Charleston Mercury, February 16, 1861. Mr. Bret Stephens was not available to complain
about how unkind and divisive Lincoln had been, so they had to do it
themselves. Reminds me of Biden how they complain that Lincoln doesn't
feed the press often enough and that he's an 'indecent old man".
The other day, I was
comparing
Biden's September 1 speech to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 State of
the Union, and the Four Freedoms peroration. Today, Mr. Bret Stephens,
stealing a David Brooks lede ("With Malice Toward Quite a Few"), decides to up the ante:
Abraham Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address was a 3,600-word olive branch to a
South on the eve of the Civil War. His second promised malice toward none
after the war left 620,000 dead. Americans have long revered both speeches
because they offered a measure of redemption, and a means of reconciliation,
to those who deserved it least.
Joe Biden’s speech in Philadelphia last week bears no resemblance to either address, except that, in his
own inaugural, he staked his presidency on ending “this uncivil war that
pits red against blue.” So much for that. Like the predecessor he denounces,
Biden has decided the best way to seek partisan advantage is to treat tens
of millions of Americans as the enemy within.
(First sentence in the second paragraph is screaming for an editor: an
expression in Biden's inaugural address is not a feature of last
week's speech—at some point in composing the sentence he decided it was about
all of Biden's speeches, but was too lazy to reread the first seven words.)
Noteworthy, as
Erik Loomis
says, that Stephens is now agreeing that the Republican Party is the
Confederacy. I mean, why else would he be urging Biden to treat the former the
way Lincoln treated the latter?
Winner of my "Best Visual Illustration of Rarely Asked Questions" contest, via EntheoNation.
I'm crazy about the Biden proposals introduced in Wednesday's Joint Speech, or as Susan Glasser/New Yorker says, in what seems to me like the most accurate summary I've seen,
To anyone who remembered last year’s Democratic primaries, the President’s first address to a joint session of Congress sounded as if Elizabeth Warren, and not Biden, had won.
and I'm going to want to take issue with scoffers, not necessarily representing "Modern Monetary Theory", including the generally very estimable David Dayen at The American Prospect, complaining of "that old deficit hawkery" in the way the plan is being sold.
I don't think it's that at all. But before I get there, I'd like to lay down some basics on the nature of government spending in a modern state that I think aren't well understood. because most of us think we already know, and as I've been learning recently we don't:
A: Everyplace that gives the US government money, including tax collections by the IRS and other agencies, fees it collects from various enterprises (think parking at national parks. but there's lots more), and of course money it has borrowed from the private sector by selling bonds and other kinds of federal paper. Unlike your checking account, it also includes all the assets the government owns that it can't easily convert into cash, generally inventory, and isn't supposed to sell, like stocks of toilet paper and paperclips and nuclear weapons and land, plus the loans it issues to veterans, students, small business owners, etc.
As the tweeps were quick to note, McDaniel's Brooksian assumption that Lincoln must have been talking about "bringing our badly divided country together" is stupid. Lincoln's speech, with which he accepted the Republican Party's nomination to run against Senator Stephen Douglas in the 1858 election, was a radical which-side-are-you-on moment of reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (allowing the residents, meaning the white male residents, of each of the newly organized western territories to decide whether or not slavery would be legal) and the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which held that somebody who was a slave in a slave state remained a slave in a state where slavery was illegal, without a right to defend himself against the demands of his "owner".
The Republic, Lincoln maintained, was one decision away from making slavery legal in all states, regardless of the desires of the citizens:
Stephen Johnson Field of California, the last 10th Justice. Via Wikipedia.
By the way, y'all know who succeeded in packing the Supreme Court? Did you know that it actually happened?
She didn't fabricate a quote, she backed an incorrect interpretation.
BTW a better interpretation shows how much smarter Lincoln was than Trump, who shot his wad before Justice Ginsburg's funeral and gained zero votes pic.twitter.com/UcydNGChvo
It was Congress that established the 10th seat (partly to help administer the newly established 10th Circuit of California and Oregon, but partly to rebalance the overly conservative Court of Dred Scott CJ Roger Taney).
If Biden expands the Court, I would expect it to be after the style of Lincoln and Obama: only with a push from Congress, and in all probability naming a conservative to the new seat (a NeverTrumper, hopefully not approved by Federalist Society but no leftist).
But replacing Thomas or Alito, if that turned out to be possible (those guys are always spreading the story that they'd like to retire, but they never go through with it) with somebody more fun, and maybe reverting to nine justices when the crisis is over, as happened in the 1860s. In any case I really wish it would happen, and your sacred historical authority is right here, for your reading pleasure. They did this thing, and it didn't destroy the Republic. It didn't even change it as much as one might like.
