Vicious Cycle of Child Abuse, Neglect

Alvin Poussaint, an African American authority on child psychiatry, says blacks and other Americans need to pay more attention to a festering problem in child-rearing among poorer, often single, black parents. In "Spare the rod, save the child," columnist Clarence Page, who is himself black, gives the sorry details. The column appeared recently in The Chicago Tribune and other newspapers.

The immediate problem, per Page, is that "African-American kids are being expelled from preschool at a much higher rate than other racial or ethnic groups ... African-American children are twice as likely to be expelled from preschool programs as white or Latino children, and five times as likely to be expelled as Asian-American children." Why? Poussaint says it's not racial profiling by school officials that's mostly to blame. Instead, "early anger" among three- and four-year-old black children leads to their misbehavior and expulsion.

That anger in turn often results, quite predictably, from parental abuse and neglect.

We're talking here in part about the 80 percent of black parents who believe that when their kids act up, they ought to "beat the devil out of them," Poussaint says. The psychiatrist goes on: "And research shows the more you beat them, the angrier they get. It is not good discipline."

Just as wrongheaded as outright corporal punishment is "black parents cursing, shaking or slapping their prekindergarten kids or demeaning them with statements like, 'You're no good, just like your father'." Or, the parent will simply neglect to discipline the child in a more appropriate way. Page then adds:

Single parents, usually moms, can easily be overwhelmed by the challenges involved in raising children, especially boys. In the worst cases they pass the consequences of their anger down from one generation to another.

Those consequences can later include social isolation, unruly school behavior and violence. Lacking appreciation at home, kids will often shop for it out on the street.

So childhood abuse/neglect not only breeds — via internalized anger that is always going to find some outlet — street crime, gang violence, drug use, educational failure, entrenched poverty, and other social pathologies. It also produces, eventually, parents who have their own bottled-up anger and who take it out on a new generation of kids: theirs. And the vicious cycle begins again.


This is an insight which oldstyleliberal finds most compelling. Anger breeds anger, via childhood abuse and neglect, with social ills in this country as its unfortunate side effect. We all need to pay attention to this syndrome; race is, after all, the third rail of American politics.

oldstyleliberal is accordingly mindful of the side effect of the side effect, as one might call it: non-black Americans develop a negative impression of black Americans, which turns into a stereotype, which turns into racial profiling and worse.

Thus we all need to be open to possible solutions to this problem. "What," asks Page, "can be done?" He answers that a Yale study "found that preschools that had psychologists and other support for their teachers had a lower expulsion rate. Back at home, communities may need to provide more resources, whether voluntary or through local social service agencies, to help parents cope. We need to help more parents learn about what works best in raising children — before the problems with their families become our problems."

Catamaran Politics

Catamaran: two hulls joined by a frame

The image to the right is a picture of (a military version of) a catamaran. It is from this Wikipedia article, which defines the catamaran as "a type of boat or ship consisting of two hulls joined by a frame."

oldstyleliberal defines "catamaran politics" as a habit of preferring, as it were, the frame to the hulls. Think of the hulls as the ideological right and left wings; it doesn't matter which hull represents which ideological wing. The object of catamaran politics is to keep the ship of state perfectly balanced over the two wings.

President Bill Clinton was a master of catamaran politics — which have also been called "triangulation" and "Third Way liberalism" — especially in his approach to reforming welfare. Political pundit Joe Klein writes of the topic in "Three Cheers for Triangulation: What Lieberman's primary defeat means," in a recent issue of Time magazine:

... [Clinton's] philosophy was both successful and profound. It proposed the achievement of liberal ends through market-oriented conservative means. Welfare reform, which combined a work requirement with significant financial incentives for the working poor, was the best example of how the philosophy might work. Unfortunately, Monica Lewinsky's thong show prevented further successes — and Al Gore and John Kerry foolishly sidled away from the Third Way, toward the [Democratic] party's electorally lethal special-interest groups.

Another name for what I'm calling catamaran politics, says Klein, is "bipartisan moderation — which has the additional advantage [over the extremism of either political wing] of being the highest form of patriotism and the only route to victory in a time of war."

Klein says the defeat of three-term Democratic senator Joe Lieberman in the recent Connecticut primary, at the hands of Ned Lamont, an anti-Iraq War candidate, set off a war of words between Lamont-supporting "blognuts" of the left and Bush administration "wingnuts" of the right. The latter were led by Vice President Dick Cheney, "the nation's wingnut in chief," who "actually said Lieberman's defeat would give aid and comfort to our terrorist 'adversaries and al-Qaeda types'."

The former, repesented by "Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org and therefore, perhaps, the nation's blognut in chief," gloated about Lieberman's loss as the "death of triangulation."

If Pariser is correct, it's bad news, writes Klein:

It was Bush's disastrous decision to go to war — and worse, to go to war with insufficient resources — that transformed Iraq into a terrorist Valhalla. It is Bush's feckless prosecution of the war that has created the current morass, in which a U.S. military withdrawal could lead to a regional conflagration. [Bush political strategist Karl] Rove may avert another electoral embarrassment this November with the same old demagoguery, but his strategy has betrayed the nation's best interests. It has destroyed any chance of a unified U.S. response to a crisis overseas. Even the Wall Street Journal's quasi-wingnut editorial page cautioned, in the midst of a typical anti-Democratic harrumph, "[No] President can maintain a war for long without any support from the opposition party; sooner or later his own party will begin to crack as well."

Accordingly, "the essential felony of the Bush White House [is] that it has tried to run a war without bipartisan support." Bush spurns catamaran politics at a time when Clintonian deftness is sorely needed.

So, too, does the far left wing of Clinton's own party. Alas and alack.

Tipping Point Against Iraq War?

Heretofore, it has admittedly been difficult for oldstyleliberal to answer the simple question, Should we get out of Iraq? Recent shifts in the attitudes of pundits he respects have brought him to a tipping point, however. He now thinks a "win" in Iraq to be too much to hope for.

"Snake Eyes," a brief article by Hendrik Hertzberg in the August 21, 2006, New Yorker pretty much says it all. Hertzberg compares a recent opinion piece by centrist and former war supporter Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times to the famous on-the-air renunciation of the Vietnam War by Walter Cronkite in 1968. (The Friedman piece may be read for free here.) Friedman writes:

It seemed to me over the last three years that, even with all the Bush team’s missteps, we had to give our Iraqi partners a chance to produce a transitional government, then write a constitution, then hold an election and then, finally, put together their first elected cabinet. But now they have done all of that — and the situation has only worsened ... we can’t throw more good lives after good lives.

Accordingly, says Friedman, "we need to try a last-ditch Bosnia-like peace conference that would bring together all of Iraq’s factions and neighbors ... For such a conference to come about, though, the U.S. would probably need to declare its intention to leave."

And, Hertzberg adds:

In a Washington Post column a day [earlier than Friedman's piece], the relentlessly centrist David S. Broder, citing his colleague Thomas E. Ricks’s new book, “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,” admitted that “the hope for victory is gone” and deplored “the answer from Bush,” which he characterized this way: “Carry on. Do not waver. And do not question the logic of prolonging the agony.”

Broder's opinion piece, "Doubling Two Bad Bets?", chastised the Bush administration for its blind stubbornness in holding out for both the total destruction of Hezbollah by Israeli forces in Lebanon and the eventual U.S. quelling of the sectarian insurgents in Iraq.

oldstyleliberal agrees with Friedman and Broder. As Friedman says, "Since the Bush team never gave us a Plan A for Iraq, it at least owes us a Plan B."

Moral Questions in Israel's Struggle with Hezbollah

As might be intuited from a recent post, The Pan-Islamist Threat, oldstyleliberal tends to side with Israel when it is attacked from within or without by those who loudly say they oppose its very existence. Hezbollah, now attacking Israel from Lebanon, would seem to qualify in that regard. So it is with a great deal of reluctance that oldstyleliberal concludes that the way Israel is presently conducting its war against Hezbollah in Lebanon leaves way too much to be desired, in terms of moral propriety.

The reasoning oldstyleliberal employs to arrive at this sad conclusion is aptly and succinctly presented in this August 4 article by Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. The title of the article summarizes its basic perspective: "Fog of War Is No Cover for Causing Civilian Deaths." Though "an honest reckoning of the conduct of Israeli forces in Lebanon is difficult" because "the awful bloodshed and intense emotions of war are not conducive to careful moral reasoning," Roth writes, he takes Israel to task nonetheless for several of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's potentially misleading claims in recent speeches.

