Ronald Radosh's Blog, page 27

Spain Betrayed

Divided They Fall

Prophets on the Right

The Amerasia Spy Case

This Weekend, Oliver Stone Will Not be a Happy Man: Now The New York Times Takes Him On!

Oliver Stone and his co-author Peter Kuznick are not going to be happy this week. After making scores of media appearances in which he heralded the supposedly great reception for his new TV series and accompanying book, “Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States,” which airs each week for 10 episodes on the CBS owned network Showtime, Stone is finally getting the negative response he feared.

First, Stone was hit hard by Michael Moynihan at Newsweek/The Daily Beast. Calling Stone and Kuznick’s work “junk history,” Moynihan called Stone’s work “swivel-eyed, ideological history,” based on “dubious quotes and sources,” a veritable “marvel of historical illiteracy.” Coming on the heels of my own debunking of Stone, “A Story Told Before: Oliver Stone’s Recycled History of the United States,” Stone and Kuznick were hit with two substantive critiques in one week.

Stone, of course, completely ignored my own substantive article, alluding to it without naming me as an example of “a few far-right diatribes” that do not have to be dealt with. Stone bragged that “the majority of reviews and articles have been positive,” until that is- the piece by Moynihan that he had to answer since it appeared in what he considers a mainstream media venue. Since the original author has the last word, Moynihan hit Stone hard in his own answer, that appears after Stone’s response as an update. Moynihan easily further demolishes Stone and Kuznick, concluding after presenting more evidence that their work “is activism masquerading as history.”

This  Sunday, however, Stone and Kuznick will be even more upset. The New York Times Magazine features a story by editor Andrew Goldman, “Oliver Stone Rewrites History-Again.” Goldman’s story, which summarizes Stone’s theory behind the TV series and has many vignettes based on his own interview with the director, notes among other things that Stone never really took back his incendiary comment that there is “Jewish domination of the media” and that Israel’s “powerful lobby in Washington”  controls U.S. foreign policy. The apology he supposedly made to the Anti-Defamation League was forced on him to avoid cancellation of “Untold History,” and Stone now told Goldman that he should not have used the word “Jewish,” but that Israel has “seeming control over American foreign policy” and that AIPAC has “undue influence.” He accuses them of “militating for the war in Iraq,” completely ignoring that in fact, Israel did not favor the war, considering Iran its major enemy, and that AIPAC in particular never lobbied on its behalf. Each time Stone explains himself, he further puts his foot in his mouth.

When Goldman eventually gets to the new Showtime series, readers learn that Stone’s accolades come mainly when he presents his film to sympathetic viewers from the far left Nation magazine, as in a forum held in New York after the annual New York Film Festival. Referring to the magazine as “the left’s beloved 147 year-old weekly,” Goldman quotes its editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, as saying that Stone’s film “is what we try to do at The Nation,” which if anything, is more of a giveaway about its reliability than she imagines.  That she sees the film as challenging “the orthodoxy” and the “conformity of our history” is a statement that should, if anything, be very embarrassing to those who think she has any credibility.

Indeed, Goldman goes on to point out that to Stone and Kuznick, “Stalin…still comes off as heroic, as an honest negotiator who, following F.D.R.’s death, was faced at every turn with Truman’s diplomatic perfidy.” Truman is to Stone and Kuznick, Goldman puts it, the “black hat” while the “white hats” belong to F.D.R., John F. Kennedy and most of all, “the man who inspired the whole project: Henry Wallace.”

Readers of my own article will find the real truth about Wallace, who as I argue, was the very epitome of a Communist dupe, a man whom if he had become president, would have enabled Stalin to fulfill his plans for takeover of more than Eastern Europe, and perhaps even succeeded in the Stalinization of the entire European continent.

What will really irk Stone and Kuznick, however, is that Goldman turns to me as an example of the sharp criticism Stone gets from those who know something about history. He writes the following:

While to his fans Stone’s alternate histories are provocative, his detractors see them as grossly irresponsible cherry-picking. The conservative historian and CUNY emeritus professor Ronald Radosh said he found himself wanting to do harm to his television while watching the first four episodes, which he reviewed for the right-wing Weekly Standard. Radosh had been blogging skeptically about the Stone project since its announcement in 2010, but now that he’d actually seen it, he said, it was the historian rather than the conservative in him who was most offended. “Historians can have different interpretations, but based on evidence,” he said. “What these other guys do is manipulate evidence and ignore evidence that does not fit their predetermined thesis, and that’s why they’re wrong.” According to Radosh, Stone and Kuznick’s take on the United States’ role in the cold war mirrors the argument in “We Can Be Friends,” a book published in 1952 by Carl Marzani, who was convicted of concealing his affiliation to the Communist Party when he joined the O.S.S., the precursor to the C.I.A. “This Stone-Kuznick film could have been put out in 1955 as Soviet propaganda,” Radosh said. “They use all the old stuff.”

