Corey Robin's Blog, page 42

Why does it matter that Donald Trump is not a novelty?

In the past few weeks, as the campaign has intensified, I’ve gotten a lot of questions (and pushback) about why I keep arguing for the non-newness of Donald Trump, why I keep resurrecting the multiple precedents for his candidacy against those who would argue for its novelty and innovations.

Part of the reason, of course, is that it is an offense against history and memory to pretend that the GOP of the past was somehow a party of reasonable men, clear-headed and basically decent moderates who were taking the car out for a Sunday spin when it got suddenly hijacked by crazies and yahoos. For years, I’ve been making the claim that the GOP radicals and extremists of today are consistent with conservatives past; I don’t see why I should give it up just because it’s no longer convenient for winning elections, because it doesn’t jibe with the claim, heard every four years, that this is the most important election ever.

But as I’ve thought about it some more these past few days—why do I keep insisting on these precedents?—it occurred to me that there is a less historical, less intellectual and scholarly, reason for my claim.

In this election, we have the opportunity to repudiate not only Donald Trump but Trumpism, and not only Trumpism but the entire apparatus that gave us this man and this moment. That apparatus is the Republican Party and the modern conservative movement. The movement and the party that gave us the Southern Strategy, that made white supremacy the major dividing line between the two parties, that race-baited its way to the free market as the dominant ideology of our time, that made hysterical, revanchist militarism the common sense of bipartisanship, that helped turn the Democratic Party into the shell that it is today (with plenty of assistance of course from people like Bill Clinton), that gave us Donald Trump.

When we pretend that Donald Trump is an utter novelty on the American political scene, when Democratic presidents and Democratic presidential aspirants invoke the reverie of Ronald Reagan against the reality of Donald Trump, when liberal journalists say the contest this year is not between the Republicans and the Democrats but between a normal party and an abnormal formation (with the implication being that if only we could go back to the contests of 2008, 2000, 1992, 1980, 1972, all would be well), we not only commit an offense against history and memory; we not only betray a woeful ignorance of how we came to this pass (and thereby, as the cliche would have it, ensure that we will come to it again); we help shore up, we extend the half-life, of a party and a movement that should be thoroughly smashed and repudiated. (That, incidentally, is what all the great realignments do: they shatter the old regime, they destroy the ideological assumptions and repudiate the interests that have governed for decades, they send the dominant party and its leading emblems into exile.) We make plain our intention to give that party and that movement, even if they should lose in November, a second chance to make their malice and mischief all over again.

Philadelphia Stories: From Reagan to Trump to the DNC

So Donald Trump Jr. went to the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi this week, where he said, vis-a-vis the Mississippi state flag, which is the only state flag that still invokes the Confederacy, “I believe in tradition.” (h/t Ellen Tremper)

Those Neshoba County fairgrounds are just a few miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi. The place indelibly associated with the murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in 1964.

So that tells you a lot about Donald Trump. Junior and Senior.

But it also tells you a lot about the Republican Party.

Thirty-six years ago, almost to the day, Ronald Reagan, then a candidate for the presidency, also went to the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi. There, he said, “I believe in states’ rights.” That, of course, had been the slogan for decades of racial segregation and Jim Crow.

And it also tells you something about the Democratic Party.

For Ronald Reagan is the man whose name improbably electrified the Democratic National Convention meeting this week. In another Philadelphia.

On Wednesday night, President Obama said:

Ronald Reagan called America “a shining city on a hill.” Donald Trump calls it “a divided crime scene” that only he can fix.

And on the final night of the Convention, a former Reagan official enchanted a crowd of cheering Democrats with this one-liner (itself a nod to another DNC one-liner; there’s more intertextuality at a political convention than there is in a grad school seminar):

Donald Trump, you are no Ronald Reagan.

