peter Beinart is out with a major new argument in The Daily Beast about what the political future might hold in store for us. The headline writer calls it “The Rise of the New New Left,” and it begins by citing the recent victory of liberal populist Bill de Blasio in New York’s mayoral primary. “The deeper you look,” Beinart writes, “the stronger the evidence that de Blasio’s victory is an omen of what may be the defining story of America’s next political era: the challenge, to both parties, from the left.”

The argument is generational: that the class of politicians who govern us now take for granted that our ideological debates take place between the goalposts of Reaganism and Clintonism—as manifested not least in the case of Barack Hussein Obama. He notes how Obama established himself in The Audacity of Hope as a child of Reaganism (“In arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find myself in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview”) with a distaste for Reaganism’s left-wing opponents—who enforced a tyranny of “either/or thinking” that only leads to “ideological deadlock.” Obama emerged as a true avatar of Third Way politics. But the Third Way was at its heart about embracing the dynamism of the market and denying the necessity of activist government to protect people from its ravages—and for kids today, the experience of being ravaged by the free market is their dominant impression of the world. Ravaged by usurious student debt. Ravaged by subprime mortgage scams. Ravaged by structural unemployment. Ravaged by the arrogance of unaccountable plutocrats. And on and on. So much for today’s kids embracing the Third Way.

They are also, he continues, less susceptible” to “right-wing populist appeals”: they are less white and less religious than the populations these appeals are designed for, and also “more dovish on foreign policy.” And above all, they are far to the left of their parents economically: “In 2010, Pew found that two-thirds of Millennials favored bigger government with more services over a cheaper one with fewer services, a margin of 25 points above the rest of the population. While large majorities of older and middle-aged Americans favored repealing Obamacare in late 2012, Millennials favored expanding it, by 17 points.” And “unlike older Americans, who favor capitalism over socialism by roughly 25 points, Millennials, narrowly favor socialism.”

Most fascinatingly, he finds evidence that young Republicans consider the GOP’s Generation X superstars creeps: “According to a 2012 Harvard survey, young Americans were more than twice as likely to say Mitt Romney’s selection of Ryan made them feel more negative about the ticket than more positive. In his 2010 Senate race, Rubio fared worse among young voters than any other age group. The same goes for Rand Paul in his Senate race that year in Kentucky, and Scott Walker in his 2010 race for governor of Wisconsin and his recall battle in 2012,” as well as Ted Cruz’s 2012 Texas Senate race.

Occupy, he says, is an omen—and its children, members of what Chris Hayes has called the “newly radicalized upper-middle class,” are now making their long march through the institutions, with de Blasio’s victory against an (admittedly divided) field of Clintonian Democrats as the harbinger of things to come. He concludes that “Hillary”—a Clintonite Democrat if there ever was one—“is vulnerable to a candidate who can inspire passion and embody fundamental change, especially on the subject of economic inequality and corporate power, a subject with deep resonances among Millennial Democrats. And the candidate who best fits that description is Elizabeth Warren.”

What do I think of the argument?

Well, I’m a historian. The act of predicting the future discomfits me, in any event—and the bigger the prediction, the more distrusting I am. (I sketched out my objections to the demographic arguments for Democratic inevitability here, here and here.) I also have never much dug “generational” arguments, finding them rigidly deterministic and reductionist, betraying a style of thinking more appropriate to ad industry hustlers than serious political analysts.

But Beinart’s arguments are smarter than those. For one, he explicitly rejects what is most offensively schematic about generational arguments: that “generations” are identities that emerge automatically, like clockwork, every twenty or thirty years or whatever—Depression/World War II, Baby Boom, Generation X, Millennial—like the unfolding of the seasons. He deploys instead the conception of the early-twentieth-century German social thinker Karl Mannheim, for whom, he notes, “generations were born from historical disruption.” He argued that people are disproportionately influenced by events that occur between their late teens and mid-twenties,” and that, as such, “a generation has no set length. A new one could emerge ‘every year, every thirty, every hundred.’ What mattered was whether the events people experienced while at their most malleable were sufficiently different from those experienced by people older or younger than themselves.” That is correct: this is how a generational identity is stamped—by a sense of everyday difference from the elders who do not understand them.

But Beinart downplays, even while he acknowledges, another crucial argument of Mannheim’s classic The Problem of Generations: that political generations are not defined by a common ideology but a common ideological argument. For example, the German political generation of the Weimar era was defined by an argument over the meaning of Germany’s loss in World War I and the traumas of the punitive Peace of Versailles. For that era’s left, the solution was proletarian revolution; for the right, the revanchism of Nazism—“socialism or barbarism,” as the left laid out the alternatives. For the Baby Boomers in America, the political argument, in an age when prosperity seemed self-evident and scarcity no longer seemed an issue, was over “freedom.” Theodore White sketched out a Mannheimian observation in a memorable footnote in Making of the President 1964:

I have attended as many civil-rights rallies as Goldwater rallies. The dominant word of these two groups, which loathe each other, is “freedom.” Both demand either Freedom Now or Freedom for All. The word has such emotional power behind it in argument, either with civil rights extremists or Goldwater extremists, a reporter is instantly denounced for questioning what they mean by the word “freedom.” It is quite possible that these two groups may kill each other in cold blood, both waving banners bearing the same word.

But Beinart’s generational argument is deterministic. It’s not about what the defining argument of the future will be. Young people’s ideological outlook seems to him already settled—leftward. That’s far too simple and optimistic.

For one thing it assumes that political dynamics are linear—since the trends tend this way now, they will only tend that way more so in the future. It thus leaves out an awful set of variables that complicates any narrative of progress.

For one thing, he assumes that America has a democracy.

But consider the counter-evidence against that, of which many of you are aware. Thanks to partisan gerrymandering by power-hungry Republicans (remember the counsel to a Texas representative who bragged in a 2003 e-mail to colleagues that they’d fixed it for Republicans to “assure that Republicans keep the House no matter the national mood”), our House of Representatives is, in fact, far from representative. You can’t repeat it often enough: when Barack Obama wins the state of Pennsylvania by five points but the delegation Pennsylvania returns to the House of Representatives contains thirteen Republicans and only five Democrats—well, poll numbers aren’t counting for very much, are they?

Then there’s the “dark money” problem: for instance, the recent news that “a single nonprofit group with ties to Charles G. and David H. Koch provided grants of $236 million to conservative organizations before the 2012 election, according to tax returns the group is expected to file Monday…. Freedom Partners established itself in November 2011 as a 501(c)6 ‘business league,’ typically a trade association of corporations, like the Chamber of Commerce, organized to promote a common business interest. Instead of donors, it has more than 200 ‘members,’ each making a minimum $100,000 contribution, which Freedom Partners classifies as member dues. The approach gives it many of the same advantages social welfare groups have, with one significant addition: Some contributions to the group may be tax deductible as a business expense.”

So let’s assume Beinart is right in his generational diagnosis: kids who came to their maturity during the “Age of Fail,” whose formative experience of American exceptionalism is that America is exceptionally crappy, are pissed, and are willing to work hard for politicians who are willing to do something about it.

If that is so, another scenario looks like this: young citizens motivated by left-leaning passions run into a brick wall again and again and again trying to turn their convictions into power. The defining story of our next political era becomes not a New New Left but a corrosive disillusionment that drives the country into ever deeper sloughs of apathy.