Moreover, Goldman took my suggestion that Stone’s distortions of history were something that bona fide liberal historians who respect historical truth understand, and that he get in touch with Princeton University’s distinguished historian, Sean Wilentz. Wilentz had e-mailed me that Stone’s book was “misinformation,” and that anyone with a respect for history knew it was trash. When  Goldman spoke to Wilentz, he stuck to his guns. Goldman writes:

Radosh, who grew up as a Red Diaper baby in Washington Heights and only later turned to the right, thinks of himself as intimately familiar with the “old stuff.” But fearing he might be dismissed as partisan, he insisted I reach out to Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian who, owing to his strident defense of Bill Clinton during his impeachment hearings and to his 2006 Rolling Stone cover article on George W. Bush, “The Worst President in History?” is regarded as decidedly left-leaning. When I spoke to him, Wilentz said: “You can’t get two historians more unlike each other than me and Ronnie Radosh. But we can agree about this. It’s ridiculous.” Wilentz was in the middle of writing a review of Stone’s book. “Always beware of books that describe themselves as the untold history of anything, because it’s usually been told before,” he said. “It sets up this thing that there is some sort of mysterious force suppressing the true facts, right? Glenn Beck does this all the time. It’s the same thing here, except this is basically a very standard left-wing, C.P., fellow traveler, Wallace-ite vision of what happened in 1945-46.” It’s not, Wilentz continued, that the questions raised aren’t worth raising. “Is there a legitimate argument to be made about the origins of our nuclear diplomacy or the decision to build the H-bomb?” he said. “Of course there is. But it’s so overloaded with ideological distortion that this question doesn’t get raised in an intelligent way. And once a question gets raised in an unintelligent way, then you are off in cloud-cuckoo land.”

There is much I said to Goldman he left out, obviously because of space concerns from his editors at the magazine. I recommended to him in particular two books on the dropping of the A-Bomb that answer in detail the rehashed revisionist view Stone and Kuznick argue as if nothing has appeared to answer them since Gar Alperovitz’s first statement of the “atomic diplomacy” theory in the 1960’s. I told Goldman to consult Wilson D. Miscamble’s new book The Most Controversial Decision:Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan, and Robert James Maddox’s earlier collection, Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism.  

If he did, there is no indication of it in the article. Both of these books would present chapter and verse of the kind of real evidence that Stone and Kuznick completely ignore. The evidence shows, for example- contrary to the assertion made in the film series- that dropping of the A-Bombs, as horrible as it was, saved not only thousands of American lives that would have been lost, but more Japanese lives than were lost as a result of the A-bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They also show that contrary to the film’s argument, the Japanese government was not ready to surrender and end the war, until after both bombs were used.

Finally, I must note that as pleased as I am that Goldman went to me to counter Stone, and then to Wilentz, he colored (or his editors did) his account by referring to The Weekly Standard as a “right-wing” publication. One could more accurately refer to it as a conservative magazine. The term used is one of opprobrium, meant obviously by the editors of the Times to undercut the possibility that anyone reading it could learn the truth in its pages. And of course, as a “Red-diaper baby” who subsequently turned away from the ideology I once adhered to decades ago, many readers will suspect that a turn-coat like myself can hardly be judged to have anything worthwhile to say about Stone and Kuznick’s film.

Goldman ends his article by referring to Stone and Kuznick’s appearance at a forum at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, where Kuznick again bragged about the “glowing” reviews they were getting and actually said that “nobody’s challenging anything we’re saying.” Stone gestured and said, “Well, it’s early.”

On that point, Oliver Stone is right. Now he has been hit first by myself, next by Michael Moynihan, and now by Andrew Goldman. So I publicly challenge Stone and Kuznick. I will gladly appear with both of them in a public forum, along with another historian, such as Miscamble, Maddox or Wilentz, where we  could in detail expose and challenge all the shibboleths they offer as unvarnished truth.

