Ronald Radosh's Blog, page 11

In Nigeria, Obama’s Pro-Islamist Policies Have Negative Practical Results

Boko Haram is a violent Salafist group that emerged in predominantly Muslim northeast Nigeria in the early 2000s. (Salafism is a Sunni Muslim reform movement that seeks return to the mores of the first generations of Muslims — the Salafiyya or the companions of Mohammed.)

There are reports that it got seed money from Osama bin Laden, and it has long been known to have al Qaeda ties, but how closely it actually works with al Qaeda — as opposed to loud displays of ideological support — is the subject of some debate in the U.S. government. This debate is reflective of general confusion and incoherence in American counterterrorism policy.

The ideological glue that holds Islamist groups together is Islamic supremacism, which is directly derived from a strict, literal interpretation of Muslim scripture, coupled with a belief that the “golden age” of Islam was the time of the first generations — Mohammed and his immediate companions and descendants — to which Muslims must return if they are ever to overcome the corrupting influence of the West. (Boko Haram actually means “Western education is ‘haram’ or forbidden.”)

Nevertheless, our government adamantly refuses to acknowledge the Islamic doctrinal underpinnings of Islamic supremacism.  Consequently, the disconnect: Boko Haram is quite clear that its goal is to impose sharia law and join al Qaeda’s global jihad. Its targets include churches and Western symbols, and its current leader, Abubakar Shekau, is quoted threatening the United States in 2010: “Do not think jihad is over. Rather jihad has just begun. America, die with your fury.” Yet, the Obama administration long refused to designate it as a terrorist organization — at the insistence of the State Department under Hillary Clinton, over the objections of other government agencies. (The State Department finally listed Boko Haram as a terrorist organization after John Kerry took over for Mrs. Clinton.)

Instead, ignoring what Boko Haram pronounces its goals to be, the Obama administration portrayed it as a diffuse organization with no clear agenda that was ascendant due to the policies of the Nigerian government (which is under Christian leadership). As the Boko Haram threat got progressively worse, the State Department and the White House theorized that it could be defused by better government engagement with the Muslim population in Northern Nigeria, and that designating Boko Haram as a terrorist organization—which would have triggered our law’s array of counterterrorism tools and squeezed the organization financially—would raise its prestige while encouraging more government repression against Muslims.

Note the absurdity: our government denies the Islamic doctrinal roots of jihadist terror, yet constantly fears that America’s condemnation of a group as “terrorist” will increase its appeal to factions of the Muslim population.

Obama Tells Cops Immigration Reform Will Make Their Jobs Easier

As the nation’s capital is packed with cops marking National Police Week, President Obama sat down with law enforcement leaders to make a case for immigration reform.

About 40 officers representing the Major Cities Chiefs Association, Major County Sheriffs Association, National Sheriffs Association, International Association of Chiefs of Police, Fraternal Order of Police, National Association of Police Organizations, Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, and Police Executive Research Association, along with Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, got about 10 minutes of Obama’s time at the Eisenhower Office Building at noontime.

“The immigration system that we have right now makes it harder, not easier, for law enforcement agencies to do their jobs. It makes it harder for law enforcement to know when dangerous people cross our borders. It makes it harder for business owners who play by the rules to compete when they’re undercut by those who would exploit workers in a shadow economy. And it makes it harder for law enforcement to do their jobs when large segments of the community are afraid to report crimes or serve as witnesses because they fear the consequences for themselves or their families,” Obama said.

“This system is not fair. It’s not fair to workers; it’s not fair to businesses who are trying to do the right thing; it’s not fair to law enforcement agencies that are already stretched thin.”

Obama told the cops that his administration put personnel “arrayed at the border… well beyond anything that we saw five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago.”

“But what this reform package would also do is create a firm but fair pathway to earned citizenship for those who live in the shadows — and as a consequence, would give law enforcement a better idea of who’s in the country. It would also help build trust between local communities and law enforcement and immigrant communities. It would undermine criminal enterprises that prey on undocumented immigrants. And it would allow law enforcement to focus on its primary mission, which is keeping our communities safe,” he said.

The president blamed “a handful of House Republicans right now who are blocking going ahead and letting legislation get to the floor.”

“To their credit, I think Speaker Boehner and some of the other leaders there do believe that immigration reform is the right thing, but they’ve got to have a political space that allows them to go ahead and get it through their caucus and get it done. I’ve said to them, if they’ve got ideas I’m happy to talk to them. We’re not hell-bent on making sure that every letter of what’s in the Senate bill is exactly what ultimately lands on my desk for signature, but there are some core principles that we’ve got to get done,” he continued.

One of those musts: “We’ve got to make sure that there’s a way for people to earn some pathway to citizenship.”