What if, in other words, the harbinger election didn’t take place in New York but in Colorado—where a hyper-ideological, insurrectionist, corporate-money-soaked minority, as I pointed out the other day, recalled two progressive legislatures for daring to favor background checks for gun purchases even though Coloradans want background checks by a margin of 68 to 27 percent.

Beinart wants to think big. So let’s think big. Given a precedent like that, the result of our current trends might not be more socialism, but once more a stark showdown between socialism and barbarism. Apathy and social misery might make fertile ground for some charismatic demagogue, preaching scapegoating and a narrative of violent redemption…

But that’s a big, big prediction—and again, as a historian, I don’t like big predictions. Let’s stay close to the ground, and the near-term, instead. Beinart has amassed some very convincing poll numbers about the mood of young voters. He has written, “If Hillary Clinton is shrewd, she will embrace it, and thus narrow the path for a populist challenger.” Hillary Clinton surely reads Peter Beinart. Let’s hope she reads and heeds this. That would be a very nice start. What will come next, frankly, nobody knows.

Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines in a scene from Lee Daniels’s The Butler. (AP Photo/The Weinstein Company/Anne Marie Fox)

Have you heard about the right-wing outrage over The Butler, the movie about the faithful White House retainer who served under presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan, and transforms himself from a Booker T. Washington to a W.E.B. Du Bois under the tutelage of his civil rights activist son?

The movie presents a sort of Forrest Gump journey through the American civil rights movement, from Eisenhower’s anguish over whether to send federal troops to escort black students past the racist mobs into Little Rock High School to the 1980s protests over apartheid. When I heard about it, I was skeptical. I wrote on Facebook before the first time I tried to see it (it was sold out; my mostly black neighborhood is crazy about the thing) that I “will try to keep open mind but dollars to donuts my dominant impression will be: ‘When there’s finally a movie about a white man serving as foil to the moral development of a black man—then, and only then, Dr. King’s dream will be on its way to fulfillment.” You know the kind of thing I was afraid of: the “Magical Negro” narrative, in which a black character “who often possesses special insight or mystical powers” exists only to come to the spiritual aid of the white protagonist.

It turned out to be far richer than I’d expected—not another Bagger Vance retread but in fact a refreshingly pointed examination of political conflict within African-American families. In a key plot setup—spoiler approaching—Cecil Gaines, the hyper-competent, hyper-compliant butler played by Forest Whitaker, is inspired by the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. to present himself to his martinet boss, played by an icy Jim Gleason, to complain that black White House employees are paid less for the same work and are denied opportunities for promotion. In response, he hears the glorious battle cry of freedom beloved of American bosses everywhere: if you don’t like it, you can quit.

Soon, though, comes the reign of Ronald Reagan, and a second key plot development (spoiler alert). The second time his boss refuses his protest, Whitaker’s butler responds that he’ll be sure to tell the commander-in-chief, Mr. Reagan, about his objections. The boss’s jaw, proverbially, drops, the black staffers get their raises and promotions, and the wisdom of Booker T. Washington’s advice to generations of black men—that the best way to advance is to do your job exceptionally well and to cultivate powerful white patrons—is affirmed. Then, however, in one of the fictionalized film’s few accuracies, Nancy Reagan personally invites him to a state dinner—which ends up (back to fiction again) cementing his turn to Du Bois–ism: he feels the sting of shame at witnessing how his butler-friends are forced to display obsequiousness toward him; almost simultaneously, he overhears President Reagan forcefully asserting his intention to veto South African sanctions. He soon quits, and—spoiler! spoiler! spoiler!—ends up in jail with his son for protesting American accommodation with apartheid.

Cue wingnut outrage.

Columnist Mona Charen offered a quiz: Reagan or Obama, “Which president did more to help black Americans?” Why, Reagan, of course: “The black labor-force-participation rate, which rose throughout the 1980s and 1990s, has declined for the past decade and quite sharply under Obama to 61.4 percent.” Case closed. She writes: “The Butler… misrepresents President Reagan (as I gather from those who’ve seen it [sic]) as, at best, insensitive to blacks, and at worst as racist.” Michael Reagan chimed in: “There you go again, Hollywood. You’ve taken a great story about a real person and real events and twisted it into a bunch of lies,” he wrote on Townhall.com. “If you knew my father, you’d know he was the last person on Earth you could call a racist.” In The Washington Post, three historians who earn their paychecks as professional conservatives weighed in with a brief about the Gipper’s “sensitivity to racial discrimination.” (“While accurate in depicting Reagan’s opposition to sanctions against South Africa…”)

Nation readers don’t need much persuading about how dubious this stuff is—how disastrous Reagan’s policies as president were for struggling African-Americans, how (to indulge the argument ad Hitlerium) even a certain German was nice to his dog; personality is not policy. And in this magazine last July, Sam Kleiner explained how soft Reagan and Reaganites were on apartheid.

Yes, there’s plenty that’s historically haywire in the picture: chronology that’s out of order, a character dying in Vietnam eleven months after American involvement ended, made-up dialogue from people like Martin Luther King, misappropriated historical credit. But personally, speaking as a historian and a storyteller, when it comes to inaccuracy in historical fictioneering, I follow the Shakespeare principle: I’m willing to overlook gobs of mistaken detail if the poetic valence is basically correct. (Richard III, after all, probably never actually said as he lay dying on the battlefield, “My kingdom for a horse.”)

And on Reagan, The Butler’s poetry is acute. Has there ever been an American who so doted upon his kindness to individual African-Americans, who did more to disadvantage them as a class?

It was a core component of the man’s amour-propre: “I am just incapable of prejudice,” as he said on his debut on Meet the Press, in 1966, and many, many times after. Yet he distrusted civil rights laws (like the 1964 act outlawing discrimination in public accommodations that he called “a bad piece of legislation”) as unwarranted intrusions of federal power into the lives of individuals. A man who was raised by a Protestant mother who married his Catholic father in an anti-Catholic age; who played side by side with black boys; who was raised in a church that preached racial brotherhood; whose mother took in released prisoners, black and white, to convalesce in the family sewing room—how could he be racist?

There was the time he wanted to see Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith’s pro-Ku Klux Klan blockbuster. “My brother and I were the only kids not to see it,” he would say, reciting his father’s words: “The Klan’s the Klan, and a sheet’s a sheet, and any man who wears one over his head is a bum. And I want no more words on the subject.” And the time his father was working as a traveling salesman and the desk clerk at the only hotel in a small town proudly informed him that the place didn’t serve Jews; Jack announced they wouldn’t be serving this Catholic, either, and slept a winter’s night in his car. There was the time when a visiting team could find no hotel to stay in, for they had two black players, and were welcomed into the Reagan home instead. It was precisely such magnanimous gestures on the part of individual whites that could solve any lingering racial problem and, since Americans were magnanimous, would solve the the problem.

“There must be no lack of equal opportunity, no inequality before the law,” as he said in the televised opening speech of his 1966 gubernatorial campaign. But “there is a limit to what can be accomplished by laws and regulations, and I seriously question whether anything additional is needed in that line.” (In Washington, a new civil rights law banning housing discrimination was then being debated; in Chicago, marching through the city’s white bungalow belt in favor of the principle, Martin Luther King was jeered by swastika-wielding protesters and had knives and rocks thrown at his head.) The next year, while visiting Eureka College to dedicate a new library, he asked the students at his alma mater a rhetorical question: “The problems of the urban ghetto are the result of selfishness on our part, of indifference to suffering?”; the answer was plain. “No people in all the history of mankind have shaped so wisely its material circumstances.” Speaking again at Eureka in 1973 he marveled at those who claimed America was still marred by racism: Hadn’t Los Angeles just elected a black mayor?