First of all, Olmert's statement that "the Israeli military exercises great care to avoid harming Lebanese civilians" is called severely into question, in view of the fact that "Human Rights Watch investigators in Lebanon have recorded an appalling number of incidents in which civilians and civilian objects were hit with no apparent military justification." Roth lists the high civilian death tolls and massive amounts of destruction at Dweir, Marwahin, Beflay, Srifa, "nine square blocks of southern Beirut," and Qana as examples of Israel's insufficient care in safeguarding Lebanese civilians and their living conditions.

Does Hezbollah's "abusive" and "aggressive" intent to "wipe Israel off the face of the earth," or the fact that Hezbollah started these hostilities, justify Israel in sometimes harming civilians, as Olmert seems to claim when he suggests that Israel ought to be "given more latitude"? No, says Roth:

The obligations to respect international humanitarian law, including to refrain from deliberate or indiscriminate attacks on civilians and to take all feasible precautions against civilian casualties, persist regardless of the conduct of one's opponent.

Can Israel's less-than-fully-successful attempts to warn civilians to flee the areas that are about to be attacked excuse the subsequent unfortunate deaths of those who have stayed? No, says Roth,

... the failure to heed [a warning] does not create a free-fire zone. If it did, Palestinian militant groups might "warn" all settlers to leave Israeli settlements and then be justified in treating as legitimate targets those who remained.

Does Hezbollah bear the true blame for civilian deaths because it is using the Lebanese civilians as "human shields"? Roth says that Hezbollah has been guilty of violations of "international humanitarian law [that] does prohibit the deliberate use of civilians to shield fighters and military assets, and [that] requires all parties to do everything feasible to station their forces away from civilians." Yet the scale of the civilian carnage in Lebanon well exceeds any level commensurate with Hezbollah's "human shield" violations. When, as has been too often well-documented, Hezbollah troops are nowhere near Israel's chosen strike locations, the "human shield" argument doesn't work.

Nor, says Roth, do the putative misdeeds of the Lebanese government in allowing Hezbollah to continue to operate in south Lebanon prior to this war's outbreak justify the civilian carnage: "A government's misdeeds never justify attacks on its people."

What about the targeting by Israel of Lebanon's infrastructure — is it permissible? No, says Roth,

... international humanitarian law permits attacks on infrastructure only if it is making an effective military contribution, and the military benefits of its destruction outweigh the civilian costs. That case is difficult, if not impossible, to make for the extensive attacks on electrical facilities, bridges and roadways throughout the country.

oldstyleliberal is not sure he agrees here. It is his understanding that Lebanese bridges and roads are being devastated to keep Hebollah from rearming: restocking the rockets it is raining down daily on northern Israel, killing civilians there. Of course, it is an open question whether the strategy is actually succeeding. If it isn't, then the infrastructure attacks are indeed morally suspect.

On the whole, oldstyleliberal thinks Israel needs to clean up its act, if it wants to be seen as taking the moral high road – which it ought to do, to avoid paying for having pursued the opposite course of action somewhere down the road when its chickens come home to roost.

The Pan-Islamist Threat

"Actually, the Middle East Is Our Crisis Too," writes conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer in this week's Time. In Gaza, he says, Hamas

... is fighting not to create a 23rd Arab state but, as its charter explains, to recover "an Islamic Waqf." Meaning? Territory claimed under the Islamic precept that "any land the Muslims have conquered by force ... during the times of [Islamic] conquests" more than a millennium ago belongs to Muslims forever because "the Muslims consecrated these lands to Muslim generations until the Day of Judgment."

From Lebanon, meanwhile,

Islamist Hizballah — client of Islamist Iran, ally of Islamist Hamas — provokes a war with Israel. Hizballah's motivation has nothing to do with Arab nationalism. Israel withdrew from every square meter of Lebanese territory six years ago. But legal obligation means nothing to Hizballah. Like Hamas and Iran, Hizballah views the destruction of Israel as a religious obligation.

Hamas and (as I'll spell it) Hezbollah are, Krauthammer says, part of the movement called pan-Islamism, unlike the Palestinian Liberation Organization under the late Yasser Arafat, which was just a "secular, vaguely socialist and entirely nationalist movement." Even Iraq under Saddam Hussein was pan-Arabist, not pan-Islamic. "The successor Arab rulers [to the pan-Arabists of yore] no longer dream of a single Arab state," writes Krauthammer, "and have grudgingly come to accept a small Jewish state in part of Palestine. Hence the peace treaties that Egypt and Jordan signed with Israel."

But pan-Islamism is unwilling to tolerate a Jewish state in its midst. The destruction of Israel, once but a geopolitical goal, has become a tenet of religious duty, in service to a "larger Islamist vision of a cataclysmic showdown with the infidel West as a harbinger of the return of the 12th Imam and the End of Days."

So, as Israel's staunchest ally, we're in for a "struggle against [pan-Islamism that] will be long and painful, and enduringly surreal."


We may be able to take some comfort from the fact that pan-Islamism has, in effect, two rival churches, with two Vaticans and two Popes vying for primacy — like Rome and Avignon in medieval times. The "Iran-Hizballah-Hamas axis" is one of these "churches" (even though Iran and Hezbollah are Shi'ite and Hamas is Sunni). The other "church" of pan-Islamism consists of al-Qaeda and its spawn, now trying to catch back up to the wave pulsed out recently in the Middle East by the activity of the first axis.

Krauthammer asserts:

For all their medieval trappings, these two sources of Islamic fervor now vying for possession of the newly transmuted Arab-Israeli dispute confirm the Bush Administration's view that, after a holiday from history in the 1990s, the global ideological struggles of the 20th century have been rejoined with a change only in the cast. In place of the ersatz Western religions of fascism and communism, radical Islam, bastard child of a real and great religion, has arisen. Led by two rival Vaticans, one in Tehran and the other cavebound on the Afghan-Pakistani border, it raises the banner of a militant religion that will not rest until, as al-Zawahiri pledged, Islam has retaken every piece of Waqf "from Spain to Iraq."

I'm not sure I concur that the Bush administration has the right attitude on all this. My understanding is that the administration is stuck ideologically in a world where states — nations, countries — remain the major players. By Krauthammer's own logic, this will never do.


oldstyleliberal likes the approach outlined in a companion article, "Why the Middle East Crisis Isn't Really About Terrorism," under the subhead, "By insisting it is, President Bush clouds the real issues, which are how much the U.S. should do for Israel and what it should do to Iran." Lisa Beyer, in her analysis, insists Bush is wrong to lump Hezbollah and Hamas under the umbrella epithet of "global terrorism." Doing so obscures the fact that Hezbollah and Hamas don't threaten us directly ... at least, not yet. We need to keep our powder dry, so to speak, and direct our ammunition only at those who threaten us face-to-face. Otherwise, U.S. power loses credibility abroad, as we stretch ourselves too thin.

Where Krauthammer sees a single pan-Islamist movement with two rival "Vaticans," Beyer maintains that such a view

... implies that Hizballah has the same mind-set and agenda as the global jihadis of al-Qaeda and its imitator groups, but they are not the same. Hizballah's military mission is principally to defend Lebanon from Israeli intrusion and secondarily to destroy the Jewish state. As an Islamist group under Iran's sway, Hizballah would like to see Islamic rule in Lebanon. The global jihadis think much bigger. They are Salafists, radicals who seek to revive the original and, to their minds, pure practice of Islam and establish a caliphate from Spain to Iraq, in all the lands where Islam has ever ruled. The Salafists are Sunni, and Hizballah is Shi'ite, which means their hatred for each other is apt to rival their hatred for the U.S. Al-Qaeda's late leader in Iraq, Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, used to say Shi'ites were worse than Americans and launched a brutal war on them in Iraq.

We can combine the Krauthammer and Beyer outlooks, which are really not as incompatible as they seem, by noting that the former attitude inspirits us for the long fight ahead while the latter cautions us not just to fight hard, but to fight smart. If there are fissures within pan-Islamism, a smart fight against it would seem to require that we do everything we can diplomatically, politically, economically, and socially to drive a wedge into it — using "soft" power, as the policy wonks say.

If there are moderate and hard-line wings in Hamas and Hezbollah, we need to play our cards so as to support the former at the expense of the latter — holding our noses all the while, perhaps. The moderates have, after all, shown signs in the past of being willing to accept our ally Israel's existence. Per the Beyer article:

"The strategy should be to identify the fissures in a terrorist group and widen those chasms to cause it to explode, to isolate the hard-liners and strengthen the moderates," says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp. and the author of the new book Inside Terrorism. "The risk of painting all terrorists with one brush is that you miss those signs, and so you miss those opportunities."

It would be downright stupid of us to drive together our various enemies, whether direct or by proxy, when there is now, practically speaking, faint daylight between them:

An additional downside to tossing all terrorists under one heading is that if you treat them the same, address them as one, you may encourage them to see themselves that way. "Bush has really been the great unifier of all the previously divided and often mutually hostile groups we're trying to defeat rather than assemble," says François Heisbourg, director of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research. "Waging war in Iraq to combat terrorism has transformed Iraq into a nexus of terrorism it hadn't been before. Justifying the operation in Lebanon by putting Hizballah on the same terrorism shelf as al-Qaeda is getting radical Sunnis to back radical Shi'ites in a way we'd have never imagined."