The Other Night at Philadelphia

Back in the 1950s or 60s, can’t remember when it was, Diana Trilling had an essay called “The Other Night at Columbia.” It was meant to be a mordant, ironic musing on a poetry reading at Columbia University by Allan Ginsberg, who had been a student of Trilling’s husband, the Columbia professor and literary critic Lionel Trilling. I’m sure I’m misremembering the details, perhaps even the overall mood and ethos of the piece; it’s been a long time. What I vaguely remember is this: Despite Trilling’s attempts to make the essay into a larger comment about littler manners and morals, what you come away with, more than anything else, is her total emotional investment in…Columbia. Even when she’s trying to be critical, she completely identifies with the institution. She repeats detail after lovingly remembered detail of Lionel this, the Dean that, Professor So and So this, the students that. It’s unsettling: here is this uncommonly intelligent critic, so smart and humane in every way, so able to cut through cant as if it were so many slabs of rancid meat, yet so in thrall to an institution of such abject smallness (that’s how, if memory serves, Lionel Trilling described it in some of his private writings), an institution that would never see fit to hire or accept her as an equal, despite her manifestly superior talents. Anyway, that’s how I feel during these conventions and moments of collective euphoria over our candidates, particularly as I read the commentary on social media. I apologize, in advance, for how I know this statement (and others I’ve made throughout this week on social media) must seem to some, perhaps many, of you. I’m not unaware of how sneering or snooty, even obnoxious, my distance and disdain comes off, particularly if you only know me on the page or in the ether; I regret that. There’s some element, I’ve come to realize, of psychic investment, for all of us, in this election, that goes beyond the specific policies and platforms and parties. And who am I kidding, thinking I can distance myself from it all? It was Trilling (Lionel, that is), after all, who famously wrote: “There is only one way to accept America and that is in hate; one must be close to one’s land, passionately close in some way or other, and the only way to be close to America is to hate it; it is the only way to love America.” I guess I just wanted to explain to you all why I—and perhaps others—feel so alienated from the scene. Well, not really explain; that’s a longer post. But at least acknowledge—

Gag Me With Calhoun

After weeks of embarrassing publicity and political mobilization, Yale University has been forced to rehire Corey Menafee, an African American employee who was fired for smashing a stained glass window at Yale’s Calhoun College that depicted slaves shouldering bales of cotton. For over a year, Calhoun College has been the subject of intense national controversy because it is named after one of America’s foremost defenders of slavery and white supremacy. Menafee’s actions, firing, and now rehiring gave expression, and amplification, to the controversy.

But now there’s a new source of controversy: one of the conditions of Menafee’s rehiring is that he keep his mouth shut about the case.

But in a move more familiar in corporate labor proceedings than in an academic setting dedicated to free discourse, the university included in the agreement to rehire Menafee a provision that he will no longer be able to speak publicly about his case, the university confirmed….Provision #8 in the agreement reads: “The parties agree that neither Mr. Menafee, the Union, nor the University, nor counsel for any of these, will make any further statements to the public.”

…

The provision sparked outrage from demonstrators who stood in support of Menafee over the past two weeks.

While gag orders like this are indeed routine in corporate litigation and settlements, the restriction on employee speech is even more routine in workplaces across America. Indeed, for workers in the United States, it is the rule rather than the exception.

But that’s not what makes this particular gag order so interesting.

Throughout the controversy over Calhoun College I’ve maintained that the mistaken premise of both sides of the argument is that Calhoun is a voice from the nation’s past, a defender of slavery and thus a relic of the 19th century. But Calhoun’s real significance, I’ve argued, is that he was a theoretician of white supremacy, the proponent of racism as a way for whites to feel that they are the superior class, a racism that outlasted slavery and persists to this day. “His was less the voice of a dying institution,” I wrote, “than a vision of the future that was only just being born.”

But Yale’s gag order of Menafee evokes the long shadow of John C. Calhoun in another way.

Beginning in the 1830s, abolitionists sought to present petitions to Congress seeking restrictions or outright bans on slavery. John Quincy Adams, the retired sixth president of the United States and now sitting representative in the House, was at the forefront of this movement.

In response, pro-slavery forces imposed a series of escalating “gag rules,” which eventually were formalized as a standing rule against Congress even hearing these petitions. John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson’s former vice president and now leader of the pro-slavery faction in the Senate, was at the forefront of this movement.

