Consitutional Checks on Mob Rule

I was re-reading Federalist No. 10 and No. 51 the other day.

I think it was this post at Maggie's Farm that got me going, "Crawled out of a snowbank":

American exceptionalism contains the notion that government is a necessary evil, requiring containment and strict limitations by a virtuous people and a muscular Constitution to handcuff the state. The state is the enemy of individual freedom. GW: "Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

RTWT at the link.

A Weaker Tea Party?

Here's the headline from yesterday's New York Times front page: "Sidestepping Fiscal Showdown, Weaker Tea Party Narrows Focus."

The main thrust of the piece is to brush off the tea party as an irrelevant "fringe" movement following Obama's reelection and internal divisions among prominent organizations. There are indeed problems, but by no means is the tea party finished as a movement. The congressional elections saw some significant tea party victories and the tea partiers will no doubt have a strong voice in 2013, as their bread-and-butter issues of limited government and fiscal restraint prove more relevant than ever.

Note too that the tea party isn't so much a protest movement any more as it is a political tendency seeking to place activists into positions of power at all levels of government. I love the protests, but that energy has been increasingly channeled into electoral activities and organization. Leslie Eastman comments on that, at Legal Insurrection, "Tea Party tidal surge, not tsunami." And a local example is conservative activist Mike Munzing, who I first met at tea party rallies in 2009. He was elected to the Aliso Viejo City Council in November. A number of other local tea partiers either ran or were elected to the Orange County GOP Central Committee in recent years. Basically, the movement helped generate a mass of activists moving into formal political organizations.

Having said all that, the latest high profile conflicts at FreedomWorks are like catnip to the liberty-haters on the left. The Other McCain has the story with lots of links, "The Bloody Mess at FreedomWorks."

Either way, it's best not fall for the Democrat Media Complex's operation demoralize narrative. Taking back the country will require lots more activists to redouble their efforts at all the forms of grassroots participation. There's going to be ups and downs. Ignore these stupid memes about a "weaker tea party."

All or Nothing In the Family

The following is a guest post from Christopher Shannon in response to Chris Ramsey's recent review of Robert O. Self's latest book All In the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s.  Shannon is an assistant professor of history at Christendom College in Front Royal, VA.

Chris Ramsey praises Robert Self’s All in the Family:  The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s as “an ambitious attempt to interweave the histories of postwar liberalism, conservatism, gender, and sexuality from the Lyndon Johnson administration to the present day.”  Not having yet read the book, I am not prepared to comment on its technical merits as a model of interdisciplinary history.  Ramsey’s review does demand a response in those areas where the book, at least by Ramsey’s description if not his judgment, seems to lack ambition:  the narrative framework that holds all this dazzling interdisciplinary together.  Unless Ramsey has irresponsibly represented Self’s argument, it would appear that Self tells the story of the heroic challenge to the established family values of “breadwinner liberalism” by feminists and cultural radicals during the 1960s, followed by the reaction against this emancipator development by the advocates of “breadwinner conservatism,” itself now under siege by a new flowering of inclusive and expansive ideas of family life best represented by recent victories on the gay marriage front.  I have no reason to doubt Ramsey’s account of Self’s narrative, for it is a narrative that one finds enshrined in the cultural commentary of the New York Times and similar mainstream liberal publications.  It is the historical common sense of the liberal educated classes.  Self’s book and Ramsey’s approving review raises the deeper question of whether, in post-Reagan-Bush America, historians can be anything more than the lap dogs of establishment liberalism.  

            I may share liberals’ distaste for what appears to be the only viable alternative—mainstream conservatism—but the righteous indignation with which liberals approach phenomenon like “breadwinner conservatism” continues to obscure ideological continuities identified in their own research.  Liberal historians continue to be surprised by the ways in which privacy rights championed by the left have so easily been invoked by the right in its attack on “big government.”  What we see in the politics of the last forty years is an underlying consensus on the primacy of free choice, followed by a secondary insistence on the need for government to mop up after the disastrous consequences of unrestricted free choice.  So, liberals insist that the government must stay out of our bedrooms, but then insist justice demands that government fund contraception and pay for abortions.  Conservative CEOs extol the virtues of the free market yet pony up to Congress with their begging bowls when it comes time for a “too big to fail” bailout.  These are two sides to the same coin that historians once called corporate liberalism—a system of socializing costs and privatizing benefits that has served as a substitute for a thickly textured conception of the common good.  Why this substitution?  Because left and right alike see thick textures as threats to freedom.