I’m waiting for their answer!

 

Thoughts on Conservatism at Restoration Weekend

Coming back from Restoration Weekend in W. Palm Beach, Florida- the annual gathering of the David Horowitz Freedom Center- I heard the leading conservative analysts, and many political leaders as well, present their views of what led to the disastrous defeat of Mitt Romney one short week ago. Politicians were represented by Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann, among others, and the roster of prominent speakers included Charles Krauthammer, Bret Stephens, Steve Moore, Pat Cadell, Monica Crowley, Michael Reagan, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter and scores more. Everyone addressed the issues of what happened, and what can we do in the future. Eventually, all the videos of the events will appear on Frontpagemag.com, and readers will be able to see and hear what was said. When they appear, make sure to watch Charles Krauthammer’s analysis- to me the highlight of the weekend, and Bret Stephens very important presentation on foreign policy and the Middle East. Both were brilliant and essential.

The event did lead me to think anew of the reasons for our defeat, and to consider the question once more of what reforms, if any, conservatism and The Republican Party in particular have to make. The speeches reminded me of the old Jewish aphorism- that when you hear two Jews arguing, you are listening to 20 different opinions. Michael Reagan began by talking about the need to build an inclusive movement and party, that does not leave out scores of Americans whom many conservatives seem to believe are beyond hope. His father, he reminded us began as a liberal Democrat and knew how to speak to those whose ranks he had left.  The next morning, Rick Santorum argued for putting the social issues many call divisive front and center, and denied that he and other candidates hurt Romney’s chances by seeking to destroy him during the primaries. And so it went, the entire weekend long.

So now, here are some of my own thoughts I came out of the weekend with.

     1:  The Republican Party has to moderate its policy on immigration.

This is not simply because it needs to win the votes of Hispanic Americans. It is because a less harsh policy is in our country’s interest, and to treat or appear to treat a growing percentage of our country’s citizens as somehow anti-American means that our movement is doomed to oblivion.  To some extent, this is already being done. In last week’s New Yorker, the political reporter Ryan Lizza spent much time with Texas Republicans, and showed how the largest state Republican Party in our country has rejected its once tough restrictionist policy.  As Ted Cruz, the senator-elect from Texas told him, “ ‘If Republicans do not do better in the Hispanic community,’ he said, ‘in a few short years Republicans will no longer be the majority party in our state.’ He ticked off some statistics: in 2004, George W. Bush won forty-four per cent of the Hispanic vote nationally; in 2008, John McCain won just thirty-one per cent. On Tuesday, Romney fared even worse. “ This demographic truth, however, does not mean that a policy based on self-deportation, mass arrest of illegal immigrants, or building a complete barrier to illegal immigration via a fence or more border agents, is the answer. The Texas Republicans once held such a tough approach, but this past year, at its state convention, voted overwhelmingly to change their policy. Lizza writes:

In 2010, the platform of the Republican Party of Texas included some of the country’s most restrictionist language on immigration. It referred repeatedly to “illegal aliens” and called for an “unimpeded deportation process,” elimination of all government benefits to unauthorized immigrants, and the adoption of policies that would mirror the controversial “Show me your papers” provision of Arizona’s immigration law.

Early this year, Martinez de Vara and his allies from the Texas Federation of Hispanic Republicans decided that they would rewrite the state Party platform on immigration. “There was a minority in the Party that was vocal and basically hijacking that issue,” he said. “And so we took it to the convention.” The Republican Party of Texas’s convention includes some nine thousand delegates. They met in early June, in Fort Worth. Martinez de Vara pushed new language through a subcommittee on immigration that he chaired and then through a full committee. Munisteri, the Party chairman, made sure that the issue received a thorough hearing, a move that angered a significant faction of his party. The debate came down to a contentious floor fight in which the new language was challenged four times. Martinez de Vara rose at one point and delivered the soliloquy that he gave me about how building a wall and confiscating property was big government. “When I said that on the floor of the Republican Party of Texas convention,” he said, “with nine thousand of the most diehard conservatives, people who paid two or three thousand dollars to go to Fort Worth and participate, I got seventy-five per cent of the vote. Because they all know it’s true!”