Via The Log Cabin Sage, who retails a great story from the 1858 Senate campaign of how Douglas snidely noted that Lincoln had managed a grocery store in the course of his career, and showed himself to be "a very good bartender". Lincoln came back to it in his response: “What Mr. Douglas has said, gentlemen, is true enough. I did keep a grocery, and I did sell cotton, candles, and cigars, and sometimes whiskey; but I remember in those days, Mr. Douglas was one of my best customers. Many a time have I stood on one side of the counter and sold whiskey to Mr. Douglas on the other side; but the difference between us now is this: I have left my side of the counter, but Mr. Douglas still sticks to his as tenaciously as ever.”
Touché, gentlemen.
Candidate Yang made a couple of really annoying historical errors, when he suggested that folks in the ancient times when they used to debate socialism and capitalism never anticipated how economies would be transformed by automation
and claimed the support of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for his silly "universal basic income" program
Dear Andrew Yang, Dr. King's MINIMUM guaranteed income pegged to the median wage was a very different animal from your $1000 universal handout, a lovely present for somebody like me but not close to a living income for those who need it.
Photoshop by the Brazilian artist PSHoudini via Tom Banwell, 2011.
This enchanting piece from the president's remarks at the the US Mission to the United Nations, last Thursday, on the release of the whistleblower report:
That Hat Wouldn't Work For Me
by Donald J. Trump
I say, “Steve, what happens when
you come off a vice presidential
plane, it’s called Air Force Two,
your father’s with you, you walk
into a room in China and they
give you a fund of $1.5 billion,
billion, you make hundreds of
thousands of dollars and millions
of dollars off that. And that’s probably
not all they gave him. They gave
him plenty more, I’m sure.
We might never find out."
Colonel John C. Frémont, Republican candidate for the presidency in 1856, in a campaign lithograph, via.
So Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, is back on the theory that Donald Trump is Jimmy Carter.
No, really, this has been going on for a couple of years. Just around the time of the inauguration, Julia Azari, Scott Lemieux, and Corey Robin wrote pieces suggesting that the Trump presidency was likely to be what Steven Skowronek called a "disjunctive" presidency, that is one that takes place at the time when an old order or "regime", the long-term ordering of the ideologies and interests on which the politics depends, is falling apart and a new one is not yet clearly emergent; like Buchanan's, before the cataclysms of the Civil War and Reconstruction, or Hoover's, before the New Deal, or Carter's, before the beginning of what you might call the Era of Miniature Government.
Ross, with an authoritarian's inability to grasp a discussion of systemic factors, took this to mean that Trump must be personally like Carter in some respect, as in this from his contribution to the Times inauguration coverage, committed to the proposition that Trump is as smart as Carter was, with a "vision" that is similarly "new", though unlikely to succeed:
One such president was Jimmy Carter, who tried to maintain the creaking New Deal coalition while also grasping at a new vision for liberal governance. He failed because his party simply couldn’t accommodate the tension, and he himself couldn’t effectively blend the old and new.
Right now Trump looks like he might be similarly disjunctive. Like Mr. Carter with the ’70s-era Democrats, he has grasped — correctly — that Republican politics desperately needs to be reinvented. But his populist-nationalist vision has seemed too racially and culturally exclusive to win him majority support, and it’s layered atop a party that still mostly believes in the “populism” of cutting the estate tax.
Combine those brute political facts with Trump’s implausibly expansive promises, and a Carter scenario — gridlock, disappointment, collapse — seems like the most plausible way to bet.
Which is pretty amusing in retrospect: whatever we may think about Trump's intelligence and vision, he's turned out to have an amazingly firm hold on his party, in spite of the claims to independence of a few crabby pundits. Today, anyway, Ross isn't going for retrospection, but instead prefers to look ahead, toward the question of who's going to play the "reconstructive" Reagan in this remake ("Bernie Sanders, Socialism's Reagan?"):
It's not only Election Day, and the day after Guy Fawkes, but also, as it happens, Diwali, the Hindu darkest new-moon night of the year, and a festival of liminality, where doorways are fantastically decorated with colored rice powder and lit up with candles. In Singapore,where it is known after the Tamil name as Deepavali, the government policy of strenuous ethnic integration has meant that all the different kinds of Chinese, Malay, and other citizens have Indian neighbors if they live in a Housing Development Board estate, as most do, somewhere up or down the common corridor, and walk past one of these doorways as they get home. Image via.