            Lest my invocation of the common good appear an unwarranted imposition of normative value preferences on to the “real” story of history, Ramsey shows Self to be more than willing to impose normative frameworks on his narrative.  The normative dimension lies in his judgment of the failure of American politics to continue the proper progressive development from the “negative rights” of the Civil Rights era to the “positive rights” aspired to in the early years of the Great Society.  This is most obvious in the conservative backlash against welfare, but the whole debate about welfare was initially bound up with debates about normative ideals of proper family life.  Ramsey approves of Self’s interpretation that efforts to instill into black men the breadwinner virtues of the white middle class issue distracted the nation from the real issue at hand: the need for “using the government to guarantee that discriminated or disadvantaged groups can effectively exercise their personal liberties.”   Leaving aside the issue that Moynihan understood instilling breadwinner virtues as itself a government responsibility, the great tragedy of the era appears, by Ramsey and Self’s account, to lie in the failure to extend to poor and minority women the opportunity to achieve the same marketplace success that the feminist movement had brought to white middle class women.  Culturally and economically, this amounts to the failure of the government to subsidize the autonomy of individuals. 

            Perhaps I should qualify this statement to read the failure of government to subsidize the prosperous autonomy of individuals.  Women are by all accounts much more autonomous today than they were fifty years ago.  For middle class women, this means successful careers.  For poor women, it means the feminization of poverty.  If some conservatives are all too willing to blame poverty on the breakdown of the family, liberals are all too willing to gloss this break down as evolution toward autonomy.  In the teleology that ends with “Modern Family,” families are not broken, they are blended, transformed, re-imagined, etc.  If liberals concede the dark side of autonomy when it comes to material poverty, they continue to evade the social and psychological costs of autonomy for the comfortably middle class.  If Betty Friedan could invoke the addiction to sleeping pills as a symptom of the quiet desperation of suburban housewives in the 1950s, what should historians conclude from the epidemic of behavioral medication among the children of the “brave new families” celebrated by historians as advancements in autonomy?

            Liberal historians approach matters of sex, family and autonomy much like the NRA approaches gun control legislation.  To suggest that the promiscuous availability of sexual partners has any inherent connection to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases is as heretical as suggesting that the easy availability of guns has any inherent connection to gun violence.  For both sex and guns, freedom trumps all other considerations.  Yes, we must be responsible citizens—for sex, using condoms, for guns, obeying the law.  In acknowledging the harm principle, we remain good pupils of John Stuart Mill, which is to say proper Victorians.  Contemporary liberalism grates against the intellect in that it so often presents itself as having a social conscience even as it advances individual autonomy.  The struggle for gay marriage is thus more about breaking down a barrier to choice rather than promoting a public good.  Historians are certainly free to take sides in the debate over family life, but in the interests of honesty, or at least clarity, there should be some recognition that “family” means nothing if it can mean anything.  Yes, I suppose there is the common denominator of warm fuzzy feelings—but in that too, we remain Victorians. 

  

Robert H. Bork, 1927-2012

The great conservative jurist has died.

I've cited Judge Bork many times in my writings on the gay marriage debate, and he's the model for judicial restraint when I discuss the Supreme Court and constitutional interpretation in class. William Jacobson laments that Bork will be remember for the wrong reasons, "Robert Bork, R.I.P."

And at the New York Times, "Robert H. Bork, Conservative Jurist, Dies at 85" (via Memeorandum):

Robert H. Bork, a former solicitor general, federal judge and conservative legal theorist whose 1987 nomination to the United States Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate in a historic political battle whose impact is still being felt, died on Wednesday in Arlington, Va. He was 85.

Judge Bork’s death, of complications of heart disease, was confirmed by his son, Robert H. Bork Jr.

Judge Bork, who was senior judicial adviser this year to the presidential campaign of Gov. Mitt Romney, played a small but crucial role in the Watergate crisis as the solicitor general under President Richard M. Nixon. He carried out orders to fire a special prosecutor in what became known as “the Saturday Night Massacre.” He also handed down notable decisions from the federal appeals court bench. But it was as a symbol of the nation’s culture wars that Judge Bork made his name.

It is rare for the Senate in its constitutional “advice and consent” role to turn down a president’s Supreme Court nominee, and rarer still for that rejection to be based not on qualifications but on judicial philosophy and temperament. That turned Judge Bork’s defeat into a watershed event and his name into a verb: getting “borked” is what happens to a nominee rejected for what supporters consider political motives.

The success of the anti-Bork campaign is widely seen to have shifted the tone and emphasis of Supreme Court nominations since then, giving them an often strong political cast and making it hard, many argue, for a nominee with firmly held views ever to get confirmed.

Till the end of his life, Judge Bork argued that American judges, acting to please a liberal elite, have hijacked the struggle over national values by overstepping their role, especially in many of the most important decisions on civil rights and liberties, personal autonomy and regulation of business.

He advocated a view of judging known as “strict constructionism,” or “originalism,” because it seeks to limit constitutional values to those explicitly enunciated by the Framers and to reject those that evolved in later generations. He dismissed the view that the courts had rightly come to the aid of those neglected by the majority. By contrast, he felt that majorities, through legislatures, should be empowered to make all decisions not specifically addressed in the Constitution.

He most famously took issue with the Supreme Court’s assertion in the 1960s and ’70s that the Constitution implicitly recognizes a right of privacy that bars states from outlawing abortion or the use of contraceptives by married couples.

