Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong

Jo Walton Disbelieves in the Wrong Singularity

She writes:

Tor.com:The Singularity Problem and Non-Problem: I don't think we'll ever get to the point where understanding the future would be like explaining Worldcon [i.e., the world science fiction annual convention] to a goldfish...

She may be right about the future. I think that she is almost surely not right about the past.

I have here a time machine, into which I will place Jo Walton, and send her back 50000 years so that she can greet the first group of behaviorally-modern humans to venture out of the Horn of Africa and into Arabia, and explain Worldcon to them.

Someone should write this up. I hereby disavow and relinquish any and all intellectual property rights, including cinema, to all existing and any future forms of informative or entertainment media, in the interest of getting this puppy started...

Why We Need a Different Opposition Party to Compete with the Democrats (Miscellaneous)

Matthew Yglesias writes about Reihan Salaam and Ross Douthat's Grand New Party:

Matthew Yglesias: The Trouble With Sam's Club: [T]he big flaw with Grand New Party... is that its analysis of why the GOP is the way it is.... The book is very good on the nature of the GOP's predicament and on possible ways out of the predicament, but it seems to view the "how did we get here?" issue as... [bad] luck -- Bush wasn't very bright or something.

I think that's wrong. And importantly wrong.... Republicans [do not] literally only care about their super-rich financial backers. But... other impulses Republicans might have are ultimately undermined by the stranglehold that the tax cut jihad holds over the party. At the end of the day, a political party whose politicians all need to portray themselves as "tax cutters" is going to be very limited in its ability to do anything constructive....

[T]he models Ross & Reihan point to... book were governors or mayors during the 1990s who, thanks to the robust economy, were able to cut taxes while also spending non-trivial amounts of new money on programs.... Republicans aren't congenitally incapable... [but] in order to do useful domestic policy stuff... they would need to be freed from the iron grip of tax cut mania.

How hard would it be to do this? I don't know.... John McCain's primary defeat in 2000 and his primary win in 2008 appears to confirm the idea that the GOP is first and foremost a tax cutting party.... [W]hile Grand New Party is... implicitly critical of the "tax cuts ueber alles" forces, its authors seem to believe that those forces are sufficiently powerful that they shouldn't be taken on... head-on...

As I see it, back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s the spinmasters for Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan rooted the Republican Party in three beliefs:

1. the government is not on your side--the government is on the side of the Negroes
2. tax cuts always raise revenues
3. the people outside our borders (and the people inside our borders who came from outside our borders) are not our friends

The ramifications of these beliefs have poisoned the entire party. They are the reason that smart well-intentioned Republicans--like George H.W. Bush--turned out to be mediocre presidents; that not-smart but well-intentioned Republicans--like Ronald Reagan (who with the help of his wife and her astrologer partially escaped #3)--turned out to be lousy presidents; and Republicans who were neither smart nor well-meaning--like George W. Bush--has turned out to be either the worst or the second-worst president in American history (depending on what you think of James Buchanan).

The problems are thus deeper than Matt thinks. He sees #2 as the big problem--and sees it as the insurmountable obstacle to making the Republican Party a source of strength rather than weakness and corruption for America. But as I see it, it's only one of three big insurmountable obstacles.

Hence my belief that it would be better to dear the thing down and start again from scratch. Retire the Republican Party, give it an honorable place in American history for its long, successful run from Fremont to Eisenhower. And pass over what has happened since in silence.

FNMA: A History Lesson

John M. Berry: Fannie, Freddie Have Worn Out Their Independence:

July 16 (Bloomberg) -- It's time to put an end to the charade that no one ever believed. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be dead without the announced backing of the federal government for the securities they issue to guarantee home mortgages. That's a strong argument for dropping these public-private partnerships, in which management and shareholders have taken the public for a ride. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's plan to shore up the companies includes no direct protection for stockholders, and their share prices plunged more yesterday. Fannie Mae closed at $7.07, down 82 percent this year, while Freddie Mac fell to $5.26, off 85 percent for the year....

The two companies own or guarantee more than half the $12 trillion of home mortgages in the U.S., so there was never any reason to think the government wouldn't step in to keep them operating.... However, instead of just finding ways to keep them going, Paulson should have proposed a government takeover -- with a payment to shareholders based on, say, July 11 share prices of $10.25 for Fannie and $7.75 for Freddie.

Over the years, both Fannie and Freddie have made very large profits precisely because they were able to raise money by selling securities regarded by most investors as carrying a government guarantee. As we have seen this week, the investors were right.... [T]he implicit subsidy has been enormous.... [CBO] estimated that in 2003 the annual value of the subsidy to the housing government-sponsored enterprises -- these GSEs include Fannie, Freddie and the Federal Home Loan Banks -- at $23 billion. Only about half that got passed on to homeowners in the form of lower interest rates on mortgages, the CBO said.... Fannie and Freddie persuaded members of Congress to let them issue ever-more debt.... Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan expressed concern about Fannie and Freddie in congressional testimony in February 2004 because... they had not chosen to manage risk by holding more capital....

[T]hat is the source of today's crisis for Fannie and Freddie: Investors believe the companies have large unrecognized losses.... As much as anything, the crisis represents a political failure. Congress wasn't willing to see the two companies reined in. So it's time to end the public-private partnership with its built-in conflict of interest.... Let's make them fully public entities whose role is to support the securitization of home mortgages...

The privatization--such as it was--of the FNMA was accomplished in 1968, I believe for three reasons:

1. Getting FNMA debt off the federal government's books allowed Johnson to postpone moving a bill raising the limit on the allowable national debt through congress.
2. Providing mortgage insurance seemed to the then-Budget Bureau to be much closer to an "insurance" function that was properly private than a "central banking" systemic risk-control function taht was proprly public.
3. Nobody in 1968 imagined how good FNMA would turn out to be on Capitol Hill in using congressional power to draw the teeth from regulation, and how effective FNMA would be in persuading Wall Street that it had much more of a government guarantee than your standard large financial institution.

Truth be told, I am having a hard time understanding why FNMA and FHLMC equity has dropped so much. The power to borrow money at essentially the Treasury rate and use it to make mortgages is awesomely valuable. FNMA and FHLMC shareholders own that power--unless the Fed and the Treasury force it into a Bear Stearns- or LTCM-like fire sale. That is, I think, what the market fears.

Richard Milhous Nixon

I have decided that Rick Perlstein's Nixonland is an even better book about Richard Nixon and the Nixonland we live in than Garry Wills's Nixon Agonistes:

One of Richard Nixon’s biographers, reflecting upon the image [of his father repeatedly throwing him into the irrigation ditch], speculated the kid “might well have felt that his father was trying to drown him like an unwanted puppy.” For most farmers, that ditch helped bring a decent crop. Not Frank Nixon, who was filled with the kind of self-destructive abstemiousness that is sometimes labeled pride. “I won’t buy fertilizer until I raise enough lemons to pay for it,” he said, though in Yorba Linda’s “loaf-sugar” soil—it tended to clump—you couldn’t grow lemons without fertilizer. Frank and his family went bust.

California wasn’t supposed to be like this. Frank had come from Indiana after a life spent collecting humiliating jobs: farmhand (upon dropping out of school in the sixth grade); streetcar motorman (his feet got frostbitten in the unheated cab); glassworker; potter; housepainter; sheep rancher; telephone-pole climber; oxcart driver; oil-field roustabout.

When Dick was ten, the family moved to the Quaker outpost of Whittier, home to his mother Hannah’s people. They never really approved of Frank. That didn’t keep the patriarch from affecting a peacocklike sense of superiority. To the point of tedium, he would remind people that he had once met William McKinley—as if that, and not the family he was raising, was his life’s great accomplishment. Eventually Richard Nixon’s loquacious father didn’t do too poorly with his store. He built it in a former church, which was appropriate enough, for in this family, to toil was a sacrament. Frank, who did the store’s butchering, took pride in changing his bloodstained shirts no more than once a week. Richard Nixon would ever transit between feelings of pride and feelings of shame toward his dirty-necked, lusty spitfire of a father, between apologizing for him and boasting about him, between desperately reaching for success to honor him and desperately reaching for success to repudiate him....

