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Summary
Summary
The author of the bestselling Blowback Trilogy reflects on America's waning power in a masterful collection of essays
In his prophetic book Blowback , published before 9/11, Chalmers Johnson warned that our secret operations in Iraq and elsewhere around the globe would exact a price at home. Now, in a brilliant series of essays written over the last three years, Johnson measures that price and the resulting dangers America faces. Our reliance on Pentagon economics, a global empire of bases, and war without end is, he declares, nothing short of "a suicide option."
Dismantling the Empire explores the subjects for which Johnson is now famous, from the origins of blowback to Barack Obama's Afghanistan conundrum, including our inept spies, our bad behavior in other countries, our ill-fought wars, and our capitulation to a military that has taken ever more control of the federal budget. There is, he proposes, only one way out: President Obama must begin to dismantle the empire before the Pentagon dismantles the American Dream. If we do not learn from the fates of past empires,he suggests, our decline and fall are foreordained. This is Johnson at his best: delivering both a warning and an urgent prescription for a remedy.
Author Notes
Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute & professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, has written numerous books on Japan & Asia including his classic "Miti & the Japanese Miracle" & "Japan: Who Governs?" He lives near San Diego.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This timely book from accomplished historian Johnson (Blowback) collects previously published articles that make succinct, hard-hitting attacks on what the author perceives as America's ruinous imperial follies. Johnson is especially critical of the U.S. penchant for covert operations run by the CIA-"the president's private army"-and its enthrallment to what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. For Johnson, the country's devotion to the "military Keynesianism" ascendant since WWII has not only caused untold and unnecessary damage at home and abroad but is "a form of slow economic suicide." His proposal to abolish the CIA and sell off the more than 700 military bases around the world may sound fanciful, but, Johnson insists, "Change is in the air." Indeed, he's no voice in the wilderness: recent movements across the Congressional aisle to drastically curb Pentagon spending suggest a new and serious attempt to address the problem so compellingly presented here. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
It's a sign of how poorly liberals market themselves and their ideas that the word "liberal" is still in disrepute despite the election of the most genuinely liberal president that the political culture of this country will probably allow. "Progressive" is now the self-description of choice for liberals, though it's musty and evasive. The basic equation remains: virtually all Republican politicians call themselves conservative; few Democratic politicians call themselves liberal. Even retired Classic Coke liberals like Walter F. Mondale are skittish about their creed. "I never signed up for any ideology," he writes in his memoirs. That would be fine (people are sick of labels) if clarity weren't such an obvious political advantage. Simple ideology routinely trounces nuanced pragmatism, just as emotion so often beats reason and the varsity fullback will most likely deck the captain of the debate team in a fistfight. For four decades, conservatives have used the word "liberal" as an epithet, while liberals have used "conservative" defensively ("I'm a little conservative on . . ."). And Fox fans range out of factual bounds ("death panels") more than their NPR-listening counterparts in the liberal "reality-based community" (a term attributed to a Bush White House aide by the author Ron Suskind). Liberals are also at a disadvantage because politics, at its essence, is about self-interest, an idea that at first glance seems more closely aligned with conservatism. To make their more complex case, liberals must convince a nation of individualists that enlightened self-interest requires mutual interest, and that the liberal project is better constructed for the demands of an increasingly interdependent world. That challenge is made even harder because of a tactical split within liberalism itself. Think of it as a distinction between "action liberals" and "movement liberals." Action liberals are policy-oriented pragmatists who use their heads to get something important done, even if their arid deal-making and Big Money connections often turn off the base. Movement liberals can sometimes specialize in logical arguments (e.g., Garry Wills), but they are more often dreamy idealists whose hearts and moral imagination can power the deepest social change (notably the women's movement and the civil rights movement). They frequently over-indulge in fine whines, appear naïve about political realities and prefer emotionally satisfying gestures to incremental but significant change. Many Democrats are an uneasy combination of realpolitik and "gesture politics," which makes for a complicated approach toward governing. As Senator Al Franken says of the Republicans: "Their bumper sticker . . . it's one word: 'No.' . . . Our bumper sticker has - it's just way too many words. And it says, 'Continued on next bumper sticker.' " Action liberalism has its modern roots in empiricism and the scientific method. Adam Smith was the original liberal. While "The Wealth