It was part of his liturgy of absolution on, for instance, the subject of “law and order.” “The phrase has become unfashionable,” he said on one of his radio broadcasts in the summer of 1975. “Those who have made it so began looking askance at anyone who used the words. Their arched eyebrows were a reaction to what they would inform you that ‘law and order’ were ‘code words’ that really meant a call for racial discrimination…. Well, I think this inference of bigotry is in itself bigoted…. Are they not implying that our fellow citizens that happen to be black are so given to crime that a call for law and order is automatically a call for a curb on the black community?” He went on to cite an unidentified “survey done in the nation’s capital” that found more blacks than whites wanted “sterner action against criminals”—proving, he concluded with an extraordinarily artful rhetoric inversion, that “ ’law and order” is not a code word to blacks. It’s a cry for help—and we’d better join them.”

Indeed, in 1968 when a black questioner asked him why she never saw blacks at Republican events, he politely but forcefully replied that it wasn’t Republicans who were racist but the supposedly liberal Democrats, “a party that had betrayed them…. The Negro has delivered himself to those who have no other intention than to create a Federal plantation and ignore him.” (We’d hear that one again…) The New York Times reported, “Reagan handled the situation so smoothly that some of the newsmen aboard his chartered 727 suggested, half-seriously, that the Reagan organization had set up the incident.”

He hadn’t always handled such questions so smoothly. He almost never lost his temper in public. He did once, however, during his 1966 gubernatorial primary campaign. A delegate at the National Negro Republican Assembly in Santa Monica said, “It grieves me when a leading Republican candidate….” He then shocked the assembly by slamming down his note card and shouting, “I resent the implication that there is any bigotry in my nature. Don’t anyone ever imply I lack integrity. I will not stand silent and let anyone imply that—in this or any other group.”

He slammed his fist into his palm, muttered something and walked out of the convention.

He knew better than to blow up again. He learned to respond with pleasing stories about racial uplift instead. There was, for example, the incredible moment two days after he announced his candidacy for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. He was in Charlotte, North Carolina. In his speech he preached a homily on racial reconciliation: “When the first bombs were dropped on Pearl Harbor there was great segregation in the military forces. In World War II, this was corrected. It was corrected largely under the leadership of generals like MacArthur and Eisenhower…. One great story that I think of at that time, that reveals a change was occurring, was when the Japanese dropped the bomb on Pearl Harbor there was a Negro sailor whose total duties involved kitchen-type duties…. He cradled a machine gun in his arms, which is not an easy thing to do, and stood on the end of a pier blazing away at Japanese airplanes that were coming down and strafing him and that was all changed.” This was news to the more historically minded reporters, who knew the armed forces integrated only under an executive order from Harry Truman, in 1948, three years after the war ended—and that segregation only ended in the rest of society after concerted protest and civil disobedience. In the press conference that followed he was asked whether he had approved Martin Luther King’s civil disobedience tactics.

No, he responded: “There can never be any justification for breaking the law.”

Then, someone followed up, how could blacks have ever gained their civil rights in places like North Carolina?

He undertook to explain, in response, “where I think the first change began…. I have often stated publicly that the great tragedy was then that we didn’t even know that we had a racial problem. It wasn’t even recognized. But our generation, and I take great pride in this, were the ones who first of all recognized and then began doing something about it.”

Reportorial ears surely pricked up at that: this was going to be something.

“I have called attention to the fact that when I was a sports announcer, broadcasting Major League baseball, most Americans had forgotten that at the time the opening lines of the official baseball guide read, ‘Baseball is a game for Caucasian gentlemen,’ and in organized baseball no one but Caucasians were allowed. Well, there were many of us when I was broadcasting, sportswriters, sportscasters, myself included, began editorializing about what a ridiculous thing this was and why it should be changed. And one day it was changed.”

And indeed, he had called attention to that supposed fact, in 1967, in a televised debate with Robert Kennedy. But if in the interim anyone had bothered to point out to him since that there was no such “official baseball guide” reading “Baseball is a game for Caucasian gentlemen”; or pointed out to him that he stopped broadcasting baseball in 1937 but that the sport wasn’t integrated until 1947; nor that no Iowans who heard him back then could recall him ever raising the subject on the air, the intervention clearly didn’t take, for he was still telling the story in the Oval Office nine years later.

That was Reagan on race. “Eugene Allen, the actual White House butler on whom the film is supposedly based, kept signed photos of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in his living room (pictures of the other presidents he had served hung in the basement),” Mona Charen writes. I don’t doubt it. Reagan was usually nice to individuals (though not so much if they were his children: don’t forget that he didn’t even recognize his own son Michael Reagan, so eager to defend his dad now, when attending his high school graduation, instead introducing himself, “My name is Ronald Reagan. What’s yours?”) In the film they accurately depict his practice of writing checks to individual citizens who wrote to him with sob stories, enlisting loyal Cecil to help him hide the practice—“Don’t tell Nancy!”—from his embarrassed staff and wife. But if The Butler is brilliant about anything, it is in grasping how this is actually the opposite of racial progress—because it makes racial progress seem unecessary. It’s the whole point of the movie. Which unsurprisingly conservatives have proven unable to grok.

Activists attend a pro-gun rally as part of the National Day of Resistance at the state Capitol in Salt Lake City, Utah, on February 23, 2013. (Reuters/Jim Urquhart)

I Googled the phrase “stack them in the streets” because I was searching for a historical reference from 1968. I ended up stumbling on something else: an article from the far-right site MinutemanNews.com explaining what was really going on with the gun debate in Congress:

Once cowed at the thought of provoking Second Amendment supporters, leftists will soon attempt to ban ‘assault weapons’ (and much more) as legislation offered by Diane Feinstein makes its way to the Senate floor…. Maybe Democrats are confident that fallout from Sandy Hook will provide the floor votes necessary to disarm the American people. But if the left is willing to risk picking this fight with millions of American gun owners, it must also believe something far more important—that Americans who have spent years arming themselves against the ultimate expression of tyranny by their own government—the overthrow of the Second Amendment—will choose to not fight when the time finally comes.

It is illustrated with a Che-like logo of a machine gun’s silhouette and the legend “COME AND TAKE IT”—a slogan, which is crucial to know about if you want to understand the contemporary right, that I wrote about here.

And then, at MinutemenNews.com came the 420 comments:

“…we will run them like the british to the shores and they better hope theres a boat waiting for them to take there ass to Europe with rest of the sheeple. If not, the sharks are be eating good that week. They better hope we deside to show mercy long enuff for them to get on planes or ships to leave the usa….”

“thats right there could be a lot of dead LEFTIST!!”

“Stack them in the streets like cordwood. There’s no room for prisoners.”

“Take members of Congress prisoner and hold them hostage because it is reported that many Federal Depts have ordered millions of rounds of hollow points supposedly to hold off civil unrest and insurrection. How long does the left think these Federal employees will hold out if many members of Congress are held as hostages…”

“Not hostage—Citizen Arrest. Their vote will provide the wanted list and their confession.”

“HELL NO, GITMOIZE THEM!”

“Bad time to be a politician. Dibs on shooting/hanging the President.”