At Whittier, a fine Quaker college of regional reputation unknown anywhere else, he embarked upon what might have been his most humiliating job of all: learning to be a backslapping hail-fellow-well-met. (“I had the impression he would even practice his inflection when he said ‘hello,’” a reporter later observed.) The seventeen-year-old blossomed when he realized himself no longer alone in his outsiderdom: the student body was run, socially, by a circle of swells who called themselves the Franklins, and the remainder of the student body, a historian noted, “seemed resigned to its exclusion.” So this most unfraternal of youth organized the remnant into a fraternity of his own. Franklins were well-rounded, graceful, moved smoothly, talked slickly. Nixon’s new club, the Orthogonians, was for the strivers, those not to the manner born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one’s unpolish was a nobility of its own.

Franklins were never photographed save in black tie. Orthogonians wore shirtsleeves. “Beans, brains, and brawn” was their motto. He told them orthogonian—basically, “at right angles”—meant “upright,” “straight shooter.” Also, their enemies might have added, all elbows. The Orthogonians’ base was among Whittier’s athletes. On the surface, jocks seem natural Franklins, the Big Men on Campus. But Nixon always had a gift for looking under social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspectacular—silent—majority. The ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback’s shadow....

The circle could be made to expand, Richard Nixon might have realized even then. Though via a paradox: the greater their power, the more they felt oppressed. When the people who felt like losers united around their shared psychological sense of grievance, their enemies felt somehow more overwhelming, not less; even if the Franklins weren’t always really so powerful at all, Franklin “power” often being merely a self-perpetuating effect of an Orthogonian sense of victimization. Martyrs who were not really martyrs, oppressors who were not really oppressors: a class politics for the white middle class. The keynote of the new, Nixonian politics…though we are getting ahead of ourselves. For first we must send Richard Nixon to law school, where he was a monk....

It was, to be sure, an unglamorous way to play [poker]. The fun in gambling lies in risking the chance. Which was how people who had not mastered the endurance of the dirty job—most people—played. Which may be one of the reasons Nixon was so successful against them. Sometimes Nixon played pots as high as the price of a new car. Waiting, waiting, waiting; enduring not so much the losses as the long stretches of nonwinning; because you’ve only really ever finally lost when you’ve given up the game. At any rate he won enough money at poker to fund the greater part of his first congressional race. He knew a whole lot about winning by then.  

There is one more thing to say before we launch Richard Nixon on his public career. Nixon has been the subject of more psychobiographies than any other politician. His career vindicates one of that maligned genre’s most trustworthy findings: the recipe for a successfully driven politician should include a doting mother to convince the son he can accomplish anything, and an emotionally distant father to convince the son that no accomplishment can ever be enough. We have seen something of the father. Now, something of the mother. Nixon called Hannah Nixon a saint. People remembered her as soft-spoken and pious. But Nixon’s best psychobiographer, Fawn M. Brodie, sees evidence of “repressed anger” in Hannah Nixon’s makeup. History dotes upon her honesty. But that, too, doesn’t quite cover it.

For even while instructing her sons that lying was the most unpardonable sin, on one subject she lied often, especially later in life: on the subject of her second son. To understand this we must explain the death of his brothers. It is another psychobiographical theme in the lives of successful men: the deaths of siblings. The first one to die was the youngest, Arthur, who came down with what might have been tubercular meningitis. Twelve-year-old Richard was given reason to believe that a concussion from a schoolyard rock thrown to Arthur’s head that Richard had been unable to prevent had been a contributing factor. Older brothers are supposed to protect younger ones. Richard was convulsed by his failure, and the loss. Then, the second brother. Richard hadn’t been the favorite son. The golden boy, the one on whom great hopes were pinned, was the oldest, Harold—handsome, well-rounded, graceful: the first Franklin Richard knew. Harold became even more the center of the family universe when he came down with tuberculosis.

After Hannah set up a second household for him to recuperate in the hot, dry air of Prescott, Arizona, Richard was left behind with two other brothers under the care of their slave-master father. It was the middle of the Depression. The family almost went bankrupt. Richard was sent to Arizona to help nurse the boarders Hannah brought in to help keep the family afloat.

The work was endless, dirty, unrewarding, sepulchral. When Harold died, Hannah once told Ladies’ Home Journal, Richard “sank into a deep, impenetrable silence.... From that time on it seemed that he was trying to be three sons in one, striving even harder than before to make up to his father and me for our loss.” Hannah would come to recast Richard in her mind as an impregnable figure of destiny, bringer of miracles. When he became famous, she began to report that Richard had been born the day of an eclipse (he wasn’t), that his ragged and forlorn family had sold land upon which oil was found immediately afterward (they hadn’t). The exaggerations she got away with drove home for her son the lesson that a lie unexposed does no harm, that a soul viewed as a saint can also lie. And her swooning (though she withheld praise in his presence) drove home a lesson the politician was predisposed to internalize: that he was a figure of destiny, impregnable. Which could only heighten the pain of the losses he had pledged himself to endure when they came. Which made him want to win even more; though the pleasure of those victories was dulled to the vanishing point by survivor’s guilt; even as any victory could not be enough to please his internalized father anyway. This was an ego finely tuned to believe that it was nothing unless it was everything: one for which winning wasn’t everything, it was the only thing—but which even victory could never fully satisfy...

For the first time, I think I understand how Nixon could win so much and yet wind up such a loser: his entire strategy was to win by making himself the oppressed loser and the spokesman for all the other oppressed losers--which meant that the more he won, the more he saw himself as and became a loser, until in the end he lost absolutely everything.

And made the Republican Party the world's biggest loser as well.

Tim Lee Reviews Brink Lindsey's "The Age of Abundance"

You know, The American Scene is like the love child of National Review and Partisan Review in their heydays--except, that is, for the fact that The American Scene is really good.

Tim Lee:

Two Ages of Abundance | Culture | Politics | The American Scene: I promised that I’d do a post discussing one of the weaknesses of Brink Lindsay’s The Age of Abundance. In particular, it felt like it was really two separate books that were stitched together in one volume. Both halves were good, but they didn’t cohere....

The first half of the book... up to about 1980, is a rich and colorful discussion of Americans social and cultural evolution. The second half of the book, which focuses on the last quarter-century or so, is more a technical economics discussion, focusing on the effects of globalization, changes in consumption and inequality, etc....

I can think of several possible reasons for this. The most obvious is that Lindsey may simply be writing what he knows... a youngish Baby Boomer....

The shift may also be a consequence of one of the trends Lindsey identifies... the astonishing increase in the diversity of American culture. One could make a plausible case that Nirvana is to the early 1990s what the Beatles were to the mid-1960s. But... it’s not clear that it was in the 1990s, or ever will be again, possible to reach that kind of stratospheric social success. The Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show drew an estimated 73 million viewers, about half the country....

[I]t might be impossible to write a cultural history of late-20th-century America as coherent as the one Lindsey writes about the cultural trends of the 50s and 60s.... A final possibility is that it’s not yet possible to write a definitive cultural history of the last couple of decades because we don’t have enough perspective to see which trends proved to be really important. The rise of evangelical Christianity began in the 1940s and 1950s, but a writer in 1970 might not have appreciated its significance... the social movements that will shape popular culture in the next couple of decades are almost certainly in our midst today, but we won’t be able to identify them [for a while yet]....

I found the first half more interesting than the second... [which] draws more on the work of libertarian thinkers whose work I’m already familiar with.... [Also,] the best writing is often about good storytelling, and there are a lot more fun stories in the first half.... The whole thing is excellent, though, and I encourage you to check it out.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Writes About the Burden His Parents Carried

Lynell George:

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes of father Paul in 'Beautiful Struggle': Black Pride and Black Arts and Black Awareness provided the atmosphere in which Paul Coates -- Vietnam veteran, ex-Black Panther, autodidact and soon-to-be book publisher -- had begun to raise his young family. But... [e]ven Coates' young son Ta-Nehisi... was able to discern discrepancies... that he didn't quite have language for.

