Politics & Rule
- Got News? Make it Quick. — Jeffrey Shaffer argues that too much emphasis on the current news cycle without doing the hard work of studying the past is causing myopia in the media and public at large. (Christian Science Monitor)
- The Five Most Influential Civil War Books of the Last Twenty Years (as if that’s possible Brooks) Kevin Levin attempts the impossible and makes some interesting choices. (Civil War Memory)
- Where Are This War’s Winter Soldiers? — Ronald R. Krebs reflects on why veterans from the current war have so little political influence when compared to their Vietnam predecessors. (Slate)
- War Torn: Five Years — Yes, the Iraq War has been going on long enough to have a history. John Burns reflects on the past five years. (New York Times)
Human Rights in the History Survey
I have been teaching History 100, the one-semester survey of Western Civilization that is required for all students at George Mason University. Yes, really. One semester. As I mentioned earlier, this semester I decided to abandon the old chronological approach and follow a thematic one instead. I organized the course into six major themes, plus an introductory unit on historical thinking. One of those themes was "Politics and Human Rights."
If one looks at Western Civ textbooks or the reading lists from my days as a graduate student, human rights are not going to be an obvious subject of study, especially not for a history survey that can only afford to choose six major topics. Yet they are not only important to learn about, they also offer a powerful integrative vehicle for talking about a variety of issues that have been central to the history of the West since the eighteenth century.
Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and Generational Differences
Times might have changed, but it seems that some didn’t get the memo. It would be nice if Reverend Jeremiah Wright would trust the next generation, embodied by Senator Barack Obama, to do things its way, instead of clinging to his own experiences and ignoring the great changes that this society has undergone. Why is he trying so hard to wreck the Obama campaign anyway? Maybe he doesn’t believe a black man can get elected and now he is in the business of creating a self-fulfilling prophesy? I dunno.
What I do know is that someone else from his earlier generation is also out of touch with what leaders like Obama are saying. Listen to Bill Moyer’s interview with Wright, and you will see Moyers feeling very much at ease with the man. Moyers (born in 1934) is a little older than Wright (born in 1941), but both experienced the Johnson administration and the Civil Rights Movement as young men. I respect their experiences and enjoy hearing their thoughts on where America is at. I also enjoyed Moyer’s conversation with Fred Harris (born in 1930), the only surviving member of the Kerner Commission, which reported on the racism underlying the social inequality that had helped set off the race riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The thing about Moyers’ and Harris’ conversation that stood out most for me, however, was that it appeared on the show right after Moyer’s conversation with Mayer Cory Booker of Newark. Booker (born in 1969) did not speak the language of race and anger. Like Obama (born in 1961), he is very much about members of the community doing what they can to move forward. Watch the video and you’ll understand what I mean. (You’ll also maybe want to see him on the national stage at some point.) Watch too how Moyers is almost mystified by Booker’s perspective, one Obama shares. Moyers expects to see righteous anger in Booker. He wants Booker to blame all of Newark’s woes on racism and demand assistance from the federal government, but Booker refuses to follow that path. This conversation made clear to me that a vast gulf separates my generation (I am forty-five) from Moyers’. It also made me glad that leaders such as Obama and Booker are out there.
Obama understands the differences between the experiences of his generation and those of Wright’s. Wright might too, but he seems unwilling to trust the next generation to do the right thing. Instead he is out there doing what he seems to feel is truth-telling, that is, trying to wreck the very real chances that a former member of his congregation has to become the next president. Yet if he has done his job as the pastor of his congregation, he can trust those he helped bring up in his church to do the right thing. Time to let go, Reverend Wright, and give Senator Obama a chance to do it his way.
Yet Wright seems trapped in the experiences of his own generation. He seems unable to acknowledge that Obama’s generation has undergone a different set of experiences. He also thinks in unhistorical terms. As a historian I grew dizzy listening to him jump back and forth across the centuries and millennia, as if injustices here and there were all part of the same unchanging story. Thus I cringed when he called himself a historian of religion at one point in his conversation with Moyers. He knows more than I ever will about the subject, but he was not thinking historically. He could not move across different times and imagine that each period involved different mentalities and experiences. For him it was all one story with one set of values. Thus, he seems to differ from Obama not just in generational terms, but also in terms of the philosophy of history that underlies his worldview. Obama’s major speech on race was keenly aware of the passage of time and its impact on people living in it. Wright, on the other hand, is almost oblivious to it—unless he is just getting carried away by his own intemperate and impolitic rBarack Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and Generational Differences
Times might have changed, but it seems that some didn’t get the memo. It would be nice if Reverend Jeremiah Wright would trust the next generation, embodied by Senator Barack Obama, to do things its way, instead of clinging to his own experiences and ignoring the great changes that this society has undergone. Why is he trying so hard to wreck the Obama campaign anyway? Maybe he doesn’t believe a black man can get elected and now he is in the business of creating a self-fulfilling prophesy? I dunno.
What I do know is that someone else from his earlier generation is also out of touch with what leaders like Obama are saying. Listen to Bill Moyer’s interview with Wright, and you will see Moyers feeling very much at ease with the man. Moyers (born in 1934) is a little older than Wright (born in 1941), but both experienced the Johnson administration and the Civil Rights Movement as young men. I respect their experiences and enjoy hearing their thoughts on where America is at. I also enjoyed Moyer’s conversation with Fred Harris (born in 1930), the only surviving member of the Kerner Commission, which reported on the racism underlying the social inequality that had helped set off the race riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The thing about Moyers’ and Harris’ conversation that stood out most for me, however, was that it appeared on the show right after Moyer’s conversation with Mayer Cory Booker of Newark. Booker (born in 1969) did not speak the language of race and anger. Like Obama (born in 1961), he is very much about members of the community doing what they can to move forward. Watch the video and you’ll understand what I mean. (You’ll also maybe want to see him on the national stage at some point.) Watch too how Moyers is almost mystified by Booker’s perspective, one Obama shares. Moyers expects to see righteous anger in Booker. He wants Booker to blame all of Newark’s woes on racism and demand assistance from the federal government, but Booker refuses to follow that path. This conversation made clear to me that a vast gulf separates my generation (I am forty-five) from Moyers’. It also made me glad that leaders such as Obama and Booker are out there.
Obama understands the differences between the experiences of his generation and those of Wright’s. Wright might too, but he seems unwilling to trust the next generation to do the right thing. Instead he is out there doing what he seems to feel is truth-telling, that is, trying to wreck the very real chances that a former member of his congregation has to become the next president. Yet if he has done his job as the pastor of his congregation, he can trust those he helped bring up in his church to do the right thing. Time to let go, Reverend Wright, and give Senator Obama a chance to do it his way.
Yet Wright seems trapped in the experiences of his own generation. He seems unable to acknowledge that Obama’s generation has undergone a different set of experiences. He also thinks in unhistorical terms. As a historian I grew dizzy listening to him jump back and forth across the centuries and millennia, as if injustices here and there were all part of the same unchanging story. Thus I cringed when he called himself a historian of religion at one point in his conversation with Moyers. He knows more than I ever will about the subject, but he was not thinking historically. He could not move across different times and imagine that each period involved different mentalities and experiences. For him it was all one story with one set of values. Thus, he seems to differ from Obama not just in generational terms, but also in terms of the philosophy of history that underlies his worldview. Obama’s major speech on race was keenly aware of the passage of time and its impact on people living in it. Wright, on the other hand, is almost oblivious to it—unless he is just getting carried away by his own intemperate and impolitic rhetoric.hetoric.
Links: History, Politics, and Memory
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.