The platform no longer refers to “illegal aliens” and no longer has any language that could be construed as calling for Arizona-style laws. Instead, it proposes a “common ground” to find market-based solutions and “the application of effective, practical and reasonable measures to secure our borders.” Rather than expelling eleven million immigrants, it says, “Mass deportation of these individuals would neither be equitable nor practical.” Most significant, Martinez de Vara won adoption of language calling for a temporary-worker program. At around the time that Mitt Romney was winning the primary by attacking his opponents for being too soft on immigration, the largest state Republican Party in America was ridding its platform of its most restrictionist immigration language and calling for a program to allow unauthorized immigrants to stay in the U.S. legally and work.  (my emphasis)

   2.  We need a truce on divisive social issues.

 Let us take opposition to gay marriage as the major example. Last week, gay marriage initiatives were passed in states that in previous years were defeated. The voters, not the courts, made their judgement known. While he must protect the rights of those who are fiercely opposed to it on religious or other grounds, and respect and seek to understand their opposition to the measure, we must accept the fact that to young people today, including young Republicans, the measure is seen as a civil rights issue whose time has come.

 How do we answer the young Republican woman who in the Wall Street Journal a week ago, wrote that most of her friends view the Republicans as “social bigots,” and complains that “The right has done nothing to welcome young people.” Sarah Westwood argues that “Republicans don’t have a future unless they break up with the religious right and the gay-bashing, Bible-thumping fringe that gives the party such a bad rap with every young voter.” She may be too harsh, and does not appreciate the need to build coalitions of people with different views on the issues she raises. But at least, I think, Mitch Daniels is correct that we need a “truce” on emphasizing the social issues.

 3.      Show in concrete detail how pro-growth and free market policies benefit all Americans, not just the wealthy few.

 Mitt Romney’s 47 per cent remark during his closed fund-raiser, and his reiteration of it last week, shows that he was unable to grasp just how his depicting almost half the populace as takers who wanted handouts was extremely harmful.  John Podhoretz writes:

He was displaying the same obtuseness about the wants and needs of ordinary people that did more to torpedo his campaign than any goodies Obama might have had to dole out.

Bobby Jindal, the brilliant and effective governor of Louisiana, raged against Romney in response. The former candidate was “absolutely wrong,” he said. Romney was “dividing the American voters.” Republicans, Jindal asserted, “need to continue to show how our policies help every voter out there achieve the American Dream.”

As the Republican nominee, it was Romney’s job to find a way to speak to some of those groups of voters and offer practical solutions to their difficulties that both resonated with them and sounded plausible to them.

Podhoretz is correct when he says that we need more than advocating pro-business policies that do not resonate with those who actually are working very hard and are falling behind each day.  Free market policies cannot just benefit risk-takers and entrepreneurs, “at the expense of everything else.” In Wisconsin, the same people who voted in Scott Walker despite a huge nation-wide campaign to defeat him by the Left, voted this time to put Republicans in local offices, but elected Tammy Baldwin as Senator and Barack Obama for President.

Romney may have won the white-working class vote, but many of that group stayed home this time, since he got less votes than McCain did four years ago from this part of the population. Emphasizing the power of entrepreneurs, as one friend e-mailed me, “only sails past the working-class anxiety about fraying safety nets and lack of job security.” It is not enough to call for small government. We need to support government measures that are effective in meeting the demands of those who are worried about their future, and who have been obeying the rules of the game, raising their families, and working hard all of their lives.

Scott Walker was able to win his fight because he showed regular citizens of his state that his policies helped them, that public sector workers were a privileged group that was living off the largesse of the state and was way ahead of private sector workers- including union members- whose taxes were paying for their great advantages and perks. Clearly, these same voters were scared by Romney’s message, in a way they were not by that made by Scott Walker a year ago.

These same points were made in “The Corner” last week by Yuval Levin, who is one of the intellectual luminaries of the conservative movement, and from whom I always gain much knowledge. Levin writes:

The story of this election is not massive turnout of the Democratic base but exceptionally depressed turnout of a portion of the electorate that, when it votes, tends to vote Republican. Those were after all the two parts of President Obama’s cynical and substance-free campaign strategy: to work the most intensely committed and reliable parts of his base into a frenzy while persuading the least committed and reliable part of the Republican base (white working-class voters) that Mitt Romney didn’t deserve their support so they should just sit it out. Much of the post-election analysis has focused on the sophistication of the former effort—finding every last tiny niche in the patchwork of clamoring interest groups that makes up the Democratic coalition and telling it exactly what it wanted to hear. But the election returns suggest the latter effort—using any low and mendacious tactic required to tell working-class voters (especially white, Midwestern ones) that Mitt Romney was an evil and uncaring plutocrat—was by far the more successful and important. Those voters were not going to support Obama, but they could be kept away from Romney, and evidently they were.