If the newspapers Dad left around the house were true, the greater world was obsessed over Challenger and the S&L scandal. But we were another country, fraying at our seams. . . . The statistics were dire and oft recited -- 1 in 21 killed by 1 in 21, more of us in jail than college," writes the younger Coates in his new memoir, "The Beautiful Struggle."

There were those, like Paul Coates and Ta-Nehisi's mother, Cheryl Waters (to whom the book is dedicated), who remained steady at the task, raising their sons (Ta-Nehisi and Menelik), fortifying the foundation, buttressing the support beams of the soul, as America's inner cities seemed to collapse from within. They were at ground zero of gang warfare, wrong-place-wrong-time street violence, the escalating crack cocaine epidemic. The most vulnerable and visible target: young black men.

For Ta-Nehisi Coates, now 32, the book was a way to sketch not just time and place but an intricate support system that came into being, the other side of the story -- intact families, men who got up and went to work, young men who stayed away from drugs, black girls who didn't get pregnant, black kids who devoured books.

"Too often people tell our stories," Coates said on a recent Wednesday morning over breakfast.... "I can remember being in college being so frustrated [with the media]: 'Where is the other side?' " Ta-Nehisi Coates said. "I really wanted the full humanity of black folks to come across. That's one of the things we don't get." And so Coates set out himself to slip behind those late 1980s and early 1990s headlines, the statistics about "endangered" young black men. "A cottage industry sprung up to consider our fate," Coates writes. "At conferences, black boys were assembled. At schools we were herded into auditoriums. At home mothers summoned us to dinner tables and there they delivered the news: Our time was short."

Coates' book is many things: a tribute to his demanding, disciplinarian father... as well as an homage to the complexities of the communities that he grew up in -- in and around Baltimore as well as the metaphoric idea of "black community" itself.... The result: a lyric, hip-hop epic that meticulously evokes the period through its textures and its talismans -- headlines, break beats, back-in-the-day vernacular....

[F]ather and son did not have an easy relationship, but it wasn't without love. His father was a big man with outsize dreams for his son. He had a complicated life -- seven children from four wives -- yet he was always on the scene. Not just in name but as a constant force of accountability in young Ta-Nehisi's life.

That "beautiful struggle" is Ta-Nehisi's journey toward "consciousness," of finding his "deeper self" or "knowledge of self" in a country that had been, from slavery to Jim Crow segregation, bent on negating African Americans' sense of personhood. This "groping for manhood in the dark" was eased some by his father's basement store of literature, which grew to overtake the house, by this man who resuscitated old books by black scholars, historians, thinkers, long out of print. These books would become the backbone of his Black Classic Press....

The concern was about putting not just the discipline, but all of it, in context. "As a father, I wanted to do a job that stood the test of time," Paul Coates later reflected from his home in Baltimore, the city Ta-Nehisi grew up in. "I share the worry of most black fathers and black mothers. I wanted him to grow to manhood, and I didn't want him to end up in jail. I wanted him, and all my children, to make a contribution to their community. I wanted him to be able to stand up as a man. And whatever comes at him, to take it on."...

Now father to his own 8-year-old son, Ta-Nehisi is bent on telling stories that will broaden the view. Contemplating the future, he's still studying the past: "What I came to understand from looking at my dad was the importance of consistency and pressure. It's constant expectation. That should never flag. That should never go away."

Ross Douthat Says That He Is Not Now Nor Has He Ever Been a Jesse Helmsian

But we liberal webloggers want more! We will not let Douthat evade the key question: What, exactly, is Ross Douthat's position on "To His Coy Mistress" and "A Horatian Ode Upon Oliver Cromwell's Return from Ireland"?

We will not be denied.

We do, however, wish Ross luck as he tries to construct a decent non-Helmsian anti-Limbaughian right in America:

Ross Douthat: The Case of Jesse Helms: The liberal blogosphere wants to know: Why have conservatives lined up to say kind things about the late Jesse Helms?... [L]argely because Helms was an sometimes-effective, always-steadfast champion of conservative causes for decades, and there's a sense on the right that the liberal case against Helms-the-awful-bigot is really just the latest manifestation of the long-running liberal attempt to argue that... "the essence of conservatism is and always has been Dixiecrat-ism ... [and] that everything that conservatism has accomplished and stood for since 1965--Reagan, the tax revolt, law-and-order, deregulation, the fight against affirmative action, the critique of the welfare state...everything--is the poisoned fruit of the poisoned tree."

Regular readers will know that I... [am] sensitive to the way that liberals cry "racism!" in an effort to disarm conservative arguments.... I should note that I'm not convinced that Helms' famous "white hands" ad merits the sort of outraged denunciations that Andrew and Max Boot have offered up today....

But a specific ad is one thing; Helms himself is another. He simply was an awful bigot, and worse he was an awful bigot who never expressed a shred of remorse, so far as I know, for his toxic approach to issues ranging from civil rights to HIV to foreign affairs. Far from being the sort of politicians who conservatives ought to defend, out of a sense of issue-by-issue solidarity, he's the sort of politician conservatives ought to carefully distance themselves from, because his political style brought (and continues to bring) intellectual disrepute to almost every cause with which he was associated. Inherent to conservatism is the responsibility to stand up and say to bien-pensant opinion: Just because a bigot opposes something doesn't mean it's a good idea. But the necessity (and difficulty) of making that case, whether the issue is affirmative action or "comprehensive" immigration reform or the NEA and Piss Christ, is all the more reason for conservatives to keep their distance from actual bigots, even (or especially) when they're representing the great state of North Carolina in the U.S. Senate....

I'm happy to defend Helms' views on a variety of issues, but the man himself has no business in the right-wing pantheon, and the conservatives who have used his death as an occasion to argue that he does are doing their movement a grave disservice.

Let Us Now Speak Ill of the Living...

Let us speak ill of the editors of National Review, who write:

The Editors on Jesse Helms on National Review Online: Jesse Helms died on the Fourth of July — a fitting end for a true American patriot. He was one of the most consequential conservatives of his generation.... It is easy to rattle off a long list of what Senator No opposed. First and foremost was Communism. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was an aggressive and outspoken critic of the Soviet Union. He refused to overlook the evils of Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba. During the 1980s, he led efforts to support Nicaragua’s contra rebels against the Sandinistas and their incipient totalitarianism.

He was against many other things as well: federal funding of obscene art, ineffective aid to foreign governments, and the continual encroachments of Big Government on everyday life. One of the things he was against in the 1960s was, alas, civil rights. His defense of segregation was of course deeply misguided. But is it fair for this error to have been placed in the first sentence of the New York Times’s obituary of him?...

One of the things that Jesse Helms was against was the teaching of seventeenth-century poetry:

To Their Coy Senator | OurFuture.org: Rick Perlstein: Here's a New York Times article from October of 1966:

CHAPEL HILL, N.C, Oct. 22—"To His Coy Mistress"... by Andrew Marvell, one of the great poets of the Puritan period in England, has risen to stir a tempest on the campus of the University of North Carolina. An instructor has been transferred from teaching to research duties. Students are mounting protests. Faculty members are disturbed. Chancellor Carlyle Sitterson, who recommended the transfer, has had to issue a clarifying statement in justification for his stand.

The clouds began to gather when Michael Paull, an instructor in freshman English, assigned his class to write a theme on the subject of "To His Coy Mistress," a poem that appears in many college textbooks.... One of the students apparently wrote her parents... the parents brought it to the attention of WRAL-TV, a television station in Raleigh with right-wing views that has been a frequent critic of liberalism at the university....