It was in response to an effort to introduce such a petition to the Senate that Calhoun first offered, in 1837 on the Senate floor, his famous formulation that far from being an evil, slavery was in fact “a good—a positive good.” Here’s what he said about the dangers of allowing anti-slavery speech to be heard in the world’s greatest deliberative body:

Encroachments must be met at the beginning…those who act on the opposite principle are prepared to become slaves. In this case, in particular, I hold concession or compromise to be fatal. If we concede an inch, concession would follow concession—compromise would follow compromise, until our ranks would be so broken that effectual resistance would be impossible….The most unquestionable right may be rendered doubtful if once admitted to be a subject of controversy, and that would be the case in the present instance….As widely as this incendiary spirit has spread, it has not yet infected this body, or the great mass of the intelligent and business portion of the North: but unless it be speedily stopped, it will spread and work upwards…

Calhoun lost that vote. But almost 15 years later, in his last major address to that body, he would return to it, like an old sore.

Had my voice been heeded…the agitation which followed would have been prevented, and the fanatical zeal that gives impulse to the agitation, and which has brought us to our present perilous condition, would have become extinguished, from the want of something to feed the flame.

As I characterized that speech in The Reactionary Mind:

In his last major address to the Senate, John C. Calhoun, former vice president and chief spokesman of the Southern cause, identified the decision by Congress in the 1830s to receive abolitionist petitions as the moment when the nation set itself on an irreversible course of confrontation over slavery. In a four-decade career that had seen such defeats to the slaveholder position as the Tariff of Abominations, the Nullification Crisis, and the Force Bill, the mere appearance of slave speech in the nation’s capitol stood out for the dying Calhoun as the sign that that the revolution had begun.

Why, after all these years, did it so agitate him? As I argued in the book:

Every once in a while, however, the subordinates of this world contest their fates. They protest their conditions, write letters and petitions, join movements, and make demands. Their goals may be minimal and discrete…but in voicing them, they raise the specter of a more fundamental change of power. They cease to be servants or supplicants and become agents, speaking and acting on their own behalf. More than the reforms themselves, it is this assertion of agency by the subject class—the appearance of an insistent and independent voice of demand—that vexes their superiors.

Fast-forward to 2016.

After months of watching his social betters at Yale and throughout the nation politely debate the virtues of naming a residential college after a man who not only defended slavery but sought to impose a gag rule on any negative mention of it on the Senate floor, a black dishwasher at Yale decides to take matters into his own hands and smash a stained-glass icon of slavery. After weeks of bad publicity and even worse optics, Yale—an institution that fashions itself, like the Senate over which John C. Calhoun presided, to be a universal bastion of open exchange and deliberative reason—rehires this man. On the condition that he never speak publicly of this wrong again.

There’s a reason Yale decided to “Calhoun.”

 

Booing and Nothingness

Across social media, a lot of people are still reeling over yesterday’s booing at the DNC. In particular, they’re saying it was childish. I find that an odd claim. There are legislative bodies across the globe, including countries we often hold up as tutors in democracy, where elected officials routinely boo and get booed. You might even say it’s a sign of a slightly less than grownup political culture that we in the US react to it with such a charge, that we see it as such a taboo. It seems to reflect a kind of obeisance to the magic of authority that we typically associate with, well, children.

Liberalism and Fear: What Montesquieu has to teach us about Clinton’s Use of Trump

Many people on social media tonight were puzzled why the Democrats at the convention in Philadelphia spent so little time laying out a positive agenda, focusing instead on the dangers of Trump. The Democrats, after all, are the party in control of the White House. Usually, that party’s candidate runs on the record of the incumbent or lays out a vision, if the incumbent is popular, of how she’ll continue that record into the future.

I was less troubled or puzzled by this. Donald Trump is Clinton’s strongest argument for her election. Simply by running against him—as, let’s face it, LBJ did in 1964 against Goldwater—she shores up support not only within her base but among moderates who are legitimately terrified of Trump. But without committing herself too much to any particular agenda. It’s smart politics, and I suspect that between now and November, we’ll be seeing more of it. A lot more of it.

It may be smart politics, but it’s also an old problem in liberalism, a problem that runs deeper than the current travails of the Democrats.

As I argued in this passage from my book Fear: The History of a Political Idea:

Like Hobbes, Montesquieu turned to fear as a foundation for politics. Montesquieu was never explicit about this; Hobbesian candor was not his style. But in the same way that the fear of the state of nature was supposed to authorize Leviathan, the fear of despotism was meant to authorize Montesquieu’s liberal state.