Well, admittedly it's a short paragraph. It's only voids, and voids are all I have to take your heart away.
No, seriously, he's got to get out his "why Democrats have failed" piece before its sell-by date, which is coincidentally today, November 6, and the central challenge of the age is, obviously, the one he's most confident Democrats have failed to meet:
Interesting! He's got that way of watching his own TV show from the real outside. He's a student of himself, but he always retains the ability to be surprised by the remarkable things he does, when an eminent critic points it out.
Dinesh is kind of like the Frederick Douglass of our time, in the sense that he's doing an amazing job and getting recognized more and more, and has understood that Lincoln is just like Trump because he owned the libs and drove them nuts.
US Embassy in Arnona. Photo by Reuters, via Jerusalem Post.
Too Flowery. And He Died.
by Donald J. Trump
Do I get credit for saving a million,
billion bucks? Not really. Someday.
You know when Abraham Lincoln made that
Gettysburg Address speech, the great speech,
you know he was ridiculed? He was ridiculed.
He took the horse and carriage up
from the White House and wrote it
partially in that carriage and partially
at a desk in the Lincoln bedroom which is
incredible by the way in the White House,
and he went up to Gettysburg and delivered that speech.
And he was excoriated by the fake news.
They had fake news then. He was excoriated.
They said it was a terrible, terrible speech.
They said it was far too short. It’s not long,
many of us know it by memory. It was far too short
and it was far too flowery. Four score and seven
years ago, right? Too flowery. And he died.
Fifty years after his death they said
it may have been the greatest speech
ever made in America.
From (I believe) the 14th-century Libro del Buen Amor by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita, via.
Here's some heavy-duty Dinesh, a response to his assertion that Lincoln called himself a conservative (not exactly untrue, but it meant somewhat the opposite of what Dinesh thought it might), and NSFW below the fold, some suggested questions for Senator Kamala Harris to ask Judge Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearings:
Unknown artist, portrait of Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood (1830-1917), first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court, in a campaign poster from her first presidential race, in 1884. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
Abraham and Tad Lincoln, 1865, in a photo by Alexander Gardner. Looking for an unfamiliar picture of Lincoln in the NPG collections is what set me off on this,
I've been paying a ridiculous amount of attention lately to rightwing academic fraud Dinesh D'Souza and his new booklike object, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, an extended argument that the party of Nancy Pelosi, Tom Perez, and Keith Ellison is objectively pro-slavery, since it was founded 190 years ago by slaveholders, and therefore Nazi, because Hitler's Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei was directly inspired by those leftists John C. Calhoun, James Buchanan, Jefferson Davis, and the Ku Klux Klan and Senator Theodore Bilbo, and Al Smith and Franklin Delano Roosevelt too, who were all essentially the same person, as you can tell by the presence of the word "sozialistisch" in Hitler's party name. And the progressive birth control advocate Margaret Sanger is in there because tying the tubes of intellectually disabled women without asking them for permission, which she thought was a good idea, seems wrong to us, and gassing Jews seems wrong to most of us as well, so that proves gassing Jews is a progressive program*, though only in a Democratic, Woodrow Wilson sense of "progressive", not a Republican, Theodore Roosevelt** sense.
I know it's so stupid it's not worth thinking about in serious times like these, but the thing is D'Souza's thesis is a reductio of a kind of thinking that can be found all over the place, for example in a piece in yesterday's Washington Post by somebody who seems like the opposite of D'Souza in almost every respect, the calm and dignified, indisputably honorable and honest, eminently moderate, compromise-loving, Episcopal priest and former Republican Senator from Missouri John Danforth, an unwavering Trump opponent (in theory at least; I can't find him publicly mentioning Trump's name between December 2015, when he found Trump revolting, and now, when he still does), who writes:
From Marvel's salute to the 2009 Obama inauguration, the digital comic Gettysburg Distress.
Here's another distressed Republican, Peter Wehner ("Can We Find Our Way Back to Lincoln?"), a veteran faith-based public relations flack of the Reagan, Bush A, and Bush B administrations, to complain that his party has been hijacked by
repulsive elements, people who were attracted to racial and ethnic politics and moved by resentment and intolerance rather than a vision of the good. This group was larger than I ever imagined, and at important moments the Republican Party either overlooked them or played to them. Some may have been hoping to appeal to these elements while also containing and moderating them, to sand off the rough edges, to keep them within the coalition but not allow them to become dominant. But the opposite happened. The party guests took over the party.