of Nations" (1776) has long been the bible of laissez-faire conservatism, Smith's first book, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" (1759), pioneered liberal ideas of social and moral interdependence. By today's standards, Abraham Lincoln's support for large-scale government spending on infrastructure and appeals to "the better angels of our nature" would qualify him as a liberal. In the 20th century, progressives cleaned up and expanded government, trust-busted on behalf of what came to be known as "the public interest," and experimented with different practical and heavily compromised ways of addressing the Great Depression. The quintessential example of the pragmatic core of liberalism came in 1943, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that "Dr. New Deal" had become "Dr. Win the War." Roosevelt believed that the ends of liberalism - advancing democracy, expanding participation, protecting the environment and consumers (first promoted by a progressive Republican, Theodore Roosevelt), securing the vulnerable - were fixed, but that the timing and means of achieving them were highly negotiable, a distinction that often eludes modern liberals. Whatever F.D.R.'s advantages over President Obama in communicating with the public, they share an unsentimental emphasis on what's possible and what works. Both men, for instance, rejected the urgent pleas of some liberals to nationalize the banks and tacked toward their goals rather than standing ostentatiously on principle. Roosevelt was criticized by New Deal liberals in 1935 for allowing Congress to water down the Social Security bill before passage. Sound familiar? Many movement liberals consider such concessions to be a sellout, just as they thought President Bill Clinton sold out by signing welfare reform in 1996. It's important to criticize parts of Obama's performance where merited - he didn't use his leverage over banks when he had it - but some liberal writers have gone further, savaging his motives and integrity. Roger D. Hodge's book is called THE MENDACITY OF HOPE: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99), as if Obama's corporate fund-raising and failure to live up to the unrealistic expectations of purist liberals made him and his team puppets and liars. Hodge says the fact that Obama is "in most respects better" than George W. Bush or Sarah Palin is "completely beside the point." Really? Since when did the tenets of liberalism demand that politics no longer be viewed as the art of the possible? Hodge, formerly the editor of Harper's Magazine, makes valid arguments about the failure of Democrats to undertake the essential liberal function of checking the excesses of capitalism. But the political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson are closer to the mark in their important new book, WINNER-TAKE-ALL POLITICS: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (Simon & Schuster, $27). Without rationalizing specific policy choices, they describe the "paradox" Obama confronted on taking office when the country faced a genuine risk of another depression: "how to heal a fragile economy without simply reasserting the dominance of the forces that had brought that economy to the brink of ruin." It's the healing part - preventing another depression - that voters often forget in their understandable rage over bailouts, almost all of which, by the way, have already been paid back. In making the broader case that the rich have essentially bought the country, Hacker and Pierson zero in on two killer statistics. Over the last three decades, the top 1 percent of the country has received 36 percent of all the gains in household incomes; 1 percent got more than a third of the upside. And the top one-tenth of 1 percent acquired much more of the nation's increased wealth during those years than the bottom 60 percent did. That's roughly 300,000 super-rich people with a bigger slice of the pie than 180 million Americans. The collapse of the American middle class and the huge transfer of wealth to the already wealthy is the biggest domestic story of our time and a proper focus of liberal energy. Arianna Huffington wasn't exaggerating when she entitled her latest book THIRD WORLD AMERICA: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream (Crown, $23.99). Poverty in the United States isn't as bad as in the third world, but the disparity between rich and poor is far beyond that of other highly developed nations. While Huffington's muscular tone fits the mood of today's liberals, she insists on pivoting to the positive. After excoriating politicians, she cites innovative nonprofits that can help liberals feel less helpless. THE good news reported by Hacker and Pierson is that American wealth disparities - almost exactly as wide as in 1928 - are not the residue of globalization or technology or anything else beyond our control. There's nothing inevitable about them. They're the result of politics and policies, which tilted toward the rich beginning in the 1970s and can, with enough effort, be tilted back over time (emphasis added for impatient liberals). The primary authors of the shocking transfer of wealth are Republicans, whose claims to be operating from principle now lie in tatters. It doesn't take feats of scholarship to prove that simultaneously supporting balanced budgets, status quo entitlement and defense spending, and huge tax cuts for the wealthy (the Republicans' new plan) is mathematically impossible and intellectually bankrupt. But of course Democrats, caught up for years in the wonders of the market, are complicit in the winner-take-all