He adds: “It would seem that the commonly voiced concerns that Romney would have trouble connecting with working-class voters and that the attacks on him as a vulture capitalist might work were basically right.”

    4.  It’s the culture, stupid.

 I made this argument in a previous column.  I only wish to add a few points. We need more than Fox News as a television outlet to counter the forces of the Left.  We need documentaries that tell about our recent past that are solid, forceful and accurate, that can counter the mendacious current project of Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, that will be used throughout our universities by the left-wing academics after its TV run is over. More of that ilk are undoubtedly on the drawing boards, by the successors of Howard Zinn who are carrying on his enterprise. So far, I have not heard of any similar projects underway by conservatives.

 We need humor shows with wide appeal that will not tilt so obviously to the left as both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert do, but that will take on both the foibles of conservatives and Republicans as well as that of Democrats and liberals, and that will have the kind of influence and ratings as those now on Comedy Central.

We need to urge that conservatives not hand over academia to the left, and to consider going into the humanities as well as business and politics. If only those on the left continue to dominate, it only means future generations will continue to frame their beliefs on the miseducation they received during their college years.

 We need to show Hollywood that good films with a conservative message can be made and be profitable—and not just right-wing agitprop such as recent unnamed movies have proved to be, and that were as bad and unwatchable as their leftist counterparts.

All of the above, I think, have to be taken into consideration. We have a strong economic case to make. Robert Pollock noted yesterday we should be able to show that the blue state social model has failed. Since the 1970’s, he writes, “there’s been a growing scholarly consensus that the blue state social model of high taxes and generous social welfare benefits risks creating a culture of dependency and slow growth. That’s why Bill Clinton signed welfare reform. There are mountains of empirical data showing more job creation in states that tax and regulate lightly. Weak economies do not reduce inequality.”

 Yet the Left, emphasizing inequality as their main issue, argues in favor of more redistributionist measures, legislative increases in the minimum wage, more taxes on business, and more statist measures that increase the power of government in cahoots with large corporations.  As Pollock quips, “attachment to the blue state model reminds one of the communist apologists who insisted in the face of all evidence that the system just hadn’t been tried hard enough. At least they’ll be getting their laboratory in the years ahead. California has just voted to double down on blue state policies with higher taxes and Democratic supermajorities in the state government.”

 As we all know, California is drowning, and scores are leaving, making cities like San Diego basket cases.  All we need are individuals and candidates who can explain carefully and logically why the Left’s policies are harmful and wrong for the nation. Hopefully, by 2016 someone who can do that job will be the presidential candidate of the Republican Party.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Academic Malpractice: The Case of Grover Furr

I was not going to write about Prof. Grover Furr of Montclair State University. I did not want to call more attention to him, which he obviously craves. But now that the video of his speech at a recent forum has gone viral on the internet, thanks to the Washington Examiner, and is being featured on other sites as well, I have decided it is time to speak out about this particularly imbecilic member of the Academy.

Professor Furr is a professor of medieval English literature, but what has led to all the hullabaloo about him is his decades-long defense of the old Soviet Union, and in particular of the years in which one of the 20th century’s most horrendous monsters, Josef Stalin, wreaked havoc on the lives of the people living under his reign of terror. Professor Furr has been in the business of Stalin worship for quite some time.

So shameful is this man that he actually tried to lead a protest against a speech by one of the most brilliant contemporary scholars, Timothy Snyder of Yale University. Snyder is the author of the magisterial and highly acclaimed book Bloodlands, which the Economist rightfully chose as its “Book of the Year.” Professor Furr, it seems, cannot countenance any scholar who engages in rigorous research. “Instead of studying Nazi atrocities or Soviet atrocities separately, as many others have done,” Anne Applebaum writes, Snyder “looks at them together,” revealing that “the two systems committed the same kinds of crimes at the same times and in the same places, that they aided and abetted one another, and above all that their interaction with one another led to more mass killing than either might have carried out alone.” Applebaum’s accolades are among many Snyder has rightfully received. His book is one of lasting value that not only informs, but leads one to see the past in a new way.