“And keep in mind, some of these statistics you may have already heard — it’s estimated that over 80 percent of the folks who are here on an undocumented basis have been here 10 years or longer. These are folks who are woven into the fabrics of our communities. Their kids are going to school with our kids. Most of them are not making trouble; most of them are not causing crimes. And yet, we put them in this tenuous position and it creates a situation in which your personnel, who have got to go after gang-bangers and need to be going after violent criminals and deal with the whole range of challenges, and who have to cooperate with DHS around our counterterrorism activities — you’ve got to spend time dealing with somebody who is not causing any other trouble other than the fact that they were trying to make a living for their families. That’s just not a good use of our resources. It’s not smart. It doesn’t make sense.”

Obama said he’s trying to get “unexpected voices” to push for an immigration bill, like the cops and the evangelical Christian community, which “has shown itself to be foursquare behind immigration reform.”

“The closer we get to the midterm elections the harder it is to get things done around here. Now, I know it’s hard to believe that things could get harder that this place could get a little more dysfunctional. But it’s just very hard right before an election. So we’ve got maybe a window of two, three months to get the ball rolling in the House of Representatives. And your voices are going to be absolutely critical to that effort,” he said.

At the end of his speech, the president squeezed in a quick thank-you to law enforcement for their “heroic work.”

Jailbreak: Obama Releases 36,007 Criminal Aliens Into U.S.

Here’s everything you need to know about immigration reform: last year the Obama administration released 36,000 criminal aliens into the United States population. The jailbreak was deliberate and included 193 murderers.

The Center for Immigration Studies obtained the information and released a report documenting the number and nature of the crimes committed by the aliens.

If 36,000 criminal aliens walking around your community wasn’t enough, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security is aiming to make it even easier for aliens to be released from detention. That’s what the groups agitating for immigration reform are demanding. That’s what the groups are likely to get.

The 2013 jailbreak included rapists, kidnappers, arsonists, burglars, sex offenders, and car thieves. That’s merely for 2013.

The criminals that Obama administration policies set free are unlikely ever to be deported. Detained aliens facing deportation are highly unlikely to ever be deported once they are set free into the general American population. They don’t show up for their deportation hearings, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement doesn’t have the manpower or money to hunt down tens of thousands of criminal aliens.

That’s a heaping helping of criminality the Obama administration just introduced into America.

After five years of Obama, it’s clear and undeniable that his presidency repeatedly takes the side of lawless criminals over law-abiding Americans. This is a common philosophy that runs through multiple Obama policies, ranging from attacks on the police, to nominating Debo Adegbile for a top Justice Department post, to failing to prosecute election criminals who supported President Obama, sometimes six times in one election.

Releasing 36,007 alien criminals into America is just the latest example of this philosophy. Never before has America suffered under a president so aligned with the depraved and malignant.

Speaker John Boehner says immigration reform isn’t moving because his caucus doesn’t trust Obama to enforce any new immigration laws. If a lack of trust is the issue, then immigration reform should be dead and buried. Anyone using their gift of eyes to see and ears to hear knows that Obama cannot be trusted to enforce immigration law, even laws already on the books. Immigration reform advocates simply do not understand the lawless architecture of the Obama administration. They don’t understand and appreciate that law to this gang is a mere suggestion.

Common Core: 2014′s Bipartisan Wedge Issue

Establishment Republicans and their pals in the press – at least until the general election campaigns begin (RINOs never learn) — are celebrating their defeats of tea party-sympathetic challengers in last Tuesday’s Indiana, North Carolina, and Ohio primaries.

They would be well advised to hold the champagne. At least a half-dozen victorious candidates in GOP state legislative contests in those three states, including several who defeated party-supported incumbents, discovered that the key to motivating voters on their behalf was expressing genuine and vocal opposition to the federal government’s stealth imposition of the Common Core standards and testing regime in their schools.

Their success has national implications. You can rest assured that party leaders who have been doing all they can to hide from the issue, as well as all-in “Fed ed” proponent and current Republican establishment fave Jeb Bush, have noticed.

Nowhere was the anti-Common Core momentum more clear than in the Buckeye State. The entity I have dubbed ORPINO (the Ohio Republican Party In Name Only) and its legislative leaders are visibly shaken.

Although the state’s press will only acknowledge Common Core’s relevance in one of Tuesday’s state rep race results, a reliable longtime activist told me on Thursday that candidates’ opposition to Common Core tipped the balance in their favor in four instances. My review of Stop Common Core Ohio’s endorsements against actual election results confirms that contention.

The result that’s impossible to ignore is Tom Brinkman’s triumph over incumbent Peter Stautberg in Southwestern Ohio.

