The Conservative Media: A History Lesson

I don't mean to pick on Eric Alterman, but the same issue of The Nation that saw him feuding over the reputation of I. F. Stone finds him in his own column drawing comparisons between President Obama and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Alterman believes that Obama should emulate FDR's pragmatic boldness, his willingness to experimentation without regard for ideology. At the same time, he notes what he sees as an important difference between Roosevelt's time and Obama's.

FDR did not face an army of lobbyists seeking to thwart his every move. Perhaps more important, he did not have to succeed in today's media environment, in which nut cases like Limbaugh/O'Reilly/Hannity manage to set the terms of debate. As sage Washington Post pundit E. J. Dionne Jr. explains, the MSM's ["mainstream media"] proclivity for giving the 'right wing's rants ... wall-to-wall airtime' gives its ignorance and recidivisim legitimacy despite its failure under Bush as well of its lack of support among the larger public.

Without commenting on Alterman's policy recommendations, I have to correct his implication that conservatives weren't prominent in the "MSM" of the 1930s. If anything, the mainstream media of the time, the press, had a much stronger conservative bias than the MSM of today. My authority for this claim is the midcentury press critic A. J. Liebling, the man who coined the famous statement, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." I'm currently looking through the latest Library of America edition of Liebling's works, which includes a collection of articles on the news media itself. In his account, Republican or conservative bias in the press during the FDR years and after was overwhelming. He cites statistics from the American Newspaper Publishers Association showing that 84% of newspaper publishers as of 1953 were Republicans -- many of whom angrily denied charges of bias during the last Presidential election. Publishers' concern for maximizing profits while dealing with militant unions, Liebling explains, inclined publishers to the right even if they started to the left. He quotes Joseph Medill Patterson, the founder of the New York Daily News, who described a career arc for papers and publishers that Patterson followed himself.

Newspapers start when their owners are poor, and take the part of the people, and so they build up a large circulation, and, as a result, advertising. That makes them rich, and they begin, most naturally, to associate with other rich men -- they play golf with one, and drink whisky with another, and their son marries the daughter of a third. They forget about the people, and then their circulation dries up, then their advertising, and then their paper becomes decadent.

I don't know to whom Patterson married off his own children, though I do know that the Daily News is still going, maybe even strong, today, but he was right about his own eventual tilt to the right. The paper is no longer conservative (except on certain details of foreign policy), but when I was growing up it was still pretty rabid on the Right. Something did change during the 1970s that created the impression that the news media had developed a liberal bias. It may have had something to do with the mergers and closings of so many papers during the period Liebling describes. He feared that the consolidation of the press business would only reinforce the Republican bias he decried. But as more towns and cities became one-paper territories, there was probably commercial pressure on all papers to lose their partisan identity in order to maximize readership by attracting former readers of dead papers. As journalists tell it, this trend encouraged greater objectivity rather than bias. But what they called objectivity proved in practice to be an adversarial relationship to the Powers That Be that became apparent when the news media turned on Richard Nixon in the 1970s. Nearly all media were inclined to knock the party in power, or at least the party leaders, and since the Republican party dominated the White House through most of this period (it held the Presidency for 28 of the 40 years from 1969 through 2009) the GOP came in most often for criticism. I won't deny that an influx of journalism majors from sometimes radicalized colleges influenced the content of journalism during this period, but publishers had no motive to discipline or simply crush the new generation the way the press barons of previous generations would have.

In the FDR years, newspapers were more obviously mouthpieces for their publishers or owners than they are now. Press barons like William Randolph Hearst were as much celebrities in those days as people like Rush Limbaugh are today. Hearst became an extremely reactionary critic of FDR and had newspapers and newsreels all over the country to disseminate his opinions. The weekly news magazines like Time were similarly biased, with Time's Henry Luce nearly as severe a reactionary as Heart. Hearst differed from Limbaugh mainly in the fact that he relied on others to speak or write for him. But the pre-eminence of people like Limbaugh may signal a reversion of the news media back to an earlier state of partisanship. On a business level, Limbaugh isn't as powerful as Hearst because he owns no radio stations (nor any media except, I presume, his own website) and must always negotiate with others (albeit from a position of strength) in order to broadcast his opinions. But the rise of political talk radio in general revived the commercial potential of overt bias in news commentary, a potential now tapped by liberals as well as conservatives with Keith Olbermann in the lead. Whether or not Limbaugh or other critics were right that ideological bias pervaded the news media of the 1980s, he might agree that whatever "liberal" bias he perceived wasn't commercially motivated, while his own is. I don't mean that Limbaugh affects conservativism only to make money, but that he realized that there was a market for his own conservative bias that wasn't being satisfied, but could satisfy his own ambition for fame and fortune. In any event, my point has been that, as Alterman probably knows, Limbaugh's emergence was something new only to the extent that he relied on radio rather than print media. He is Hearst without any middlemen, without the expense of detailed reporting or the expensive mechanics of printing ink onto paper. Hearst himself was just the latest of generations of publishers who started papers primarily for propaganda purposes, dating back to the birth of the Republic.