I think the operative part was "played to them". Wehner might not have known anything about the size of the repulsive elements, but the party knew the exact number: enough to win all but one of the presidential elections from 1968 through 1988. And they systematically built a bridge between the government-hating patricians and tycoons of the conservative movement and the race-haunted white voters of the South and the industrial northeast (I don't think enough of a point has been made, by the way, of how many white southerners migrated north to Michigan and Ohio and so on after World War II, changing those states' political complexions more than the African American movement in the same period did) and the Mexican-fearing southwest.
Climaxing with Ronald Reagan's famous visit to the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he dogwhistled "states' rights" to an audience made up, perhaps, of the very people who had protected the murderers of the civil rights workers James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner 16 years earlier, in a speech focusing on libertarian economic theories and condemning an activist federal government.
Happy birthday to America's first socialist president, Abraham Lincoln, who wrote, in his 1847 "Fragments of a Tariff Discussion", the year before the publication of Marx's and Engels's Communist Manifesto,
...inasmuch [as] most good things are produced by labour, it follows that [all] such things of right belong to those whose labour has produced them. But it has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have laboured, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To [secure] to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.
The Rail Splitter. Painting by J.L.G. Ferris, ca. 1909, via Honest Abe Blog.
Robert P. George, probably the most brilliant social conservative theorist in the country, argued that just as Lincoln persistently rejected the Dred Scott decision, so “we must reject and resist an egregious act of judicial usurpation.”
Faced with the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, Lincoln declared the ruling to be illegitimate and vowed that he would treat it as such. He squarely faced Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s claim to judicial supremacy and firmly rejected it. To accept it, he said, would be for the American people “to resign their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”
Any presidential candidate worth our support should have at least in rudimentary form what Lincoln offered in full. He needs a profound vision formed by a thorough reading of no more than four books, all of them fiction; a double-minded temperament enabling one of his minds to check the other one when it gets dangerous; and the kind of strategic shrewdness with which Lincoln decided to end slavery not immediately but through unromantic, gradual economic means.
As you'll all remember, no doubt, from your history, when instead of issuing a showoffy emancipation proclamation, Lincoln devised his No Amnesty program permitting enslaved Americans to open tax-deferred Emancipation Accounts with their local stockbrokers so they would be poised to buy themselves when market forces drove their price low enough.
Voting for a third party and hoping that Obama is defeated because you
think that it will result is The Great Progressive Awakening is like hoping you get cancer because you’d like to lose a few pounds. (TBogg, September 4)
Obama gave Jessica Yellin on CNN an interview in which he answered a lot more questions than you might have imagined on the subject of drone strikes, here. I heard about it at Columbia Journalism Review, where there is another, less forthcoming interview.
He doesn't confirm or deny the Kill List, beyond noting that what you see in the papers is not always exactly true, which you probably already guessed. I do wonder how this works. Assuming that Scott Shane is not simply writing fiction on the one hand, but is nothing like an eyewitness on the other, what exactly is it that he gets wrong?
Are Shane's anonymous informants eyewitnesses who are giving him a distorted picture, whether to glorify themselves or the president or to cover their asses against some accusation, perhaps actionable? Is he confusing things himself, because he mishears or because what he hears doesn't match some stereotype he's working with?
I can't make myself imagine a true story that would be similar to Shane's story but different enough to make Shane wrong. (You fool, what is this Thomas Aquinas crap? The president only reads Kierkegaard when he's deciding whom to kill!)
Also from a narratological standpoint, I have no trouble accepting Obama's assurances that the drone strikes are ordered with excruciating care for the protection of the innocent, or of whomever they consider to be innocent. He could be wrong, and there's no question but that the protections fail from time to time, but he's not lying, for whatever that's worth, because why would he? Like Thomas Friedman cares?? It's because he cares himself that he chooses to talk about it.
I'll be getting to this again and again over the next weeks. But when you're wondering why those cowardly journalists never ask Obama some particular
question or other, keep in mind that somebody may actually have done so.
Update 9/9:
Emptywheel's take on the interview is in a headline that bites like the Onion,
Obama Looking for Structures to Ensure He Abides by Rule of Law
as in "I'll stop myself from violating the Constitution if I have to pursue myself to the ends of the earth," and expands the point pretty fairly, I think:
He’s looking for structures and institutional checks to make sure we
don’t go down that slippery slope where we forget rule of law. And yet
his Administration has repeatedly avoided the one mandated by the
Constitution: courts.
Which, according to his own logic, means he’s not using the tool that would best work to keep us safe from terrorism.
Freddie Bartholomew as Little Lord Fauntleroy, 1936, from Stars Color. A much more imaginative account of the picture is found at the unhappily short-lived homepage of the Ministry of Information for the Free Democratic Peoples Republic of Koskovia.