ORPINO thought they had ended “Tax Killer Tom’s” political career two years ago when he lost in a comeback attempt after being term-limited from the legislature four years earlier. Heavily aided by ORPINO, two-term incumbent Stautberg dished out a 22-point drubbing.

This time around, it was different, principally because Brinkman sincerely and strongly aligned himself with anti-Common Core activists. ORPINO doubled down on its smear campaign, spending huge sums on a radio blitz and baldly false which, among other things, hysterically implied that the supposedly “radical” Brinkman sided with Democrats on critical matters. ORPINO also claimed that he opposed a 2005 “tax cut” that was really an initially revenue-neutral restructuring which gave birth to an ugly new gross receipts tax.

Brinkman’s trump card over the wishy-washy incumbent was his vocal opposition to Common Core. Stautberg claims to have not taken a position. My source calls BS on that; but in any event, convenient neutrality doesn’t cut it. It instead allows force-fed “Fed ed” to become a permanent fixture of the educational landscape.

In winning by seven points on Tuesday, Brinkman engineered a 29-point turnaround from 2012, inducing palpable fear and loathing at ORPINO and among GOP legislative leaders.

Suddenly, the same people who have spent well over a year blowing off, marginalizing, and in some cases insulting concerned parents and teachers feel that they must commission a poll to see if the rest of the state is as opposed to Common Core as voters in Southwestern Ohio.

I can save them the trouble. A late-April University of Connecticut poll showed that thanks to its undemocratic imposition, only 39 percent of Americans have heard of Common Core. But of those who have, only 38 percent across all ideologies support it, while 44 percent oppose. A scant 24 percent of conservatives favor it. In the Buckeye State, Common Core polled as the number one issue of concern in the GOP primaries, even ahead of Governor John Kasich’s authoritarian expansion of Medicaid.

Why oppose Common Core? Five videos posted at my home blog in March of 2013 take only 33 minutes to fully explain why. Here’s a quick boil-down:

These are standards which have been furtively pushed onto the states — i.e., not developed by the states, as proponents claim — through de facto federal government bribes contained in the 2009 stimulus bill and through the conditional granting of No Child Left Behind waivers. State legislatures had virtually no input into Common Core’s initial adoption.
Costly and rigid standardized national tests will force reluctant private schools, charter schools, and homeschooling parents to conform their curricula to Common Core to ensure that their students perform well on them.
One “feature” of Common Core is a national student data tracking system involving a reported 400-plus “data points” from pre-school through the workforce which will strip away students’ and families’ personal privacy. Personally identifiable and sensitive student and family data can and will be shared among government and private entities.
The bottom line is that Common Core strips the states of their constitutional authority over education, will end parents’ ability to influence what their children are taught, and will ultimately and illegally accomplish the far left’s long-time dream of giving the federal government full control over the nation’s school curricula.

In the intervening year, it has become dreadfully obvious that Common Core’s “standards” are a watered-down muddle of incoherence backing a curriculum which is frustrating the nation’s children, infuriating their parents, and driving down test scores.

Venezuela: Washington’s Forgotten Revolution

WASHINGTON — Opponents to the Chavista rule of Nicolas Maduro poured out into the streets as the Euromaidan activists were demanding a future free from the Kremlin’s grip, creating a tug-o-war with the news cycle at different corners of the globe as both Venezuelans and Ukrainians demanded democracy and an economically viable future.

Now, both in the news cycle and in Washington, Venezuela is almost the forgotten revolution.

A quick scan of the headlines in El Universal shows that this ongoing quest hasn’t gotten any better in the South American nation, with Maduro’s government attacking more student demonstrators, going after more protest leaders, and even halting the flow of newsprint to El Universal, forcing the paper to dramatically cut its page count since mid-March.

Opposition leader and former Chacao mayor Leopoldo Lopez has been in Maduro’s custody since Feb. 18, while his wife Lilian Tintori continues leading peaceful protests despite harassment from the government. On an active Twitter account, Tintori vowed to stand “on the side of the truth” and on “the right side of history.”

White House press secretary Jay Carney last mentioned Venezuela in a news briefing on Feb. 25, when he was asked about Washington’s expulsion of three Venezuelan diplomats and the future of the oil trade relationship.

“I would simply say that President Maduro needs to focus on addressing the legitimate grievances of the Venezuelan people through meaningful dialogue with them, not through dialogue with the United States,” Carney said. “Despite what the Venezuelan government would like to lead people to believe, this is not a U.S.-Venezuela issue. It is an issue between Venezuela and its people. We’ve been clear all along that the future of Venezuela is for the Venezuelan people to decide.”