That position along with his rejection of court-mandated help to minority groups led a coalition of liberal groups to push successfully for his Senate defeat, motivated in no small part by their sense that he cared more about abstract legal reasoning than the people affected by it. They contended that his confirmation would produce a radical shift on a closely divided Supreme Court and “turn back the clock” on civil and individual rights.

Judge Bork, who was 60 at the time, was sitting on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, often a steppingstone to the Supreme Court, when President Ronald Reagan announced on July 1, 1987, that he was nominating him to the high court to replace Lewis Powell, a moderate justice who was retiring. Within an hour of the announcement, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, set the tone for the bruising contest to come when he said in a speech:

“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, school children could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.”

Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.

Added: At Althouse, "Robert Bork has died."

"Politicizing" and the Rhetoric of Reaction

“Regardless of where anyone stands on the gun-rights debate, however, we will encourage everyone to try to refrain from politicizing the tragedy in Connecticut.” -- Conclusion of statement by Michigan State House of Representatives' GOP Caucus Press Secretary Ari Adler, asking the Governor of Michigan to sign a law to expand concealed carrying of weapons in Michigan (including in schools), December 14, 2012.

"A Tragedy Like Newtown Should Be Politicized, But Changing Anything Will Take Different Politicians" -- Headline of a Time magazine article by Mike Grunwald, December 17, 2012.




Following Friday's school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, calls for a debate about gun policy were predictably met by the objection that we shouldn't "politicize" such a tragedy.  Whether or not we have a serious debate about gun policy, let alone a change in that policy, as a response to this mass shooting and the larger series of mass shootings that have taken place this year, at first glance, it seems that raising the specter of "politicization" will not, in and of itself, shut down discussion.  That, at least is a good thing.  The notion that dozens of people losing their lives in an act of violence in a public facility should not be an object of political reflection is truly bizarre. So where does this notion come from?

This post won't be a comprehensive history of the idea of "politicization" in the pejorative sense that those urging us not to politicize the Newtown shooting use the term.  But it's at least a preliminary attempt to sketch the outlines of what such a history might look like.  As best I can tell, this usage goes back to the 1960s and was largely created and cultivated by the political right.  And I think it might be productively connected to what the late Albert O. Hirschman called the "rhetoric of reaction."*



According to the OED, "politicize" entered the English language in the mid-18th century as an intransitive verb meaning "to engage in or talk about politics."  You don't see this usage much anymore, though you can see it in the word's first appearance in the New York Times, in Jo Ranson's June 11, 1950, review of Ralph Foster Weld's book Brooklyn is America:

"Brooklyn is America" builds up such a convincing case for local supremacy that a goodly number of the town's intransigent politicos, reminded of the borough's 300 years of culture and industrial acclaim, may again politicize that it is high time Brooklyn stopped being a tail to Manhattan's kite and threaten to secede from New York City.

But we're interested in the second, the transitive meaning of "politicize": "to make political, esp. to make (a person, group, etc.) politically aware or politically active."  This meaning according to the OED, dates back to 1846.  And it's far and away the more common meaning today.

If Google's ngrams are to be believed, the verb rarely appeared at all in print until the 1960s, when its usage took off, especially in that decade's second half.

It's thus fitting that the second appearance of "politicize" in The New York Times involves the second meaning and was published on March 23, 1969. Better yet, it occurs in a statement by President Richard Nixon, that font of the culture wars, concerning the ur-culture war topic of dissent and political violence on campus.  The Times published a long statement by President Nixon on this issue alongside a letter that his Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Robert Finch, had sent to university presidents pertaining to a new series of federal laws regarding crime on campus.  Here's the relevant passage from Nixon's statement:

Increasingly, it is clear that this violence is directed to a clearly perceived and altogether too conceivable objective: not only to politicize the student bodies of our education institutions, but to politicize the institution as well. 

Anyone with the least understanding of the history of freedom will know that this has invariably meant not only political disaster to those nations that have submitted to such forces of obfuscation and repression, but cultural calamity as well.

It is not too strong a statement to declare that this is the way civilizations begin to die.

Following Nixon's statement, the word "politicize" appeared over and over again in the pages of the Times. Almost always it appeared as a pejorative and, through 1970, in relation to higher education.    An October 20, 1969, editorial entitled "Free Universities--Or Captive?," decrying protests led by Black students at Dartmouth against an appearance by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and infamous eugenicist William Shockley, concludes, "Pressures to politicize the universities--often in the name of high-minded goals--are pernicious because they imply that the institution henceforth will be held responsible for what is said and thought in its classrooms and lecture halls. It is a trend that must be resisted, whether the pressures come from the right or the left, from blacks or whites. What is at stake is not the structure, but the heart and mind of the campus."

In a December 11, 1969, article outlining Spiro Agnew's views on education (he thought there was too much of it), the Times quoted the Vice President: "denied political participation in the real community, the youth seeks to politicize the only community he has, the academic one."