How relevant should this stuff be, you ask, to one’s ordinary political reflections and calculations? After all, how many people can possibly read MinutemenNews.com? Well, let’s investigate. Deploying the algorithm at Ranking.com (and allowing that there’s no easily settled way to measure traffic), I compared the traffic there to some of the sites I read and have written for. CoreyRobin.com, the blog of the Brooklyn College professor who is my favorite political writer, ranks 144,234. The website of Campaign for America’s Future, where I published in 2007 and 2008, is at 41,870. Three of my regular lefty reading stops, the blogs Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Americablog, and Crooks and Liars—where I contributed regularly last year—rank 41,346 and 11,301 and 9,897, respectively. The homes of my online columnizing in 2006-07 and 2012, TNR.com and RollingStone.com, clock in at 8,481 and 7,263. TheNation.com? We are at 9,088.

MinutemenNews is in the middle of that pack: 12,600.

It is a reasonable surmise, then, that the author of “The Left Is Convinced Americans Won’t Fight for Second Amendment Rights” has at least as many or possibly more readers than I do. And look here: as much as I hate to admit it, its readers race leagues ahead of the lefty blog pack when it comes to putting their money where their mouth is: knocking on doors in campaigns, stuffing envelopes—and, don’t forget, showing up at political meetings with guns. As my favorite blogger Digby always reminds us, pissing in the wind as far as I can tell, committing politics while armed is the ultimate act of civic intimidation. I find it very hard to argue that the implicit threat by these people to shoot politicians and officers of the law who cross them—or better yet, to “stack them like cordwood”—does not provide some sort of unmeasurable advantage in political conflicts.

Gun nuts are the most motivated people in our politics. And now we’ve had a natural experiment to prove it: the first recall election in Colorado history was lost by two state senators who had the temerity to vote for legislation requiring background checks for firearms purchases and banning ammunition magazines over fifteen rounds.

A site called PolticusUSA.com pronounced with bafflement: “Colorado Voters Support Background Checks Yet Still Recall Lawmakers for Background Checks.” It headlined a nice roundup of data from the election last Tuesday. Senate president John Morse went down 51 to 49 in conservative Colorado Springs, and the other senator, Angela Giron, went down 56-44 in blue-collar Pueblo, both “not districts that lean heavily Republican.” Statewide, a Public Policy Polling survey found the weekend before the balloting that Colorado voters favored background checks by 68 to 27 percent. They concluded that this means Democrats might face trouble in the next statewide election, but I thought that was a dense conclusion. It was the issue here that was the issue—the issue of “politicians taking away our guns.”

“Intensity of commitment” is a difficult problem for political theory to analyze: is it a violation of the public will when fanatics motivate themselves so much more efficiently than moderates? (“The definition of ‘moderate,’” I once read a Barry Goldwater supporter noting in 1964, “is ‘someone who doesn’t knock on doors on election day.”) Is it “undemocratic” when a measure overwhelmingly favored by “ordinary” voters is defeated by conspiracy theorists who fear that a baby step designed to keep guns out of the hands of psychotics and criminals is actually a giant leap toward New World Order government? Or is it the essence of democracy?

I wish I knew.

But that’s an intellectual problem. The political answer is obvious. Don’t mourn. Expose the fact that the National Rifle Association and its acolytes violate all the bounds of civility that make democratic deliberation possible (most people simply don’t know this: the PPP found that the same Coloradans who want background checks by a margin of 68 to 27 percent also have a positive view of the NRA by a margin of 53 to 33 percent). Embarrass the pundits who refuse to recognize this. Tell the story that Digby’s been trying to tell: that guns at political events make democracy impossible. And don’t be moderate. Knock on doors on election day. Organize.

Leonard Ziskind and Devin Burghart chronicle America’s burgeoning militia movement.

A supporter of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet holds a picture of Pinochet outside of Chile's Military Hospital in Santiago on December 3, 2006. (Reuters/Ivan Alvarado)

Let’s not forget Chile.

On September 11, 1973, warplanes began strafing radio stations and newspapers. Images arrived of people scattering in fear ahead of tanks in the streets. Fearsome generals in coats with starred epaulets ordered President Salvador Allende, the world’s only elected Marxist leader, to step down. A military communiqué: “The armed forces and the body of carabineros are united in their historic and responsible mission of fighting to liberate Chile from the Marxist yoke.” Signed; General Augusto Pincohet Ugarte, Commander-in-Chief of the Army.

Pinochet’s coup came the day before a planned national referendum scheduled by Allende, a man fastidiously obsessed with observing his nation’s constitution. Unlike Allende, the military chose not to chance democracy. Instead, they rounded up thousands and deposited them in the national stadium, some marked for execution. In the streets of Santiago, loudspeakers barked out commands: “All people resisting the new government will pay the price.” For at least seventy-five, in the first three weeks, the price was execution by Pinochet’s Caravana de la Muerte—the “Caravan of Death.” One bullet-ridden body, belonging to the popular, pacifist singer Víctor Jara, was found dumped in a Santiago back street, his hands broken and his wrists cracked.

On the morning of the coup, the ousted president, refusing to yield, made his way to the parliament for one last speech. Then he fell back to the presidential palace, now bombarded by planes and pummeled by tanks, forty civil servants still pinned inside. The majestic building nearly burned to the ground. “Oh, baby!” a CBS Radio correspondent intoned on the air with an intake of breath as machine gun volleys sounded. “We’re in the wrong place…. We are pinned down on a corner…looking at a policeman with an automatic rifle…. What the hell am I doing here?”

I wrote here this winter about what General Pinochet’s subsequent rule was like, in the context of Ronald Reagan’s complaining two years later about “the innuendos and the accusations that the CIA and our government had a hand in bringing about the downfall of the government of Chile,” flaying congressmen who “act as if fascism had been imposed on the Chileans, to their great distress and unhappiness,” citing a goofy Gallup Poll—as if “citizens” in a police state could tell strangers honestly what they thought about their government—that 60 percent of Chileans approved of their government and only 3 percent did not. Reagan: “This is quite a contrast to much of what we’ve heard in the news about a reign of terror, political prisoners, torture and a depressed and frightened populace!”

But the Chileans since September 11, 1973, had lived under an official “state of siege,” renewed every month by military decree and not lifted until 1978, at which point General Pinochet revised the state of siege to a mere “state of emergency.” The new rules, he magnanimously explained, meant “I cannot banish anyone for more than six months and there will be no more trials of a military nature.” The death toll of his murderous regime was up in the many thousands by then.

And it couldn’t have happened without our tax dollars.

On December 18, 1975, the Church Committee transmitted its report, U.S. Covert Actions by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Chile (Including the ‘Assassination’ of Salvador Allende), 1963, 1973.” Short, sharp and thorough like all the Church Committee’s publications—you can pick it up yourself in a nice 127-page paperback from ARC Manor Publishers, including Congressman Maurice Hinchey’s follow-up 2000 report. It concluded: “Covert United States involvement in Chile in the decade between 1963 and 1973 was extensive and continuous. The Central Intelligence Agency spent three million dollars in an effort to influence the outcome of the 1964 Chilean presidential elections. Eight million dollars was spent, covertly, in the three years between 1970 and the military coup in September, 1973, with over three million dollars expended in fiscal year 1972 alone…. What did covert CIA money buy in Chile? It financed activities covering a broad spectrum, from simple propaganda manipulation of the press to large-scale support for Chilean political parties, to public opinion polls to direct attempts to foment a military coup.” In 1970, when the agency passed weapons to the plotters, the army’s commander-in-chief, René Schneider, who opposed them, ended up dead.

What the hell were we doing there, indeed. Let’s not let it happen ever again.

Peter Rothberg commemorates Salvador Allende's final public address.