At the State Department last week, spokeswoman Jen Psaki was asked about Maduro’s latest demands of the Obama administration: that Washington better not think about applying sanctions because Caracas will retaliate, including hurting Venezuelans living in the U.S. by closing consulates, and that President Obama needs to accept the credentials of the new Venezuelan ambassador.

Psaki said the U.S. is “encouraged” by talks between Maduro’s government and the opposition, mediated in part by the Holy See, and “we encourage the parties to remain focused on strengthening Venezuela’s democracy, including the right to peaceful protests.”

A few hundred Venezuelans joined a caravan from Florida to Washington on Friday to lobby for sanctions on Capitol Hill, but Psaki said she hadn’t heard of the grass-roots effort. Photos from the protest in front of the White House show one man holding up a sign that reads, “In Venezuela we have a human rights violator as a president, your silence allows it.”

In remarks to the Council of the Americas conference last week, Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. “is deeply concerned by the deteriorating situation” in Venezuela.

“We believe the future of Venezuela is for the people of Venezuela to decide. And the people in the streets have legitimate grievances that deserve to be addressed. And the serious and worsening economic and social challenges in Venezuela can only be resolved with the input of those people,” Kerry said.

A few lawmakers with a long history of anti-Chavista activism are trying to put some tangible action behind the platitudes that trickle out of the administration now and then.

Before the House left for recess last week, the Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution from Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) “to impose targeted sanctions on individuals responsible for carrying out or ordering human rights abuses against the citizens of Venezuela.”

At Friday’s markup hearing, Ros-Lehtinen also gave a nod to activists who caravanned to D.C., as well as actress Maria Conchita Alonso, who has compared the late Hugo Chavez to Hitler.

“For three months now, the Maduro regime in Venezuela has committed grave human rights violations as it seeks to muzzle students who are peaceful and the Venezuelan people who are calling for the respect of human rights and democracy to really take hold in this country,” the congresswoman said. “There have been over 40 people killed, nearly 60 reported cases of torture, more than 2,000 people unjustly detained, and hundreds more injured.”

Just that week, she noted, “250 teenage protesters, ones who had camped out in public squares to protest, were rounded up at 3 in the morning yesterday; the Venezuelan Intelligence agency, SEBIN, picked up and has put in detention Rodrigo Diamanti, the leader of a NGO called Un Mundo Sin Mordaza; censorship continues as yet another prominent independent radio program was pulled off the airwaves; newspapers like El Universal are saying they have about two weeks left of newsprint because the government has put many challenges in their way to provide information to the people of Venezuela.”

“And lastly, opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez was supposed to have his day in court yesterday and all of a sudden, his hearing was simply postponed without reason, without discussion, no explanation, simply canceled. All of this happened just this week.”

Ros-Lehtinen stressed that students are still bravely demonstrating and paying the price while congressional opponents of her resolution have said they won’t back sanctions so that the U.S. can “give peace a chance” in Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) talks.

Video: Dinesh D’Souza on Ants vs. Termites in American Politics

Dinesh D’Souza addresses the central divide in American politics using a simple analogy. A brief excerpt from America, D’Souza’s latest documentary, which will open in limited release on June 27, 2014 and expand to wide release on July 2, 2014. Here’s the narration from the above clip:

To understand the central divide in American politics it helps to think about the distinction between the ant and the termite.

Now the Ant is very industrious, I’ve been reading the Harvard scholar E.O. Wilson an authority on ants and he points out that the ant can be an individualist. But at the same time ants like to work together, they will cooperate voluntary to haul food.

Wilson notes that you want to be careful when dealing with the ant. The ant is a leave me alone type of guy. Ants don’t like you to mess with them.

Now the termite by contrast is not so much of a builder. The termite is really a destroyer. I’ve been reading an authority on termites, Alinsky, in his book rules for radicals, and he points out that termites need to be no less industrious than ants in accomplishing termite objectives.

Now it’s easy to be dismissive of the termite and to consider the termite in a purely negative light, but try to look at the world from the point of the termite. If termites could talk, they would call what they do progress.

Much more on America at Dinesh D’Souza.com.

I Was an Israeli Spy

In case you missed it, Newsweek has attempted to take itself off life support the last few days by publishing two articles alleging Israel has engaged in “rampant” spying on the United States.  This is a grave matter with drastic international consequences that has touched my conscience deeply.

So I can hide it no longer. I have a confession to make:  I was an Israeli spy.

Now some would say that the U.S. is spying on practically everyone from Angela Merkel to your mother-in-law,  so what’s the big deal?  But I wouldn’t know about that.  I’m not Edward Snowden.  And others would say that almost everybody spies on everybody else — at least if they can do it.  But again.  I wouldn’t know.  That’s not my expertise.  As I said, I was an Israeli spy.