A July 16, 1970, editorial entitled "Crisis on the Campus" begins, "The efforts to politicize American higher education, along with the demonstrations of student unrest, have dominated public thinking about the nation's universities and colleges."

A September 5, 1970 story entitled "Hester Warns N.Y.U. Won't Tolerate Disruptions" describes NYU President James Hester's issuing "a strong warning yesterday to faculty and staff members and students that the university would not tolerate efforts by extremists to 'politicize' the school during its coming academic year."

An October 6, 1970, op-ed by Princeton historian Frederick Starr defended his institution's new plan to give students a one-week recess prior to election day against attacks, largely from conservatives.  One of the objections Starr cites is "The recess will 'politicize' campuses." Starr replies that "[m]any are already politicized, thanks in part, at least to President Nixon," before continuing to argue that, in fact, the recess was designed specifically to keep the campus politically neutral and to encourage students to pursue their politics off-campus (unlike, Starr notes, Northern Illinois' decision to offer a course on "Fieldwork in Political Campaigning," which is "precisely the situation that the Princeton Plan seeks to avoid"). 

An October 16, 1970 editorial entitled "The Angela Davis Tragedy," on the occasion of the FBI's capture of Davis, takes us (with Davis herself) off campus...but the topic of course still involves academia:  "Already attempts are under way by her defenders to politicize her case, and to deflect attention from the specifics of the charges against her to the merits of the causes she espoused."  (The thought that the Davis case was not already politicized, let alone that it would be inappropriate to do so, is pretty laughable.).**

A November 14, 1970, article entitled "Kent Coach to Resign Over Campus 'Fatalism,'" details outgoing football coach Dave Puddington's decision to quit following "negativism on campus" in the wake of the Kent State killings.***  "The fatalism around us and the current tendency to politicize every fact of life--even sports--has certainly affected the young men in our football program," Puddington is quoted as saying.

Starting in 1971, the term's appearance in the Times seems to move beyond the walls of academe, to cover other areas of concern.  The AFL-CIO, for example, worried in the fall of 1971, about attempts by the Nixon administration to "politicize" the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  And positive uses of the term even show up occasionally (in January 1972, the Rev. William Jones, at an event honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., is quoted as saying "Blacks and other minorities must politicize their numerical strength and collectiveize [sic] their economic power.").  

But the conservative, culture-war quality of those 1969 and 1970 appearance of the term set the tone for the most common political uses of "politicize" in ensuing decades.

In recent years, death has been as prominent a realm as higher education when it comes to conservative arguments about politicization.  The October 29, 2002, memorial service for Paul Wellstone, killed on October 25 in a plane crash, was immediately and rather ludicrously denounced by conservative talkingheads for "politicizing" his death and has been used, ever since, as a kind of template to discourage Democrats from talking politics when prominent Democrats die (Media Matters for America did a nice piece on this around the time of Ted Kennedy's death).

The idea that deaths, especially untimely violent deaths like Wellstone's and those of the Newtown victims, should have a politics-free zone built around them is somewhat different from the notion that colleges and universities should be politics-free.  Yet, the two arguments share, I think, at least two things beyond the word "politicize."

The first is the sense of a threat to the core values of civilization.  Back in 1969, Nixon very effectively articulated the idea that "politicizing" campuses might lead to "cultural calamity." Similarly, accusations that liberals are showing an insufficient reverence for the dead fits into a larger narrative of dangers of relativism and secular humanism. 

The second similarity is where Albert Hirschman comes in.  In The Rhetoric of Reaction (Belknap Press, 1991), Hirschman argues that, going back to the French Revolution, conservative critiques of progressive social programs have tended to employ three typical arguments, which he calls the perversity thesis ("any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy"), the futility thesis (attempted social transformations will simply not work), and the jeopardy thesis ("the cost of the proposed change is simply too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment").  Obviously all three of these rhetorics are employed against gun control:  if guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns (perversity); prohibition never works (futility); if assault weapons are banned, schools will be safer but we will have lost our freedom (jeopardy).  In a sense, arguments from the right against "politicizing" things from campuses to mass shootings, are a kind of shorthand for these rhetorics of reaction.  Some things need to stand beyond politics because sometimes--very often, in fact, according to conservative rhetoric--politics cannot work.

Against such a view, simply having a political discussion is a useful act of resistance.

__________________________________

* Hirschman passed away last week.

** This editorial is, incidentally, a textbook example of New York Times liberalism. It concludes: "Whatever the eventual outcome, the tragedy is that one who might have made a significant contribution to the nation's normal political debate and to its needed processes of peaceful change became so alienated that she finally went over to revolutionary words and perhaps even worse."

*** You really can't make this stuff up!

Bill Whittle at David Horowitz's Restoration Weekend 2012

This is fifteen minutes long and I only first found time for it yesterday during office hours. It's well worth it when you have a chance.