ethos. President Clinton and his Treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin played to the bond market, and many of their protégés later came to dominate the Obama administration. Hacker and Pierson call Rahm Emanuel types "Mark Hanna Democrats," a reference to William McKinley's campaign manager, who said: "There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can't remember what the second one is." Action liberals can explain that they opposed the ruinous 2001 Bush tax cuts and that their prodigious fund-raising is necessary to stay competitive, but large segments of their base are no longer buying it. They want a more bare-knuckle attack on Wall Street than Obama has so far offered. But now the president is getting hit from both sides. In FORTUNES OF CHANGE: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America (Wiley, $25.95), David Callahan points out that Obama raised more than John McCain in 8 of the 10 wealthiest ZIP codes in the United States. Callahan, the author of "The Cheating Culture," notes that Hollywood money proves that rich donors don't always push the parties to the right. It can also push the Democrats left on issues like the environment and gay rights. And yet in the months since he finished his book, many wealthy Obama supporters have grown disenchanted with what they see as the president's "anti-business" language (he attacked "fat-cat bankers"). This was inevitable. "A benign plutocracy is still a plutocracy," Callahan concludes. He quotes Louis Brandeis: "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." That's as relevant today to liberal thinking as it was when Brandeis said it, decades ago. On social issues, liberals have mostly won, with the public backing them on abortion, gay rights and other live-and-let-live ideas. That doesn't necessarily make liberals more libertine (in fact, divorce rates are higher in red states than in blue). But it floats them closer to history's tide. The great hope for the future of liberalism lies in the changing demographics of the country. With younger voters and Hispanics moving sharply into the Democratic column, Republicans are in danger of being marginalized as an old, white, regional party. The Tea Party energy might be seen in retrospect as the last gasp of the "Ozzie and Harriet" order, with Obama as the scary face of a different-looking America. (Why else did Tea Partiers not seem to care over the last decade about President Bush's profligate spending?) For now, of course, it's conservatives who have the mojo, and not just because the economy is so bad. Despite historic advances in 2008, liberals remain better at complaining than organizing, which is a big reason they may take a shellacking in November. A couple of new books recall the story about the civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who was visiting F.D.R. to push for a policy. "Make me do it," the president is said to have replied. Roosevelt meant that his visitors should go out and organize and demonstrate, not just expect him to wave a magic wand. Liberals have a tendency to think that when the "right" person wins, order has been restored. The idea of permanent trench warfare between liberals and conservatives is an abstraction to them rather than a call to arms. One reason health care reform stalled in the summer of 2009 was that Tea Party forces turned up en masse at town meetings in swing districts while liberals stayed home, convinced that after electing Obama they were free to go on Miller Time. The enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 was a bad experience for certain movement liberals. If conservatives were mindless in describing as "socialism" what was essentially a plan pioneered by Bob Dole, Howard Baker and Mitt Romney, liberals seemed strangely incapable of taking yes for an answer after more than 70 years of trying to expand coverage. They were right about the value of a public option, but wrong to attack Obama for not obtaining it when the votes were never there in the Senate. Many Democrats were ignorant of all the good things in the legislation (partly the fault of White House mistakes in framing the message) and politically suicidal in echoing Howard Dean's infamous cry of "Kill the bill!" By the end of the process, voters were revolted by the notorious "Cornhusker kickback" and other smelly deals. If making laws is akin to making sausage (you don't really want to know what goes into it), the stench from Capitol Hill spoiled everyone's appetite for the liberal meal. But somewhere Ted Kennedy is smiling. To the list of revealing Kennedy books, add Burton Hersh's EDWARD KENNEDY: An Intimate Biography (Counterpoint, $32). Hersh, a Harvard classmate of the future senator, ignores much of his Senate career but makes good use of sources going back six decades to paint a personal portrait. While Hersh's uncontrolled freight-train prose is loaded with often extraneous details, he nonetheless brings many of the old stories alive again. Kennedy was both the heart and the tactical brains of late-20th-century liberalism, which won many small victories even as it fell out of fashion. Had he been vital in 2009 and able to work his charm across the aisle, senators in both parties agree, the health care debate would have been healthier. In GETTING IT DONE: How Obama and Congress Finally Broke the Stalemate to Make Way for Health Care Reform (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $25.99), Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, strips the color from that story in order to maintain his Washington relationships. But Daschle, forced by a tax