The current Bush they're-all-terrorists rhetoric hurts our cause by feeding Muslim "paranoia." We need, Beyer suggests, leadership with greater capacity for strategic nuance, since

... there is no one ideology among terrorists. And terrorism isn't even an ideology. It's a tactic. The President would be better off leveling with the American people. The U.S. has interests in the Middle East, such as protecting Israel. Some of them are subtle and require explaining, like resisting Iran's efforts to expand its influence. And many of them have nothing to do with global terrorism.

Well, "nothing to do with global terrorism" puts it a bit too strongly, oldstyleliberal feels. Many of them, it is true, don't threaten us directly. But they still feed into global crosscurrents that could capsize our ship. Krauthammer is right about that.

"Doughface" Liberals Mirror Moral-Clarity Conservatives

Peter Beinart, author of The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, doesn't want American liberals to be "doughfaces."

"The original doughfaces," Beinart quotes historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., as saying

... were "northern men with southern principles" — Northerners who opposed slavery but could not bring themselves to support the Civil War. Schlesinger called the [Henry] Wallace liberals [Progressive party members who opposed the Truman administration's proposal to aid undemocratic but anti-Communist regimes in Greece and Turkey] "democratic men with totalitarian principles." They opposed Communism, but would not endorse practical steps to combat it, so as not to implicate themselves in a morally imperfect action. In the "doughface fantasy," Schlesinger wrote, "one can denounce a decision without accepting the consequences of the alternative." It is a fantasy to which liberals fall prey to this day. (p. 7)

Schlesinger coined the term "doughface progressivism" in his 1949 book The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, excerpts from which can be read here. Today, the expression Beinart uses is "doughface liberals," as he would like to de-stigmatize the word "liberal" by separating it wholly from such "doughface" sentiments. Today's doughface liberals, complains Beinart, resent all efforts of the United States to fight totalitarian Islamic jihadism around the world, especially when military force is used.

Modern doughfaces accuse U.S. power of being imperialistically motivated, as when Michael Moore suggests the Bush family is way too tight with Saudi oil interests. They secretly or openly believe that the 9/11 attack on America was a case of our imperialist chickens coming home to roost.

Not wanting to implicate themselves in moral imperfection makes doughfaces the mirror image of conservatives such as William Bennett, oldstyleliberal thinks. Bennett champions a return to "moral clarity" in his book Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism. That phrase, "moral clarity," shows up again in the July 31, 2006, issue of The New Yorker, in "Holy Toledo," Frances Fitzgerald's article on Ohio's 2006 gubernatorial race and the power of the Christian right.

Rod Parsley, Fitzgerald says, is a conservative Christian pastor of a megachurch in Ohio and the founder in the summer of 2004 of the Center for Moral Clarity, whose mission it was "to educate citizens nationwide about legislation in statehouses and Congress." The article continues, "That fall [of 2004], he [Parsley] travelled around Ohio, advocating the passage of Issue One." Issue One: that was the famous 2004 ballot initiative in Ohio to ban gay marriage, which, Fitzgerald reports, "passed with sixty-three per cent of the vote."

It seems to oldstyleliberal that both doughface liberals and moral-clarity conservatives have the same pathological fear of moral "imperfection." True, the one supposedly unforgiveable sin for leftists is different than for rightists. To the former, it's American power. To the latter, it's American decadence. Still, both extremes are alike in fastidiously shunning those aspects of worldly diversity and complexity that they most deeply abhor.

Who's a Totalitarian?

The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, by Peter Beinart, is the book which oldstyleliberal is currently reading and absorbing. Beinart, an editor-at-large of New Republic, points out that, first and foremost, mainstream liberals love liberty. So they ought to be leading the charge against radical Islamic terrorism, since the terrorists are basically totalitarians.

Totalitarianism — as in Fascism, Nazism, and Communism — is an "ideal type [which] no movement or regime embodies ... perfectly" (p. 94). Yet Osama bin Laden 's stateless Al Qaeda terrorist organization and the former Taliban government in Afghanistan both qualify as totalitarian. Beinart cites political philosopher Michael Walzer's analysis of what totalitarian regimes have in common. Let us take the three points in reverse order.


Totalitarianism, according to Walzer's third — and "decisive" — defining feature, "involves a systematic effort to control every aspect of social and intellectual life" (p. 95). The goal, says Beinart, is to transform people into "perfect human beings" by telling them exactly what to do and think, down to the minutest behavioral detail.

German politcal theorist Hannah Arendt wrote, "If totalitarianism takes its own claim seriously, it must come to the point where it has 'to finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,' that is, with the autonomous existence of any activity whatsoever." No pastime, however innocent, can be allowed to interrupt the flow of coercion and control from the authorities to their subjects.

Totalitarianism's second defining feature, according to Walzer — so Beinart writes — is its "political messianism": its claim (per Arendt) "to have found a way to establish the rule of justice on earth." This, indeed, says Beinart, is the justification for all the thought and behavior control: people "themselves must change."

"As Arendt notes," says Beinart (p. 96), "totalitarianism's ultimate goal is 'the transformation of human nature itself'." Only when we stiff-necked, unruly humans have been duly transformed will there be peace and justice on earth.

Meanwhile, there remains the need for totalitarianism's first defining feature: the ruling party "hoards all power [and] decision making is clandestine" (p. 94). Hence, "public politics become, in Walzer's words, 'ritual performance'." The masses are not to be consulted or listened to; they are to be mobilized. One thinks of the hearty "Sieg Heils" elicited by Hitler's frenzied harangues.


Beinart's discussion of totalitarianism in the abstract is admittedly less than wholly satistying to oldstyleliberal, feeling as he does that further attention ought to be paid to the distinctions between totalitarian movements, particularly when they are transnational, as with Al Qaeda, and totalitarian national regimes. For one thing, the former may be strong, while the latter may prove weak.

Even the Taliban in Afghanistan, Beinart admits (p. 95), "had less capacity to mobilize that masses than did the Bolsheviks and Nazis. But they tried." Now we hear of a resurgent Taliban pressing the attack again in southern Afghanistan. But by the standards of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, it has always been ragtag and weak.

Still, Beinart's main point is well-taken. There is nothing more anti-American than totalitarianism, no matter what form it takes.

It's not clear to oldstyleliberal how best to oppose radical Islamic jihadism in its totalitarian form, or, as Beinart identifies it, salafism — after the salafs, who were the original and supposedly most pure practitioners of Islam, Muhammad and his companions (see p. 89). He supposes he will gain more insight about that as he continues reading the book. But what is already clear to him is that American liberals need to step up to the plate and make the fight against totalitarianism once more the centerpiece of their philosophy.

Who's a Liberal?

In A Fighting Faith, oldstyleliberal talked about the new book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, by Peter Beinart. He has now begun reading it, and it's even better than he had hoped. As he says in this post in another blog, the book is a call-to-arms for latter-day liberals to take up the mantle of their august forebears from the earliest days of the Cold War.

At that time, many on the American left opposed our resisting the Soviet Union's intentions to expand Communism's influence in the world. While not necessarily Communists themselves, these leftists tended to identify with the stated goals of the Marxist-Leninist ideology to eliminate economic and social inequality on this planet. At the same time, they were relatively blind to Communism's basic threat to human liberty.

Others on the left recognized that Soviet-style Communism was actually a new form of totalitarianism, the successor to Nazism and Fascism. President Truman, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., diplomat-historian George Kennan, Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and that brash young Minnesota senator, Hubert Humphrey: all were on board with the newly founded Americans for Democratic Action in 1948, whose liberalism was anti-totalitarian through and through.


It was necessary for America, anti-totalitarian liberals said, to fight Soviet expansionism through a policy of containment. Defensive military pacts such as NATO were part of the equation, but so too were economic aid to war-ravaged European nations, in the form of the Marshall Plan; pragmatic support for nationalist governments that were more anti-Communist than strictly democratic; a progressive domestic agenda for civil rights and social justice, by which we might prove to the world our worthiness to win the Cold War; and an essential sense of modesty and restraint, avoiding all "my country right or wrong" pitfalls.

If we were to lead the world away from the brink of Communist enslavement, we had to earn that right by proving ourselves better and more just than our adversary. We could not simply wrap ourselves in a mantle of manifest destiny, vaunted exceptionalism, and ostensible moral superiority, and expect the world to follow.