Without engaging in the kind of real scholarly work that Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum have both done in their respective works, Furr simply takes to his computer to put out blast after blast at anyone who dares to tell the truth about Stalinism or to cast aspersion on the years in which the USSR existed. He actually writes that “Snyder is a most unsuitable speaker for any discussion of the Holocaust, or of Eastern European history generally.” As most sane people realize, that judgement applies more accurately to Furr himself, rather than to a major historian like Timothy Snyder. That Furr can even write these words about Timothy Snyder is itself an indictment of Furr, and reveals to anyone with an  ounce of intelligence what a fraud he is.

What has now created the storm that has made Furr visible are his statements at the recent forum at Montclair, where he called it a “big lie” that Stalin killed millions of people. “I have yet to find one crime — yet to find one crime — that Stalin committed,” Furr said. “I know they all say he killed 20, 30, 40 million people — it is bullshit. … [Nazi propagandist] Goebbels said that the Big Lie is successful and this is the Big Lie: that the Communists — that Stalin killed millions of people and that socialism is no good.”

His field might be medieval literature, but if you consult his own website, it is readily apparent that what most interests him, and the cause to which he is singlemindedly devoted, is defense of Stalin’s reputation. Evidently a member or follower of the 1960s era Maoist group the Progressive Labor Party — a breakaway movement from the Communist Party U.S.A. that saw fit to defend China during the years of the Moscow-China split and to try to build a new Marxist-Leninist communist organization to replace what they called the “revisionist” official American Communist group — Furr now appears as its only remaining public face.

Think for a moment that someone like this is actually teaching at an American public university.

It’s the Culture, Stupid: Facing the Long Road Ahead

If we can turn away from the elections for a moment, and the future of the Republican party, a more fundamental problem exists. It is nothing less than the nature of the American culture. By the term culture I am not referring to the social issues that usually come up when one talks about culture wars; i.e., abortion, gay rights, religion, etc. Rather, I am talking about the perception and outlook that stand beneath the way our American public define the very nature of civic life in our democratic capitalist society.

That is why I regularly borrow from the Left, as some astute observers of my previous column noted in some comments, to the works of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and particularly to his theory of cultural hegemony. As I wrote in my concluding paragraph, we have to wage a “wage a war of position on the cultural front and to do all possible to challenge the ascension of a failed intellectual liberal ideology, whether it is in the form of Progressivism, liberalism or socialism.”  I’m referring to the kind of work Fred Siegel carries out in a new book he has just finished writing, and which I had the pleasure of reading in manuscript form, on the nature of American liberalism. When it is eventually published, I believe it can have the kind of impact that great works of history like Richard Hofstadter’s books had in the 1940’s and 50’s.

Siegel shows that from its very inception, liberalism was a flawed ideology whose adherents substituted its would-be virtues as a way of distancing themselves from most Americans and their work-a-day lives; an ideology based on a view whose believers saw themselves as superior to most Americans, including those who were merchants, workers or regular folk, who could not be counted on to comprehend the backwardness of their beliefs.

Continuing on through the post-war decades, Siegel deals with liberalism’s failure to accurately confront the issue of race; its love affair with the New Left and its moral collapse in the face of its anarchism and nihilism; the effects of McGovernism on the political collapse of the Democratic Party, and the resulting politics of “rights-based interest groups” and the new power of public sector unionism, a far different breed than that of the old labor movement of Walter Reuther and George Meany. If we want a different kind of social polity than the one we have now- based on catering to the power of competing interest groups that compose the core strength of the Democratic party- we have to address first the essential question of the kind of social order that liberalism has built.

I’m also referring to the work the intellectuals who edit National Affairs  and those who edit The Claremont Review of Books do—solid theoretical and analytical work on social policy, education, law, and all of which challenge the intellectual foundations of contemporary liberalism.

If you doubt that this intellectual work is necessary, you might ponder the question of why college educated Americans are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats or among those even much further to the political Left. An answer appears in this article by Richard Vedder, which appears today in Minding The Campus. Vedder shows that the majority of professors who teach our young people in the humanities are primarily on the Left, as he writes, “62.7 percent of faculty said that they were either ‘far left’ or ‘liberal,’ while only 11.9 percent said they were ‘far right’or ‘conservative.’ The notion that universities are hot beds for left-wing politics has a solid basis in fact. Moreover, the left-right imbalance is growing –a lot. The proportion of those on the left is rising, on the right declining.” The latest research reveals that there are 5.7 professors on the left for each one on the right!