problem to step down as Obama's health care czar, has written, with David Nather, an exceptionally clear account of an exceptionally tangled piece of recent history. He's especially good on why the credibility of Democrats depends on how skillfully they implement the bill over the next 10 years. Left unsaid is that Democrats in 2012 will face not just hostile Republicans favoring repeal but also cost controls on Medicare that will encourage conservatives to resume their pandering to the elderly, an approach long taken by liberals to retain power. Beyond the specifics of the bill, Daschle is obviously right that "health care has become a symbol of the deep divide in Americans' feelings about the role government should play." In his Inaugural Address, Obama tried to define his view of that role when he said, "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works." This is a sensible definition of modern liberalism but also a bloodless and incomplete one, evoking Michael Dukakis's claim that the 1988 presidential election was about "competence, not ideology." That definitional dispute had first flared four years earlier, when Gary Hart mounted a stiff challenge to Walter Mondale for the Democratic nomination. Both have new books out. Hart's eccentric contribution, THE THUNDER AND THE SUNSHINE: Four Seasons in a Burnished Life (Fulcrum, $25), will remind readers why he and the presidency would have been an awkward fit. His bitterness over the sex scandal that ended his political career in 1987 hasn't fully ebbed. As always, he tries to aim higher: Condoleezza Rice is in the index, but Donna Rice isn't. The book contains a sustained and ponderous "Odyssey" metaphor, with one chapter opening, "As he rises from his stony perch above the harbor, Ulysses tells his mariners that he is prepared to sail beyond the sunset." Hart began his career as a 1960s movement liberal, a seeker and intellectual (he received a doctorate from Oxford in 2001, at the age of 64) with Homeric aspirations. He ruminates well about some of the essential differences between the American political creeds. Conservatives, by nature more skeptical, "accept that life is just one damn thing after another, that we are on our own, and it is up to us to make the most of it. But for those with a sense of commonwealth and common good, the shattering of dreams and hopes is always viewed more tragically." True enough, but it raises the question of why attaching emotion to politics makes conservatives stronger but often weakens liberals. In the years since Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, something soft has wormed its way into the heart of liberalism, a diffidence about the cut-and-thrust of politics. Carville-style fisticuffs are satisfying, but have not yet made it a fighting faith again. Mondale's memoir, THE GOOD FIGHT: A Life in Liberal Politics (Scribner, $28), written with David Hage, is, not surprisingly, more conventional than Hart's, but he comes to terms more squarely with the limits of liberalism. Looking back at his early days in the Senate in 1965, at the peak of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society - what he calls the "high tide" of liberalism - Mondale says: "A lot of it was wonderful, overdue and much needed. But we also overstated what was possible." He recalls the years in the wilderness, when "I wanted to talk about poverty and opportunity, but people wondered why I wanted to give away things for free." Even in feeling vindicated by Obama's election, he admits that "liberalism is still on trial." Especially when it comes to education. It's encouraging that even a paleoliberal like Mondale now believes that "we should weed out teachers who are unsuited to the profession" and that teachers' union rules "must have flexibility." There's a great struggle under way today within the Democratic Party between Obama and the reformers on one side and, on the other, hidebound adult interest groups (especially the National Education Association) that have until recently dominated the party. If liberalism is about practical problem solving, then establishing the high standards and accountability necessary to rescue a generation of poor minority youths and train the American work force of the future must move to the top of the progressive agenda. Education reform is emerging as the first important social movement of the 21st century, a perfect cause for a new generation of idealists. Where education might offer grounds for cooperation with conservatives, foreign policy almost certainly will not. After a long period of favoring interventionism to fight fascism and Communism, liberals have been doves since Vietnam, even in a post-9/11 world. If Democrats retain control of the House, they will pressure Obama hard next year to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan as promised. Chalmers Johnson, a noted scholar of Japan, has in recent years made a point of explaining how the Afghan freedom fighters the C.I.A. supported in the 1980s, when they were fighting the Soviet Union, are now the Taliban and Qaeda forces trying to kill Americans. In DISMANTLING THE EMPIRE: America's Last Best Hope (Metropolitan/Holt, $25), he argues for a complete reordering of the national security state to save not just lives but treasure. While Obama won't go as far as Johnson urges, a big tussle between the White House and the Pentagon is likely next year, when we'll learn if neoconservatives can once again convince the country that liberals are "unpatriotic." The answer to that question - and to the immediate fate of liberal ideas - depends largely on the performance