From left, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin E. Dempsey, US Secretary of State John Kerry and US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel at the first hearing on Syria held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 3, 2013. (AP Photo)

Maybe the cruise missiles will fly on September 11: wouldn’t that be grand?

It was eleven years ago, a year after September 11, 2001, in the runup to war in Iraq—and my, how time flies—when I published a piece about what George W. Bush was doing to Americans’ power to exercise their muscles for critical citizenship. It began by recording Richard M. Nixon’s envy at Chinese commissars who got to decide what would be in the next day’s People’s Daily. George Bush, too: “Dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier,” he’d said a few months before expressing how impressed he was when China’s President Jiang Zemin ended a joint news conference with him by walking away after the second question. I called the piece “Surrender to Trust,” and in it I tried to pound some basic points of democratic theory: “Secrecy and power are intimates: Both tend to corrupt; both, when absolute, tend to corrupt absolutely; and both can steal up like an addiction. The cover-up, even of an innocent error, can be worse than the crime. That is why any break in any check or balance in our constitutional power structure should make the front page. Every time. But they almost never do.”

Maybe we’re a little bit better now. But maybe not. “With the World Watching, Syria Amassed Nerve Gas,” Judith Miller’s old paper headlined yesterday. But they didn’t really offer any evidence. John Kerry and Barack Obama now say the evidence is indisputable that President Assad ordered a chemical attack. But listen to Congressman Alan Grayson’s devastating argument from Saturday: “The documentary record regarding an attack on Syria consists of just two papers: a four-page unclassified summary and a 12-page classified summary. The first enumerates only the evidence in favor of the attack”—and “cites intercepted telephone calls, ‘social media’ postings, and the like, but not one of these is actually quoted or attached.”

He says, “I’m not allowed to tell you what’s in the classified summary, but you can draw your conclusion.” (My conclusion, duh: Grayson’s trying to tell us that the extra eight pages add nothing important.) The House Intelligence Committee told him there was no other documentation available for him to examine prior to his vote. That committee hasn’t received access to the intelligence reports on which the conclusions are based.

Grayson notes a media report “that the Obama administration had selectively used intelligence to justify military strikes in Syria, with one report ‘doctored so that it leads a reader to just the opposite conclusion reached by the original report’ ”—the conclusion was that some evidence suggests that Assad didn’t himself know about the chemical weapon attack, which may have taken place in defiance of the orders of his general staff.

He writes that John Kerry “has said repeatedly that this administration isn’t trying to manipulate the intelligence reports the way that the Bush administration did to rationalize its invasion of Iraq.”

In other words, Kerry says, Trust me.

The American people seem to get it. According to polls, they’re saying, No way. Do Democratic congressional representatives get it? Not enough, I’m afraid. On NPR, the bright young comer Adam Schiff of California says, “I’m convinced about the evidence. I think there’s really compelling evidence that Assad has gassed his own people, and not once but multiple times; this being the worst occasion. I also think that a military strike could have the effect of deterring him from doing it again.” But, oops, not even United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power seems particularly confident about that.

Kerry then suggested maybe Russia’s proposal to give Assad a chance to turn over any chemical weapons wasn’t such a bad idea—that if this happened, America’s objective would be achieved. Then, basically, a spokesman said: just kidding. He “was making a rhetorical argument about the impossibility and unlikelihood of Assad turning over chemical weapons he has denied he used.” That’s George W. Bush–style thinking—that the administration’s mind is made up: a bad guy is a bad guy, and if you entertain any possibility of rationality on the part of evildoers, you’re just being a naive sucker.

Trust him.

But that’s not how the founders of our nation wanted it. They didn’t want us to trust any politician. As I wrote, “Our Federalist Papers forefathers once wrote something wise enough to deserve to be affixed to our civic doorposts: ‘If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.’ We need not wonder whether [the president] is angelic to make the point: Both external and internal controls are falling by the wayside in this White House.” Only it was eleven years ago, and I was writing—then—about George Bush.

When the president speaks, think about this: after a day when the The New York Times writes about an activist journalist arrested and threatened with over a hundred years in jail for linking to a URL the security establishment didn’t like, and with a White House that demands unprecedented power over reporters to change quotes at will, I don’t see any reason the arguments we used to make about George Bush and trust don’t apply equally to Barack Obama as well. Listen to Grayson: why should we trust Obama? After all, he clearly doesn’t trust us.

Take Action: Demand Your Reps Vote No on Military Intervention in Syria

Greg Mitchell reviews public opinion polls on intervention in Syria.

Higher education stamp from 1962. (Wikimedia Commons)
 
On August 21 I published an essay in which I offered several anecdotes in the service of the argument that with the rise of a class of permanently under-employed college instructors, alongside a class of “tenured professors…hardly aware that they’re aristocrats and that they oversee an army of of intellectual serfs,” American society has reproduced the era of the “gentleman scholar”—because the only people who can afford the soul-satisfying profession of adding to the world’s store of knowledge, and passing it on to the next generation of college students, are the independently wealthy.

I also made a broader social argument: First, that the historic expansion of liberal arts education “made America more decent, more lovely, more cultured, more critical, even—ask anyone who went to college in the 1960s or ’70s—more fun. It made America richer too, both spiritually and materially; though in an important sense the first condition fed the second, as the liberation of intellectual imaginations midwifed a thousand productive careers in every field, careers that were productive precisely because they were inspired by a ‘liberal arts’ attitude, not merely pinched Babbit-like commercial aspirations.” And that therefore, atrophying this professoriate was one way “a healthy capitalist society eats its seed corn.”

The piece received a staggering amount of attention among the sort of people I was writing about—graduate students, and adjunct and tenured professors. So I invited people to write me with stories of their experience within this rapidly transforming space.

Before I turn to those, let me address a criticism. I called the post “On the Death of Democratic Higher Education.” Some asked what I meant by “democratic higher education”—after all, a professoriate, any professoriate, is not exactly a democratic institution. And indeed one of the practices I criticized, and will be criticizing more in the future—the rise of “MOOCs,” or massive open online courses—lets people take courses from excellent professors, often star professors, for free. Which is pretty damned democratic. For another thing, I’m not really talking about the democratic failings of the present higher education system that harm undergraduates the most, excellently covered by others at The Nation and elsewhere: exploitative for-profit education; crushing student debt; the death grip an amoral class of professional administrators enjoy over governance prerogatives once enjoyed by more public-spirited faculty.

No, I’m focusing on what I know best: the world of professional intellectualism, whose attenuation makes for more subtle harms to the health of a democratic society—but, I’ll be arguing, may make for equally tragic harms in the end.

And so: on to some stories! I’ll reveal what the professors said later. For now, it’s adjuncts-a-go-go.

A young man writes:

I graduated from college in May of 2009. That previous fall, as I faced an uncertain economy, and since I had no idea what to do with a Bachelor’s in History, I followed the only constant piece of advice my professors gave me, and applied to MA programs in history.

So why would history professors encourage smart college history majors to apply for masters degrees? Some might be myopic, not having given a thought to the class politics of modern education: getting a masters worked for them back in the day, so why not now? Another reason is more cynical—that they have thought about the class politics: keep feeding the pipeline that produces more adjuncts, and you better preserve your own tenured privilege—research without teaching—by building and maintain a reserve army of the under-employed. Or at least by not discouraging one from being built and maintained.

Anyway, he liked the master’s program!

Long story short: graduate school was amazing, stressful, made me doubt my every decision on a 24/7 basis for the better part of two years…but I don’t regret it. One of my friends summed up graduate school very succinctly—“it forever alters how your mind functions”—and I realize nearly every day that she was correct.