Just as Hobbes depicted fear in the state of nature as a crippling emotion, Montesquieu depicted despotic terror as an all-consuming passion, reducing the individual to the raw apprehension of physical destruction. In both cases, the fear of a more radical, more debilitating form of fear was meant to inspire the individual to submit to a more civilized, protective state.

Why would a liberal opposed to the Hobbesian vision of absolute power resort to such a Hobbesian style of argument? Because Montesquieu, like Hobbes, lacked a positive conception of human ends, true for all people, to ground his political vision.

Montesquieu’s liberalism was not the egalitarian liberalism of the century to come, nor was it the conscience-stricken protoliberalism of the century it had left behind. Unlike Locke, whose argument for toleration was powered by a vision of religious truth, and unlike later figures such as Rousseau or Mill, whose arguments for freedom were driven by secular visions of human flourishing, Montesquieu pursued no beckoning light. He wrote in that limbo period separating two ages of revolution, when weariness with dogma and wariness of absolutism made positive commitments difficult to come by and even more difficult to sustain. His was a skeptical liberalism: ironic, worldly, elegant—and desperately in need of justification.

Despotic terror supplied that justification, lending his vision of limited government moral immediacy, pumping blood into what might otherwise have seemed a bloodless politics. Montesquieu did not know—and did not care to enquire—whether we were free and equal, but he did know that terror was awful and had to be resisted. Thus was liberalism born in opposition to terror—and at the same time yoked to its menacing shadow.

But hitching liberalism to terror came at a price: It obscured the realities of political fear.

Montesquieu painted an almost cartoonish picture of terror, complete with a brutish despot straight out of central casting, and brutalized subjects, so crazed by terror they couldn’t think of or for themselves. So did he overlook the possibility that the very contrivances he recommended as antidotes to terror—toleration, mediating institutions, and social pluralism—could be mobilized on its behalf….

The polemical impulse behind his account was clear: If Montesquieu could show that despotic terror destroyed everything men held dear, and if he could show that terror possessed none of the attributes of a liberal polity, terror could serve as the negative foundation of liberal government. The more malignant the regime, the more promising its liberal alternative. Built into Montesquieu’s argument, then, was a necessary exaggeration of the evil against which it was arrayed.

Trump knows how to rattle cages, without setting anyone free

I have a piece in today’s New York Times. It’s a contribution to the “Room for Debate” section. The question on the table: “Is Trump’s Foreign Policy Really That Unreasonable?”

Here’s a sneak preview of my reply:

Rather than dismiss Trump’s claims in his New York Times interview as “unreasonable,” we should take seriously two of them — less for what they say about him than what they reveal about his critics.

…

During the Bush years, we had a name for laptop bombardiers willing to fight America’s wars with other people’s blood. But liberals today don’t talk about that. When a high-level official in the Obama administration says, “We are ready to give our lives” in defense of Latvia, liberals don’t ask, “What do you mean ‘we’?”

So Trump poses a version of the question. Not because he cares about the poor or people of color — his focus is on who pays the bills — but because he knows how to rattle cages, without setting anyone free.

But go check out the whole thing over there.

Power Behind the Throne

Why are advisers to men of power—the vizir, the counselor, the chief of staff—such shifty figures? From Haman to Iago to Rasputin to Cheney, the adviser is often depicted as the source of evil, rot, and decay. Is this just a way of preserving the myth of the good king, corrupted by the whisperer in his ear? Or is there something suspicious and untrustworthy about someone who would subsume his fate to the fortune of a king? Or hide his power behind the power of another? Perhaps that makes a man, in the traditional view, too much like a woman, too much like a wife? Perhaps that’s why such figures are sometimes treated as sexually ambiguous, gender-bending freaks of power, and why characters like Lady Macbeth are conscripted to play the roles that they play?

Tim Kaine, and Other Faith-Based Politics

1.

Christ on a stick, this is what I didn’t count on with the Kaine pick as VP.

The problem isn’t the pick itself: it is what it is (see #2 below). The problem is the ejaculations of joy it prompts among the pundit class and the Twitterati, who now have to sell it to us as the greatest choice of a second since Moses appointed Aaron.

And not because the pundits are on the Clinton payroll: I’d have a lot more respect for them if they were.

No, they do this shit for free. Out of love. Rapture. And bliss.

2.