The anti-totalitarians held sway over the American left for over a decade and a half, until the assassination of President Kennedy and the escalation of the Vietnam War. From Truman through Kennedy and on to LBJ, if you were a Democrat, chances are you were committed to anti-Communism.

And, unless you were from the Deep South, chances are you were committed to some form, however watered down, of the civil rights agenda which sought equal rights for American blacks. True, President Kennedy dragged his feet on civil rights for reasons he thought were pragmatic at the time, during his early presidency, but he also recognized that if we shortchange the children of slaves here at home, "we have betrayed not only ourselves and our destiny, but all those who desire to be free" around the world (p. 26).

There was an essential linkage between facing up to our struggles to fulfill our potential for freedom domestically and our capacity to win the Cold War, anti-totalitarian liberals said. When Kennedy told us we had to "pay any price, bear any burden," among the prices and burdens we had to bear were resisting any soft and effete complacency. America had to work hard to be good.


That wasn't what the anti-Communist right said. On the right, the ascendant notion was that America ought to hold itself out as morally superior to its adversary, period. How could we win the war against Communism if we admitted to being really guilty of circumscribing liberty at home? How could we hope to win, if we became the next thing to Communists ourselves, with socialistic domestic policies right out of Moscow's playbook?

Meanwhile, there was always a (for more than a decade mostly silent, until Vietnam) wing of the American left that was the right's mirror image. How could we deserve to win the war against Communism if we historically and habitually circumscribed liberty and social justice at home? Let us clean up our own act, the New Left of the 1960s said ... and get out of the business of inserting ourselves into nationalist uprisings in far-off places like Vietnam.

It is apparent to oldstyleliberal that the for-a-time dominant anti-totalitarian coalition of Cold War liberals occupied an ultra-thin slice smack in the middle of the American ideological spectrum.


That was a very hard thing to do. Take the question of nationalism. Cold War liberals held it as axiomatic that nationalism was incompatible with Communism, and was one good way to fight the spread of Communism. Nationalist movements, even if they involved dictators and governments that were less than ideally democratic, were our best proxies.

That axiom worked well enough when it came to Europe, but in other parts of the world it broke down — as in North Vietnam, where the Communist Ho Chi Minh was preeminently a nationalist. Indeed, one of the fathers of Cold War liberalism, George F. Kennan, "the strategist behind [President] Truman's early policies toward the USSR," as early as the late 1940s had "believed nationalism and Communism could coexist."

"Partly for that reason," continues Beinart, "[Kennan] urged the United States to contain only Soviet Communism, not indigenous Communist movements, and even then only when circumstances were favorable. In his 1947 speech urging aid to Greece and Turkey, however, Truman had ignored that distinction, pledging the United States to oppose virtually any Communist movement. Behind that perilously expansive vision was the growing assumption that Communism and nationalism were incompatible. And with Kennan's distinction gone, containment suddenly meant preventing Communism's spread in every corner of the globe" (p. 40).

Thus, President Kennedy's willingness to string along with the anti-Communist government in the South Vietnamese capital in Saigon, no matter its lack of widespread support among the Vietnamese people, its corruption, its favoritism toward rich landowners, and its reluctance to send its troops to engage the enemy alone.


Anti-totalitarian liberalism thus occupies not just a narrow slice of the ideological spectrum, but a thin sliver thereof. If you feel America is so deeply flawed that it ought not to exert much influence externally to itself, you're way to the left of it. If you think America is just fine the way it is, hence ought to forcefully assert its hegemony abroad, you're way to the right.

To be an anti-totalitarian liberal, you have to think America should behave with restraint abroad, but not with passivity.

To be an anti-totalitarian liberal, you have to think America should call itself good, but not purely so. To the anti-totalitarian liberal, America's goodness is a work in progress. It is never a forlorn hope, as the "soft" left often believes, never simply a fact to be assumed at home and foisted on a skeptical world abroad, as the right would have it.

To be an anti-totalitarian liberal, you have to be as skillful as George Kennan was in nuanced, this-does-not-really-imply-that thinking: supporting nationalism in Greece and Turkey does not necessarily imply supporting it in Vietnam. A lot of Cold War liberals were blind to that particular splitting of a hair, got us in over our heads in Vietnam in the 1960s, and unraveled the erstwhile anti-totalitarian liberal coalition here at home.


Who's a liberal today? Mostly, people whose thinking is soft on the new totalitarian threat of radical Islamism, Beinart says. In many ways, they're the heirs of the "neoliberals" of the 1970s, whose president Jimmy Carter was, who were in turn heirs of the "Come home, America" McGovernites who took over the Democratic Party between 1968 and 1972, who were the more-adult versions of the New Left student radicals of the early- and mid-1960s ... who were the ideological heirs of the not-particularly-anti-Communist leftists of the 1940s, whom the anti-totalitarian Cold War liberals had marginalized.

Cold War liberals understood the value of building coalitions among such disparate forces as ethnic white labor unions and black civil rights organizations, southern and northern Democrats, rural and urban interests, and all of America's social classes from bottom to top. That's why their platforms and policies were short on purity, long on pragmatics and prestidigitation — which ultimately drew fire from the radical, confrontational left of the '60s.


Anti-totalitarian liberalism is a point of exquisite ideological balance that many of its own practitioners have had a hard time keeping. One who had the knack was Robert F. Kennedy, President Kennedy's younger brother, who ran for the Democratic nomination in 1968 as an antiwar candidate, before being struck down by a murderer's bullet.

RFK was held in suspicion by many of 1968's liberals for being quite the political street fighter, and for a "checkered past" on civil liberties and civil rights (see p. 47). His supporters, of which I was and remain one, believe he loathed effeteness and yet was capable of softening and growing in his world view. He represented a vital center — at least within liberal precincts — which could hold. When he died, the anti-totalitarian liberal coalition in America was a goner.

After RFK was gone, liberalism lost its way. It could no longer tell a story of the greatness we Americans together would find just over the next hill, if our country continued to strive to be all that it can be. Lacking such a coherent, unifying, uplifting message, liberalism began to substitute mere concepts and technical solutions for ideology, sources of national shame for wellsprings of American pride, and indifference to America's role in the broader world for a former muscular anti-totalitarianism.

Beinert's book is a study in how to get all that back again, now that we need it so desperately.

A Fighting Faith

“In sharp contrast to the first years of the cold war, post-September 11 liberalism has produced leaders and institutions—most notably Michael Moore and MoveOn—that do not put the struggle against America’s new totalitarian foe at the center of their hopes for a better world.” Those are the words of Peter Beinart, then-editor of The New Republic, in an essay called "A Fighting Faith" published in that magazine not long after the 2004 election which Democrat John Kerry lost to President Bush.

The words are cited in George Packer's review of Beinart's new book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. The review appears in The New Yorker, July 10 & 17, 2006. It can be read here and accessed in printable form here.

oldstyleliberal hasn't read Beinart's book or his original article, but he obtains a great deal of insight and satisfaction from reading Packer's book review. oldstyleliberal will now try to explain himself in this regard.

First of all, "America’s new totalitarian foe" is, of course, radical Islamism, which Packer speaks of as jihadism. The thrust of Beinart's (and Packer's) argument is that Democrats ought to react to this new threat much as their predecessors, in the persons of Presidents Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy and of thinkers like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., did to the totalitarians of that earlier age, the Communists.

Democrats like Truman, Kennedy, Schlesinger, et al. were considered anti-Communist liberals in their time. They were liberals in many ways, but they were hard-liners against Communism. Today's Democratic liberals tend to be "soft" on jihadism, Packer notes, in suggesting that "defeating the new Islamist threat,"

... [as Beinart] wrote [in his 2004 article], “must be [today's] liberalism’s north star. Methods for defeating totalitarian Islam are a legitimate topic of internal liberal debate. But the centrality of the effort is not. The recognition that liberals face an external enemy more grave, and more illiberal, than George W. Bush should be the litmus test of a decent left.”

It is extremely curious that today's liberals are typically "softs" with respect to foreign threats, oldstyleliberal feels. It is true that in the mid-20th century there were scads of leftists who were "fellow-travellers" of Communism, or worse. But "liberal Democrats of Schlesinger’s era fought and ultimately purged the fellow-travellers in their ranks," Packer reminds us. And that's the very sort of thing Beinart and Packer would like to do again today: marginalize Democratic "softs."

True, Beinart seems to have softened his rhetoric in his book, compared with his original article: "Beinart no longer wants to provoke a battle for the soul of the Party." Instead, writes Packer,

In the course of two hundred fluently argued pages, [Beinart] reviews postwar history and shows how the Democrats gained (with Truman and Kennedy), and then lost (after Vietnam), and then began to recover (with Clinton), and then lost again (after September 11th) the ability to offer the public “their own narrative of American greatness.”