Every so often someone digs up a quote from some hysterical contemporary critic of the New Deal warning of the disasters that FDR's "socialism" was going to inflict on the country. These are usually dug up by Democrats and liberals who want to refute by analogy today's reactionaries who accuse Obama of "socialism." Those quotes ought to have convinced people that Limbaugh and Hannity had their counterparts seventy years ago. Columnists like Alterman may want to argue that Limbaugh and his ilk are worse or at least more stupid than the reactionaries of the 1930s, and I can understand the anger that drives them to say so, but I see no reason to believe them. If he offers the prominence of the radio talkers as an excuse for Obama's failure to experiment as boldly as Alterman would like, I think he should try again.

Major Cook and the "Birthers"

The talk of subterranean quarters of the internet today is the news that the military has revoked an order deploying Army Reserve Major Stefan Frederick Cook to Afghanistan after Cook, who had volunteered explicitly for Afghan service in May, challenged the legitimacy of President Obama as Commander in Chief. He was apparently instigated to make the challenge by Orly Taitz, who has emerged as a leader of what is called the "birther" movement. These are the people who continue to question Obama's eligibility to serve as President on the suspicion that he was born, not in Hawaii as a verified birth certificate claims, but in Kenya. The Constitution requires the President to have been born in the United States. Taitz contends that the birth certificate verified in Hawaii is inadequate documentation, and demands that Obama release what she calls a "vault" birth certificate, which she suspects will reveal the damning truth about his disqualifying alien birth.

Taitz represents an organization called the Defend Our Freedoms Foundation. This is a conservative-populist group that advocates more military spending, greater border security against illegal immigration, lower taxes and protectionist trade policies. This document details their case against Obama's eligibility, which includes the claim that, had he even been born in this country (as most people assume) he lost his citizenship as a child during the time he lived in Indonesia. They even question whether Barack Hussein Obama is his real name, asserting that he was registered in Indonesian schools under the name Barry Soetero while claiming to find no evidence of a legal change of name to the one we know. You'll notice, however, that their point-by-point attack is riddled with equivocations; they "suspect" this or that based on supposedly missing documentation. Taitz would no doubt say that this is exactly why the government should release all the information she requests, but it looks like the stand-or-fall point of the whole claim is the validity of the Hawaiian records, and on this point, since even most conservative media concede their validity, the DOFF are voices howling in a wilderness, everyone else's refusal to respect their suspicions only reconfirming and deepening them.

No reason has been given yet for the revocation of Major Cook's deployment orders, but Taitz considers it a breakthrough moment for her cause. Her hopeful assumption is that the Pentagon gave in to Cook because they could not prove what he demanded proven: Obama's legitimacy according to the standards set by Taitz and the "birthers." Inevitably, conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this, since the question of why the Pentagon backed down, if this action can be so characterized, will hang in the air for a long time. For some people, questioning Obama's citizenship is probably just a way of disguising their more instinctual suspicion that his race alone makes him unfit for his office. But there were people running around last year also questioning John McCain's eligibility to serve as President, their questions having something to do with whether the Republican was born in the Panama Canal Zone, so we may now be dealing only with a more popular form of a suspicion of political power so absolute and terrible that those who share it may feel that no one is qualified to be President.

Public Enemies

"How many persons know that there is at this moment a national police force, or, if they know it, realize what this implies?" That's what Harper's magazine asked in 1934 when confronted with the rise to prominence of the Federal Bureau of Investigation after the killings that year of John Dillinger, "Pretty Boy" Floyd and "Baby Face" Nelson. Responding to legislation that had increased federal crime-fighting powers, the liberal monthly called it all "unnecessary or dangerous." And this was before many people had any image of J. Edger Hoover in their minds.

This tidbit comes from Bryan Burrough's Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. Burrough published the book in 2004, but I'm reading it only now because the current movie loosely based on the book renewed an old interest I had in the country bandits and other criminals of the 1930s. When I was a kid, one of my treasured possessions was a copy of Bloodletters and Badmen, an encyclopedia of famous criminals. Reading Burrough's book, I found myself recalling bits of history I had forgotten, along with much that was new to me. Michael Mann's movie doesn't do the book justice, focusing as it does on John Dillinger and Melvin Purvis at the expense of most of the other bandits and G-men who figure in Burrough's story. The film isn't bad, but it could have been much richer if it dealt straight with the material instead of indulging in Mann's personal archetypes of brooding criminals and lawmen.