The History Wars and Detachment

In her post, “A Canon Canon,” L.D. asks readers to suggest books related to the canon debates of the 1980s, which crystallized with the Stanford “Great Books” debate, L.D.’s dissertation topic. L.D. seems both excited and worried about her topic’s continued relevance, about how such relevance should or should not inform her approach. As she writes: “At some point—and I haven’t quite identified that point yet—the debate about canons and canonicity shifts from a historic moment that I am examining to a current critical discourse into which I am, as the argot of academe has it, ‘making an intervention.’ This is one of the (many!) tricky methodological challenges of my dissertation.”

In the comments section, I posted the bibliography of the most important books I used and/or analyzed in my chapter on the topic of the canon wars (one chapter of nine on the history of the culture wars). My list of books provoked this response from L.D.: “This is both informative and illustrative. Your list instantiates exactly the oscillation I see ahead—a toggling between immediacy and remove, a scholarly debate as a historic ‘event’ and ‘detached’ scholarship about the event.”

Does writing about topics in such close proximity to our lives—temporally, professionally, epistemologically, politically, perhaps even psychologically—change our approach? Are we more likely to engage our subjects as contemporaries? Are we more likely to enter into the struggles that we are seeking to understand and analyze? I find these methodological questions fascinating.

I admit that when I first chose the culture wars as the topic of my second book, I had similar concerns. I had a dog in the race, so to speak. But I did not want to write yet another culture wars polemic, yet another missive against all that is wrong in the world. To my happy surprise, once I began my research I felt less of a subjective pull. I started seeing historical subjects worthy of historical analysis. Yes, I disagree with many culture warriors (and I even agree with a few). But I also feel detached from them. I suppose this is as it should be (although my former self would be surprised not only by my detachment but also by my comfort with such detachment).

None of this is an endorsement of detachment in and of itself. Sometimes, I think, a full-throttle polemic is in order (as I hoped to make evident by the example of my very un-detached essay on Teach for America). But I also think learning how to be detached from the culture wars has improved my ability to understand them. In writing my chapter on the canon wars, I felt like a distant observer, much as I would if I had written a chapter on the Constitutional Convention. I held no more affinity for a poststructuralist obliterator of canons like Stanley Fish than I did for a traditionalist defender of them like Allan Bloom. I identified no more with Richard Rorty than with Dinesh D’Souza (this definitely came as a surprise). Of course, this does not mean I sought faux “objectivity” in the fashion of some half-wit television host like David Gregory: “Let both sides present their case, the truth must lie somewhere in the middle; or, at least we won’t be accused of bias, the ultimate sin of political reporting).” No, in writing my canon wars chapter, detachment meant I had the freedom to point out the contradictions that inevitably formed the arguments of all of my subjects, such an approach being a means to a better historical understanding.

In sum, L.D.’s “tricky methodological challenge” is not necessarily mine. For the most part. I am currently writing a chapter on a topic from which detachment is proving more difficult. The topic is the “history wars” and the chapter deals with some of the infamous controversies about public history from the 1990s, especially the brouhahas over the Enola Gay and National History Standards. It also is an intellectual history of the methodological debates about the historical discipline that were embedded in these larger public history struggles. Historians are the main subjects; historiography is the central content. In other words, this chapter hits close to home. The reason for this is not because I want to take sides, although I am more tempted here than in my other chapters. Rather, I am finding detachment more difficult because the explanations and arguments offered by historians are my own. I have been trained to think like my subjects. More than that, given that my subjects are some of the most influential historians of the last few decades, given that their books have often been de rigueur in graduate historiography seminars, it’s not too far fetched to claim that I have been trained to think like my subjects by my subjects.

By the early 1990s, a debate had ensued about the proper approach historians should take to the past. On the one hand were traditionalists, who caustically criticized the hold social and cultural history had taken on the larger discipline, to the demise of traditional political and, yes, intellectual history. They charged that New Historians were relativists who no longer believed in the longstanding purpose of the historical craft, to shed light on the truth. For instance, Gertrude Himmelfarb, one such traditionalist, maintained that privileging the “holy trinity” of race-class-gender was an ahistorical imposition of present concerns on the past. On the other hand were postmodernists on the order of Hayden White, who provocatively claimed that the work of the historian was no more than “a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse.” The contours of this debate were not new, but the political urgency of it was unique, given the larger context.

Most professional historians sought to carve out a middle ground in these historiography wars. In their 1994 book, Telling the Truth About History, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob sought to “take on both the relativists on the left and the defenders of the status quo ante on the right.” Eschewing both epistemological (if not political) extremes, they argued in favor of “a democratic practice of history [that] encourages skepticism about dominant views, but at the same time trusts in the reality of the past and its knowability.” But, while charting this middle ground, Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob offered a compelling analytical framework that explained how historiographical developments had contributed to a traditionalist-postmodernist binary that seemed false. Social historians, who came of age in the 1970s on the heels of the sixties liberation movements, wrote histories of marginalized groups, predominantly blacks, women, and workers, that complicated traditional, often triumphalist narratives of the United States. But they accomplished this with traditional methodologies and epistemologies. “Social historians did not oppose the standards of objectivity or the codes of professional discipline; they used those very standards to challenge the traditional interpretations which had excluded marginal or nonconforming historical groups.” That said, no matter their objective intentions, social historians undermined the premise of historical objectivity by revealing that historical narratives were always partial, always political. “It is as if the social historians with their passion for breaking apart the historical record had dug a potentially fatal hole into which history as a discipline might disappear altogether.”