That's key, oldstyleliberal thinks. Kerry lost in 2004 because he couldn't put forth a "narrative of American greatness" to match Bush's.

Even if, like oldstyleliberal, you're anti-Bush, you have to admit the President stood foursquare for American greatness in his rhetoric and posturing in 2004. His execution of post-9/11 military and foreign policy before and since leaves much to be desired, but the "narrative of American greatness" that lies behind the Bush policy is right on.

Kerry, on the other hand, got tangled up in trying to explain why he had voted for military outlays in Iraq after he had initially voted against them — things like that. Not much narrative force there.


So how come today's Democrats can't tell a convincing story of how America's greatness could be harnessed to defeat the new totalitarian enemy, radical Islamism or jihadism?

One big reason is the lingering effect of Vietnam. Packer writes:

The policymakers of the Kennedy era overlooked the essentially nationalist nature of Vietnamese Communism because they were swept up in the binary thinking of Kennedy’s call to “pay any price, bear any burden.”

It's crucial that a revived Democratic "liberal internationalism" such as Beinart seeks and Packer seconds be smarter than that. Democrats ought to get over Vietnam, becoming as firm in their resolve as Kennedy was against the Communist threat of his own time ... but learn from the mistakes Kennedy's brain trust made in oversimplifying that threat.

Here is where Packer feels he needs to correct Beinart:

How much less [Packer writes] do today’s policymakers know about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the factions vying within the Arab Gulf states, the Muslim minorities in Europe, the configuration of power in Iran, the causes of the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan, the Islamist takeover in Mogadishu, or the rising terrorist threat in Bangladesh? The grand, overarching “narrative” of antitotalitarianism that Beinart offers can’t explain the different kinds of trouble that America faces in a chaotic world. It substitutes will for understanding, which is just as dangerous as the reverse—if the Iraq war has taught us anything, it should be that.

We need the "grand, overarching narrative" of America's exceptional greatness to be tempered with shrewd understandings of the various subtly different ways in which the jihadist threat manifests itself in different parts of this "chaotic world" of ours.

In 1960s terms, we Democrats need to split the difference between the hard-headed realism of the late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington and the equally hard-headed idealism of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, murdered in 1968 as he was running as an antiwar candidate for President.

Jackson was a Democratic hawk on Vietnam. RFK, for his part, by 1968 wanted an end to the ill-conceived Vietnam War which his brother, JFK, had admittedly fostered, but which he, JFK, may have already been changing his mind about, not long before his assassinnation in 1963. RFK himself, it has been learned in recent years, spoke out in meetings of his brother's cabinet as early as 1962 and 1963 against putting so much blind faith in the corrupt, albeit anti-Communist, South Vietnamese government.

RFK, his brother's closest confidant, was always both hard-headed and idealistic, and inasmuch as he was as staunch an anti-Communist as his brother, his opposition to the Vietnam War in 1968 came only after much soul-searching about the continued viability of the war effort. He ultimately decided a war fought for the wrong reasons — we were actually fighting not so much Communism as entrenched nationalist sentiment in Vietnam — had to fail.

Today, oldstyleliberal feels, we Democrats need to seize the anti-jihadist bit in our teeth and treat the external threat as seriously as the Kennedys did the Communist threat in the 1960s. Politically, the threat must be communicated to the American people and abroad in terms of a grand, overarching narrative: one by virtue of which America will rally international and domestic support for the worldwide war against terrorism and radical Islamic jihadism and ultimately win that war — for the greater good of humankind.

At one and the same time, we Democrats must be as capable of nuanced thinking as John Kerry notably was and is, so as to respond to all the different manifestations of the jihadist threat in strategically and tactically sound ways that will advance, not hinder, the cause. The way Bush got us into the Iraq War, for example, was ill-conceived, as is the way in which he is continuing to prosecute the war, leading to more chaos, not less.

Right now, oldstyleliberal doesn't see a single Democrat on the presidential horizon who can hold a candle to Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona in this regard. McCain, no dove, has long called for a stepped-up, smarter war effort in Iraq. At the same time, his has gotten out in front of congressional efforts to end the American use of torture on war detainees. How clear-headed! How consistent with narratives of this country's values and greatness! How likely to catapult McCain into the White House in January 2009!

Can we Democrats compete?

New Electricity Rates on Tap for Maryland

Here in Maryland, oldstyleliberal and 1.2 million of his fellow Free Staters are witnessing a political donnybrook over a proposed 72% hike in their electric bills, supposedly due in July 2006.

Most of the state, including Baltimore County where oldstyleliberal dwells, gets its electricity from Baltimore Gas and Electric, aka BGE, a subsidiary of Constellation Energy Group. BGE/Constellation had long been subject to old-fashioned rate regulation, before a deregulation bill was enacted in 1999. Between deregulation and now, prices for electrical power sold to consumers nonetheless remained capped at comfortable below-market rates.

In the last year, meanwhile, market prices for the fuels used in generating electricity shot up — by whopping amounts, just as the artificial rate caps were slated to come off. That's what triggered the anticipated 72% hike in BGE's electric rates.


The state's mostly-Democratic General Assembly, its Republican governor, Robert L. Ehrlich, and the governor's mostly hand-picked Public Service Commission have, since the sharp 72% rise was announced earlier this year, offered several plans to soften the shock of the hike.

A week or two ago, the Maryland General Assembly passed into law a plan that would defer the full rate increase for all BGE customers, with no individual choice to opt in or out, for 11 months. During that time, rates would rise by only 15% over present rates.

After that period, consumers would have the option to extend the deferral period for another several months. The exact details of that second-deferral option are murky. Those who don't avail themselves of it will, we do know, go to paying full market prices as of June 2007.

They can then expect to start paying for 10 years a $2.19 monthly surcharge to recompense BGE for the cost of borrowing money to pay for its fuel at market rates while, under the law, for 11 months it is not able to pass those costs on to its consumers.

The exact size of that monthly deferral charge, $2.19, assumes that BGE comes through with certain financial "givebacks" it promised the General Assembly as it was considering the new legislation in an unusual special session in early June. Otherwise, the size of the surcharge would nearly double to roughly $5 a month.


Assuming that no individual consumers sign on for the second deferral, the benefits of the first deferral — the mandatory one — are small but undeniable. According to a chart published in The Baltimore Sun ...

(Sorry, the link to the chart no longer works.)

... the General Assembly's plan effectively saves consumers $311.78 over its lifetime of 11 months plus 10 years. The governor's plan saves customers just $43.02 over the same period, while a plan offered earlier this year by the PSC (and killed via a legal challenge instigated by Ehrlich's Democratic gubernatorial-race rival, Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley) saves consumers a paltry $3.90.


The rate-plan comparison in the chart above strikes oldstyleliberal as the right way to judge the respective plans. It is the only comparison he has seen that takes into account the "present value" of the dollars in question.

Look at the numbers. Over 10 years and 11 months, in the absence of any deferral plan whatsoever, the "average" consumer would pay $18,591.83 in increased electric bills. With the Assembly plan, that increase goes down to $18,332.79, a saving of $259.04.

But if the pennies the Assembly plan saves consumers on a month-by-month basis are religiously put, by those consumers, in a savings account that pays interest at the rate of 5 percent per year, the total amount of interest which accumulates over 10 years, 11 months will be $52.74. That $52.74 accrual increases the plan's savings to the consumer of $259.04, over the course of the 10-years-and-11-months deferral/recovery period, to $311.78.

Hence the "net present value" of the total savings afforded by the Assembly plan to BGE's residential consumers is $311.78.

Applying like arithmetic to the governor's plan and to the PSC's plan gives $43.02 and $3.90, respectively, as the "net present value" of the total savings afforded by each plan, considered in turn.

That's why oldstyleliberal thinks the Assembly plan is, of all the plans that have been laid on the table, manifestly the best deal.


Since the General Assembly passed its deferral plan by apparently veto-proof majorities in each house, Governor Ehrlich has dug in his heels against it. He recently convened a five-hour public hearing in the state capital, where most speakers denounced the plan. In the last few days, he has actually made good on his threats and vetoed the bill. The General Assembly then met yet again in special session to override the veto.

In addition to complaining that the Assembly's bill fired his hand-picked Public Service commissioners, Ehrlich seized upon two admittedly unpopular features of the plan in justifying his veto. One, the rate-increase deferral over the first 11 months is mandatory for individual consumers, not optional. Two, consumers would then be forced to pay back (some of) the added interest payments BGE will have incurred — since it must of course sell bonds on the open market to offset its heightened energy costs during the deferral period.


But, say the Assembly plan's proponents, making the deferral plan mandatory for all consumers during the initial 11-month period, and then charging them a fixed amount on each month's bill over the next 10 years, lets BGE's bond buyers feel sure that the deferred consumer billings are fully "securitized": they will certainly be covered by carrying charges, billed to customers in a set monthly amount of $2.19, during the course of a predictable 10-year recovery period.