of one man, the president. Jeffrey C. Alexander's intriguing argument in THE PERFORMANCE OF POLITICS: Obama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (Oxford University, $29.95), a meticulous review of the 2008 campaign, is that his fellow sociologists have overemphasized impersonal social forces at the expense of the theater of public life - the way politicians perform "symbolically." It's a prosaic call for a more poetic (or at least aesthetic) understanding of politics. Ideology must connect viscerally, or it doesn't connect at all. Liberalism, like any idea or product, can succeed only if it sells. Roosevelt was criticized by New Deal liberals for watering down the Social Security bill. Sound familiar? Why does emotion make conservatives stronger but often weaken liberals? Jonathan Alter, a columnist for Newsweek and an analyst for MSNBC, is the author of "The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope" and, most recently, "The Promise: President Obama, Year One." By Christopher Caldwell Within the space of a week last summer, one judge in Arizona, ruling in a suit brought by the Obama administration, blocked a provision in a new state law permitting police officers to check the status of suspected illegal immigrants, while another blocked the implementation of a California referendum banning gay marriage. The two decisions imposed liberal policies that public opinion opposed. These things happen, of course. Congress had acted contrary to measurable public opinion when it passed health care reform in March. What made the two judicial rulings different was that both seemed to challenge the principle that it is the people who have the last word on how they are governed. American conservatives, most notably the activists who support various Tea Party groups, have a great variety of anxieties and grievances just now. But what unites them all, at least rhetorically, is the sense that something has gone wrong constitutionally, shutting themout of decisions that rightfully belong to them as citizens. This is why many talk about "taking our country back." If polls are to be believed, conservatives should have no difficulty taking the country back or doing whatever else they want with it. Gallup now counts 54 percent of likely voters as self-described conservatives and only 18 per cent as liberals. More than half of Americans (55 per cent) say they have grown more conservative in the past year, according to the pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen in their new book, MAD AS HELL: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99). America's self-described conservatives, however, have a problem: They lack a party. While the Tea Party may look like a stalking horse for Republicans, the two have been a bad fit. Insurgents have cut a swath through Republicans' well-laid election plans. They helped oust Florida's party chairman. They toppled the favored candidates of the party establishment in Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, New York, South Carolina, Utah and elsewhere. More than 70 percent of Republicans embrace the Tea Party, but the feeling is not reciprocated. If conservatives could vote for the Tea Party as a party, they would prefer it to the Republicans, according to Rasmussen. (Lately, Rasmussen's polling, more than others', has favored Republicans. Not coincidentally, perhaps, it has picked up certain recent shifts earlier and more reliably - like the surge that won the Republican Scott Brown the late Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat in January.) Much of the Tea Party is made up of conservative-leaning independents. The journalist Jonathan Rauch has called these people "debranded Republicans," and they are debranded for a reason - 55 percent of them oppose the Republican leadership. While Republicans are likely to reap aU the benefit of Tea Party enthusiasm in November's elections, this is a marriage of convenience. The influential conservative blogger Erick Erickson of RedState.com, insists that one of his top goals is denying the Republican establishment credit for any electoral successes. Hence the Republicans' problem. After November, the party will need to reform in a conservative direction, in line with its base's wishes, and without a clear idea of whether the broader public will be well disposed to such reform. How Republicans wound up in this situation requires one to state the obvious. Well before George W. Bush presided over the collapse of the global financial system, a reasonable-sounding case was being mustered that he was the worst president in history. Foreign policy was the grounds on which voters repudiated him and his party, starting in 2006, and President Obama's drawdown of forces in Iraq may be the most popular thing he has done. But foreign policy is unlikely to drive voters' long-term assessment of the parties. The Iraq misadventure was justified with the same spreading-democracy rhetoric that Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and other Democrats used to justify interventions in Haiti and the Balkans in the 1990s. President Obama's difficulties in resolving Afghanistan and closing Guantánamo show that Bush's options were narrower than they appeared at the time. Republicans' future electoral fortunes will depend on domestic policy and specifically on whether they can reconnect with "small-c" conservatism - the conservatism whose mottoes are "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" and "Mind your own business," and the opposite of which is not liberalism but utopianism. The Bush administration was a time of "big-C" Conservatism, ideological conservatism, which the party pursued with mixed results. As far as social issues were concerned, this ideology riveted a vast bloc of religious conservatives to the party, and continues to be an electoral asset (although that bloc, by some measures, is shrinking). Had gay marriage not been on several state ballots in 2004, John Kerry might now be sitting in the White House. Ideological conservatism also meant "supply-side economics" - a misnomer for the doctrine that all tax cuts eventually pay for themselves through economic growth. The problem is, they don't. So supply-side wound up being a form of permanent Keynesian stimulus - a bad idea during the overheated years before 2008. Huge tax cuts, from which the highest earners drew the biggest benefits, helped knock the budget out of balance and misallocated trillions of dollars. To a dispiriting degree, tax cuts remain the Republican answer to every economic question. Eric Cantor, potentially the House majority leader, told The Wall Street Journal that if Democrats went home without renewing various Bush-era tax cuts (which they did), "I promise you, H.R. 1 will be to retroactively restore the lower rates." Until recently, supply side was political gravy for Republicans. It confirmed the rule that in American politics the party most plausibly offering something for nothing wins. In the 1980s, the New York congressman Jack Kemp was the archetype of an ambitious, magnanimous, "sunny" kind of Republican who let you keep more of your taxes while building more housing for the poor. Democrats who questioned the affordability of these policies sounded like killjoys. In a time of scarcity like our own, calculations change. Today your tax cut means shuttering someone else's AIDS clinic. Your welfare check comes off of someone else's dinner table. Deficits in the Obama era are a multiple of the Bush ones, and the product of a more consciously pursued Keynesianism. But that does not absolve Republicans of the need to find a path to balancing the budget. With some exceptions - like Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, a Kemp protégé who has laid out a "Road Map" for reforming (i.e., cutting) Social Security in coming generations - Republicans have not adjusted to zero-sum economics. There is certainly no credible path to budget balance in the "Pledge to America" released in late September. YET the case against supply-side economics can never be airtight or decisive, and Republican tax promises will probably help the party this year. That is because taxes are not just an economic benchmark, but a political one. The public should not expect more in services than it pays in taxes. But the government should not expect more in taxes than it offers in representation. And the number of Americans who feel poorly represented has risen alarmingly during the Obama administration. Americans' feelings toward the president are complex. On the one hand, there is little of the ad hominem contempt that was in evidence during the Clinton and Bush administrations. There are no campaign spots showing a Congressional candidate's face morphing into Obama's. But the president's ideology, fairly or not, has provoked something approaching panic. Not many Americans agree that Obama is a closet totalitarian, as the Fox News host Glenn Beck has claimed. But they have serious misgivings of a milder kind. In retrospect it looks inevitable that Republicans would have been punished by voters in 2008; but until Lehman Brothers collapsed in mid-September of that year, it was far from certain they would be, despite strong Democratic gains in the 2006 elections. Independent and Republican voters wanted an assurance that Senator Obama would not simply hand over power to the Democratic Party. He consistently provided it. The centerpiece of his campaign was a promise of post-partisanship. He introduced himself as a Senate candidate in 2004 at the Boston convention, deriding as false the tendency of pundits to "slice and dice our country into red states and blue states" - a bracingly subversive thing to do at a partisan convention. He praised Ronald Reagan. And in 2008 he got more than 52 percent of the vote, a higher percentage than many political consultants thought possible for a Democrat. That means he came into office unusually dependent on the good will of independents and Republicans. And yet, once in power, the president set to work enacting the agenda of the same Congressional Democrats he had implied he would keep at arm's length. No president in living memory has compiled a slenderer record of bipartisanship. It is often said in the president's defense that Republican obstructionism left him no choice. Today, this is true - and it has put an end, for now, to the productive part of his presidency. But it was not true at the time of the stimulus in early 2009, when the president's poll numbers were so stratospherically high that it appeared risky to oppose him on anything. Republicans certainly cannot be blamed for the way Democrats passed their health care bill. Whether or not the deal-making and parliamentary maneuvering required to secure passage was unprecedented, it was unprecedented in the era of C-Span and blogs, and many voters found it corrupt. The president's legislative program has been bought at a huge price in public discontent. The expression "picking up nickels in front of a steamroller" has been used to describe a lot of the gambles taken by A.I.G. and other companies on the eve of the financial crisis. It describes the president's agenda equally well. It is vital to understand where