I can’t detach from these subjects because their analysis seems, well, truthful. As such, I see Telling the Truth as both a primary and secondary source. (The same goes for a few other sources, especially Peter Novick’s brilliant That Noble Dream, which emerged from the same historiographical crisis about the "objectivity question.")

Scientists Show That Unborn Babies Yawn Repeatedly in the Womb

At LifeNews, "Amazing 4-D Ultrasound Captures Baby Yawning in the Womb."

Texas Secession Fever

At the New York Times, "With Stickers, a Petition and Even a Middle Name, Secession Fever Hits Texas":

HOUSTON — In the weeks since President Obama’s re-election, Republicans around the country have been wondering how to proceed. Some conservatives in Texas have been asking a far more pointed question: how to secede.

Secession fever has struck parts of Texas, which Mitt Romney won by nearly 1.3 million votes.

Sales of bumper stickers reading “Secede” — one for $2, or three for $5 — have increased at TexasSecede.com. In East Texas, a Republican official sent out an e-mail newsletter saying it was time for Texas and Vermont to each “go her own way in peace” and sign a free-trade agreement among the states.

A petition calling for secession that was filed by a Texas man on a White House Web site has received tens of thousands of signatures, and the Obama administration must now issue a response. And Larry Scott Kilgore, a perennial Republican candidate from Arlington, a Dallas suburb, announced that he was running for governor in 2014 and would legally change his name to Larry Secede Kilgore, with Secede in capital letters. As his Web page, secedekilgore.com, puts it: “Secession! All other issues can be dealt with later.”

In Texas, talk of secession in recent years has steadily shifted to the center from the fringe right. It has emerged as an echo of the state Republican leadership’s anti-Washington, pro-Texas-sovereignty mantra on a variety of issues, including health care and environmental regulations. For some Texans, the renewed interest in the subject serves simply as comic relief after a crushing election defeat.

But for other proponents of secession and its sister ideology, Texas nationalism — a focus of the Texas Nationalist Movement and other groups that want the state to become an independent nation, as it was in the 1830s and 1840s — it is a far more serious matter.

It's interesting, if not something of a sideshow.

RELATED: From Saberpoint, "Vox Popoli Hates Californians -- Even Conservatives."

Tea Party Looks to Oust Republicans Seen as Not Conservative Enough

This isn't anything new, although there's obviously greater urgency amid the left's information coup and the second term of the Obama disaster. Basically, double down hoping to gain some traction before we're all shot to hell.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Tea Party Seeks to Regroup: Movement Sets Sights on Ousting Republicans Seen as Not Conservative Enough":

The tea-party movement is trying to regroup after taking some licks in this month's elections. Several groups already are setting their sights on 2014 congressional races, in which they plan to promote their preferred candidates and hope to weed out Republicans they consider insufficiently conservative.

Many tea-party activists say they remain dumbfounded by the Nov. 6 defeat of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and favored GOP candidates for the Senate, and opinions are swirling over how the movement should push forward.

In Virginia, organizations that canvassed aggressively for Mr. Romney are now girding for next year's election for governor. Many are moving to support Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in his GOP primary contest against Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling.

Conservative groups also are considering potential challenges to GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, Lamar Alexander in Tennessee and Saxby Chambliss in Georgia, whom some activists view as not conservative enough.

After scoring a wave of successes in the 2010 midterm elections, tea-party groups found the environment much less hospitable this year in states where President Barack Obama's campaign made gains with the electorate.

One of the movement's most outspoken advocates, Rep. Allen West of Florida, lost his first bid for re-election, while Rep. Michele Bachmann, a founder of the congressional Tea Party Caucus, barely scraped by to keep her Minnesota seat. Still, many House freshmen backed by the tea party in 2010 survived this year, and Republicans retained their House majority.

"This was a very difficult year, with the strength of the Obama ground game and the fact that Romney just didn't inspire much enthusiasm," said Jamie Radtke, an unsuccessful 2012 Senate candidate and founder of the Virginia Federation of Tea Party Patriots, a statewide umbrella group that continues to expand and now has over 60 member organizations. "But in many ways, we are stronger than ever," she said.

The federation, Ms. Radtke said, plans to play a big role in 2013 Virginia races, including those for the governor's and lieutenant governor's offices.

Across the country, tea-party activists are drawing different lessons from the year's setbacks.

One of the movement's big losses was in the Indiana Senate race, where Richard Mourdock, a favorite of tea-party activists, toppled six-term Republican Sen. Richard Lugar in the Republican primary, only to lose this month to conservative Democrat Joe Donnelly. Mr. Mourdock's campaign took a hit after he said that "even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something God intended to happen."