That means BGE's bond rating can stay high. Accordingly, the interest BGE will pay on its new bonds will stay low. That's good for consumers, for BGE (like any other business) must in the end pass on its costs of borrowing money to its customers.

The need to assure bond buyers that the utility's deferred costs are "securitized," with a known-in-advance carrying surcharge over 10 years, explains why the Assembly's initial deferral plan must be made mandatory for all consumers. If it weren't, opters-out would saddle opters-in with a higher carrying charge later on down the road. The eventual size of the carrying charge would be unknown; it would depend on how many consumers opted out. The plan's predictability would thus disappear, and BGE's bond buyers would insist on the utility paying a higher interest rate on its bonds to offset their extra risk.

So BGE customers must participate in repaying some or most of the "interest charges" BGE incurs to BGE at the end of the 11-month deferral period. That is the unavoidable cost of "securitizing" the deferred sums BGE will postpone receiving, as part of the deferral plan.

That $2.19/mo. surcharge will allow BGE to recoup about $109 million in paid-out interest over the 10-yer recovery period. However, supporters of the Assembly plan say that the givebacks promised by BGE as part of the deal far exceed that $109 million.


The plan the Governor hashed out earlier with BGE, prior to the Assembly going into special session to pass its own plan, offered savings whose "net present value" is much less ($43.02) than the $311.78 of the current Assembly plan. If BGE's deferred receipts cannot be "securitized" by means of a mandatory plan that features a fixed post-deferral surcharge — one that takes into account the extra interest costs the utility sustains — then obviously the deferral-period savings it can offer to its customers will have to be less. That's the bottom line here.

It only stands to reason that the mandatory Assembly plan is a better deal than the optional Governor's plan. It's like auto insurance. The fact that car insurance is mandatory under state law maximizes the size of the coverage pool and accordingly holds premium rates in check. If people could opt out of buying car insurance, those who opt in would have to pay premiums through the nose.

Interestingly, the Governor's own plan charged consumers interest, too, as did yet another plan which the Governor agreed to earlier this year but which couldn't be passed by the General Assembly before its regular session expired. But the Governor's own plan passed less interest on to BGE customers, it is true. In part, that was because it saved consumers less money up front, and in part it was because BGE exchanged the ability to recoup some of its interest expenses for a virtual guarantee that a proposed merger between its parent, Constellation, and a Florida energy company would not be blocked.

The givebacks in the Assembly plan, on the other hand, are not tied to any merger.


The above is why Marylanders ought to support the Assembly rate plan and tell the governor to look elsewhere for votes in this fall's gubernatorial election ... in which his opponent will undoubtedly be the very O'Malley whose legal suit as mayor of Baltimore was instrumental in getting the General Assembly to come up with its plan in the first place.

Time to Reinstate the Draft?

Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks has written recently ("Require all young people to serve the nation" and "Draft might breathe new life into a listless U.S.") in support of reinstating the draft. Bully for him. Not only would requiring young adults to serve their country for two years equalize the risks of war-fighting among all social classes and backgrounds, it would also initiate Americans in the sadly dormant value of shared sacrifice in performing personal service to one's community and nation.

Rodricks wants everyone at 18 — with possible deferment not beyond age 21 — to be required to go into the military branch of their choice, or an AmeriCorps-style domestic service, or "a revitalized and expanded Peace Corps."

Why? "A draft would wake everyone up," Rodricks says. "It would ... transform a citizenry that, in the post-baby boom period, has become increasingly myopic, wealth-obsessed, self-centered, cynical and clueless to essential concepts of loyalty and teamwork, community and commitment. We think our kids are getting this through community service hours in high school. But that's a limited lesson, easily overwhelmed by the me-first think that marks the adolescent society of 21st-century America."

Such a draft it would also end the persistent complaint that the war in Iraq is being fought by the sons and daughters of the have-nots in lieu of those of the have-a-lots, whose offspring simply aren't signing up. oldstyleliberal can't decide which rationale for supporting a return to conscription impresses me the most: the value of shared sacrifice, or that of egalitarianism.


The idea of expressing my support for Rodricks' idea popped into oldstyleliberal's head today when he read Charles Krauthammer's Time essay "In Plain English: Let's Make It Official". Krauthammer fears that the "enormous, linguistically monoclonal immigration [influx we experience] today from Latin America" will undermine American cultural and political unity. English, he says, ought post haste to be declared our "official language."

Indeed? Whatever happened to the love which conservatives like Krauthammer so often profess for uncoerced market outcomes, including those in the "marketplace of ideas"? Which language people choose to speak in their homes and everyday lives — that of their native land or that of their adoptive country — depends on ideas they subscribe to about what is right and best. Why should the government in Washington step in and force them to employ a different tongue?

Well, says Krauthammer, we're in grave danger of becoming like his native Quebec: a threat to the continued existence of (in that case) Canada as one united nation. That's why we here in the U.S. need an "official language," now, for the very first time.

If in fact we are so imminently threatened, oldstyleliberal would suggest that Rodricks' idea of shared compulsory national service, at the cost to each of us of personal sacrifice in the bloom of our youth, would do at least as much to hold us together and build national solidarity as declaring English the "official language" of the United States would.

Not that oldstyleliberal is unalterably opposed to requiring citizens to be conversant with English. Let's just say that he'll cheerfully support Krauthammer and other conservatives in this regard when they sign on to the idea of reinstating the draft.

"The Murrow Doctrine" — Nicholas Lemann

A recent New Yorker magazine (Jan. 23 & 30, 2006) offers Nicholas Lemann's "The Murrow Doctrine," an article that adds nuance to the story told by the recent movie Good Night, and Good Luck (see Roger Ebert film review here).

When oldstyleliberal was small, Edward R. Murrow was just about God ... if God were a TV news reporter whose familiar closing tagline was "Good night, and good luck." But Murrow's apogee had already passed by the time oldstyleliberal got old enough to savvy. So (I switch now to the first person) I don't really recall the night of Tuesday, March 9, 1954, at 8:00 PM EST, when Murrow's half-hour "See It Now" aired as the first of four installments whose combined effect would be to disembowel Senator Joseph McCarthy's reputation forever.

McCarthy had for some four years, ever since the early part of 1950, says Lemann, made "sensational accusations" about the alleged Communist leanings of countless Americans in high places and low. The practice of outing supposed Communists ran rampant during this era of the second "Red Scare." (The first "Red Scare" occurred in 1917-1920.)

For instance, according to Lemann, there was an Air Force Reserve lieutneant named Milo Radulovich who was unfairly "dismissed from the service because his father and sister had unspecified Communist affiliations." That was not McCarthy's doing per se, but it came out of an atmosphere of paranoia which McCarthy was guilty of generating. Murrow, after dithering for several years, in the end could not stand idly by. He aired an exposé in the fall of 1953 which incensed ordinary Americans (I presume) and got Radulovich reinstated.

By the time Murrow faced off directly against McCarthy the following March, McCarthy had already met what turned out to be, Lemann tells us, "his Waterloo." This is apparently the kind of historical nuance the movie, which I have not seen, skips over.

At any rate, such were, apparently, the Army-McCarthy hearings. Lemann does not let us in on exactly what the hearings entailed, or why they were so damaging to McCarthy. But he does point out that McCarthy already had some pretty potent enemies, even before Murrow's onslaught commenced. For example, Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life magazines, had been a longstanding McCarthy critic.

Hence, the Murrow programs — the original installment, then a follow-up, and then "McCarthy's reply, and Murrow's reply-to-the-reply" — simply finished off an already wounded duck. Although McCarthy was on his way down already, there has grown up around Murrow's memory (he died too young of lung cancer in 1965) a legendary status, almost a myth, which credits him with ending the McCarthy scourge singlehandedly.


So what really put the handwriting on the wall for McCarthy, Lemann says, was the fact that "just a few weeks earlier [before the first Murrow installment], he had picked a fight with the Army," a faux pas on McCarthy's part that Lemann characterizes as "an overreach." That was what led to the fateful Army-McCarthy hearings and made McCarthy a wounded duck for Murrow to finish off.

That, admittedly, is not Lemann's main point. Instead, he wants to show that the Murrow attack was a necessary end stage, though not sufficient all by itself, in bringing about McCarthy's demise. And it wouldn't and couldn't have happened in the absence of a then-strong, nay, meddlesome Federal Communications Commission, with its paternalistic oversight of broadcast radio and TV.