The speech
There were so many really great speeches at the DNC, in such a wealth of different styles, that one started feeling a little sorry for the Republicans, with their plastic faces and Freddie Bartholomew delivery, and their need to repeat the exact Luntz-tested verbage (though I have to admit the Democrats have something of that too, and I sure wish they would start working on an alternative, say, to "marry who they love").
And some no doubt felt that President Obama's speech at the end was a bit of a letdown, sober and un-oratorical, after all those fireworks. But to me the very sobriety was climactic, like the poet speaking at the end of Schumann's Kinderszenen, and then he did give it its big peroration, only very quickly, after that gorgeous apostrophe to "you", meaning us, the people, the agents of change. Tom Junod did a beautiful analysis of this at Charlie Pierce's place.
There were two things I really needed to hear that I heard. One was in the discussion of energy policy, and was really pretty cold comfort:
unlike my opponent, I will not let oil companies write this country's
energy plan, or endanger our coastlines, or collect another $4 billion
in corporate welfare from our taxpayers. We're offering a better path - a
future where we keep investing in wind and solar and clean coal; where
farmers and scientists harness new biofuels to power our cars and
trucks; where construction workers build homes and factories that waste
less energy; where we develop a hundred year supply of natural gas
that's right beneath our feet.... And yes, my plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is
heating our planet - because climate change is not a hoax. More
droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They're a threat to
our children's future. (Transcript by New York Daily News)
Cold comfort in that he seems to see carbon reduction only as a happy byproduct of the quest for energy independence (including "clean coal", safe hydrofracking, and why not unicorns on treadmills?). But at least he remembered to stick it in there, and gave it much of a paragraph.
The other thing was that appeal to Lincoln that has been much spoken of:
And while I'm proud of what we've achieved together, I'm far more
mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he
said, "I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming
conviction that I had no place else to go."
Remember sunny George W. saying he couldn't think offhand of any mistakes he'd made? Obama can think of plenty—he just isn't allowed to discuss them in public. But seriously, that means young Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi. It means all the thousands of immigrants that have been hunted down and deported by an insanely overreactive Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It means awful things, no doubt, of which we know nothing and will perhaps never know anything. But just that he feels it—that he's not so psychopathic he can't feel it—means something to me.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great
men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not
authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty
of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the
office sanctifies the holder of it.
The mitigating factor is that of self-awareness, which Lincoln had in abundance, and psychopaths wholly lack, and it makes enough of a difference.
I knew it! Or, more accurately, I knew something; Brooks has not actually come out and endorsed Obama as the Burkean conservative in the race, but he has come approximately halfway:
But there is a flaw in the vision the Republicans offered in Tampa. It
is contained in its rampant hyperindividualism. Speaker after speaker
celebrated the solitary and heroic individual. There was almost no talk
of community and compassionate conservatism. There was certainly no
conservatism as Edmund Burke understood it, in which individuals are
embedded in webs of customs, traditions, habits and governing
institutions.
Not that that's exactly true: there was plenty of talk about family at the convention, for one thing. I'll never get over Rick Santorum riffing on his father's hard workingman's hands while his extreme makeup job made it look as if he himself was made of marzipan. And there was tons of church, as well, at least from Mr. and Mrs. Romney, and anecdotes of the churchy helping one another out.
What Brooks really objects to in these conservatives is on display in his opening paragraph:
America was built by materialistic and sometimes superficial strivers.
It was built by pioneers who voluntarily subjected themselves to
stone-age conditions on the frontier fired by dreams of riches. It was
built by immigrants who crammed themselves into hellish tenements
because they thought it would lead, for their children, to big houses,
big cars and big lives.... Many Americans, and many foreign observers, are ambivalent about or
offended by this driving material ambition. Read “The Great Gatsby.”
Read D.H. Lawrence on Benjamin Franklin.
Compare Burke, in his speech on Conciliation with America (1775), criticizing
vulgar and mechanical politicians... a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is
gross and material; and who therefore, far from being qualified to be
directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel
in the machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly
taught,…ruling and master principles, which, in the opinion of
such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in
truth every thing, and all in all.... (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
It's that—of course Brooks has nothing against them, my no, salt of the earth, but—they're not very classy. Think a lot about money, less about the higher things such as the writings of Burke and Oakeshott. And apparently not joining things in the good old style; what we're looking at is a kind of right-wing Bowling Alone perspective.
The list of great communitarian conservatives of history goes like this: George Washington, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, and Condoleeza Rice. I'll just take a pause here, maybe for quite a long time.