All 22 of Mr. Paull's students signed petitions requesting his return to teaching duties. Between 200 and 300 students and faculty members, organized into the Committee for Free Inquiry, met and asked that Mr. Paull be reinstated and that a review board be set up in the English department 'to determine whether or not Mr. Paull's effectiveness as a teacher been damaged to such a degree as to necessitate his reassignment to nonteaching functions."

Some newspapers expressed concern. The Greensboro Daily News declared, "The spectacle of a great university 'reassigning' its instructors at the behest of a bullying television pundit is hardly believable." The Daily Tar Heel, campus newspaper, headed its editorial, Who's afraid of Jesse Helms? The university—that's who"...

---

BONUS!!

Ramesh Ponnuru on Jesse Helms:

RAMESH PONNURU: [Jesser Helms] was willing to stop a lot of things that had a lot of bipartisan support. For, you know, just one small example of that, William Weld, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, had been nominated late in the Clinton administration to be ambassador to Mexico, had huge bipartisan support. He was a Republican, after all. Jesse Helms said no and single-handedly blocked it....

[But] he was also to work with people, like Paul Wellstone and Madeleine Albright, who actually became quite [interrupted]...

He was a throw-back to an older era of conservatism, a much more combative type of conservatism than you have today...

David Brooks on Jesse Helms:

[nothing]

David Frum on Jesse Helms:

[nothing]

Hilzoy Speaks Ill of the Living

She speaks ill of all those conservatives who praise Jesse Helms, that is:

I haven't written anything about Jesse Helms' death, since I don't like speaking ill of the dead. However: every so often, conservatives wonder: why oh why do people think that the Republican party, and/or the conservative movement, is bigoted? I think that the conservative response to Helms' death ought to settle that debate once and for all.

More below the fold. Note that I have largely restricted myself to conservatives' own words (and not random bloggers, but people and magazines with some standing in conservative circles), and to Helms' words and actions.

For my part, I'll just echo Matt:

"Conservatives are taking a line that I might have regarded as an unfair smear just a week ago, and saying that Helms is a brilliant exemplar of the American conservative movement.

And if that's what the Heritage Foundation and National Review and the other key pillars of American conservatism want me to believe, then I'm happy to believe it. But it reflects just absolutely horribly on them and their movement that this is how they want to be seen -- as best exemplified by bigotry, lunatic notions about foreign policy, and tobacco subsidies."

And Ezra:

"Some of my conservative friends often complain about the difficulty of constructing a "usable history" out of the movement's recent past, and I sympathize with their plight. When leading exemplars of your political tradition were trying to preserve segregation less than four decades ago, it's a bit hard to argue that your party, which is now electorally based in the American South, is really rooted in a cautious empiricism and an acute concern for the deadweight losses associated with taxation. That project would really benefit, however, if more of them would step forward and say that Helms marred the history of their movement and left decent people ashamed to call themselves conservative. The attempt to subsume his primary political legacy beneath a lot of pabulum about "limited government and individual liberty" (which did not apparently include the liberty of blacks to work amongst whites or mingle with other races) is embarrassing. But if it goes unchallenged, what are those of us outside the conservative movement to think?"

Some conservative reactions:
George W. Bush:

"Throughout his long public career, Senator Jesse Helms was a tireless advocate for the people of North Carolina, a stalwart defender of limited government and free enterprise, a fearless defender of a culture of life, and an unwavering champion of those struggling for liberty. Under his leadership, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a powerful force for freedom. And today, from Central America to Central Europe and beyond, people remember: in the dark days when the forces of tyranny seemed on the rise, Jesse Helms took their side.

Jesse Helms was a kind, decent, and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called "the Miracle of America." So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July. He was once asked if he had any ambitions beyond the United States Senate. He replied: "The only thing I am running for is the Kingdom of Heaven." Today, Jesse Helms has finished the race, and we pray he finds comfort in the arms of the loving God he strove to serve throughout his life."

John McCain:

"At this time, let us remember a life dedicated to serving this nation."

Mitch McConnell:

"Today we lost a Senator whose stature in Congress had few equals. Senator Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in."

Trent Lott:

"He was one of the giants of the '80s and '90s in the United States Senate"

Bob Dole:

“He was a conservative icon,” Bob Dole, the former senator and Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview on CNN. “He was a good, decent human being.”

The Corner:

"Death of a Conservative Great [Mark R. Levin]

I wish the Helms family peace, and I thank Jesse Helms for helping to ensure the election of Ronald Reagan, being a warrior against the Soviet Union and for the release of Soviet Jews and other abused minorities, and being a voice for millions of unborn babies.

I have noticed some of the smears lobbed at William Buckley in other places since his death; Jesse Helms is in for even more of it. Other prominent conservatives will face the same. Unfortunately, such is the nature of these things now."

The Weekly Standard reposted this article in response to Helms' death:

"Reagan, as candidate and president, was conservatism with a happy face. Helms is conservatism with a stiffened spine. Reagan's success as a conservative leader, however, wouldn't have happened without Helms's bracing him. The Republican party needs another duo like that. What's missing, obviously, is a new Reagan. Helms is still here, operating at full tilt."

The Heritage Foundation blog:

"Jesse Helms, U.S. Senator and Conservative Champion, Dies

Conservative Sen. Jesse Helms, 86, a truly great American and champion of freedom, died at 1:15 a.m. today. Helms, who gave our country three decades of service as a U.S. senator from North Carolina, was ill in recent years.

Heritage President Ed Feulner (pictured at right with Helms and his wife Dorothy) presented Helms in 2002 with the Clare Boothe Luce Award, Heritage’s highest honor, calling him a “dedicated, unflinching and articulate advocate of conservative policy and principle.”"

John Fund, WSJ:

"If Ronald Reagan was the sunny and optimistic face of modern conservatism, the uncompromisingly defiant exemplar of it was Jesse Helms, who died yesterday at age 86."

The American Conservative's blog cites, without comment, someone saying:

"On Capitol Hill, conservatives had no finer champion than Jesse Helms, the longtime Republican senator from North Carolina."

Commentary's blog reposts an old article (pdf), which says, among other things:

"Yet the "racism" of which Helms is accused turns out on inspection to consist of nothing more than an opposition to quotas and other forms of racial preferences."

Commentary's blogger adds:

"His controversial political career has been chronicled in numerous obituaries, but few recall the severity of the demonization to which Helms was subjected by many liberals–who accused him of being a one-man “pantheon of evil.”"

See below to judge Helms' racism, and whether he was just a "controversial figure" who was "demonized" by the left. The quotes below might also provide some useful background for judging this, from The Corner:

"The first sentence of the NYT obit:

Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina Senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday.

He "opposed civil rights"? Uh, no. He opposed a particular vision of them."

And, of course, RedState:

"He was a warrior and a patriot. The date of his death is fitting indeed."

***

Here are quotes by Jesse Helms himself. As you read them, bear in mind all those lovely quotes above, the ones about how he's a conservative champion, a fighter for conservative ideals, etc. They said it, not me. Like Matt Yglesias, I would have thought it was a completely unjust smear against conservatism to have said any such thing. [UPDATE: To be clear, what I would have thought was unfair was not to take him as a part of the conservative movement, but to think of him as an exemplary figure or a champion. END UPDATE.]

On respect for the President:

"Just days after Mr. Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, created a furor by saying that President Clinton was not up to the job of Commander in Chief, he told The News and Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh: "Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard.""

On race:

"From the beginning, Helms was schooled in the political device of using race to propel white conservatives to the polls. As news director for WRAL radio, Helms supported Willis Smith in his 1950 Senate campaign against Frank Porter Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina. The campaign theme was that Graham favored interracial marriages. "White people, wake up before it is too late," said one ad. "Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races."

The campaign's further contribution to political notoriety was a handbill that showed Graham's wife dancing with a black man. (...)

But before long, Helms found his real calling as a nightly television commentator for WRAL in North Carolina, a post he held from 1960 to 1972. He blasted the "pinkos" and "Yankees" in Washington, and criticized King's inner circle of civil rights leaders for "proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion." He railed against Social Security, calling it "nothing more than doles and handouts." (...)