this steamroller is coming from. According to Gallup, support for Obama has fallen only slightly among Democrats, from 90 percent to 81 percent, and only slightly among Republicans, from 20 percent to 12 percent. It is independents who have abandoned him: 56 percent approved of him when he came into office, versus 38 percent now. The reason the country is getting more conservative is not that conservatives are getting louder. It is that people in the dead center of the electorate are turning into conservatives at an astonishing rate. The frustration and disappointment of these voters is probably directed as much at themselves as at their president. Therewere two ways to judge Obama the candidate - by what he said or by the company he kept. The cable-TV loudmouths who dismissed Obama right off the bat were unfair in certain particulars. But, on the question of whether Obama, if elected, would be more liberal or more conservative than his campaign rhetoric indicated, they arrived at a more accurate assessment than those of us who pored over his speeches, parsed his interviews and read his first book. SOME wish the president had governed more to the left, insisting on a public option in the health care bill and pushing for a larger stimulus. But those people make up only a small fraction even of the 18 percent of voters who call themselves liberal. In a time of growing populism and distrust, Republicans enjoy the advantage of running against the party of the elite. This seems to be a controversial proposition, but it should not be. It is not the same as saying that Democrats are the party of elitism. One can define elitism as, say, resistance to progressive taxation, and make a case that Republicans better merit that description. But, broadly speaking, the Democratic Party is the party to which elites belong. It is the party of Harvard (and most of the Ivy League), of Microsoft and Apple (and most of Silicon Valley), of Hollywood and Manhattan (and most of the media) and, although there is some evidence that numbers are evening out in this election cycle, of Goldman Sachs (and most of the investment banking profession). That the billionaire David Koch's Americans for Prosperity Foundation supports the Tea Party has recently been much in the news. But the Democrats have the support of more, and more active, billionaires. Of the 20 richest ZIP codes in. America, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, 19 gave the bulk of their money to Democrats in the last election, in most cases the vast bulk - 86 percent in 10024 on the Upper West Side. Meanwhile, only 22 percent of non-high-school educated white males are happy with the direction the country is going in. The Democrats' overlap with elites leaves each party with a distinctive liability. The Democrats appear sincerely deluded about whom they actually represent. Democrats - who would have no trouble discerning elite solidarity in the datum that, say, in the 1930s the upper ranks of Britain's media, church, business and political institutions were dominated by Tories - somehow think their own predominance in similar precincts is . . . what? Coincidence? Irony? Republicans, meanwhile, do not recognize the liability that their repudiation by elites represents in an age of expertise and specialization - even in the eyes of the non-elite center of the country. Like a European workingman's party at the turn of the last century, the Republican Party today inspires doubts that it has the expertise required to run a large government bureaucracy. Whatever one thinks of Obama's economic team, and Bill Clinton's before it, the Bush White House was never capable, in eight years, of assembling a similarly accomplished one. Nor is there much evidence that Republicans were ever able to conceptualize the serious problems with the nation's medical system, let alone undertake to reform it on their own terms. "Democrats and Republicans agree that our health care system is broken in fundamental ways," Eric Cantor notes in YOUNG GUNS: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders (Threshold, $15), a campaign book he has written with Paul Ryan and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California. Well, great. But for years now, Republicans discussing the availability and cost of health care have been like a kid who, when asked why he hasn't cleaned up his room, replies, "I was just about to!" It is in the context of class that Sarah Palin's two-year career on the American political scene is so significant. She "almost seemed to set off a certain trip wire within the political class regarding access to power," as Rasmussen and Schoen put it. But it is not an ideological trip wire. The Alaska governorship that catapulted Palin onto the national scene requires dealing with oil executives and divvying up the money from their lease payments. It is a job for a pragmatist, not a preacher. Palin has sometimes opposed big government and sometimes favored it, as became clear when journalists discovered that, contrary to Palin's claims, she had been slow to oppose the wasteful Alaskan "Bridge to Nowhere," which became a symbol of federal pork. The controversies over Palin are about class (and markers of class, like religiosity), not ideology. She endorsed several underdog insurgent candidates who wound up winning Republican primaries in the spring and summer. How did she do that, when few observers - no matter how well informed, no matter how close to the Republican base - had given them a chance? Either Palin is a political idiot savant of such gifts that those who have questioned her intelligence should