But to clear the record, and perhaps to avoid a lifetime in prison, allow me to reveal some of the important information I passed on to my handlers in Tel Aviv.  (See: I know Mossad headquarters are in Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem.  You have to believe me.)

1. That the United States has a secretary of State who thinks Israel will become an “apartheid state” even though Arabs have vastly more civil rights in Israel than they have in any Arab country.  Go figure.

2. That former UN ambassador Susan Rice was not telling the truth when she said the Benghazi incident was caused by a video.  They asked me then why was she promoted to national security adviser.  I said I didn’t know. (Actually, I think it’s to shut her up.)

3. I told them many Americans were worried they wouldn’t be able to keep their doctors.  They told me they had plenty of doctors and started in with a lot of Jewish jokes that I had heard already.

4.  I assured them that Hillary Clinton’s kissing Suha Arafat was not a homosexual act.  It was an act of friendship and admiration.  And that Anthony Weiner displaying his private parts on Twitter was not a reflection on all American Jews.  Mel Brooks never did that.

5. Finally I told them to be especially careful about the American negotiation with Iran because Obama had failed at everything and would make a deal with the mullahs at any cost to save his reputation.

On this last one, they fired me.  Tell us something we don’t know, they said with disdain and promptly confiscated my six passports.

So it goes.  I told you I was an Israel spy — just as Newsweek was, once, a news magazine.

(Artwork created using multiple Shutterstock.com images.)

The Day Obama’s Presidency Died

Almost nobody in Japan heard about the Battle of Midway until after the war. The Emperor Hirohito, upon hearing of the debacle, ordered a comprehensive cover-up. The wounded were isolated on hospital ships. All mail was censored. Surviving enlisted men and officers were held incommunicado until they could be shipped off to distant battlefields from where it was hoped they would never return. The sunken ships themselves were gradually written off over the course of the war until their loss blended in with the general demise of the imperial fleet. In order to coordinate this effort, Hirohito created a special office of cabinet rank.

It worked perfectly. If the U.S. had not won World War 2, Midway would never have existed in Japanese history. The average man of course read nothing in the papers, heard nothing on the radio, saw nothing in the newsreel. But perceptive Japanese “felt” something momentous had happened though they could not identify its cause. It’s impact, though denied in the press, shuddered through the whole imperial fabric. From that day forward events seemed to take a downward trajectory. Only after the war did the Japanese know the root of their misfortunes.

Midway.

But the loss was worse than four carriers sunk. Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, in their classic account of Midway, The Shattered Sword, argued that the battle broke the Japanese empire in a fundamental way. It was the consequences of denial that really finished the Japanese military:

Cohen and Gooch propose that all military failures fall into three basic categories: failure to learn from the past, failure to anticipate what the future may bring, and failure to adapt to the immediate circumstances on the battlefield. They further note that when one of these three basic failures occurs in isolation (known as a simple failure), the results, while unpleasant, can often also be overcome. Aggregate failures occur when two of the basic failure types, usually learning and anticipation, take place simultaneously, and these are more difficult to surmount. Finally, at the apex of failure stand those rare events when all three basic failures occur simultaneously-an event known as catastrophic failure. In such an occurrence, the result is usually a disaster of such scope that recovery is impossible.

The Japanese did not want to accept what Midway meant about their strategic assumptions and therefore they suppressed it. That was more damaging than the naval losses themselves. It was that failure to adjust to reality which doomed the empire.

The curious thing about September 11, 2012 — the day of the Benghazhi attack — is that for some reason it marks the decline of the Obama presidency as clearly as a milepost. We are told by the papers that nothing much happened on that day. A riot in a far-away country. A few people killed. And yet … it may be coincidental, but from that day the administration’s foreign policy seemed inexplicably hexed. The Arab Spring ground to a halt. The secretary of State “resigned.” The CIA director was cast out in disgrace. Not long after, Obama had to withdraw his red line in Syria. Al-Qaeda, whose eulogy he had pronounced, appeared with disturbing force throughout Africa, South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. Almost as if on cue, Russia made an unexpected return to the world stage, first in Syria, then in the Iranian nuclear negotiations.

A Eulogy for Martin J. Sklar, 1935-2014: Historian, Patriot, and Socialist

I was a friend of Marty Sklar since 1955, when I first met him as an entering freshman at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  His name had been given to me by a friend in New York City, who said that Marty was a leading figure on the left in Madison, and would gladly take me under his wing. He was also my graduate teaching assistant in the U.S. history course I took in Madison.

Since that meeting, I have been engaged with Marty for over half a century, agreeing and disagreeing with him about history, politics, and the state of American society. Throughout these years, one thing was constant about Marty: he said in 1955 — and held to this belief up to his passing — that he was a socialist.