The irony is that this occurs only in the academy, since studies also show that more and more Americans define themselves as basically conservative rather than liberal. So it should come as no surprise that the suburban middle-class and university educated Americans, having learned their liberalism and leftism at college, vote the way that they do. One study shows that 41 per cent of Americans call themselves conservative while only 21 per cent call themselves liberal. Thus, as Vedder says, the university faculties are truly “out of sync” with the country at large.

Why is it, he asks, are the faculty so leftist? He answers:

Regarding politics, while some devise esoteric theories how the inquisitive mind leads to non-mainstream political views, historically intellectuals have sometimes been largely oriented to what today would be called “conservative” views. I think today’s leftish-faculty orientation is easily explained: the academy, even at so-called private schools, is heavily dependent on public funds, and liberals tend to be more disposed to larger government. Liberals like big government, and big government means a better, more secure life for more faculty.

Since the gateway to the professoriate is through professors themselves, right-leaning prospective faculty are sometimes turned off by the usually correctly perceived need to suppress their views in order to get an appointment and tenure. Those who do not share the affinity for big government are often shunned, leading conservative/libertarian groups such as the Charles Koch Foundation to fund little campus enclaves where right-minded professors can teach and do research without harassment. Attempts to form those enclaves are often bitterly fought by the faculty. Promoting “diversity” in higher education means supporting relatively trivial variations in physical attributes of humans (such as skin color or gender differences), not the far more important differences of the mind manifested in verbal and written expression.

Why Obama Won — and What Conservatives Must Do

There are no ways to get around the facts. For Republicans and conservatives and independents who wanted a new direction for our country, the victory of President Obama is sad — and for many of us, unexpected. Those conservatives who assured us with statistics, theories, and arguments about Romney winning the White House, even in a landslide, should be eating their hats.

In the past week, conservatives who usually disagree with each other about many things, including Fred Barnes, Peggy Noonan, Dick Morris, my PJM colleague Roger Kimball, George F. Will,  Karl Rove, and Michael Barone, among others, provided analysis and arguments, all of which led to predictions of an inevitable Romney victory. Instead of the outcome they all looked forward to and assumed would be inevitable given Obama’s failures and the state of the economy, they found that their theories collapsed as the returns poured in. Instead of a long night, by 11:30 p.m. even Fox News had called the election for the president. Yes, Karl Rove thought their statistics desk called it too early, but 15 minutes later he too agreed that Ohio had gone for the president.

So what happened? I had been trying to warn my optimistic friends in recent days that I thought Obama would win, and was regularly greeted with a slew of polls meant to prove I was wrong. So here are some of my thoughts and reactions, written before I can be influenced by the pundits who will be writing in tomorrow morning’s newspapers and appearing on TV talk shows.

First, the Obama campaign’s decision to frighten women worked. Republicans did not wage a campaign on social issues, but the Obama team ran commercials in all the major swing states emphasizing how Romney would try to outlaw contraception and prohibit their right to choose abortion if they felt there was no alternative, and that half the population would be threatened were a Republican elected.

Republicans lost the Senate with the two candidates who made outrageous statements that Romney simply dealt with by saying he did not agree; he refused to take away his endorsements, which would have indicated he meant business. No one expected the unpopular Claire McCaskill to win, but Todd Akin’s ridiculous statements led even her to win, and Richard Murdock’s outrageous views on rape as something God intended resulted in victory for his Democratic opponent. Without the Republican Party sticking to support for both these candidates, the Republicans might have been able to gain the Senate. With friends like these, conservatives became their own worst enemies, providing the ammunition for the Democratic charge that Republicans were waging a war on women.

Second, there is the hurricane factor. The nation saw Obama in his bomber jacket, accompanied by Republican keynoter Gov. Chris Christie as he visited the devastated areas of New Jersey hit by Hurricane Sandy. For the Democrats, it became the perfect storm that allowed the nation to believe what it wanted desperately to think — that Barack Obama had become a leader whom even the conservative governor of New Jersey worked with and praised for his leadership. The news coverage of Obama and Christie, and the governor’s effusive over-the-top praise of the president, hurt Romney in a significant fashion. Christie’s stance even led Bruce Springsteen to talk on the phone with the governor on Election Day, and to praise him for his working relationship with the president. Christie finally got the call from his hero that he had been yearning for. Gone, I think, are his chances to run for the White House as the Republican candidate four years from now.