Tea-party activist Greg Fettig, a founder of Hoosiers for a Conservative Senate and a backer of Mr. Mourdock, said the main lesson from the loss is that activists need to be sure the campaigns they support are well-run.

In South Carolina, tea-party activists are looking to mount a primary challenge against Mr. Graham, whom they oppose in part because he voted to confirm Mr. Obama's Supreme Court nominees, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

"I think he will face a strong primary challenge," said Joe Dugan, South Carolina coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots. "The extent of that challenge and the money that can be raised will depend on his actions from this time forward."

Mr. Graham didn't respond to requests for comment.

President Obama and American Intellectual History

Guest post by Leo P. Ribuffo (a version of this essay was to have been presented at the S-USIH conference).

At some point late in his term President John Kennedy read and respected Listen, Yankee, C. Wright Mills's attempt to "present the voice" of the Cuban revolution.  A month before he died, JFK used a French journalist to send an oblique message to Fidel Castro about the prospect of improved relations.  Castro must understand that Kennedy was president of the United States "not some sociologist." (1)

In many respects it is odd to write about a president for the Society for United States Intellectual History (SUSIH), a group dedicated to the revival of intellectual history including the "history of ideas."  So let's start with a definition.  I'm not defining "intellectual" in Richard Hofstadter's ebullient sense as someone who lives for ideas, if any such person has existed since the day John Stuart Mill met Harriet Taylor.  Rather, in the Wright Millsian sense, my intellectuals are people who use ideas as elected officials, policy wonks, social critics, or ideologists. 

It is hard to measure the policy impact of intellectuals, even those who both espoused grand theories and held important offices.  President Harry Truman began containment before George Kennan coined the term.  The Alliance for Progress would have existed without Walt Rostow's modernization theory, though Rostow's silly historical comparison of Latin America in 1961 and the United States during a Jacksonian era economic "take off" contributed to the unwarranted optimism.  Economists have had the best luck.  Walter Heller convinced Kennedy to endorse a Keynesian deficit to stimulate the economy even though JFK had trouble distinguishing between fiscal and monetary policy.  In general, however, intellectuals exaggerate the influence of complex ideas and of intellectuals.

Complex ideas encountered in youth do seem to have influenced one major modern presidential decision.  Before pardoning Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford not only prayed and took Communion at Saint John's Episcopal Church across from the White House, but he also recalled lessons from his "legal realist" law professors at Yale who had taught that "public policy often took precedence over a rule of law." (2)

Certainly presidents are affected by what intellectual historians used to call the "climate of opinion"--which presidents also have significantly helped to shape since the early 1900s. The Enlightenment republicanism of the first six presidents, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis as a rationale for imperialism and an explanation of the Great Depression, and the ubiquitous Munich analogy of the Cold War era stand out as cases in point.

But consider another case SUSIH members might think as odd as Jerry Ford legal realist:  Dwight Eisenhower's vision of the United States as a "middle of the road" corporate commonwealth. (3) During the "fifties" moderation was the dominant rhetorical theme (trope may be substituted if it makes readers feel smarter):  consensus history, pluralist social theory, neo-Freudian psychology, economic fine tuning, and if you went to the Rand Corporation, advice on how to fight a moderate nuclear war.  Eisenhower admired longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, a social psychological critique of so-called extremism that overlapped with the jargony versions offered by Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset.

Unlike Ike, Obama is a Hofstadterish intellectual who takes ideas very seriously as a person if not necessarily in his day job.  While trying to figure out the world and his place in it as a young man, he read widely, including the works of African-American writers male and female, Friedrich Nietzsche, T. S. Eliot and Peter Drucker.  Certainly he knows that C. Wright Mills wasn't just "some sociologist."  At age 34 Obama published a powerful, stylized account of his education in the Henry Adams sense, Dreams from My Father.  He is obviously very smart which, given the centuries of stereotypes about African-Americans, is absolutely wonderful though a source of added animosity on the Right.

Yet Obama is not a uniquely intellectual modern president.  Professor presidents Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft wrote books on American government that are still worth reading.  So did Herbert Hoover.  Some of Theodore Roosevelt's speeches on government and society merit attention too, and a colleague specializing in the topic tells me that TR's naval history of the War of 1812 holds up well.

Exemplifying pack journalism Jonathan Alter dubbed Obama "professor-in-chief." (4) What "professorial" means in the news media stereotype is that Obama is more thoughtful than the typical national political reporter and feels uncomfortable with emotional appeals beyond the obligatory "hopey-changey thing," as Sarah Palin described Obama's inspirational side in the best quip of her career.

Although journalists have uncovered an enormous amount of information about Obama's early life, no one seems to have paid much attention to what sort of intellectual he was like as a teacher at the University of Chicago.  Judging from his pre-presidential and early presidential speeches, he is at his best mulling over ethical issues with policy implications.  Some of these were very good, especially the Reverend Wright speech, Cairo speech, and Nobel Prize speech.