In the 1972 race, pitted against a Democratic congressman from Durham, Helms used code words that enraged liberals. The congressman's name was Nick Galifianakis. Helms' slogan: "Elect Jesse Helms -- He's One of Us.""

And:

"Helms warned that, "Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced."

He suggested that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist dupe and refused, even decades after King's death, to honor the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

He dismissed the civil rights movement as a cabal of communists and "moral degenerates."

As the movement gathered strength -- and as murderous violence against activists in particular and African-Americans in general increased -- Helms menacingly suggested to non-violent civil rights activists that, "The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights.""

A personal favorite, worth remembering when you read things about how courteous Helms was in person:

"When Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first African-American woman to sit in the Senate, Helms followed Moseley-Braun into an elevator, announcing to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch: "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries."

Then, emphasizing the lines about how "good" things were before the Civil War ended slavery, Helms sang "Dixie.""

And another:

"His disdain for people of color (exemplified by his "humorous" habit, in private, of referring to any black person as "Fred") continues to find ways of expressing itself. He is the Senate's most reliable opponent of any measure aimed at securing the rights or improving the conditions of African-Americans. In 1994, when Nelson Mandela visited the Capitol, Helms ostentatiously turned his back on him."

Humorous? Referring to any black person as "Fred"??

And (Helms himself, h/t Majikthise):

“No intelligent Negro citizen should be insulted by a reference to this very plain fact of life. It is time to face honestly and sincerely the purely scientific statistical evidence of natural racial distinction in group intellect. ... There is no bigotry either implicit or intended in such a realistic confrontation with the facts of life. ... Those who would undertake to solve the problem by merely spending more money, and by massive forced integration, may be doing the greatest injustice of all to the Negro.”

And:

"Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced."

And:

“To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.”

And:

""Martin Luther King repeatedly refers to his 'non-violent movement.' It is about as non-violent as the Marines landing on Iwo Jima.""

And:

"I was a senior when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Roughly 2,000 of us joined a vigil on the quad for several days. (...) Jesse Helms came on the television and said that all of the students sitting on the quad at Duke should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to "marry a Negro" (Duke students were practically all white in those days). Unless the student's parents approved of that prospect, Helms advised, he or she should go back to class."

And:

"As a television commentator before running for the Senate, Helms said, "Dr. (Martin Luther) King's outfit ... is heavily laden at the top with leaders of proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion, as well as other curious behavior." He called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress.""

Later, his views had not changed. (This is a transcription of a video; it doesn't say when the interview it shows is from, but I'd guess the late 80s or 90s, from his appearance. It's the video linked under Martin Luther King.)

"I thought it [the Civil Rights Act] was very unwise. It was taking liberties away from one group of citizens and giving them to another. I thought it was bad legislation then, and I have had nothing to change my mind about it."

Helms also "staged a filibuster against the establishment of a national holiday to mark the birthday of Martin Luther King, having called King a communist and a sex pervert", and "was one of a small number of senators who opposed extending the Voting Rights Act in 1982, eventually giving up a filibuster when then-Majority Leader Sen. Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican, said the Senate would not take up any other business until it acted on the extension."

And:

"Appearing on “Larry King Live” in 1995, Jesse Helms, then the senior senator from North Carolina, fielded a call from an unusual admirer. Helms deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, the caller gushed, “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.” Given the rank ugliness of the sentiment — the guest host, Robert Novak, called it, with considerable understatement, “politically incorrect” — Helms could only pause before responding. But the hesitation couldn’t suppress his gut instincts. “Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” he said."

One of his home state papers sums it up:

"Helms was an unceasing foe of the 20th century's social movements -- the drives for equality by blacks, women and gays. While others saw groups striving for a piece of the American dream, Helms saw threats to the social fabric.

Along with former gubernatorial candidate I. Beverly Lake Sr., Helms was a leading voice for segregation in North Carolina. Unlike other well-known segregationists, such as Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Thurmond, Helms never repudiated his views or reached out to black voters.

He portrayed the civil rights movement as being planned in Moscow, dismissed Martin Luther King Jr. as a Marxist and a pervert, and called racial integration a phony issue."

On gays:

"He fought bitterly against federal financing for AIDS research and treatment, saying the disease resulted from “unnatural” and “disgusting” homosexual behavior.

“Nothing positive happened to Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said, “and nothing positive is likely to happen to America if our people succumb to the drumbeats of support for the homosexual lifestyle.”"

And:

"Helms practically invented the modern conservative politics of sexuality, along with the electoral mobilization of white conservative evangelicals, starting back in the 1970s. In 1977, he seized on Anita Bryant's successful campaign to overturn a gay rights ordinance in Miami and began building a national backlash against antidiscrimination laws. As early as 1979, he was making speeches about the terrible threat of "secular humanism" to Christianity, making the wonky Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies an unlikely villain. When the AIDS epidemic emerged in the 1980s, Helms began an extended and violently worded campaign to "protect" Americans from the "perverts" whose "disgusting" habits were responsible for AIDS, while attacking efforts to find effective treatments. (...)

But other aspects of Helms's personality cannot be ignored, particularly his venomous assault on Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy and his virulent hatred of gays and lesbians. For years, as part of his campaign against the NEA, this "courtly" Christian carried around portfolios of homoerotic Mapplethorpe photos and showed them to reporters and (male) citizens with the question, "How do you like them apples?" And as late as 1995, when an old friend wrote him to recommend compassion for people like her gay son, who had died of AIDS, Helms wrote back to say, "I wish he had not played Russian roulette with his sexual activities.""

And:

"1993: On the nomination of a gay rights activist to a federal post: “She’s not your garden-variety lesbian. She’s a militant-activist-mean lesbian, working her whole career to advance the homosexual agenda. Now you think I’m going to sit still and let her be confirmed by the Senate? … If you want to call me a bigot, go ahead.”"

And:

"As a senator, he explained that he voted against Roberta Achtenberg, President Clinton's nominee for a Housing and Urban Development position, "because she's a damn lesbian." When Helms encountered protesters during a visit to Mexico in 1986, he remarked: "All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction." In 1990, Helms stayed away in protest when Nelson Mandela addressed a joint session of Congress."

And:

"The Bible is unmistakably instructive on the sin of sodomy," he declared in 1994. "I confess I regard it as an abomination." Aids, he suggested, was acquired through "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct" and he became an ardent opponent of government funding for Aids research and education. In 1987 he described Aids prevention literature as "so obscene, so revolting, I may throw up."

In his own words:

"The government should spend less money on people with AIDS because they got sick as a result of deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct."

And:

"Over the years Helms has declared homosexuality "degenerate," and homosexuals "weak, morally sick wretches." (Newsweek, 12/5/94) In a tirade highlighting his routine opposition to AIDS research funding, Helms lashed out at the Kennedy-Hatch AIDS bill in 1988: "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy." (States News Service, 5/17/88)"

(Take that, Ryan White!)

On foreign affairs, he was an almost wholly malign force:

"His obstinacy in foreign policy, where pragmatism often guides debate, was remarkable. Few administrations escaped his wrath. He condemned President Nixon's historic 1972 trip to Beijing as "appeasing Red China." He castigated President Carter, saying he "gave away the Panama Canal." And after the newly elected President Clinton proposed that gays be allowed to serve openly in the military, Helms said that Clinton "better have a bodyguard" if he visited North Carolina. (...)

Because of Helms, several major treaties never became law: The Kyoto Protocol against global warming, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the proposed land mine treaty -- all were stopped at his insistence."

He also had a thing about governments with death squads, and the appallingly brutal South African-funded guerilla groups in Angola and Mozambique. He supported the apartheid regime in South Africa.

***

And here's a random quote from 1966 (cited in the Boston Globe, 11/21/1994), just because I like it:

"The nation has been hypnotized by the swaying and the gesturing of the Watusi and the Frug."