I've reviewed the movie over at Mondo 70, but the book deserves some notice here because of the lesson it teaches about law, order and government. As the quote from Harper's illustrates, the growth of federal law enforcement has always provoked anxiety among Americans, whether they be liberals or libertarians. Burrough notes that to this day historians have questioned whether the crime wave of 1933-34 was as grave as Hoover claimed, or whether he exaggerated the menace to justify more power for himself. Without whitewashing Hoover or his glory-hunting underling Melvin Purvis, Burrough makes a case that there had to be an escalation of government power to deal with the country bandits. It had been too easy earlier for bank or train robbers to evade pursuers simply by crossing state lines. That had been true for a long time, but by the 1930s the bandits often outgunned and outraced the state or local police they faced, boasting faster cars and better weapons. Dillinger's gang was able to raid small-town armories with little opposition in the worst days. Reading of these depredations reminded me of news from Iraq after the invasion, when law and order had seemed to fail completely. Given that, in America, all this was taking place during the depths of the Great Depression, you couldn't blame people for thinking that the country was sinking into lawlessness or fearing that all levels of government were incompetent to deal with the small-but-deadly robbery gangs. Technological progress had given individuals and small groups an advantage over traditionally limited governments. Burrough shows that it took an increase in manpower, in bureaucratic organization, in surveillance and in both firepower and firearms training to defeat the country bandits. The War on Crime came with abuses of power and selective prosecutions (Hoover was long reluctant to go after the Mafia), but Burrough argues that it was a necessary part of the New Deal program of reviving people's confidence in government. Franklin Roosevelt himself believed that it would help his own reelection chances if the federal government could prove itself capable of subduing the robber gangs.

For some people, it's still an open question whether the expansion of federal power was worth it, but the fact is that by January 1935 almost all the high-profile bandits were dead or in prison. Burrough describes a trial-and-error process marred by embarrassing, sometimes lethal mistakes that nevertheless resulted in an efficient force that insured that Dillinger, Nelson et al had no successors. It didn't end crime, but it did restore a sense of order that had been threatened by the country bandits as objects of both fear and perverse admiration. Government had to evolve to meet a menace that had itself evolved out of social change. An absolute aversion to governmental evolution would offer no answer to new challenges like those presented by the Thirties bandits except for more of the same that had failed already. A presumption that government has inherent limits only leaves government increasingly limited when social change creates new opportunities for lawlessness. People concerned only with the dangers of government ignore dangers rising elsewhere at everyone else's peril. There are worse things than an excess of government. Let's hope it doesn't take hands-on experience for people to learn that lesson.

Still Fighting Ancient Battles

The letter column of the newest issue of The Nation features an unhappy exchange between Eric Alterman, the magazine's media columnist, and Max Holland, a historian who objects to Alterman's characterization of his research on the case of I. F. Stone. Dead twenty years and probably best known as the author of a book about Socrates, Stone was a radical journalist and self-publishing muckraker who has become an object of fresh controversy because of the emergence of evidence identifying him as someone who provided intelligence to the Soviet Union during the 1930s. While downplaying the significance of whatever Stone did, Holland complains that Alterman has blindly denounced the new findings while indicting the character of Holland as a researcher by lumping him with right-wing cranks, and Alterman responds by doing just what Holland complained of.

It's a matter of indifference to me whether I. F. Stone had anything to do with the U.S.S.R., but I know that right-wingers have tried to wreck his reputation for decades, while liberals and left-wingers have doggedly defended it. Both sides act as if the stakes were higher than they seem. It reminds me of the infinitely-renewable brouhaha over Alger Hiss and whether he was a spy for the Commies. The Nation is a last bastion of belief in Hiss's innocence while most historians concede that he was guilty of something. Again, I wonder what the fuss is about, sixty years after the fact in Hiss's case. Why are Hiss and Stone considered relevant topics in modern magazines of political opinion? Just saying that one side or the other is objectively interested in The Truth doesn't seem to explain it adequately.

These are instances of the almost infinite scope of the conflict within the ideological bipolarchy of "left" and "right," with each side hoping that history will vindicate their present-day positions. On the "right," it remains important to prove that the Communist threat was as grave as claimed by such people as McCarthy, Nixon or Goldwater. It would be a long-sought coup to prove once and for all that a great critic of McCarthyism and the Cold War like Stone was not just wrong to belittle the Commie threat, but was consorting with Commies himself. The "left" has an equal interest in disproving this. To vindicate Stone against these charges would prove, to them yet again, that the Commie threat was a chimera conjured by liars in order to smear all dissenters from the Cold War agenda. Likewise, because the Hiss case made Richard Nixon a national figure, there's always been a desire to vindicate Hiss in order to discredit Nixon and the anti-communist movement he came to represent. Because the "left" seeks to minimize the influence of the U.S.S.R. over American leftists, they're hypersensitive to any charge of spying for Moscow and hopeful that most if not all such charges are false.