But he also

realized that I didn’t want to go back to school for another 6-8 years to get a PhD (I got a glimpse of the hiring process from the inside, and saw that it was basically arbitrary, and that the job market was chock-full of very talented people desperate for jobs, even ones with heavy teaching loads).

Note that, professors: from your side of the divide, your world might look like a meritocracy. From the students’ side, though, it looks “basically arbitrary.” Consider that: a smart guy who loved graduate school but can’t imagine continuing for the sheer hopelessness of the employment prospects. Why are they hopeless? Maybe because they can fill so many teaching spots with those ever-eager adjuncts…

Anyway, this fellow, realizing “I had no clue how to leverage an MA in history when applying for jobs” (profs: maybe that’s something you ought to think about, especially if you’re giving out “constant” advice to students to apply for MAs in your field),  “bounced around a little bit. For the most part I’ve been working a seasonal job in the educational testing industry.” Then:

Last October, I essentially stumbled into two adjunct jobs. One was at Xavier University, which is a local Catholic school known for a student body a little on the affluent side. The other was at a two-year, open enrollment college operated by the University of Cincinnati, located a bit north of the city.

My job at Xavier was as follows: I played second fiddle to a full-time faculty member who had developed a new take on the standard 100-level European History survey course. Instead of relying solely upon lectures, students would do analytical exercises related to major themes in European history. For instance, students would read a chapter in their textbook about population trends in the late eighteenth century, and would then, in assigned groups, look at records of birth and death rates, diary entries, etc, and would then piece together graphs, written reports, or some other presentation that demonstrated that they not only had a basic understanding of how to read and make charts, graphs, etc., but that they could relay information in a cogent and practical manner. After all, students are not likely to write essays once they leave college and enter the workforce, but they might need to read graphs.

The class itself went well enough once students realized that we expected them to do more than just sit passively through lectures. We ran into the normal problems presented by a reliance upon group work—chronic absences, students not shouldering enough of the burden, etc—but overall we could see real progress being made. Moreover, the students were thankful that they had a chance to do more than just write essays. At the end of the semester, I met with the faculty of record and one of the deans of education to discuss this course. While I don’t want to sound bitter, I was astounded by how out of touch this dean sounded. There was some discussion about course content and assignments, but most of it was about “innovation”—as if we hadn’t completely redesigned a course already. He was more interested in social media and remote learning where students attend classes in groups independent of the classroom (I’ll admit that I am biased here. But when administrators talk about things that render faculty unnecessary, I get a little worried.) and a bunch of other “solutions” and “bold ideas” which didn’t really seem like solutions, but more like unimaginative corporate-speak.

Awesome, huh? These are the awesome folks who more and more are taking over the design and vision of the higher learning in America. (Tom Frank recently wrote brilliantly about this here.)

But let’s hear about working conditions, shall we? At this guy’s two-year college, filling in for a tenured full-timer off on a fabulous Fulbright (those aristocrats…),

I taught two classes on my own, and co-taught two others, and was thus in the classroom five days a week in some capacity. Aside from the stress of going back and forth between different campuses (and policies, cultures, etc), what I felt most was a feeling of impermanence. I felt it, and I also observed it in the words and actions of the other adjuncts I encountered at the two-year college. For them, every semester held the promise of work, but also the fear of a course load reduced to such an extent that their meager salary would barely cover the cost of driving to campus.

I labored under these conditions for only half of a year, but I cannot imagine how other members of the faculty, many of whom finished their degrees a decade or more ago—and who found out firsthand that the wave of retirements that were supposed to open up the job market didn’t exactly materialize as they had hoped, and didn’t lead to tenure-track jobs—and who have families to feed and a myriad of other issues/expenses cope with this situation.

… No matter the rewards that result from teaching (and there were real rewards, such as when my students at the two-year college, several of whom mentioned that they were descended from coal miners, watched part of Germinal and reacted favorably to seeing the miners assert themselves) I could not shake the feeling that my job did not matter, that I did not matter, and that with every lecture I was merely whistling past the graveyard. After all, a semester is only so long. And when you work at a job where your position is tied largely to enrollment numbers which you cannot control, and where your performance is not the deciding factor in whether your contract is picked up for another term, it is hard to feel like anything you do actually matters.

Wow. Next time: “Please do not refer to me by name in anything you write, as I am on the job market yet again and I do not want anything to jeopardize my chances…”

Want to share your story? Reach out at perlstein@aol.com.

Student Nation talks about a new tuition plan, “Pay It Forward, Pay It Back.”

Former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley Jr. (Reuters/Chris Wattie)

Last week, for the opening of the school year, I wrote about my interview with Tom Geoghegan about his (so-far) failed suit to stop Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s morally and educationally disastrous crusade to close fifty schools in Chicago. But that’s not all I talked about with Tom. “I don’t want this just to be a Mayor Emanuel–bashing session,” I said. “Because we have to bash Mayor Daley.”

Everyone, I suppose, dislikes parking meters. Chicagoans hate them even more. That’s because Mayor Richard M. Daley in 2008 struck a deal with the investment consortium Chicago Parking Meters LLC, or CPM, that included Morgan Stanley, Allianz Capital Partners and, yes, the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Abu Dhabi, to privatize our meters. The price of parking—and the intensity of enforcement—skyrocketed. The terms were negotiated in secret. City Council members got two days to study the billion-dollar, seventy-five-year contract before signing off on it. An early estimate from the Chicago inspector general was that the city had sold off its property for about half of what it was worth. Then an alderman said it was worth about four times what the city had been paid. Finally, in 2010, Forbes reported that in fact the city had been underpaid by a factor of ten.

Well, Chicagoans, Tom Geoghegan is here to tell you that the whole damn thing is illegal under the Illinois Constitution—and most other constitutions, too. He’s in the middle of a suit to have the whole thing torn up. The argument is driven by the legal theory that “a seventy-five-year-agreement to run parking meters is an unconstitutional restriction on the police power—the sovereign right of the city to control its public streets and ways…. This is a very traditional, conservative, really, argument: what the City of Chicago did was not sell the meters. They sold the police power of the city.”

The deal, you see, is structured like this. Not only does CPM get the money its meters hoover up from the fine upstanding citizens of Chicago. It gets money even if the meters are not used. Each meter has been assigned a “fair market valuation.” If the City takes what is called a “reserve power adverse action”—that can mean anything from removing a meter because it impedes traffic flow, shutting down a street for a block party or discouraging traffic from coming into the city during rush hour—“CPM has the right to trigger an immediate payment for the entire loss of the meter’s fair market value over the entire life of the seventy-five-year agreement.”

Shut down one meter that the market-valuation says makes twenty-two bucks a day, in other words, and the City of Chicago has to fork over a check for $351,000—six days a week (why six days? more on that later), fifty-two weeks in a year, times seventy-five—within thirty days. Very easily, Geoghegan points out, a single shut-down of parking in a chunk of the city—say, for something like a NATO summit Chicago hosted last year—“could be more than the original purchase price of the deal.”

And if the city lowered the parking meter rates, the highest in the country? Same problem: that would trigger the “reserve power action” clause too. Chicago, meet your new City Council: the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Abu Dhabi.

And that’s just wrong—illegal, says Geoghegan: “You can’t bargain away—you can’t sell off—the police power of the city.”