Washington Post Death Spiral Watch (Yet Another David Broder Edition)

Matthew Yglesias reads David Broder:

David Broder: I have not worried about the fundamental commitment of the American people since 1974. In that year, they were confronted with the stunning evidence that their president had conducted a criminal conspiracy out of the Oval Office. In response, the American people reminded Richard Nixon, the man they had just recently reelected overwhelmingly, that in this country, no one, not even the president, is above the law. They required him to yield his office. That is not the sign of a nation that has lost its sense of values or forgotten the principles on which this system rests...

And Yglesias worries:

Matthew Yglesias: I don't think anyone can seriously dispute that the current President of the United States violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or any number of legal commitments to refrain from torture. Some people think these violations were good policy. Many of those who regard those violations as good policy, also maintain that higher constitutional principles grant the President the right to break the law. Which is precisely what you could say on behalf of Richard Nixon.... But Bush won't be hounded out of office. I'm not exactly sure what accounts for the difference.... I have a vague sense that at that time America's elites operated with some sense of conscience and dignity, and it was taken for granted even among Republican leaders that one couldn't just break the law. These days, a misleading deposition taken in the course of a frivolous lawsuit aimed at avoiding the revelation of an affair is a grave national crisis, but it's taken for granted that only a lunatic would believe that Bush or any of his henchmen should be held accountable in any way for repeated violations of the law. I don't really know what changed, or why David Broder and other gatekeepers of elite consensus can't see that something's gone wrong here, but I'm not happy about it...

I think Matt is (a) right to be worried, but (b) wrong in thinking that things were very different back in 1974. His problem is that he assumes that David Broder does not casually lie--that back in 1974 David Broder really was pleased at the prospect of "the American people remind[ing] Richard Nixon... that in this country, no one, not even the president, is above the law..." and really was worried "about the fundamental commitment of the American people," but has not been worried since is simply a lie.

Broder wasn't.

He seems to have thought that it would be exciting if impeachment would fail, and looked forward to the prospect of Richard Nixon getting his political revenge.

Let's roll the videotape:

David Broder, July 10, 1974: David S. Broder (1974), "If Congress Refuses to Impeach..." Washington Post (July 10), p. A 30: [T]he case of Richard Nixon is moving... toward... the House vote on impeachment.... Suppose... few Republican defections... enough Democrats cross the line to exonerate Mr. Nixon...?... The cloud over Mr. Nixon's future would disappear... go back to being a full-time President. Congress could go back to legislating. Messrs. Doar, Jenner, and St. Clair could return to their firms.

But politically, the fireworks would just be starting.... [T]he anti-impeachment majority [would] lash... out against the Judiciary Committee members for spending $1.5 million and uncounted thousands of manhours.... [T]he tidal wave of public sentiment... sweep over the Congress... the White House charge [that the impeachment investigation was nothing but a partisan assault on the integrity of the presidential office] would surely have been proven.... The President's supporters in the country would cry vengeance....

Democratic candidates would find themselves on the defensive... a 93rd Congress which did little but posture on impeachment.... Resurgent Republicans... vindicated President... predictable public reaction against the press and the Democratic Congress....

Republican congressmen... who had broken ranks to vote for impeachment would find themselves pariahs.... If they managed to escape repudiation by the voters this year, they would be guaranteed strong pro-Nixon primary opponents in 1976. Many of them would undoubtedly wonder whether there was any way to remain in public office as Republicans.... Political scientists would... [ask] whether the friends and foes of President Nixon would not constitute themselves into separate parties, obliterating past affiliations.

All this is well within the realm of possibility. All that has to happen is for the House to exonerate the President by voting no bill of impeachment.

Note what Broder does not say: he does not say that it would be a bad thing for a majority in congress to vote that Nixon's crimes--illegal as they were--did not warrant impeachment, and thus to vote that the president was in a sense above the law. He doesn't say that at all. If he was worried "about the fundamental commitment of the American people" back in 1974, he did not think those worries were worth sharing with the Washington Post's readers.

When dealing with the Post these days, you simply have to fact-check everything.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Peter Beinart Strikes Again Edition)

It is safe to say that Peter Beinart makes a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care:

Balancing Act: The Other Wilsonianism The contrast with the development of modern conservative foreign policy is instructive. When William F. Buckley, James Burnham, and the other founding editors of National Review set out in the 1950s to devise a conservative approach to the Cold War, they did so in the full knowledge that their views were wildly outside the political mainstream. (In fact, Buckley and Burnham did not even live in Washington.) Yet they continued to elaborate and refine them, making few concessions to political necessity, until in 1976 and 1980, when Ronald Reagan brought first the Republican Party, and then the entire country, around to their worldview...

Burnham's and Buckley's foreign policy was "Rollback": a titanic Manichean struggle of total Cold War against a totalitarian adversary that could not be softened or negotiated with or contained--that was Buckley's and Burnham's critique of Harry S Truman, Dean Acheson, George F. Kennan, George Marshall, and the other graduates of what Nixon called "Acheson's Cowardly College of Communist Containment."

What was Ronald Reagan's foreign policy? Well, let's roll the videotape, from 1985:

Remarks to the Students and Faculty at Fallston High School As you know, Nancy and I returned almost 2 weeks ago from Geneva where I had several lengthy meetings with General Secretary Gorbachev of the Soviet Union. I had more than 15 hours of discussions with him, including 5 hours of private conversation just between the two of us. I found him to be a determined man, but one who is willing to listen. And I told him about America's deep desire for peace and that we do not threaten the Soviet Union and that I believe the people of both our countries want the same thing -- a safer and better future for themselves and their children. You know, people don't start wars, governments do. Our meeting should be of special importance to all of you. I know you're concerned about the future, about the growth in nuclear arsenals, about injustice and persecution of fellow human beings, and about threats to peace around the world. Well, it's because I shared that concern that I went to Geneva to begin a dialog for peace with Mr. Gorbachev....

We were realistic going into these meetings with the Soviets. The United States and the Soviet Union are as different as any two nations can be. These differences are based on opposing philosophies and values and no differences could be more profound or meaningful. It is virtually impossible for us to understand their system and how, over these -- what -- 70 years, it has imposed a way of thinking on their people. So, we didn't expect miracles. But we wanted these talks, if possible, to plant the seeds of hope in our relationship, the hope that some day, perhaps, might blossom into a real peace, a lasting peace, resting upon the only foundation on which a true peace can be built -- the indestructible foundation of human freedom. And I was determined to see if we could begin to narrow some of our differences and even come to some agreements where there was common ground. I believe that we've made a good start.

This is the mission I've come to speak to you about. One of the most exciting developments to come out of Geneva was Mr. Gorbachev's agreement to people-to-people exchanges. We're still negotiating the specifics, and it remains to be seen how much the Soviets will be willing to open up their closed society. But our objective is massive exchange programs between private citizens in both countries -- between people, not government bodies. Let's allow the people of the Soviet Union and the people of the United States to get to know each other, without governments getting in the way. And that's one reason I'm here today -- to encourage young people like you from across the country to take part in these people-to-people exchanges as never before in our history. I believe such contacts are an essential part of our building a lasting foundation for peace, because true peace must be based on openness and people talking to each other rather than about each other, and the peace must also be based on understanding....

Mr. Gorbachev, as the leader of the Soviet Union -- the new leader -- has held out the promise of change. He has said that he wants better relations between our two nations....

I couldn't help but -- one point in our discussions privately with General Secretary Gorbachev -- when you stop to think that we're all God's children, wherever we may live in the world, I couldn't help but say to him, just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from some other species, from another planet, outside in the universe. We'd forget all the little local differences that we have between our countries, and we would find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this Earth together. Well, I don't suppose we can wait for some alien race to come down and threaten us, but I think that between us we can bring about that realization...

Once George Shultz, Nancy Reagan, and Nancy Reagan's astrologer had wrested control of the Reagan administration foreign policy apparat from Alexander Haig and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Reagan (and even more so George H.W. Bush) was squarely in the "Containment"--not the "Rollback"--tradition.