revise their opinion or, more likely, she is hearing signals from the median American that are inaudible to the governing classes - like those frequencies that teenagers can hear but adults can't. This talent alone does not make Palin a viable national leader. But until Republican politicians learn to understand the party's new base, Palin will be their indispensable dragoman. After November's election, the party will either reform or it will disappoint its most ardent backers. If it reforms, it is unlikely to be in a direction Palin disapproves of. In THE RULING CLASS: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It (American Spectator/Beaufort, paper, $12.95), Angelo M. Codevilla, an emeritus professor of international relations at Boston University who formerly was on the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, gives a very interesting, conservative account of class politics. Codevilla sees the country as divided into "the Ruling Class" and "the Country Class," who "have less in common culturally, dislike each other more and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners." Codevilla's terms are often frustratingly vague. The Ruling Class, in his definition, includes top Democrats as well as Bush Republicans, despite their many differences; the Country Class seems sometimes to mean the passive remainder of the country, and sometimes the vanguard of ideological insurgents. And yet Codevilla captures the texture of today's conservative grievances with admirable boldness and convincing exactitude. Slights are harder to tolerate than exactions, he finds: "Day after day, the Ruling Class's imputations - racist, stupid, prone to violence, incapable of running things - hit like artillery cover for the advance of legislation and regulation to restrict and delegitimize." This is a polemic, and people wholly out of sympathy with conservatism will dislike it. But Codevilla makes what we might call the Tea Party case more soberly, bluntly and constructively than anyone else has done. Codevilla takes seriously the constitutional preoccupations of today's conservative protesters and their professed desire for enhanced self-rule. He sees that the temptation merely to form "an alternative Ruling Class" in the mirror image of the last one would be self-defeating. Americans must instead reacquire the sinews of self-government, he thinks. Self-government is difficult and time-consuming. If it weren't, everyone would have it. The "light" social democratic rule that has prevailed for the past 80 years has taken a lot of the burdens of self-government off the shoulders of citizens. They were probably glad to be rid of them. Now, apparently, they are changing their minds. Codevilla has no illusions about their prospects for success. Americans are not in the position to roll back their politics to before the time when Franklin D. Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson or whoever-you-like ran roughshod over the Yankee yeomanry. Town, county and state governments no longer have much independent political identity. They are mere "conduits for federal mandates," as Codevilla puts it. He notes that the 132 million Americans who inhabited the country in 1940 could vote on 117,000 school boards, while today a nation of 310 million votes in only 15,000 school districts. Self-rule depends on constitutional prerogatives that have long been revoked, institutions that have long been abandoned and habits of mind that were unlearned long ago. (Not to mention giving up Social Security and Medicare benefits that have already been paid for.) "Does the Country Class really want to govern itself," Codevilla asks, "or is it just whining for milder taskmasters?" WE will find out soon enough. With a victory in November, Republicans could claim a mandate to repeal the Obama health care law and roll back a good deal of recent stimulus-related spending, neither of which they've made any pretense of tolerating. But achieving the larger goal - a citizenry sufficiently able to govern itself to be left alone by Washington - will require more. The Republican Party's leaders will need to sit down respectfully with the people who brought them to power and figure out what they agree on. If Republicans make the error that Democrats did under President Obama, mistaking a protest vote for a wide mandate, the public will turn on them just as quickly. There's a rule in American politics that the party most plausibly offering something for nothing wins. If conservatives could vote for the Tea Party as a party, they would prefer it to the Republicans, a poll finds. Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, is the author of "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West."
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Suicide Option | p. 1 |
Part I What We Did | |
1 Blowback World | p. 11 |
2 Empire v. Democracy | p. 29 |
3 The Smash of Civilizations | p. 40 |
4 Peddling Democracy | p. 52 |
Part II Spies, Rogues, and Mercenaries | |
5 Agency of Rogues | p. 67 |
6 An Imperialist Comedy | p. 84 |
7 Warning: Mercenaries at Work | p. 93 |
Part III Baseworld | |
8 America's Empire of Bases | p. 109 |
9 America's Unwelcome Advances | p. 120 |
10 Baseless Expenditures | p. 129 |
Part IV The Pentagon Takes Us Down | |
11 Going Bankrupt | p. 135 |
12 The Military-Industrial Man | p. 148 |
13 We Have the Money (If Only We Didn't Waste It on the Defense Budget) | p. 158 |
14 Economic Death Spiral at the Pentagon | p. 163 |
Part V How to End It | |
15 Dismantling the Empire | p. 183 |
Note on Sources | p. 197 |
Acknowledgments | p. 198 |
Index | p. 199 |