Category: History

Mr Fish

Recent history, that is. That’s an awfully consistent trend for the Democrats, regardless of how well or poorly the Republicans are doing. Curious.

via DKos

A meditation by David Kaiser.

A new era?

Obama, however, will if he wins take over the government of the most divided country since 1860—in some ways, more polarized even than at that time.

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The Republican Party will remain after November perhaps the most rigidly disciplined and narrowly based party in American history. Even the opposition crises in the two previous great crises in American life included a much broader range of opinions than today’s Republicans.

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Just yesterday the Wall Street Journal editorial page lamented that the Democrats may be stronger than they have been since 1933 (they should have said 1935) or 1965, and suggested that the country would not vote them back if they realized this. In fact they will not be that strong—their majorities were much larger then—but in any case we will not be going all the way back either to the beginning of the last crisis (when 25% of the population was unemployed) or to the end of the last High. Obama is winning above all because he wants to usher in a less ideological age. That is a gamble, but so far he is winning it. But if he succeeds as President it will be with new measures, new men and women, and new rhetoric. No past, however glorious, returns—because the new generations that make the future do not remember it or revere it. The great crisis will lay the old order to rest and create a new one. That is the way of all organic life.

Paul Krugman.

Unbelievable. Sarah Palin finished her closing remarks by quoting Ronald Reagan:

It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.

When did he say this? It was on a recording he made for Operation Coffeecup — a campaign organized by the American Medical Association to block the passage of Medicare. Doctors’ wives were supposed to organize coffee klatches for patients, where they would play the Reagan recording, which declared that Medicare would lead us to totalitarianism.

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Wednesday is Constitution Day; here’s Sandy Levinson (Our Undemocratic Constitution).

Faux Originalism and “Constitution Day”

Many originalists claim to feel bound not only by the text of the Constitution (which would make them only textualists, but also by the values, aims, and aspirations of the Founders). But surely one of the central values of the Founders is that no one like Sarah Palin would ever be a candidate for the presidency (and not only because she is a woman, a piece of bigotry that would also, of course, extend for other reasons to Barack Obama). Rather, she is basically uneducated, inexperienced, and incurious about the world at large. She is no Abligail Adams or Mercy Warren, let alone James Madison or John Adams.

I have many times over the past two years, since publishing my book Our Undemocratic Constitution, been reminded, sometimes with a tone of withering condescension that ours is a “republic” and not a “democracy,” and we should keep it that way. There is, of course, some truth to that, especially if by “republican” one means a concern for public values instead of partisan interests, deemed “factions” in the 10th Federalist. Madison obviously saw no way to get read of factions, but he did believe, naively, that one might tame them through a system of representative government that would try to assure “virtuous” leaders.

Madison’s vision, of course, collapsed very quickly. Some would say 1800, though this depends on whether one shares Hamilton’s view that Burr was out-and-out unfit to be president. Others would say 1828, with the election of Andrew Jackson. I’d be more tempted to go with 1840, when William Henry Harrison, who ran under the famous slogan, Tippacanoe and Tyler too, picked the egregious John Tyler for no other reason than supplying “electoral balance,” even though he had no apparent qualifications for the presidency (unlike every earlier VP, including, one might well argue, Burr) and was a disaster as President. What is striking is that we no longer even both to lament the decline of “republican” values; instead, too many of us have become little Karl Roves and Lee Atwaters, luxuriating in the “cleverness” of political operatives who indeed care only about partisan political success and nothing else.

In any event, there is something passing strange about (some) contemporary “originalists” clutching the Founders to their bosom at the same time they celebrate John McCain’s ostensible “sagacity” in choosing the patently unqualified Sarah Palin because it might provide him an electoral boost. This is not to deny the accuracy of the analysis; it is only to say that no member of the Founding Generation would recognize such a motive (and character) as being the reason they gave for establishing a new Constitution dedicated to maintaining a “Republican Form of Government.”

Benjamin Franklin famously said that we were given a republic and the question was whether we could “keep it.” The answer is clear. Not only do we not have anything we should be willing to call a 21st century democracy; we also don’t have anything we should be willing to call a “republic.” Something to think about as we prepare to “celebrate” Constitution Day on Wednesday….. Whatever it is that (some of us) celebrate, it has almost nothing to do with 1787-88, for good (the substantial overcoming of sexism and racism) and for ill (fill in the blank with one’s favorite critique).

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke.

Helmuth von Moltke was at a meeting at the Foreign Minstry in Berlin with twenty-four men. They discussed a legal decree that would expropriate the property of deported Jews. Twenty-four of the twenty-five wanted to approve the decree; Moltke opposed it.

The men were chameleons, Moltke wrote his wife: “In a healthy society, they look healthy, in a sick one, like ours, they look sick. And really they are neither one nor the other. They are mere filler.”

It was November 8, 1941.

David Kaiser: Facts are stubborn things

A couple of days ago President Bush ignited a firestorm before the Knesset by attacking those who support talking with hostile foreign leaders as practitioners of appeasement. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939,” he said, “an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.” White House officials have identified the Senator as William Borah of Idaho, one of the longest-serving members in the history of that body, a one-time chairman and long-time ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a committed isolationist who opposed American entry into the First World War (and died in January 1940 before entry into the Second had become a major issue.)

That fact that Borah was a Republican has been cited as ironic by several commentators. David Kaiser suggests that the entire business is apparently a fabrication (unlike, it also appears, the suggestions of Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush’s financial connections with the Nazi war machine).

The purported quote from Borah has been a favorite of neoconservative Charles Krauthammer for some time. There is, however, one problem. While I cannot claim to have researched the issue exhaustively, the Proquest database of major newspapers includes not one shred of evidence that Borah ever said any such thing—and an enormous amount of evidence that he never would have.
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More to the point, however, Borah was anything but naive about Hitler and was in fact a violent opponent of Fascism, Nazism, and the Munich agreement reached by the western powers. A selection from the reports of major newspapers during the 1930s leaves no doubt about this. Like many isolationists, he blamed Hitler’s rise largely on the Versailles treaty (an opinion which I personally do not share), but he never minced words about the nature of Hitler’s regime. In 1934 he referred to Nazism as “the malign influence which the world now contemplates with amazement and horror.” In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, he violently attacked Mussolini and Hitler for making war on the government of Spain and argued that domestic Fascism was a greater threat than domestic Communism. In a radio address in late March 1939, after Roosevelt had proposed amendments to the neutrality act to allow the British and French to buy arms, Borah argued that those powers did not deserve our help. “What they are contending for is the realization of their imperialistic scheme and not the destruction of Nazism,” he said. He attacked the British for failing to oppose the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931 and for letting Hitler know they would not object to the annexation of Austria a year earlier (an apparent reference to the famous Halifax mission of late 1937.) “During the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia,” he said, “no mention was ever made of the teachings of Nazism and the dangers of enlarging its influence in Europe. ” He also criticized the British and French for failing to make any provision for the many anti-Nazis who had fallen under German sovereignty as a result of the Munich agreement. In the absence of a direct, sourced quote—which no one so far has produced—I cannot believe that this man would have made the statement that our President attributed to him.