To Peter Beinart's claim that Reagan's foreign policy was "Buckley['s and] Burnham['s]... conservative approach to the Cold War," all I can do is laugh and say: "Klaatu Barada Nikto!!"

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Ulysses Simpson "Sam" Grant Blogging

Hoisted from Comments: MacHeath:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong: On distinguishing valiant fighting by Confederates from the horrors of slavery, you can't do better than U.S. Grant in his Autobiography:

I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse...

Attempted DeLong Smackdown Watch: Origins of Central Banking Edition

Greg Ransom writes:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong: Here's a suggestion for Blinder and DeLong. Read some Roger Garrison, and give two seconds to thinking about how the Fed manipulates the time structure of the production economy through it's constantly failed attempt at price controls in the market for money and credit. Until the do so, I can't see how they can have anything of validity to say to the rest of us on this subject. Posted by: PrestoPundit | June 15, 2008 at 09:11 PM.

Greg's argument that attempts to avoid depression through government financial manipulation either by cutting off speculators' resources beforehand or by making sure that they are punished and bankrupted afterwards sufficiently completely that nobody dares try that again--Greg's argument that attempts to avoid depression through government financial manipulation must necessarily fail was, to my knowledge, first made comprehensively by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels:

Reviews from Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue: The crisis itself first breaks out in the area of speculation; only later does it hit production. What appears to the superficial observer to be the cause of the crisis is not overproduction but excess speculation, but this is itself only a symptom of overproduction. The subsequent disruption of production does not appear as a consequence of its own previous exuberance but merely as a setback caused by the collapse of speculation....

The years 1843-5 were years of industrial and commercial prosperity.... As is always the case, prosperity very rapidly encouraged speculation... [which] occurs... when overproduction is already in full swing... provides overproduction with temporary market outlets... precipitating the outbreak of the crisis and increasing its force.... When the Bank of England keeps its interest rates down in times of prosperity... capitalists with investments in loan capital thus see their income reduced by a third... under pressure to look for more profitable capital investments. Overproduction gives rise to numerous new projects, and the success of a few of them is sufficient to attract a whole mass of capital in the same direction, until gradually the bubble becomes general...

The view that overspeculation is not the disease but instead only a symptom of the truly serious disease of a maladjusted time structure of the production economy is not just (a) Marxist in its origins but also (b) a very powerful argument for Marxist politics because the disease existed before there were modern central banks to "manipulate the time structure of the production economy through... [interventions] in the market for money and credit" in an attempt to cure it. Indeed, central banking grew out of the belief that what appeared to be the disease--overspeculation--was in fact the disease and could be if not cured at least mitigated by central banking lies at the origins of our modern central banking institutions.

Contango...

From Wikiopedia:

Contango - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Origin of term

The term originated in mid-19th century England, and is believed to be a corruption of "continuation", "continue" or "contingent": (dictionary.com).

In the past on the London Stock Exchange, contango was a fee paid by a buyer to a seller when the buyer wished to defer settlement of the trade they had agreed. The charge was based on the interest forgone by the seller not being paid.

The purpose was normally speculative. Settlement days were on a fixed schedule (such as fortnightly) and a speculative buyer did not have to take delivery and pay for stock until the following settlement day, and on that day could "carry over" their position to the next by paying the contango fee. This practice was common before 1930, but came to be used less and less, particularly after options were reintroduced in 1958. It is still prevalent in some exchanges such as Bombay Stock Exchange where it is referred to as Badla.

This fee was similar in character to the present meaning of contango, i.e. future delivery costing more than immediate delivery, and the charge representing cost of carry to the holder.

A Historical Document: Mistaking the Birth Pangs of Capitalism for Its Death Throes

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue at the start of 1850:

Reviews from Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue: [T]he greatest threat to 'order' in England does not lie in the dangers emanating from Paris but is a direct consequence of [England's political, commercial, and financial] order... a fruit from the English liberty tree: a commercial crisis....

[T]he surplus capital of the period of prosperity found its usual outlets blocked. For the speculators there remained only the possibility of unloading all their capital either into industrial production, or into speculative ventures in colonial foodstuffs and the key industrial raw materials.... [I]ndustrial production naturally grew with extraordinary speed, and as a result the markets became saturated. Thus the outbreak of the crisis was significantly accelerated.... For four weeks the situation in the key industry, cotton, has been completely depressed and within this industry it is the main branches — in particular the spinning and weaving of coarse fabrics — which are suffering most. Cotton yarn and coarse calico have already fallen in price far more than raw cotton. Production is being cut back, and almost without exception the factories are working short time....

The results of the commercial crisis now impending will be more serious than ever before.... This dual crisis in England will be accelerated, widened in scope and made even more explosive by the convulsions which are now simultaneously imminent on the Continent; and the continental revolution will take on an unprecedentedly socialist character as a result of the repercussions of the English crisis on the world market.... The Tories have no popular universal panacea for the crisis, such as the repeal of the Corn Laws. They will be forced at least to carry out a parliamentary reform. This means that they cannot avoid assuming power under conditions which will open the doors of Parliament to the proletariat, place its demands on the agenda of the House of Commons and pitch England into the European revolution...

Mistaking the birth pangs of modern capitalism for its death throes

Marx and Engels on "Communitarian" Anti-Capitalism

Insightful, for 1848:

The Communist Manifesto: In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy... formulate[d] its indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone.... In this way arose feudal socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the [communitarian] past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core, but always ludicrous in its effect.... [T]he feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different and that are now antiquated.... [I]n ordinary life, despite their high falutin' phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honor, for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits.

As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has clerical socialism with feudal socialism. Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a socialist tinge....

The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie.... The medieval burgesses... the small peasant proprietors... a new class of petty bourgeois.... Thus arose petty-bourgeois socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but also in England. This school of socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labor; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities.

In it positive aims, however, this form of socialism aspires either to restoring the old [communitarian] means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society... it is both reactionary and Utopian.... [C]orporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in agriculture...

Hawley-Smoot Tariff Day

I missed Hawley-Smoot Tariff Day.

Eric Rauchway writres:

Asinine. « The Edge of the American West: On this day in 1930 the Smoot-Hawley Tariff became law. I swear when I was in eighth grade it was the Hawley-Smoot Tariff. Apparently the forces of Smoot have ensured that he takes pride of place. Or maybe it’s the forces of Hawley who have ensured that Smoot takes the brunt of blame...

A tariff is a revenue bill. And revenue bills must originate in the House of Representatives. (Although what "originate" means when procedure allows amendments in the nature of substitutes I do not know.) So it is Hawley-Smoot.

Eric goes on:

Because the law is virtually synonymous with a Bad Thing. Remember this Golden Television Moment? There’s Gore (yes, younger and thinner; so was I then) with his portrait of Smoot and Hawley, explaining Tariffs are Bad.... [T]here is a general consensus that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was bad. It prevented other countries from trading to the U.S. at a time when that might have kept them out of depression, and it probably wouldn’t have hurt the U.S. either. Instead the renewed American commitment to protectionism prompted increases in other countries’ tariffs....

If you want to know how a law generally regarded as “asinine” got passed, you might look at Barry Eichengreen’s paper.

And then he flogs his excellent little book:

If you want to know who called it “asinine,” and who predicted this kind of problem eleven years before it occurred, and other exciting stuff about the Great Depression and the New Deal, you know where to look. (Yes, I know you can find out using Google. But really, you should buy the book. Unless it would be a hardship for you. Otherwise, buy it. Please? Pretty please?)

Thomas Jefferson's DNA

Dana Goldstein:

Dana Goldstein: Monticello.... I visited there last Memorial Day weekend. Today, via Matt Yglesias, I see Ben Smith is reporting that Paula Abeles -- a white Jefferson descendant who's been active in keeping black descendants out of Monticello family reunions -- has become a John McCain volunteer after initially support Hillary Clinton. I've long been fascinated by Jefferson and his family history, and it's worth expanding, I think, upon how deeply racist and out-of-the-mainstream folks like Abeles are.