In those days of television's earliest infancy, broadcast journalism on the radio was, shall we say, just entering its adolescence. Lemann details how Murrow and his hireling William Shirer (who later gained fame as the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) had provided groundbreaking, technically revolutionary live coverage of World War II in Britain and Europe for rapt CBS listeners on the home front. This kind of journalism was brand new. Why did it happen? Not because CBS's founder William Paley wanted, of his own volition, to "offer material that was uplifting and public-spirited." The FCC insisted that, rather, if commercial broadcasters didn't want to share the radio spectrum with a commercial-free American enterprise much like England's BBC, then they had to cover world affairs themselves, and do it properly and well.

Murrow was hired to arrange for just that — without himself necessarily going on the air, mind you. But logistics made it impossible to provide the desired WWII coverage on the cheap without Murrow himself becoming an on-air personality. That was in 1938. Sixteen years later, Murrow had somewhat reluctantly switched from radio to TV, and he found himself in a position, when the apt moment came, to put paid to the entire McCarthy era.


This all fascinates me because I'd like to know more about whatever it is that can throw a magic switch and take America out of an erstwhile conservative juggernaut, jumping it over into a significantly more liberal period.

By the time I grew big enough to attend to current events, this McCarthy-Murrow stuff was bygone history. As was the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, a unanimous striking down of precedents permitting "separate but equal" treatment of African Americans in the nation's public schools.

The Brown unanimity was the work of a fledgling Chief Justice named Earl Warren, another slam-dunk inductee into the Post-WWII Liberal Hall of Fame. Lemann does not mention Warren or Brown in his article. But he does give us ample justification for believing that quantum leaps away from conservative hegemony require two things: for the conservatives to get cocky and accordingly overreach, and for the liberals to catch them at it and drive the fact home with the American people.

We now find that the present conservative juggernaut, with President Bush at ship's helm, is in danger of having possibly overreached, à la McCarthy, with similar disastrous effect still to come. The Administration's lying to the public about the warrantless domestic eavesdropping carried out under Bush's authorization by the National Security Agency may turn out to be today's right-wing Waterloo.

For that to happen, we need for it to be determined definitely that Bush did overstep the law. It looks as if that determination could eventuate this year as Congress takes the matter up in hearings. But we also need for authoritative liberal voices — today's Murrows — to drive the fact of the overstepping home with the American people — the idea that Bush was, no doubt about it, acting like King George I.

How could the latter happen? Lemann seems to think it couldn't happen today, as it did in 1954, because the Fairness Doctrine that applied to broadcast TV doesn't exist now. This once-well-known approach to controversial broadcast reportage is what Lemann calls "the Murrow Doctrine," since Edward R. Murrow promoted it as a replacement for the erstwhile Mayflower Doctrine. The Mayflower Doctrine said networks couldn't editorialize on the air, period. The Fairness Doctrine said they could, but had to provide equal time for opponents of their stated view to make their case. When Murrow lambasted McCarthy, McCarthy's inept on-air self-defense sealed his doom.

Today, the FCC has "de-regulated" broadcast media, and the Fairness Doctrine is no more. So how would the idea of a "monarchical presidency," revealed by Bush's repeatedly flouting the law in the domestic eavesdropping and other arenas, be transmitted convincingly to ordinary Americans? How would it change enough hearts and minds to halt the present conservative juggernaut?

oldstyleliberal can't answer that. But he recognizes that it may happen, some way, somehow, and set America back on a basically progressive course once again.

"Leviathan in Lousiana" — George F. Will

George F. Will's column in the Sept. 12, 2005, Newsweek is instructive. "Leviathan in Louisiana," about what Hurricane Katrina teaches us, teaches us also what lies at the root of the conservative mentality: namely, "the prudence of pessimism."

For the conservative Will, the keynote of the Katrina experience was the swift "descent from chaos into barbarism" in the wake of the flooding. "Whirl is king, having driven Zeus out," Will echoes from the words of Aristophanes. Katrina exposed for all to see, writes Will, "how always near society's surface are the molten passions that must be checked by force when they cannot be tamed by civilization." And so we saw "the essence of primitivism, howling nature" plastered all over our TV screens.

In other words, Will feels, Katrina ratcheted its victims down into "a Hobbesian state of nature," phraseology based on sentiments proposed in 1651 by political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in "Leviathan." Adapting Hobbes, Will says that in a castastrophe such as Katrina "mankind's natural sociability, if any, is so tenuous that life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'."

Thus are we forced in such circumstances to recall "the fact that the first business of government, on which everything depends, is security." It is a "brute fact," Will adverts, that politics, the basis of government, "arises from something not distinctively human — from anxiety about security, and fear of violent death."

The government which Will finds indispensible for controlling "the social furies" is not the "big government" which conservatives begrudge the bigness of. It is, rather, the government which "understands how thin and perishable is the crust of civilization" and does something about it. In fact, in the course of his discourse Will takes a slap at conservatives who are not "thoughtful." Thoughtful conservatives are, in Will's estimation, "those whose conservatism arises from reflections deeper than an aversion to high marginal tax rates."

In short, it's the city against the beast, here. Modern cities, per Will, are "such marvels," inasmuch as they are made from "the specializations and divisions of labor that sustain myriad webs of dependencies." That sophisticated complexity is what Will thinks "makes them fragile." And so the Katrina event has not launched just a "liberal hour" in America, "in that it illustrates the indispensability, and dignity, of the public sector." It has also triggered "a conservative hour, dramatizing the prudence of pessimism."


Thus, the pessimistic view of Katrina. The view I take, as oldstyleliberal, is distinctly more optimistic.

Where there is complexity, there is fragility, it is true enough. But also where there is complexity, there is the uncanny ability to fight one's way out of chaos, to struggle back to the so-called edge of chaos where wonderful things happen.

There are scientists today who believe there exists a fecund regime of evolutionary change wherein the dynamics are just right for novelty to emerge. Mathematically, this regime is positioned in between stable order and chaos. When stable order disintegrates into chaos, a counterdynamic — often, not always — is set up whereby the system returns itself to the edge of chaos, at which point new order is generated "for free." That is, the order comes from within the system; it is not imposed on the system from without.

This is not to say that Washington shouldn't spend the requisite billions that are needed to rebuild New Orleans. All edge-of-chaos systems consume "food" and "energy"; we can think of the D.C. gigabucks in that way. No, it simply means that the essential dynamics of reconstruction need to come from the people and institutions in the region itself.


But that's not really my point here. My point is rather that George Will has put his finger on the quintessential difference between him as a conservative and oldstyleliberal as an anti-conservative. Specifically, oldstyleliberal is an optimist about the trajectory of human affairs and Mr. Will is not.

I, in fact, believe in something like the perfectability of the human experience. Now, such a bald statement immediately needs a raft of qualification. Utopian schemes such as Karl Marx's doctrine of socialism originally was are simply not on. There is no ideological "quick fix" to all our woes. In fact, I'm not saying a completely woeless day will ever come.

What I'm really talking about is a religious conviction that the "kingdom of heaven" is a slam dunk. It is destined to arrive — it will transpire here on earth — given enough time. God's kingdom will emerge when enough people in the world have sufficient faith that human solidarity and compassion can, for all time, trump George Will's "howling nature."

And, oldstyleliberal would add, it is out of such solidarity, compassion, and hope that this and every "liberal hour" proceed.

Gunpoint Solidarity in Iraq?

What does Christian teaching have to tell us about the rightness or wrongness of the ongoing war in Iraq?

"Jesus was not a pacifist in principle, he was a pacifist in practice," Albert Nolan writes in Jesus before Christianity (p. 152). This book is an eloquent argument that Jesus preached, above all, compassion for all humans and solidarity among all humans. His "kingdom" was one of "total liberation for all people."

The "kingdom of God" Jesus spoke of could be enabled by faith alone ... faith in the redemptive and restorative power of human compassion and solidarity:

The "kingdom" of total liberation for all people cannot be established by violence. Faith alone can enable the "kingdom" to come.

If the "kingdom of heaven" comes through faith alone — faith in universal brotherhood and sisterhood, faith in compassion and solidarity — then can there ever be a justification for using arms? Yes, answers Nolan:

... we can surmise that if there had been no other way ot defending the poor and the oppressed and if there had been no danger of an escalation of violence, [Jesus'] unlimited compassion might have overflowed temporarily into violent indignation. He did tell his disciples to carry swords to defend themselves and he did clear the Temple courtyard with some measure of violence. However, even in such cases, violence would be a temporary measure with no other purpose than the prevention of some more serious violence.

How does this apply to Iraq?

Our armed forces are ostensibly in Iraq now — never mind the original rationales — to quell the post-invasion insurgency and foster national solidarity under a new, democratic constitution.

If this were indeed "a temporary measure with no other purpose than the prevention of some more serious violence," as we have been, in effect, told that it is, then Jesus might approve.