He thundered: “This is privatization gone nuts. It’s almost a comical form of privatization—privatization at its very, very most toxic. Because here, what is being sold off is not really a city asset. It’s not really like Midway Airport”—a deal that might be just around the corner, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. “It’s not like a tollway”—the Chicago Skyway was leased for ninety-nine years to an Australian concern for quick cash in 2005 (“With that kind of money to be made,” The Washington Post said, “Americans are lining up to try their luck at Wall Street’s hottest new game—“investing in infrastructure.”) No, at least in those cases it was just property they were selling off. Here, “they’re selling off the governmental powers of a city. And that’s what’s so disturbing about this. And getting those back is insanely expensive. And the City said, in its brief in the court below, that if the deal were undone they would owe all this money and they can’t pay it back.”

Geoghegan cites the doctrine of in peri delicto—“something you learn your first year of law school”—to explain why this cannot stand. It means the contract is illegal, and thus not enforceable. He gives the example—“not this would ever happen”—of Perlstein selling Geoghegan a gram of meth for $100. (Damn right it wouldn’t happen. My going rate is $200!) “The judge would say this isn’t a legal agreement and I’m not going to enforce it. I couldn’t get restitution. And if this agreement is unconstitutional”—he’s using the Illinois Constitution, but the principle is one of wide application—“CPM is in the same boat.”

I say that this raises an interesting point—that his suit sounds great for Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who happens to be dealing with a huge municipal budget deficit. So he must support the suit! Especially since the parking meter deal was inked by his predecessor, not by him.

“Well!” Geoghegan responds with his inimitably cheerful, bright irony. “He simultaneously badmouths the deal and defends it to the death.”

The badmouthing part: there was the mayor’s proud boast to have “renegotiated” the deal, supposedly to make parking cheaper by making it free on Sunday, which ended up extending the hours on all the other days, making everything just about a wash.

The defending part: he won’t say anything too bad about CPM, because that would discourage investors from buying up other chunks of the city—like the deal to lease the digital billboard concession along the Dan Ryan Expressway for twenty years, which reform alderman Bob Fioretti points out was about as much of a rip-off for the City as the parking meters, not least because no one knows what kind of technology for advertising will be in use twenty years from now.

Rahm Emanuel is a funny guy. He loves to simultaneously take credit for things and evade responsibility for them. In the school-closing case I wrote about last week, Geoghegan tried to sue the mayor as well as the Chicago School Board. The judge didn’t allow Emanuel to be included, buying the mayor’s office’s argument: “They said 'we have nothing to do with the schools'!”

That got a huge laugh: everyone knows that Emanuel is always saying the schools are his personal responsibility; after all, he alone appoints the school board.

So Geoghegan’s suit attached an op-ed signed by Emanuel arguing he was personally responsible for the school closings. And a press release saying much the same thing. In court, though, the mayor’s office said they were just providing “input.” More laughter: “A paralegal in our office described the mayor’s position as, ‘I’m responsible, but I’m not legally responsible.’ ”

A funny guy—and it isn’t just Chicagoans who, bitterly, are being forced to laugh. Our parking meter mess might someday be yours if it isn’t already—yes, this means you, New York, as Matt Taibbi reports. As Tom Tresser of Chicago’s CivicLab impressed upon me, they’re coming after your meters—and bridges, and billboards, and who knows what other public assets—next. “We have a massive global movement of capital which, because they’ve burned their own fucking houses down through their own greed, don’t have the gilt returns that they’re used to receiving…. So the new guaranteed annual returns that big business and big capital are looking for is our assets.”

And that’s about all of us.

Rick Perlstein writes about the resurgent protest culture that is fighting back against Rahm Emanuels’ austerity agenda.

(Reuters)

The news that a Heisman trophy winner, Johnny Manziel, will be suspended for one half of one game because he sold his autograph has revived an old debate: should college athletes in marquee sports be paid? Does it make any sense to think of them as “amateurs”? I must, alas, leave the technical discussion to better-informed interlocutors. All I have to offer is an anecdote. Maybe it will help people think some things through.

Our story begins in 1992, when your humble correspondent matriculated as an exceptionally neurotic graduate student at the football and, um, American Studies powerhouse the University of Michigan. Entirely unqualified and unprepared to teach, I was nonetheless thrown to the wolves as a freshman composition instructor. On the first day of class, I had gotten through the introductions, passed out the syllabus, and launched into explaining the course, when a strapping, tall, god-like young man walked into the room—very late. All other activity stopped. I couldn’t teach any more for the murmuring. A star of the University Michigan football team would be practicing the farce of pretending he was a college student in my very own classroom. It turned out to be quite the education for me.

Because most of us first-year graduate students had no idea what we were doing in the classroom, we taught freshman composition using a pedagogy-less “workshop” method (and that’s a subject worth writing about another time). A designated student would bring in a draft of the paper to hand out to the class. The students would read it as homework, and the next class session would be taken up by their discussion of how it could be made better.

Early class sessions, however, were largely taken up by the kids being broken up into small groups and doing writing exercises out in the hall. But I had to stop doing that. All my students would end up doing once outside of my gaze was crowd around the Football Star and harass him for what Johnny Manziel was accused of selling: autographs.

Anyway, one fine fall day, it was Football Star’s turn to show up with his draft of an essay.

But he did not show up that day at all. (He only showed up about half the time, anyway.)

I obviously had to fail Football Star for that section of the class. If I could have done worse than fail him, I would have done that as well. Because since I had no material to “teach,” the next class session had to be cancelled entirely.

Next chapter in the story: I get a call from the guy at the athletic department whose job is it to liaison with professors. I’m ashamed of what happened next. He laid on me a sob story about how Football Star came from a rough ghetto, grew up in a housing project, didn’t get any breaks, etc. That this was his one shot at a college education. Something to fall back on, in case this football thing didn’t work. And me, being a dopey neurotic weak-willed 23-year-old, packed to the gills with liberal guilt to boot, listened to him try to persuade me to give Football Star another chance—and of course I said yes.

He brought a draft of a paper to my office hours. To the moral credit of the University of Michigan athletic department, he did actually seem to have written the thing. That much was obvious: it was barely literate. I should have made a photocopy and kept it.

Football Star went on to help lead the Wolverines to the Big Ten championship that year, then the Rose Bowl, setting records at his position. What happened next? Thanks to Wikipedia, I was able to find out. The 1996 NFL draft was a quality one for his position. So he only went in the fifth round. He played in seven games in his first professional year—and only four in his second. He was traded away to another team before his third season—where he played in only two games. The next year he joined another team’s practice squad—then was released nineteen days later.

He lasted five weeks on a professional team in Europe. Then signed with a Canadian team. Things looked promising in the pre-season and early regular season games—then he got hurt, and was released in September. Two years later he tried a comeback with a team in Arena Football’s developmental league. The league was short-lived; so was the career within it of my former “student.” Then, after the section reading “Professional career” on his Wikipedia page, there is nothing—because what happened next apparently matters to no one. I checked Nexis-Lexis. Also nothing, of course; once his usefulness as a revenue-and/or-glory-generating unit had dried up, he was invisible to the world.

I wonder where he is now. Maybe he’s happy, productive, secure, thoughtful, wise—I hope so. Anyway I’d like to find him. And apologize to him. Apologize for not flunking him. Maybe, then, I could have actually taught him something in that class: you get to evade the rules everyone else has to follow only as long as you are a god. And you get to be a god only when you’re worth something to the people who are using you.

Dave Zirin admonishes the corrupt and exploitative practices of the NCAA.