Conclusive DNA evidence linking Jefferson or one of his brothers to the black Hemings line has existed since 1998. In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation concluded it was likely that Jefferson himself fathered all six of his slave Sally Hemings' children. The dates of their births correspond quite neatly to nine months after the rare times Jefferson and Hemings were simultaneously at the estate. And historical documents indicate, the foundation found, that "several people close to Thomas Jefferson or the Monticello community believed that he was the father of Sally Hemings' children."

If you visit Monticello today, you'll hear chilling, wrenching stories about the lives of the hundreds of enslaved people who lived there. Jefferson, although thought of in his own time and today as a "benevolent" slave-owner, did instruct his overseer to beat his slaves. Jefferson sold husbands away from wives and teenagers away from their parents. Jefferson publicly tortured and humiliated runaways.

Those Jefferson descendants who continue to reject their black brethren are facing off against both science and history, choosing to embrace an outdated and, quite literally, white-washed image of their scion...

Espionage Author Alan Furst on the Radio...

Aauuggh! I missed this: http://www.kqed.org/.stream/anon/radio/forum/2008/06/2008-06-06b-forum.mp3. (I was in the podiatrist's office at the time):

KQED | Programs A-Z: Forum: Home: Alan Furst -- "Spies of Warsaw": The lives of aristocrats, soldiers, spies and lovers intertwine in pre-World War II Europe in Alan Furst's "Spies of Warsaw" -- his latest historical espionage novel. Furst joins us for a conversation about the book. His other books include "Night Soldiers," "The Polish Officer" and "The Foreign Correspondent."

The Meaning of Box 722

Rick Perlstein is a national treasure. Buy his Nixonland. Buy it now:

The Meaning of Box 722 | OurFuture.org: art of the narrative. They'd never really been examined in-depth before, but by my reckoning they were the crucial hinge that formed the ideological alignment we live in now. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson—and, apparently, liberalism—achieved such a gigantic landslide victory that it appeared to pundits the Republican Party would be forever consigned to the outer darkness if they ever entertained a Goldwater-style conservative law-and-order platform again. Two years later, most of the new liberal congressmen swept in on LBJ's coattails—the congressional class that gave us Medicare and Medicaid, the first serious environmental legislation, National Endowments for the Humanities and Arts, Head Start, the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the end of racist immigration quotas, Legal Aid, and more—was swept out on a tide of popular reaction. That reaction, I hope I demonstrate effectively in NIXONLAND, rested on two pillars: terror at the wave of urban rioting that began in the Watts district of Los Angeles; and terror at the prospect of the 1966 civil rights bill passing, which, by imposing an ironclad federal ban on racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing—known as "open housing"—would be the first legislation to impact the entire nation equally, not just the South. (What that reaction most decidedly did not rest on: fear and loathing of "hippies," which were unknown, except in California, to most of the nation until 1967; or anti-war activists, which were not associated with either party, because Republicans and Democrats had about an equal number of hawks and doves in 1966.)

When I learned that the papers of Senator Paul Douglas were at the Chicago Historical Society (as it was known then; now it's cursed with the decidedly more prosaic name the Chicago History Museum), I decided to make Douglas's 1966 loss to Republican Charles Percy a key case study for my hypothesis. Douglas was a popular liberal lion first elected in 1948 and a civil rights champion, whose wife Emily Taft Douglas (a one-term congresswoman herself) had strode proudly across Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 arm in arm with Martin Luther King. He was also, as an economist, one of the architects of many of the New Deal ideas and programs that created the world's first mass middle class.

In the summer of 1966, as debate over open housing raged in Congress, King marched not in Alabama but in Chicago, to implore the city to enforce its own open housing ordinance, passed in 1963—which, if Chicago did, would be a first. It was the most segregated city in the north. As I put it in NIXONLAND (drawing on this classic study):

You could draw a map of the boundary within which the city's seven hundred thousand Negroes were allowed to live by marking an X wherever a white mob attacked a Negro. Move beyond it, and a family had to face down a mob of one thousand, five thousand, or even (in the Englewood riot of 1949, when the presence of blacks at a union meeting sparked a rumor the house was to be "sold to niggers") ten thousand bloody-minded whites. In the late 1940s, when the postwar housing shortage was at its peak, you could find ten black families living in a basement, sharing a single stove but not a single flush toilet, in "apartments" subdivided by cardboard. One racial bombing or arson happened every three weeks.... It neighborhoods where they were allowed to "buy" houses, they couldn't actually buy them at all: banks would not write them mortgages, so unscrupulous businessmen sold them contracts that gave them no equity or title to the property, from whcih they could be evicted the first time they were late with a payment.

And in 1966, a teenager answering a job ad walked over the border from Chicago into the all-white city of Cicero, and for that sin and no other was beaten to death. That was what Martin Luther King came to fight in Chicago.

At the Chicago History Museum, the Douglas collection covers seven hundred "linear feet".... I stumbled upon Box 722, which contained all the letters Senator Paul Douglas received about open housing and Martin Luther King's presence in Chicago....

Republican Charles Percy had gone into the race a civil rights liberal: "Chuck, do you have to talk so much about open housing?" one suburban Republican official complained to him. But by October, following Jerry Ford's talking points to the letter, he went on ABC's "Face the Nation" and said that while he still supported the "principle" of open housing, he disagreed with Senator Douglas on one thing: including "single-family dwelling" would be "an unpassable and unenforceable" attack on property rights. "Right now, we aren't ready to force people to accept those they don't want as neighbors," he said in tones of rue.

Long story short: Douglas soldiered on, imploring his constituents to remember the favors they had received from the Democratic Party—entree, for one thing, into the world's first mass middle class of factory workers. To no avail. Percy won in an upset. Pundits said it was because Percy's daughter had just been brutally murdered; it was a sympathy vote. But if people voted for Percy because he was a grieving father, the ratio of the sympathetic to the callous was suspiciously high in the Bungalow Belt neighborhoods where Martin Luther King had marched. A ward analysis demonstrated that in Chicago neighborhoods threatened by racial turnover, new Percy voters were enough to account for Douglas's 80 percent decline in the city since 1960. Pundits also pointed to people's unwillingness to vote for such an old man. But in the backlash wards younger Democrats declined almost as significantly.

No, it was voters like this, from 4315 W. Crystal:

A few years ago I had written you a letter stating how I and my family would welcome the opportunityy to vote fyou in to the highest office in the land--The Presidency. Since that time however your support of the open occupancy bill has caused me to change my support of your candidacy for senator of Illinois, and believe me sir there are many more in my category who are changing in their support of you.

Here is the fundamental tragedy of the backlash: voters like this empowered a party that decided they didn't need protection against predatory subprime mortgage fraud. Didn't need affordable, universal health insurance; made it easier for companies to rape their pensions; kept on going back to the well to destroy their social security; worked avidly to shred their union protections. Fought, in fact, every decent and wise social provision that made it possible in the first place for mere factory workers to live in glorious Chicago bungalows, or suburban homes, in the first place.

Now a black man from the city King visited in 1966 and called more hateful than Mississippi is running for president, fighting for all those things that made the midcentury American middle class the glory of world civilization, but which that middle class squandered out of the small-mindedness of backlash.

This post is for Chicago. This post is for America. This post is for our future. This post is for our history—that we may, this November, redeem it. This post is for a man who, had he walked down the wrong street in his own city 42 years ago, might well have been beaten to death.

Biomedical Literary Criticism Ask the Internet "Age of Innocence" Blogging

From Edith Wharton's 1920 The Age of Innocence:

: After a pause Madame Olenska broke out with unexpected vehemence: "I want to be free; I want to wipe out all the past."

"I understand that."

Her face warmed. "Then you'll help me?"

"First--" he hesitated--"perhaps I ought to know a little more."

She seemed surprised. "You know about my husband--my life with him?"

He mad