But we've been quelling and fostering and preventing for over two years now. Our leaders keep backing away from predictions that our troops will start coming home later this year or in 2006. The mounting body count shows no sign of abating. If anything, the pace of the killing is growing.

The main indigenous source of the ongoing Iraqi resistance, the Sunni Muslims, have distanced themselves from the draft constitution to be voted on soon. Even if the constitution happens to be ratified in that vote, the projected December elections look to be anything but an exercise in burgeoning national solidarity, because of ongoing Sunni suspicions of Kurdish and Shi'ite semi-autonomy.

The Iraq war has long since ceased to be anything like a "temporary" use of violent force.

And you can't forge solidarity at the point of a gun.

So you don't have to be an in-principle pacifist to believe the troops should come home. It's good non-pacifist Christian teaching that tells us to get out of Iraq now.

... Reclaiming Public Responsibility

In After Katrina ..., I suggested that in the wake of that recent hurricane, American politics may have started to tip in a different direction. What direction might this be?

An answer to the question can be extracted from an op-ed piece in today's Baltimore Sun. "A steady withdrawal from responsibility", by Goucher College assistant professor of anthropology George Baca, indicts a "make-the-federal-government-weaker philosophy" for the longstanding abdication of public social responsibility which Katrina has now exposed.

Katrina, says Baca, "washed away the gloss that decades of civil rights reforms have put over the American public's contempt for poor African-Americans, leaving their isolation and poverty for the world to see."

Weakening the government in Washington, D.C., by reducing spending on programs — "except, of course," Baca points out, those expenditures focused "on law enforcement and jails" — has been called by conservatives "starving the beast." What Baca shows is that so doing, even when it zeroes out supposedly race-neutral initiatives like government spending on infrastructure — levees are infrastructure — has hurt poor and working-class blacks disproportionately.

Those below the middle class rely on the fruits of public spending more than, say, the newly successful black middle class does. Katrina has made that clear. When the levees crumbled in New Orleans, post-hurricane, middle-class folks were long gone. It was the impecunious who could not find transportation, most of whom were black, that suffered.

So the conservative ploy of adverting to how many blacks have "made it" since the civil rights revolution of the 1960s has just masked how many more blacks have not made it, in an ideological atmosphere where private markets have trumped public initiatives.

Until Katrina, that is.

Katrina is now Exhibit Number One in the case that "the privatization of public goods," as Baca summarizes the thrust of American politics since President Reagan, was what left New Orleans and the two-thirds of its population who are poor, most of whom are African American, singularly exposed to the threat of a Category 4 hurricane.

So the direction in which I hope American politics has begun tip is one in which, the next time a political candidate extols anything like "starving the beast" or "the privatization of public goods," sensible voters will say, "But ... what about Katrina?"

After Katrina ...

oldstyleliberal is surely not the only one wondering if Hurricane Katrina has turned the tide of American politics. Can it have taken us past a tipping point such that the erstwhile hegemony of the right, as represented by President Bush, turns into a resurgence of the left?

Consider columnist Trudy Rubin's op-ed piece in today's papers, "Katrina debacle flattens America's image abroad". This analyst of America's foreign policy, particularly that vis-à-vis the Middle east, has never been a Bush booster ... but that's not what's important now. What's important is that, like so many other of her fellow anti-conservative pundits today, she clearly smells presidential blood.

Rubin tells of a plenitude of voices abroad, both friendly and antagonistic to the U.S., who fear America has lost its mojo. Why? Because we couldn't step in quickly enough and strongly enough in our own homeland to keep Katrina's body blows from morphing into chaos. Then she adverts to all the U.S. troops that couldn't be sent to New Orleans because they were trying (with questionable success) to quell chaos in Baghdad. Finally, she wraps her indictment up in a pretty bow of indignation at the Bush tax cuts which have so "shrunk his [Bush's] monetary options" that a choice between alternative military deployments became inevitable.

It's a tri-cornered charge of gross incompetence, stone-faced insensitivity, and ideological stubbornness ... and, for once, it all sticks.

Before Katrina came along to complete the triangle, the anti-Bush types could rail against the Iraq war and its faux justifications. Or they could lambaste Bush for his tax cuts and other compassionless domestic policies. But until now, they couldn't tie the two modes of complaint together into one overarching indictment that made ineluctable good sense.

That was then, this is now.


The images of devastation on our TV screens for the last couple of weeks guarantee that America has experienced one of those "I'll never forget" moments ... the JFK assassination, the Challenger disaster, and 9/11 being others. This time, unlike most of the others, we can blame Washington — not for the natural disaster, clearly, but for the lack of preparation and the tardy response that surely caused hundreds of unnecessary deaths.

This time, unlike most of the others, the situation just happened to be one in which average white folks sitting aghast in their living rooms could identify with poor, black, inner-city residents waiting vainly for rescue on rooftops above a stinking, toxic flood.

This time, unlike most of the others, there was linkage. Try as conspiracy theorists might, they could prove no linkage of the JFK assassination to anything beyond the paranoid fantasies of one Lee Harvey Oswald. Challenger was the fault of bureaucratic stupidity in NASA and its contractors, but the blame ended there. This time, we can paint New Orleans after Katrina into a portrait of American haplessness which includes Iraq, al-Qaeda, record gasoline prices, and the massive budget deficit caused by the huge Bush tax cuts.

This is one woeful president that we have. Or at least, so it inevitably seems, after Katrina. (More to come on this topic in ... Reclaiming Public Responsibility.)

Things Looking Bad in Iraq

This morning's The Baltimore Sun contains an op-ed piece by local psychiatrist/author Gordon Livingston, "Iraq looking more and more like Vietnam," which offers the most eloquent, succinct, and persuasive argument oldstyleliberal has yet seen to the effect that the war in Iraq is a huge — and growing — mistake.

The parallels with the Vietnam fiasco of the 1960s and '70s mount, Dr. Livingston says. Efforts to produce a constitution that everyone in Iraq will accept seem to have foundered, echoing our inability to foster a government in Vietnam that the Vietnamese would have preferred to Ho Chi Minh's communist regime, and that they would even have been willing to fight and die for. Dr. Livingston writes:

[L]ike Vietnam, where the average peasant was apolitical and just wanted the killing to stop, Iraqis appear more interested in security and basic services than in the details of governance.

"What can I do with a constitution if I have no water, gasoline and electricity?" asked one citizen quoted by The New York Times. "How come they gathered to approve the constitution while Iraqis are slaughtered?" asked another.

Now President Bush has even "closed the circle" of Iraq's resemblance to the Vietnam imbroglio by holding that the reason we must stay the course (and consequently get more U.S. troops killed) is basically to honor the deaths that have already taken place: that is, to keep those earlier sacrifices from having been in vain.

Dr. Livingston, who fought in Vietnam and came to oppose that war very strongly, says that "that ever-reliable call to arms: freedom, ours and the Iraqis'" is no longer valid as a justification for the war, if it ever was. "Along with most of our pre-war delusions" concerning weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda links, he writes, "we have quietly relinquished the idea of a flowering secular democracy in Iraq that would serve as a beacon of hope to other peoples of the Middle East. In fact, we will be lucky if the Iraqis can agree on anything short of civil war."


The polls show that 54% of Americans now think the Iraq war a mistake. President Bush's approval rating is now a measly 36%. As far as oldstyleliberal can see, the president has done absolutely nothing of late to shore up his popularity, save possibly for his nomination of John G. Roberts Jr. to the Supreme Court, which some moderates (but virtually no liberals) approve of. As our supposed "war president," he's taken a five-week vacation while Cindy Sheehan, mother of slain soldier Casey Sheehan, so captured the media's attention by her personal protest against the war that she in effect had Bush for lunch.

Meanwhile, the mission in Iraq has stalled. There is no apparent progress in turning over security operations in that country to Iraqis. There is no reason to believe Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds will compromise on a constitution that all will support. There is no U.S. exit strategy that will guide us in extracting our troops from Iraq.

Furthermore, reports are coming out of the country to the effect that, contrary to what our administration has been saying, most of the insurgency we are fighting in Iraq is staffed by radicalized and disaffected locals — not by terrorists who have entered the country from elsewhere.

Things are looking very, very bad.


Yet oldstyleliberal still holds out hope for that "flowering secular democracy," that "beacon" to the rest of the Middle East. Let's face it, if all we are doing by "staying the course" is trying to keep a lid on chaos, then all those who have already died in Iraq did so in vain. When we do leave, if no secular democracy has taken root, the only alternative to chaos is theocratic dictatorship à la Iran.

If the reason more have to die is so that President Bush doesn't have to admit that the earlier deaths were his fault — due to his error, his stubbornness — how very, very sad.

I'm too much of an optimist to believe that will be the case.

Still, Dr. Livingston has me (in the words of a country music classic) almost persuaded that all my hope is in vain.