Why should disputes over whether people spied for a state that no longer exists matter today, except to scholars in archives? The answer is that the spectre of Bolshevism still haunts the left-right debate. There are people on the "right" who believe that any "leftism" is tantamount to hardcore vanguard-party Leninism, with all its awful consequences. They see a continuity between the leftism of the past and that of the present, and the "left" is partly to blame for that because too many people in the past were reluctant to denounce the U.S.S.R. because they thought doing so would discredit leftism as a whole. Today's leftists keep the ball rolling by going out of their way to defend people like Stone. By doing so, they associate themselves with the left of the past and open themselves to charges of still being soft on Bolshevism. What we need today are people (and here I'll leave labels aside) who will oppose the excesses of capitalism and the corporate corruption of government on the basis of today's evidence. We need a generation that will leave Lenin behind once and for all and leave anyone who had the least sympathy for him and his nation on the proverbial ash-heap of history. We ought to have authors and activists who are willing to concede every charge against Bolshevism and Leninism, because the quicker that's done the sooner we can move on to what's wrong with multinational capitalism or the American Bipolarchy. The guilt or innocence of I. F. Stone is a question for historians to answer objectively, without ideological axes to grind on his tombstone. For everyone else, it's a waste of time.

Aborting Sotomayor?

The news reports that a small group of anti-abortion protesters, including the original "Jane Roe" of Roe v. Wade fame, since converted to the opposite side, briefly disrupted Judge Sotomayor's confirmation hearing today. This outburst coincides with a fresh attempt to whip up the anti-abortion community against the nominee. The last I saw, abortion was considered a non-issue this time because Sotomayor had made rulings in favor of Bushite laws that constrained abortion rights. But there is a huge hostility to her in some quarters of the Republican/conservative community, and I suspect that those elements are trying to stir up the rest.

A fax arrived in our office this afternoon bearing the letterhead of "TheCall to Action." This is, in the writer's own description, "a leading pro-life, pro-family" voice. That voice today was boldfaced in its headline: "EVANGELICAL LEADER: 'WAKE UP CONSERVATIVES.'" That leader is TheCall to Action's own Lou Engle, who warns that "very little attention has been paid to [Sotomayor's] views on important social issues that Christians are concerned about, especially abortion."

I'd like to think that was because the concerns of Christians as such are irrelevant to the nomination or confirmation of a Supreme Court justice. But Engle is right to note that the nominee has been characterizes as a "moderate" on reproductive rights. He just happens to think differently. Sotomayor, he notes, has been a member of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, and that entity "has issued six briefs in support of abortion rights and fought efforts on numerous occasions to overturn the landmark Roe v.Wade case." Voila: guilt by association. Never mind the more relevant precedents in the judge's judicial record, the basis for her "moderate" reputation. The fact that she woke up at least one morning in her life not committed absolutely to overturning Roe makes her suspect in Engle's eyes.

There follows the usual reactionary invocation of Martin Luther King's sentence about "content of character," urging certain readers to overlook the historical event of Sotomayor's nomination in favor of scrutiny of the "character" of her position on reproductive rights.

The content of her character must be judged by the Declaration of Independence which declares 'We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.' We contend that a child in the womb is life and is protected by our founding documents and must be upheld by justices of the Supreme Court.

So says Lou Engle, even though he quotes only one "founding document," and one that lacks the force of law. So that we may judge the content of his character, here's his own more elaborate description of TheCall to Action: "TheCall is a divinely initiated, multi-racial, multi-generational, and cross-denominational gathering to corporate prayer and fasting. TheCall is committed to mobilizing people from all across America to gather together to petition God for His undeserved mercy for our nation in 12-hour solemn assemblies." Well, good luck with that, but as I don't notice much progress on that front, it might not be such a great idea to take one's eyes off the prize in order to cast a dubious gaze on Judge Sotomayor.

Sotomayor Without Prejudice?

Senator Sessions of Alabama is concerned that Judge Sotomayor, if confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, might determine cases according to ideological or ethnic prejudices. He confesses his suspicions in an op-ed piece that appeared in the Albany paper this morning -- before he had an opportunity to ask the judge any questions under oath. This isn't the first time Sessions, a Republican, has expressed his reservations. Hasn't he announced his own prejudices in advance of a fair hearing? Isn't he guilty of exactly the offense he accuses Sotomayor of? Could he be more guilty?