Marty’s definitions of socialism, however, were something other than how most people would define that system. I have written about his concept before at PJ Media, particularly in this column, in which I tried to explain his original theory called “the mix,” in which he argued that all modern societies are composed of elements of both socialism and capitalism. This led him to argue that he considers himself to be a “Freedom Leftist” who believes in a pluralist-democratic and “publicly accountable left,” as opposed to Obama, whom he considers to be a “left sectarian doing his mass work.”

At his core, Sklar writes, Obama’s “world view is ‘Third-Worldist sectarianism.’” Moreover, he argues that Obama’s economic proposals are a high-tax, protectionist, and slow-growth program. Those of Republicans, in contrast, were based on a lower-tax, low-cost energy, “high-growth/job stimulus” program, and are not “ensnared in the green business/academia lobby agenda of high-cost energy,” which would work to both restrict economic growth and workers’ incomes.

Here is what Sklar wrote in 1999 in an essay titled “Capitalism and Socialism in the Emergence of Modern America,” which appears in Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society. His paragraph defines how he looks at both capitalism and socialism:

Social change in [the Progressive era] inaugurated an incessant interaction, both antagonistic and complementary, between capitalism and socialism that shaped and reshaped American society in the twentieth century. The continuing corporate reorganization of enterprise and the national economy has in its essence involved the meshing of capitalism and socialism in an American society distinguished politically by liberal democracy. … The rise of corporate capitalism in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century may therefore be understood as also representing the early phases of a sociopolitical reconstruction of American society based upon a hybrid of capitalism and socialism in a liberal democracy.

Sklar was insistent on the principle that state and society had to be separate from each other, and that the individual and liberty had to be protected against all encroachments by the state against individual citizens. Capitalism, he believed, broadened individual initiative and guaranteed principles of liberty and efficiency, as well as egalitarian values and behavior.

A Eulogy for Martin J. Sklar 1935-2014: Historian, Patriot and Socialist

I was a friend of Marty Sklar since 1955, when I first met him as an entering freshman at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  His name had been given to me by a friend in New York City, who said that Marty was a leading figure on the Left in Madison, and would gladly take me under his wing. He was also my graduate teaching assistant in the U.S. History course I took in Madison.

Since that meeting, I have been engaged with Marty for over half a century, agreeing and disagreeing with him about history, politics, and the state of American society. Throughout these years, one thing was constant about Marty: he said in 1955, and held to this belief up to his passing, that he was a socialist.

Marty’s definitions of socialism, however, were something other than how most people would define that system. I have written about his concept before in PJM, particularly in this column, in which I tried to explain his original theory called “the mix,” in which he argued that all modern societies are composed of elements of both socialism and capitalism, leading him to argue that he considers himself to be a “Freedom Leftist” who believes in a pluralist-democratic and “publically accountable left” as opposed to Obama whom he considers  to be a “left sectarian doing his mass work.” At his core, Sklar writes, Obama’s “world view is ‘Third-Worldist’ sectarianism.” Moreover, he went on to argue that Obama’s economic proposals are based on high-tax, protectionist and a slow-growth program. Those of Republicans, in contrast, were based on a lower-tax, low-cost energy, “high-growth/job stimulus” program, and was not “ensnared in the green business/academia lobby agenda of high-cost energy,” which would work to both restrict economic growth and workers’ incomes.

Here is what Sklar wrote in 1999, in an essay titled “Capitalism and Socialism in the Emergence of Modern America,” which appears in Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society.  His paragraph defines how he looks at both capitalism and socialism:

Social change in [the Progressive era] inaugurated an incessant interaction, both antagonistic and complementary, between capitalism and socialism that shaped and reshaped American society in the twentieth century. The continuing corporate reorganization of enterprise and the national economy has in its essence involved the meshing of capitalism and socialism in an American society distinguished politically by liberal democracy….The rise of corporate capitalism in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century may therefore be understood as also representing the early phases of a sociopolitical reconstruction of American society based upon a hybrid of capitalism and socialism in a liberal democracy.

Sklar was insistent on the principle that state and society had to be separate from each other, and that the individual and liberty had to be protected against all encroachments by the state against individual citizens.  Capitalism, he believed, broadened individual initiative and guaranteed principles of liberty and efficiency, as well as egalitarian values and behavior. All of these were protected by the “American liberal democratic political system.” Thus, within the “mix” of both capitalism and socialism in the sphere of the economic and political system, capitalism created a social order that “recognizes individual liberties and rights embedded in and protected by constitutional and statute law,” against the power of government that operates against those rights. Hence America had a strong positive government rather than one of “organizational corporatism or a corporate state.”

