Politics & Rule
American Idealism
In his 1998 survey of human history, The Way of the World, David Fromkin writes of Prohibition in the United States thus:
The experiment proved to be a disaster. Human nature resisted it. The inability of the government to enforce the laws against alcohol brought about a general collapse of law and order in such cities as Chicago in the 1920s. In the 1930s the law and the constitutional amendment were repealed, and order was restored. (215)
This observation reminds me of both drug policy and immigration policy in the United States. We legislate social change and then are surprised when it doesn’t occur or law and order come under threat. Fromkin is on to something when he writes, “Prohibition was an extreme symptom of a general American view that anything can be changed by passing a law, a view that ignores rooted realities of human nature” (215). This idealism is also evident in our foreign policy.
Paradoxically, we used to criticize the Soviet Union for its utopian attempt to remake human nature as it strove to realize the Communist dreams of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. While it took some American idealism to overcome the Soviet threat, it also took hard-nosed realism. Where would we be now if we had decided to turn the Cold War into a shooting war in the name of an idea called democracy?
Presidential Campaigns and Leadership
Hillary Clinton likes to talk about her years of experience and how she will be ready for office from day one, should she win the Democratic nomination and then make it all the way to the White House. If she wins the nomination, I’ll vote for her, but I’m not buying the argument that Obama has not demonstrated some good leadership skills. Take, for instance, his and Clinton’s respective presidential campaigns, which are non-trivial operations. Obama emerged from Super Tuesday in a dead heat with Clinton and then managed to bring about an impressive string of consecutive wins. Clinton, by contrast, has slipped. In Friday’s Christian Science Monitor, Linda Feldmann writes,
What happened? On Clinton’s part, her straits represent a massive failure of planning and organization, analysts say. Her campaign operated on the assumption she would have the nomination effectively locked up with the 22 contests on Feb. 5, and it spent accordingly. The lack of a Plan B has left her scrambling for cash and organizing late in the post-Super Tuesday contests.
This situation says something significant about Clinton’s and Obama’s respective leadership skills. Now if only Michelle Obama would stop saying that her husband is the first reason she ever had to be proud of her country.
Excitement about the Obama Campaign
My son, who is in the eleventh grade, has long supported Senator Obama, but now he is even making phone calls on behalf of the Obama campaign. It does my heart good to see youth get excited and even hopeful about politics in this way. Sure, my son didn’t grow up on Watergate and defeat in Vietnam, as I did, but his generation was exposed to other things that could be expected to cause cynicism, namely the scandals surrounding Clinton’s sex life and Congress’s ridiculous decision to impeach him. The way that Bush came to the White House the first time or the U.S. started the war in Iraq could also be expected to make youth feel cynical and powerless. Instead though, there are people like my son who have decided that cynicism has no place in their lives or this country’s political future. Good for them.
Ron Paul: Paranoid Racist
James Kirchick published a piece called Angry White Man in The New Republic on January 8th. Kirchick waded through some three decades' worth of Ron Paul’s newsletters, which he quotes extensively. I do not want to repeat the inflammatory racist and paranoid language he found, but Kirchick’s summary of the newsletters' source value bears repeating.
What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing–but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.
Normally I would just ignore a right-wing crank like Paul, but he’s been gaining too much respectable attention lately. I’ve also seen well-meaning opponents of the Iraq War support him who would be horrified by his decades-long history of racism and fear-mongering. The more blog posts about this subject the better.
Maybe the mainstream media will finally pick up on it for the presidential debates. Who knows? Maybe Ron Paul’s fellow Republicans will show some backbone and call him out on this too. Or are they afraid of losing the votes' of Paul’s supporters after he loses the primaries? Something needs to happen. As Kirchick writes,
Ron Paul is not going to be president. But, as his campaign has gathered steam, he has found himself increasingly permitted inside the boundaries of respectable debate. He sat for an extensive interview with Tim Russert recently. He has raised almost $20 million in just three months, much of it online. And he received nearly three times as many votes as erstwhile front-runner Rudy Giuliani in last week’s Iowa caucus. All the while he has generally been portrayed by the media as principled and serious, while garnering praise for being a “straight-talker.”
The truth about this man deserves the widest possible audience.
See also Selections from Ron Paul's Newsletters. Hat tips to Deborah Lipstadt for pointing out Kirchick's article in her blog and Ian Thal for pointing out the separate piece summarizing highlights from the newsletters.