His complaint focuses on the usual quotations that seem to identify Sotomayor as a judge who will decide certain cases according to ethnic solidarities or pure feelings grounded in personal experience. This prospect troubles Sessions, who frets as if nothing like this had ever happened in the United States before. He paints a heartwarming word picture of the goddess of justice, whose dedication to the principle of "equal justice under law" is illustrated by the blindfold she wears. Since I presume Sessions to be a Christian, probably a conservative one, I'm surprised to find him guilty of anthropomorphism bordering on idolatry. Justice, he ought to recall, is not literally a woman wearing a blindfold. Nor need justice be "blind" in the same sense of the word in every single case that comes to a judge's attention. Dispute that point if you wish, but don't try to dispute that Sessions in his article is being, perhaps inadvertently, a little disingenuous. A historically illiterate person might read his comments and assume that Justice has been properly blind throughout American history until the dangerous moment when the President nominated Judge Sotomayor. Everyone should know better, and our judges themselves, presumably knowing better, cannot be as "blind" as Sessions might like when it comes to cases that pit the interests of a onetime-oppressed class against mere individuals.

What Sessions wants is an end to the compensatory period in American history, the time when the government has promoted members of minority groups once victimized by blatant, legal prejudice, often inevitably at the expense of individuals who believe themselves entitled by merit to advancement in a "fair" society. He isn't wrong to desire this. The point of "affirmative action" and other compensatory policies is to accustom all Americans to one another's presence in every sector of social life in order to dissolve prejudices. The ultimate goal isn't a permanent apportionment of jobs or other social benefits on a group basis, but the education of society to a point when everyone agrees that prejudice no longer exists and meritocracy can at last prevail. The tricky part has always been to determine when that moment has arrived. It's tricky as long as groups disagree. People like Sessions claim that the moment came some time ago, if they even conceive that compensatory measures were necessary. Some will say that the moment has come despite retaining prejudices. Some in groups that benefit from compensatory policies will say the moment has not come, or will not come for a long time, and some who say that will be prejudiced in turn. They don't or won't trust the majority group to judge them fairly, or they may have rejected a meritocratic concept of fairness altogether. Neither group has the right to unilaterally call for either an end or an indefinite extension of the compensatory period. That's one reason why a "balanced" court that reflects a variety of those dreaded life experiences is probably a good idea, and why those life experiences are at least sometimes relevant to deliberation.

As I wrote at the time of the nomination, the appeal to life experience is a double-edged sword. If we concede that life experiences enable judges to decide certain cases better than those with different experiences, it follows automatically that the same life experiences may lead the same judges to decide other cases wrongly. To ask why all-white Courts decided such cases as Dred Scott or Plessy v. Ferguson wrongly, by modern standards, is to answer the question at the same time. The remedy is not to ban whites from the Court, but to make sure that there's a balance of life-experiences while society continues its work of integration until we reach the point when we need racial balance no more than we now need the sectional balance that seemed necessary generations ago.

Lincoln for Liberal Realists

The current New Republic cover-features an enormous review article by historian Sean Wilentz to mark the Lincoln bicentennial. Though his heroes of American history are usually Democrats or precursors of the Democratic party, he admires Lincoln, but he's concerned that too many people today admire the 16th President for the wrong reasons. He finds the prevailing misrepresentation of Lincoln typical of a time that has made Barack Obama President. He doesn't really criticize Obama himself this time, but it may be recalled that during last year's primary season, Wilentz was a strong supporter of Hilary Clinton and a stronger critic of people who he thought adored Obama due to a naive infatuation with his rhetorical powers. This viewpoint carries over into his Lincoln essay, because his major complaint about today's Lincoln worshipers is that they make too much of his admittedly admirable rhetoric while neglecting the necessary political skills that allowed Lincoln to advance his liberating agenda.

Here is Wilentz on Presidential rhetoric:

Presidential rhetoric certainly can persuade, placate, or inspire people to action, whether the presidents actually write their own words (as Lincoln did) or rely on speechwriters and cabinet members. But just as presidential language need not be eloquent in any classic literary sense to get things done, so eloquence is no guarantee that the words will be effective, or even right.

True enough. It seems wise at this time to warn Obama's most ardent supporters that they can't expect him to win everyone over with brilliant speeches. But Wilentz also worries that too many liberals today seem to oscillate between an idealism that idolizes the bully pulpit and a radicalism impatient with resistance and tempted toward coercion. He reads this into Lincoln biographies that make heroes out of the abolitionists and other radicals who constantly pressured Lincoln to take extreme or arbitrary actions in the name of their idea of justice. These writers make activists like Frederick Douglass the moral superiors of Lincoln, mainly because they demanded instantaneous, unconditional abolition of slavery when Lincoln was more tentative. Wilentz makes a valid point when he observes that radicals aren't accountable to anyone in the same way that a politician is, and he makes a more valid point when he reminds readers that Lincoln considered himself constrained by the Constitution, though the constraints did come off over time.

But Wilentz is clearly building toward a moral applicable to modern politics, so the question isn't whether President Obama should or shouldn't claim extraordinary powers to take emergency actions. Wilentz is trying to teach Obama's supporters how to be political, and not to despise it. He thinks that Obama benefited across the board last year with a dissatisfaction with politics as such that he seems to regard as immature.