Students at North Lawndale College Preparatory High School in Chicago walk through the school's hallways. The surrounding neighborhood has an unemployment rate almost triple the city average, and school officials estimate 5 percent to 8 percent of its 525 students are homeless at any one time during the school year. (AP Photo/Paul Beaty)

Today was the first day of school in Chicago—and a profound setback for Chicago’s forces of decency. Fifty fewer schools will be in operation this term, with 2,113 fewer staffers, a colossal injustice I’ve written about here and here and here and here. The school closings are going forward because ten days ago Federal District Judge John Z. Lee denied the attempt to get a preliminary injunction to prevent it. A week before that ruling, I spoke with one of the lawyers who brought the suit, Thomas Geoghegan, for my monthly interview series at Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Hyde Park—where I and my audience deepened our sense of just how mad and malign Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s schools agenda truly is.

You might know Geoghegan for his classic public-policy memoirs like Which Side Are You On? and his most recent, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life; or his quixotic run to win the congressional seat vacated when Rahm Emanuel became Barack Obama’s chief of staff, which The Nation endorsed. Our conversation at the Co-op—a public version of dialogues we’ve been having regularly over dinner and drinks for over a decade now—was, like so much of Tom’s discourse, heartbreaking and inspiring in equal measure.

We spoke on August 10, the day after Judge Lee declined to certify Geoghegan’s plaintiffs as a class, a harbinger of the preliminary-injunction denial to come—heartbreaking, because his arguments sounded damned well open-and-shut to my audience and me. The Americans with Disability Act specifies quite clearly that school systems, when moving disabled children, have to proactively provide opportunities for the kids and their parents to meet with “Individual Education Plan” teams to devise specific measures to ease the transition. The Chicago school board didn’t even try—it just called up befuddled parents to ask, as Geoghegan put it, “Anything you want?” And when these parents—overwhelmingly poor and harried, understandably inexpert in the intricacies of special-education best-practices—didn’t have anything specific to offer, the board considered its work done. One of Geoghegan’s expert witnesses, the woman in charge of special education of the Indianapolis school system, said the whole thing was pretty much totally nuts.

The suit also tried another angle. In 2003 Governor Rod Blagojavich (who actually did some good things) signed a state civil rights statute that allowed private plaintiffs to bring claims of disparate racial impact against entities like boards of education without having to prove discriminatory intent—a provision that used to be in federal law until the Supreme Court struck it down in the 1990s. Explained Geoghegan, 88 percent of the affected kids in the receiving schools are African-American, but African-American kids make up only 40.5 percent of students in the system. Pretty damned disparate.

Of course, the Chicago Public Schools had an explanation for that, of a sort: they argued that black kids were being helped by being moved. Actually, they made several arguments—changing them around each time the last was debunked. First it was that they needed to close schools to help with the system’s budget deficit, freeing up resources for instruction. But most of the money they claim to be saving (savings disputed in themselves) is being spent on moving kids, not instruction. And, Geoghegan points out, “After a year, that money goes into the general pot to aid kids in the system.” Look at the system’s plans, and it turns out “the board is going to use some of this money to build schools on the North Side”—the white North Side, in other words. It basically amounts to stealing from poor black kids to give to more affluent white ones.

The system’s second argument is that the schools that kids are being moved into are academically superior to the ones they’re leaving. Well, there is a word in legal jargon for what that claim represents in this case. That word is: bullshit. In their pleadings, Geoghegan’s team pointed out that only seven of the schools are arguably better academically than the ones kids are coming from; some are worse. In fact, the very act of moving kids under such circumstance basically cannot improve their educations. “What’s extraordinary about this is that the study of the Consortium of School Research at the University of Chicago stated that these school closings don’t do students any good but in the long term don’t do any harm,” Geoghegan told my bookstore audience. “The RAND study, which came out in 2012…says that they do do long-term harm, unless the children go to academically superior schools.”

You see the problem, even if a federal judge did not.

CPS’s third argument is yet more dubious. Between 2001 and 2012, leading up to this year’s closing, they closed some seventy-four schools. Back then, they said they were closing “failing schools.” But “now they’ve backed off from that notion of failing schools, which was always a little bit bogus to begin with because, Why are those failing more than any others? It was [empirically] indefensible.” (For instance, at one of the closed schools, Guggenheim, which I wrote about here, one-third of the students were homeless. Geoghegan relayed his suspicion to Chicago homelessness experts: maybe some kids counted as “homeless” were, say, doubling up at the home of an aunt. He heard back, “No! No! Those kids who are doubling up with the aunt aren’t counted as homeless. They’re, like, homeless homeless. Like, they don’t know where they’re going to be every night.” What does it mean to say a school serving a population like that, because of its poor test scores, is “failing”?)

So it was they settled upon the argument that the closing schools were “underutilized.”

Which argument one of Tom’s heroic plaintiffs, a woman named Sharise McDaniel, had already demolished on its face. McDaniel is the parent of a child at a school called George Manierre Elementary, which is by the former Carbini-Green housing projects. The advantages of Manierre for its black, impoverished population—it’s across the street from the Marshall Field Homes, where hundreds of the school’s kids live, making the commute rather safe indeed; also, the building is grand and gorgeous—and the disadvantages of moving them—the receiving school is a mile away, across a treacherous gang boundary—were brilliantly reported by the education reporter Linda Lutton for Chicago’s public radio station WBEZ. Manierre, however, with its gorgeous building, happens to be quite close to a bevy of luxurious condominiums where affluent white families live, and whose children go to overcrowded Lincoln Elementary.

McDaniel and her cadre of parents presented a solution at a community meeting. They learned that the supposedly strapped school board was paying hefty money to rent space for the Lincoln kids at DePaul University. The mothers proposed that, if Manierre was indeed underutilized, Lincoln kids could move into their second floor; Manierre kids could stay on the first floor, and—Geoghegan got a mixture of laughs and groans when he reported this one—“they would have separate entrances so they wouldn’t have to see each other!”

A win-win solution—if the point really was filling underutilized schools, and not, say, emptying out a desirable building of undesirable Chicagoans, the better for Rahm Emanuel to serve his affluent constituency.

So at the trial, Geoghegan asked the system’s number-two administrator, a mountebank named Tim Cawley, “‘Why not move the children from Lincoln Elementary into Manierre?’ I’m not going to quote his answer…but the effect of it was, ‘You don’t know how disruptive that is!’ ”

He earned a roar of laughter from our audience at that. Laughing to keep from crying.

The system denies that it’s placing such kids under physical risk. And yet it plans to spend $7 million a year on a “safe passage” system to protect them. Geoghegan now turns indignant: “The children are going under guard, though gang territory, another one or two or more miles to their new schools. For a worse education experience on all counts…there’s this trauma, not only of all this displacement, [but of] losing all your teachers because they’re all being laid off…. What’s the payoff for this? There is no payoff for it. And the board has no basis to believe these closings are doing any good for the children.”

And yet the judge ruled there was no proof kids “would suffer substantial harm as a result of the school closures.”

So what’s the inspiring part? The solidarity. Noted Geoghegan in our Q&A, “It’s interesting how many middle class white parents have been radicalized by this. They didn’t start that way. But the more they deal with the board, the more they realize that, with the minority children on the South and West Sides, they’re fighting the same battle against a really dysfunctional bureaucracy which just does not work.”

Watch this space. I’ll be writing more about what happens next. It could get ugly—and interesting.

Rick Perlstein writes about the resurgent protest movement in Chicago that is fighting back against Rahm Emanuel’s austerity agenda.