But explanation of policy, with all of the inevitable simplifications, isn't Obama's strong suit.  Having worked at a business information company before becoming a community organizer, he surely knows the difference between fiscal and monetary policy.  Indeed, Paul Volcker credits Obama with the best understanding of economics of any president he has met. Yet Obama has never used this knowledge to explain the virtues of Keynesianism during the Great Recession as cogently as Kennedy (and his speech writers) did amid the relative prosperity of 1962.  Nor would he dare to join JFK in decrying the "myth" that government is "big and bad--and steadily getting bigger and worse." (5) Times have changed.  What was once an arguable economic theory briefly in the ascendant among liberal politicians has become at most a hidden heresy. (6)

Undoubtedly there are psychological factors affecting Obama's incessant moderation and repeated calls for cooperation in "one United States of America" without blue states and red states long after congressional Republicans rejected cooperation.  Recognizing that hostility to government is "as American as apple pie," as Obama said after the 2010 elections, perhaps he also sees no point to picking fights he will lose in a historically conservative country at least a third of which is even more economically conservative than usual (relative to the existing spectrum) at the moment.

Psychology and politics aside, Obama's incessant moderation intersects with part of the prevailing climate of opinion, not with the thunder on the Right but with the partly sunny day with a chance of showers forecast by the Center-Left.  We encounter moderate punditry from E. J. Dionne, moderate Keynesianism from Lawrence Summers, moderate social philosophy from Michael Sandel, and, at the Center for a New American Security, advice on how to fight a moderate drone war.  Trendy buzz words like "civil society" and "communitarianism" should not obscure historical continuities.  Somewhere Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset are smiling.

What about those conservative and Right-wing thunderstorms?   I have written often about the American Right, the chronically obtuse liberal and radical response to it since the 1930s, and the limitations of the historical profession's recent belated discovery that there are lots of conservatives in the United States and most of them believe in God. (7) So I will restrict my comments here to four points.

I will begin with just about the only thing Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote that I agreed with until he opposed the second Iraq War.  In 1955 during the first post-World War II discovery of conservatism by liberals and radicals, Schlesinger wrote:  "What matters  . . . is not the conservatism of the professors  but the conservatism of the industrialists, bankers, and politicians." (8) When I first read this passage four decades ago, I thought Schlesinger should have added the clergy.  Now, with all due respect to intellectual historians highlighting Richard Weaver or Leo Strauss, I would in addition emphasize war veterans, gun owners, popular novelists (some of whom are clergy) and--here too--economists (even if they double as professors).

Second, much of the Right's assault on Obama is consistent with its perennial mistaken belief that ideas have more consequences than they do. One prominent example of this bad intellectual history is Dinesh D'Souza's charge that Obama as a teenager absorbed his ostensibly radical views from his maternal grandfather's Communist drinking buddy Frank Marshall Davis.

Third, we need to consider the possibility that the Right broadly conceived has changed more than the Left broadly conceived since their respective contemporary origins during the 1930s.

Fourth, we need to think about the unthinkable, that the United States for roughly a century has been in complex ways a conservative country. 

For more detail beyond these points, come to a session I organized at the American Historical Association convention in January called Studying the American Right, Center, and Left--All at the Same Time!

In the meantime, keep in mind that Barack Obama is President of the United States not some intellectual historian.

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Notes

1. C. Wright Mills:  Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York:  Ballantine,, 1960), 8.  The Kennedy anecdote comes from Norman Birnbaum, "The Half-Forgotten Prophet:  C. Wright Mills," Nation, March 20, 2009.

2. Gerald R. Ford, A Time to Heal:  The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford (New York:  Harper and Row, 1979), 173-175.

3. See the classic essay by Robert Griffith, "Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Corporate Commonwealth," American Historical Review, February 1982.

4. Jonathan Alter, The Promise:  President Obama, Year One (New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1980), 267.

5. Kennedy omitted the term Keynesian economics, probably out of prudence, but his address at the June 1962 Yale commencement included something even more heretical by current standards, an explicit acknowledgement that the United States could learn lessons from Western Europe about effective government and economic policy.

6. My admiration for Kennedy's effort to popularize complicated and counterintuitive economic ideas should not be taken as general enthusiasm for his presidency.  His civil rights actions were sluggish even if we apply standards appropriate for a president rather than some sociologist.  Many of his foreign policies were so risky that relatively few Americans now have any real sense just how dangerous these were.  Collective memory of the U.S. public "victory" in the Cuban missile crisis stands out as the prime example.  This obliviousness to the continued relevance of  the Cold War extends to some of President Obama's closest foreign policy advisers, a disposition amply documented--and misconstrued as wisdom--in James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power(New York:  Viking, 2012).

 7. For a quick summary see Leo P. Ribuffo, "Twenty Suggestions for Studying the Right Now that Studying the Right isTrendy," Historically Speaking, January 2011.

8. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Hope (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 80.