Many present-day American historians assume that political calculation, opportunism, careerism, and duplicity negate idealism and political integrity....they charge that the similarities between the corrupt major political parties overwhelm their differences....they equate purposefulness with political purity. Consequently, their writings slight how all great American leaders, including many of the outsiders they idealized, have relied on calculation, opportunism, and all the other democratic political arts in order to advance their loftiest and most controversial goals.

Here's another dose of the same toward the end:

Two of the major objects of enmity in this current of reformism are the political parties (with their dark hidden forces, the professional politicians) and the money-drenched system of campaigning (with its dark hidden forces, the coroprate donors). If only the hammerlock of the two major parties -- or, alternatively, that of the bosses within each party -- can be broken, then the true will of the rank and file, and ultimately of the people, will be unleashed, and principled government will be restored. And if the intrinsically corrupting (or so it is claimed) contributions of big money are ended, and something approximating public financing of elections is installed in its place, then something closer to Lincolnian government of the people, by the people, and for the people will emerge. Right?

Remember, Wilentz offers this paragraph sarcastically. In his mind, he's parodying people who believe that the monetarization of political speech and the persistence of the American Bipolarchy (were he aware of me, I'm sure he'd put my pet term in scare quotes) have harmed the republic. We are all so naive, and we'd probably be dangerous, in his eyes, if we weren't so ineffectual. What makes us ineffectual, as far as Wilentz is concerned, is that we want radical change yet expect that our leaders can make it happen by giving a bunch of speeches. So thinks the Obama voter of his imagination.

In Wilentz's own account, Lincoln's great political triumph is issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and getting re-elected afterward without a full-scale mutiny by soldiers or civilians. He believes that Lincoln's lessons for modern politicians lie in how he prepared public opinion for emancipation by refusing to go to extremes immediately and actually throwing generals under the omnibus who jumped the gun, and by making it clear throughout that his primary objective from the first shots was restoring the Union rather than freeing the slaves so that people would believe him when he finally said that the latter was absolutely necessary to the former end. In this account, that means schmoozing some people, lying to others, and stabbing others yet in the back -- metaphorically only, of course. In other words, for a politician there is no shame in duplicity as long as it furthers a noble end. Go back a couple of block quotes and you'll recall that Wilentz listed duplicity as one of the traits that negate integrity, in idealists' opinion. He's guilty of a little disingenuousness himself when he doesn't add duplicity to his list of "democratic political arts" in the same quote, since practically the only examples of Lincoln's political artfulness that he cites involve duplicity of some sort, whether it's telling radicals that he doesn't intend to emancipate while already planning to do so, in order to shore up conservative support, or making Frederick Douglass feel important and think they are going to be good friends.

I suppose Wilentz makes sense of a kind. If we can't hope to win people over purely with rhetoric, if reasoned arguments will never suffice with some folks, and we won't allow ourselves to force our ideas on people or disregard constitutional constraints on our powers, then politics is going to have to come down to tricking people, or at the very least manipulating them in ways that might seem dishonest to some idealists. Wilentz would have us be less idealistic about means and more realistic about pursuing ideal ends. What this has to do with the two-party system, which he seems to defend implicitly against the idealists, I'm not quite sure. I'm going to guess that Wilentz perfers "big tent" style politics that forces people of disparate beliefs and agendas to work with each other toward goals agreed upon through compromise. If I read him right, then he may imagine the only alternative to the Bipolarchy to be a bunch of ideologically rigid parties that would never do anything but speechify or simply yell at one another until one makes a grab for unconstitutional power. I shouldn't have to say that I can imagine a different alternative, but partisanship itself isn't Wilentz's main concern on this occasion. Our concern should be with his advice to his country. For all I know, he may be right that no great cause can be advanced in this country without tactics that will seem intellectually if not morally dishonest to many people. He invites us to embrace this truth and not be so snooty, but I wonder whether people can stand such a truth being told -- if it is the truth --without losing a little of their faith in democracy as the political system morally superior to all the others.

Now That the Dead are Buried...

Because I work in a newspaper office, I couldn't fully escape the Jackson funeral games. That's a sad statement to make, but they keep the TV tuned to a news channel, and Jackson had been determined to be the dominant news of the day. I don't spend too much time in the newsroom, actually, but I had the dumb luck to be there when Rev. Sharpton spoke. From him I learned that "Michael Jackson taught the world to love," and other audiences might be forgiven for believing, on the strength of Sharpton's oration, that Jackson had freed the slaves and ended Jim Crow while he was at it. The Rev. also observed that, despite all adversities, "Michael Jackson never stopped," but this was indisputably the most fraudulent of his assertions, for if Jackson had not stopped, so to speak, then what was everyone doing in that arena yesterday?