What concerned Sklar then, and concerned him before his passing, was that as the state evolved during the years of the Obama administration, that separation was eroding, and was being replaced by a “state-command economy” that dangerously led to created a dangerous path that could lead to a new oppression and to a political party integrated into the state, that eroded the individual rights that made America unique. His new view of social development flowed directly from the historical analysis he offered in his early work.

Writing in 2009, he argued that President Obama would create “proto-statist” structures, ‘social service’ political organizations operating extra-electorally and also capable of electoral engagement,” that will lead to “party-state systems…in which the party is the state.” Thus, he notes that during the campaign, Obama favored armed public service groups that could be used for homeland security, that would tie leadership bureaucracies to him through the unions and groups like ACORN.

His conclusion was that Americans who considered themselves either leftists or conservatives, had to unite around what he called a movement to preserve liberty that would defeat “the state-command sectarians” who made up the Obama administration, and which he believed were working to destroy all that made the United States a great nation.

All of his most recent writings are to be found in his e-book, Letters on Obama (From the Left), which give readers a good sense of how the historical approach he takes applies to the history we are living through in the present. They form a continuation of the many themes he wrote about in his two major works of history, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism:1890-1916, The Market, Law and Politics, and his collection of essays, The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S. History and the Progressive Era and the 1920s.”

Each year, after I or others have mentioned his work, some conservatives and libertarians have discovered his writing, and have learned much from them. For example, the libertarian writer Todd Seavy made Sklar’s first book his “Book of the Month” in September 2010, writing that Sklar “argues that rather than seeing any of these presidents [of the Progressive era] as true trust-busters or proto-socialists, we should see them as attempting to navigate a historic transition away from American capitalism dominated by small-scale individual owners and toward a more regulated, centralized but still capitalist system in which much-feared newly-enlarged corporations would routinely turn to government for regulatory approval or guidance.”

And in NRO, Jonah Goldberg wrote that consideration of Sklar’s ideas “advances the discussion [of the concept of liberal fascism] profoundly.” So conservatives and libertarians have looked  at Sklar’s work, and learned from him.

Surprisingly, this was not to be echoed by self-proclaimed leftists, such as the lengthy would-be tribute appearing on History News Network recently by historian James Livingston of Rutgers University, who writes that Sklar was “one of the great historians of the 20th century,” whom he praises for his work written over 25 years ago, and in which- as one might expect- he presents a tirade against Sklar’s e-book and anything that he has written since his two books were published. As Livingston would have it, his latest writings “could disfigure his intellectual legacy,” and he writes to restore or clarify what he thinks Sklar’s real legacy was.

If, as Livingston argues, Sklar was among the great historians of the United States, should he not seek to understand why and how his views evolved, and try to comprehend how his earlier theoretical paradigm of American development has led him to his current analysis?

Speaking as one who has read his e-book, I find that although there will be certain disagreements and argument over some of his theories and analysis, anyone reading his discussion of the Obama years will see the same sharp mind at work, developing ideas and views that clearly build on his earlier works. Livingston’s obituary is really nothing less than a proclamation of his own sadness at how Sklar had long since moved away from the terrain of the sectarian Left of which Livingston clearly still sees himself as part of.  As Sklar himself acknowledges, he was once part of that same social movement, but he soon came to comprehend how those who were part of the official socialist and New Left movements were not part of the broad American consensus, but were only fringe elements chipping away at its center in a way that was dangerous to America’s position as a nation based on liberty.

Moreover, Sklar made careful judgments. One will find that Sklar   says he was right to oppose the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court—not because of the reasons cited by the sectarian Left—-but because he believed that Bork’s concept of trying to rule by finding the “original intent” of the Founders was wrong. On the other hand, he was a strong supporter of the nomination to the Court of Justice Clarence Thomas, whom Sklar argued rightfully believes in ruling according to fidelity to “original” views of the Constitution, which he spells out is both correct and necessary.

As one reads Livingston, a reader can see his anger build. Here a man who considers himself a disciple of Sklar who in many ways was his real mentor, is furious that Sklar liked George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and even Sarah Palin, and in his own terms considered them part of the “robust left wing of the political spectrum.”

I understand what Sklar was getting at, and why he made such provocative statements meant to infuriate the old and new leftists whom he knew would simply flip out when they read his new interpretations.  But I regularly argued with Sklar myself that even if he believed that America could be explained as a left-wing society and not a center-right one, it was too late to get anyone to accept his frame of reference, and his insistence on this would not gain any adherents, especially the likes of Norman Podhoretz, Charles Krauthammer and other conservatives with whom he tried in vain to accept his way of looking at things.