Third: the Latino vote. The percentage of Latinos voting increased significantly, and although many are Catholic and socially conservative, the tough stance on immigration reform taken by Romney in the primary campaign hurt his chances of gaining enough of their votes. Republicans like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, both of Florida, were serious about conservatives developing a position more flexible and less dogmatic than the anti-immigration position of many conservatives. Their views, supported by the Wall Street Journal and most of the business community, were not that of most conservatives. When the voting statistics are tallied, I think we will find that with more Latinos voting for Republicans, Romney might have been able to do much better, if not win. As it is, he will have won far less than George W. Bush, who tried to develop a different policy but lost his fight to gain conservative support on the issue.

Thoughts on My 75th Birthday

Today is my 75th birthday, and I thought instead of a regular column, I would write about my thoughts and feelings about reaching this milestone. To use the Yiddish vernacular, I’m now officially an alta cocker, which when younger we used as a term for those old Jews who sat on benches in the non-hip Miami Beach of yesteryear. Pretty soon I’ll be able to join — if only I could be funny — my brethren who post entries on “Old Jews Telling Jokes.”

In a slightly more serious vein, as I face the reality that I’m entering my twilight years, my thoughts turn to that which has seen me through both good times and bad. I’m fortunate to have had a wonderful marriage for some thirty-seven years to my wife Allis, with whom I now write books, and to have marvelous children and grandchildren. My son Daniel in Brooklyn and his wife Gina have three fantastic kids (Milo, Margalit and Seraphina), and my daughter Laura in Berlin and her partner Silke have two beautiful girls (Malka and Noemie). And our son Mike and his wife Jen, who live nearby us in Maryland, have an always-on-the-go, energetic one year old named Evan. As everyone knows, this is what life is all about, and it affords me great pleasure.

I still have friends not only from high school, but from elementary school as well. About two years ago, I went to New York City where at one of the clubs, a group of old friends from P.S.173 in Washington Heights, where I grew up, met for a wonderful dinner of talk and reminiscences. All four of us, I’m happy to report, were successful in life and have made great contributions in our chosen careers. One of them is a now retired top editor and writer, another a player in Democratic Party circles and a lawyer of renown, and the third a highly regarded New York character actor, whom you have undoubtedly seen on the stage or in various television programs. We all remembered vividly, as if it were yesterday, events from the days in our old neighborhood. Memories do stay with us.

Last week, while on a research trip to West Branch, Iowa, for the book Allis and I are writing on the presidency of Warren Harding, I was able to meet one of my best friends from high school, who works as an artist and is now retired from Cornell College in that state. Seeing old friends and remaining in touch with them is yet another blessing to be counted.

The passing of the years has also led me to reflect on what keeps me going with columns, articles, and books — instead of supposedly enjoying going to the golf course every day (a problem anyway — since I don’t play golf) or constantly traveling to exotic locales. One is supposed to slow down as time goes on, take it easy, enjoy simple reading, watch movies, and just enjoy oneself.

Instead, I find myself angry and as motivated as I ever was to try and tell what I consider to be the truth, and to take up and challenge all the charlatans that surround us. The past few days I have worked hard on an article to appear in the next issue of The Weekly Standard, a review-essay on the new TV documentary series and book by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick titled Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States. Watching the episodes literally made my blood pressure rise. I was quite simply infuriated at what I watched and heard Stone come up with.

I knew that others would not have the expertise and background to take up the misinformation he offers Americans who listen to him and think they are learning the truth about our past. My anger and disdain for a culture that allows Stone’s celebrity as a Hollywood filmmaker — to present himself as a historian who has anything to contribute to comprehending the American story — led me to realize that I had to deal with him, because in most likelihood no one else would.

That desire to answer the likes of Stone has a lot to do with my leftist childhood and adolescence. As readers of my memoir Commies know, my decision to become a historian in the first place came from the inspiration I had from a Marxist-Leninist history teacher at my high school, who told me that “Marx said history is the queen of the sciences.” I don’t know if indeed Marx said that, but I remember the teacher whom I regarded highly telling me that. (One can be influenced by high school mentors a great deal, which is why I think Paul Kengor is correct to call attention in his book to the influence on Barack Obama of the president’s mentor in Hawaii, Frank Marshall Davis. I reviewed it here.)