If Michael Jackson had indeed been an example of love to the world, his lessons were lost on the likes of Sharpton, who has spent much of the last fortnight seeming to force the world to love the late entertainer. He pushed his way to the forefront of mourning, not so much as the chief mourner, but as someone determined to enforce general mourning among the entire population. He and others seemed determined as a matter of cultural politics that Jackson should be recognized as at least equal to Elvis Presley, and preferably as greater. Insufficient acknowledgment of Jackson's greatness could be attributed only to one cause, which was why Sharpton kept grumbling about an alleged double standard that subjected Jackson to post-mortem scrutiny of his private life while unnamed others were supposedly exempt. This case was overstated. My childhood recollection of the year 1977 was that Presley's body had barely begun to cool when gossip spread everywhere about his drug use and other follies. It has hardly been different for celebrities since, of all races.

If anything, Sharpton's pre-emptive defensiveness provoked some of the smears he complained about. For him to tell people not to speak ill of someone was practically an invitation to some people to do just that, simply to show that they would not take moral instruction from such a man. Such a thought may even have provoked Rep. King's controversial outburst, which will be forgotten sooner than some believe today. If King had to worry about what black people or Michael Jackson fans thought of him, he probably wouldn't have his current job. In any event, it may just be a vestige of monotheist culture even among secular folk like myself that makes our necks stiffen when someone seems to order us to bow before the idol of the moment. At the same time, some people were going to speak ill of Jackson no matter what, either to play the troll or from a sincere belief that his assumed crimes disqualified him from any public honor. At the same time, cultural politics were in play, especially when it became obvious that the public mourning for Jackson would surpass what had been done for nearly every other entertainer in history. That provoked envy from people who felt that their favorites were greater than Jackson. This was Mr. Duff's attitude when he made a surprise post-retirement appearance in the office yesterday. He's of the generation that revered Elvis, whom he praised for singing actual words, e.g., "You ain't nothin' but a hound dawg." I tried to remind him that "ain't ain't a word," but this advice was lost on him.

Ideally, there's nothing wrong with the idea of respect for the dead and especially respect for a bereaved family. People can think what they like of Michael Jackson, but it really would be unseemly to publicize their opinions while others are honestly heartbroken and in need of consolation. In retrospect, we can play a chicken-and-egg game to decide whether Jackson's detractors or worshippers went overboard first. But once the mourning became a public event with cultural implications, civil society inevitably had to make room for dissenting viewpoints, whether anyone really liked it or not. When so many people insisted that we all loved Michael Jackson, or that we all should, the opposition was entitled to say that they didn't, and even that you shouldn't. It's my own view that individuals can earn infamy and deserve hatred, and that the idea of respect, whether it applies to a dead person or to a political office, must have limits if it isn't meant simply to censor legitimate indignation. I do not accept that respect for the office of the President of the United States requires me not to despise or curse George W. Bush, and I can't accept that respect for the dead requires us to forget the scandals of the famous when people on podiums are declaring them saints. In any event, history is on my side. Of all the histories of Roman emperors written under the empire, it's probably no accident that one of the most scandal-laden, that of Suetonius, is one of the few to survive today. Over time, scandal becomes inseparable from legend, as the legends of Elvis, JFK, Marilyn Monroe and many more will show us. The vices of the poor are forgotten, but the price of fame for many who aspire to it is that their scandals will long outlive them.

America and Russia: No Manifest Destiny

Speaking to Russians today, the President dismissed as a "20th century" viewpoint the notion that the United States and Russia were destined to be rivals or enemies.While he's right to see this as a dated notion, it arguably dates back to the 19th century, or to whenever both countries began espousing their own destinies as great powers. I recall from a history book a cartoon from the late 19th century that showed Uncle Sam and a symbolic Russian figure straddling halves of the world and facing each other. The notion that Russia was a menace pre-dates Bolshevism. It seemed to follow automatically from the facts that Russia was vast and a tyranny. It persists today because of the lingering effect of anti-communist paranoia, which sees Vladimir Putin as a closet commie, because of partly justified perceptions of Putin's own conduct in power, and because of a lingering stereotype of Russians as a people who prefer to live under tyranny. Russia's own sense of destiny also predates the days of Lenin. From the time of Ivan the Terrible, at least, Russians saw themselves as "the third Rome," the rightful center of the Christian world. The Panslavic movement of the 19th century saw Russia as the rightful leader of eastern Europe, and its Orthodox culture as a corrective to the decadence of western Europe. To this day, Russians see themselves as big brothers to peoples as diverse as the Serbs and the South Ossetians, if not their rightful rulers. Their history of invasions by the Nazis, by Napoleon, by the Swedes, even, conditions them to see nearby concentrations of power (e.g. NATO) as more threatening than they seem objectively. Like Russians, Americans see themselves as bearers of a superior culture, destined conquerors of a continent and missionaries of "freedom." The Cold War was the fulfillment of the prophecy of that old cartoon, but now that it's over, is it destined to recur? That's up to Americans and Russians. Each country could stand to adopt a more modest self-image and stop seeing itself as guide or guardian to smaller neighbors. It might be argued that large nations are always going to be aggressive and bump against each other, but Canada is proof to the contrary. The real danger arises when countries see themselves as embodiments of cultural and philosophical ideals that justify them in telling other nations how to conduct their affairs. No nation is destined to turn out that way, but that depends on the opposite of destiny prevailing in both countries -- free will combined with the intelligence to understand the world as it is instead of how any one culture wants it to be.