Livingston does not agree with Sklar’s analysis of the contemporary era . So he descends to name-calling, and accuses him of having “mutilated the intellectual legacy” of William Appleman Williams. This is not the time or place to discuss that legacy—but I would argue that much of what Williams wrote was quite wrong-headed. Take Williams’ now fortunately forgotten book on Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, in which he moves from a critique of U.S. policy towards  Castro- a legitimate enterprise- to apologia for Castro’s growing totalitarian measures and continuing lying about the dictator’s real agenda.

Livingston calls  Marty Sklar “another reactionary utopian.” Were Marty still with us, I suspect he would use the same words to describe Livingston’s arguments. He, of course, faults Sklar for thinking highly of John Yoo’s books, and faults him for writing to him and engaging in dialogue. But it is Yoo himself who sees the relationship between Sklar’s early work and his present-day views. Yoo wrote me the following in an e-mail, which he has given me permission to use. He writes the following:

My basic view is that Sklar’s evolution in thinking was not all that different from neo-conservatives such as Daniel Bell (one of my undergraduate professors), Irving Kristol or even Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who began by studying social problems like capitalism, distribution of wealth, etc.  They did not think capitalism was perfect, but they saw that government intervention, despite its good intentions, often could make things worse.  I think it is perfectly reasonable for Sklar, who studied the alliance of corporations and government during the progressive era, to worry about a similar unholy alliance taking place now.  Many neo-conservatives also became worried about the weakness of the Left on foreign policy, and Sklar’s evolution view seems no different. (my emphasis)c

Yoo understands the continuity of Sklar’s analysis of the progressive era with his dissection of the statism of the Obama administration. The new unholy alliance Yoo refers to is evident in policies like the government handouts to “green” energy companies, the moves to shut down coal production, the auto bailout and the like. If one reads Sklar’s e-book, they will find concrete discussion of Obama policy in which he spells this out in detail.

Let me end by citing some of the letters Sklar wrote to me only a short time before his passing. On February 20th,  he argued that his analysis of Obama in his Letters had been confirmed by recent events. He argued the following:

Obama’s confirmed use of the IRS to suppress political opposition in general and GOP voters in particular (b) Obama’s FCC recent initiatives to suppress freedom of the press…indeed establish totalitarian control over the media…note that “researchers” sent by the FCC are analogous to the CP and Fascist commissars that dictated “the line”-ditto the Obama “regulators” sent into the banks and Obama agents..at various non-financial corporations.”

Sklar was also quite upset about journalist John Judis regularly endorsing his work and analysis, as late as a recent issue of Dissent and in many columns in TNR. He was most concerned with Judis’ writings about Israel, and reminded me that when he founded the socialist newspaper In These Times, and wrote its editorials, he informed the staff that the paper would not, unlike the rest of the New Left, assume a stance of opposition to Israel.

Hence Sklar wrote that Judis’ claim that Israel was created against the opposition of its neighbors was foolish, since “so was the U.S., so was Poland, so was Germany, so was England, so was Italy- indeed, so were just about all nations throughout history. So was Iraq, so was Syria, so was Jordan…Judis’s pretense is better described as ‘ahistorical selection,’ (aka propaganda). Such provincialism, and or ignoring of history. Such bias against Israel. The ‘scandal’ here is not just that Judis takes himself seriously as a ‘historian,’ but that so many ‘members in good standing’ of the intelligentsia…do also.”

Judis wrote, Sklar noted,  that Israel always played a “destabilizing” role in the Middle East.  Sklar added that this “self-avowed ‘Marxist’- revolutionary is the champion of stability and the foe of  ‘instability,’ …he’s pro-stability of reactionary tyrannies; both secular and Islamist…That kind of reactionary stability is ok.” To Sklar, Israel stood alone in the Middle East as nation that stood for “progress, democracy, and modernization and against reactionary states established by…imperialism.” He noted as well that Judis said not one word against the establishment of Arab states where none had existed before, singling out only Israel for condemnation.

The “Marxists,” “Progressives” and “Revolutionaries,” Sklar quipped, “forsake their own avowed basic principles in the face of their own deep-seated anti-Semitism…combined with their ‘Third-Worldism’ allegiances.”

Finally, Marty Sklar was a patriot and a proud American. Writing to me about my remarks about Pete Seeger, Marty wrote this past February 5th that Seeger was “ ‘lucky’ to be an American- anywhere else, his bad would have outweighed the good…it was America that made Seeger more good than bad- something he’d probably not want to concede, seeing himself as ‘going against the American grain’-whereas in historical reality” he was part of it.

Unlike those self-proclaimed leftists, including James Livingston and John B. Judis- who at various times tell readers to read and study Marty  Sklar’s writings- Marty Sklar believed in America and its promise.  We need more socialists like him.