Not to be Confused with "Wiggers"

So who are these Uighurs and why are they in such an uproar that dozens of them have died in rioting in China over the weekend? I knew them to be Muslims, and I remember that at least one of the student leaders of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations twenty years ago was a Uighur. I knew that the U.S. had been holding some at Guantanamo and that there was an issue over whether they should be delivered to China. But this was an informative article that indicates that the Uighurs are getting the same treatment as the more popular Tibetans. Their land is getting settled by Han Chinese, the majority population, in an alleged effort to end the territory's minority-majority demography, and Uighurs are being encouraged to move outside their traditional territory to find work in what's seen as an attempt to disperse the population. Their religion is under tight government regulation as is that of the Tibetans and the country's Catholics. Basically a lot of Uighurs see themselves as a subject population, fundamentally different from the Han, who ought to have their own country or at least more autonomy within their present country. But because they're Muslims instead of shiny happy Hollywood-friendly Buddhists they don't get the time of day from Americans otherwise eager to point out the outrages of Chinese tyranny. They picked the wrong week to get America's attention this time, but perseverance may pay off in the future.

Big Memorial Tomorrow

I hear it's the death of television news and you'll be able to watch all day long. So Honduran junta dudes: now's your chance to whack Zelaya. Iranian mullahs: throw a blanket over Mousavi and throw him in a hole. Chinese commies: kill the hell out of those Uighurs. No one in America will notice.

This just in: It's rumored that Rev. Sharpton will conduct a human sacrifice of Rep. King for his blasphemy tomorrow. Actually, if something like that were to happen, the event might be worth watching. Nothing against King, though; I just mean human sacrifice in the abstract.

That makes me think: if we offered fans an opportunity to be sacrificed to speed their idol's journey to heaven, do you doubt that someone would volunteer?

Palin: The Next Chapter?

To my surprise, there's still a lot of uncertainty among political commentators over whether Governor Palin has committed political suicide by resigning her office. I shouldn't have been surprised, simply because I know that the media needs material and can't let this issue expire after a weekend. But to me it seems a no-brainer that Palin has shown herself to be a quitter unworthy of the responsibilities of higher office. Some people even dispute the quitter label. On "Morning Joe" today Mika Breszinski dared suggest that Palin is only being called a quitter because she's a woman -- this after prefacing the observation by denying that she's a feminist -- when a male governor would be credited with doing something exciting to shake up the political scene. That might earn the reporter Idiot of the Week instantly, but there'll probably be many opportunities to top her this week.

Uncertainty about the Alaskan's future reflects uncertainty about the future of the Republican Party. Since many observers agree with me that Palin is sure to end up on television, they wonder whether she could use a talk show to gain a higher profile than her office-holding potential rivals and win the 2012 nomination on the raw strength of celebrity. This talk follows from the presumption that Rush Limbaugh is actually the most influential and possibly the most powerful Republican in the country. Limbaugh has never bothered testing his supposed power in any kind of election, however, and it does not follow that ratings are convertible into votes. In any event, were Republicans to nominate Palin because of some yet-to-be-revealed prowess as a talker, would they be any better than they accused Democrats of being last year when they nominated Senator Obama, as his critics saw it, mainly on the strength of his oratory? And even if this career track proves a sure path to the nomination, none of it would refute the argument that she is a quitter. The only way she could have beaten that rap was to say explicitly on July 3 that she was stepping down early in order to run for President. Then she would have won points with people who feel that they don't get their money's worth from officeholders who spend their time running for another job like Senators Obama, McCain and Clinton did last year. She's blown that opportunity, and her babbling about the burden of legal expenses allows everyone to speculate that she resigned to avoid being prosecuted for something. That's an idea that will never go away.

In my view, Palin is finished as a politician. If she isn't, something's wrong with the country. But she isn't finished as a celebrity, and the last week or so has shown us that the American news media is about celebrity more than anything else. For all I know, there may be media people, though not necessarily Mika Breszinski, who want her to run now, on the assumption that any other Republican is boring. That might be true, but Republicans claim not to listen to the media, so they shouldn't start now.