I’m not one of those people who cares much about a VP pick.

I don’t think it tells you much about Clinton one way or the other. Her agenda is what it is, and it’s not revealed or concealed by this choice. Do most people change their vote for a candidate based on the running mate? It’s hard to imagine it really matters all that much. So I’m neither heartened nor disheartened. Nor am I surprised.

But—you knew it was coming—can you imagine the howls of protest this VP choice would have provoked among Clinton supporters had it been made by Sanders? And not just howls for a few hours on a late Friday night that slowly morph into cheers by morning. No, I’m talking truly bitter howls of rage that last and last.

Howls of protest:

about how, out of 57 Democratic senators, Kaine had the 41st most liberal record, putting him far closer to the Max Baucus conservative end of the spectrum among Senate Democrats;
about his mixed record on abortion, about how he supported all those restrictions on a women’s right to choose;
about how, despite his opposition to the death penalty, Kaine sent eleven people to their death as governor. (That one, incidentally, made me think of Bill Clinton. When it comes to capital punishment, Kaine smokes, but doesn’t inhale; or inhales, but doesn’t smoke.)

Instead, we’re treated to a lot of happy talk about Kaine’s time in Honduras and how he fought housing discrimination in his younger days. Remember how they laughed whenever someone said Sanders had gotten arrested as part of the Civil Rights Movement? Suddenly, youth matters.

When I talked about the amnesia of the pundit class the other day, I was thinking they couldn’t remember what Nixon or Reagan said 40 years ago. But apparently they can’t even remember what they themselves said. Three months ago.

3.

Speaking of Kaine and abortion, there’s an interesting historical parallel here to note.

As I understand it, Kaine’s record on abortion as governor of Virginia was much more conservative than his record on abortion as senator from Virginia. As a Catholic, Kaine has always been personally opposed to abortion. And early in his career, he took some pretty bad stands.

But since he’s gotten into the Senate, Kaine’s gotten 100% ratings from NARAL and Planned Parenthood, by co-sponsoring a bill, for example, that would prohibit states from putting restrictions on abortion and insisting that Obamacare include greater access to contraception. Whether he’s given up the earlier bad stands—for example, backing the odious parental consent law and the equally odious “informed consent” law or the partial birth abortion ban—I don’t know.)

Lurking in the background for him, at least since 2008 when Obama was considering him as a VP choice, was the possibility of a seat on the national ticket. As he came closer and closer to the national stage, in other words, he “evolved” on this issue (as they say).

Which brings to mind nobody so much as another VP candidate from yesteryear: George H.W. Bush.

For years, in the 1960s and 70s, Bush was a pro-choice politician, with close ties to Planned Parenthood. So committed was he to reproductive rights that his nickname in Texas was “Rubbers.” Then, in 1980, as a spot on the national ticket came into view, he too “evolved.” To the right.

Not sure what any of this means, but I’m struck by the parallel.

P.S. On Facebook, the head of NARAL says:

I believe she chose Tim Kaine because she trusts the guy, and I trust her.

When Republicans say this kind of thing, we call it faith-based politics. Democratic skepticism, it ain’t.

4.

Whenever I pour a bit of cold water on the ahistorical commentary about Trump, I get charged with being indifferent to whether he wins or not. A commenter on this blog even compared me to people who yawned about Hitler. Which I found interesting, at the rhetorical level.

For decades, the Munich analogy was used by conservatives to say that liberals were soft on communism. Now it’s being used by liberals to say that leftists are soft on Trump.

Even when those leftists write whole books explaining to people that the reasonable, rational, prudential conservatives they think they know are in fact ultra-revanchist songstresses of domination and violence.

5.

Along the same lines, another meme I frequently see among the Clinton people and their supporters in the media is that we on the left are somehow indifferent to the fate of poor people and people of color who will be victimized by Trump’s policies .

Yet these very same people are rather blithe about the prospect of sending the US military off to fight Putin or whomever it is we’re now supposed to be willing to fight over NATO.

Now, it goes without saying that none of these people who are working themselves up into a froth over Trump’s remarks will ever have to pick up a gun and fight these wars. We’ve seen that script before, right? We had a word for that during the Bush years.

But, I wonder, who do these people actually think is going to pick up a gun and fight these wars against Putin? Who do they think actually signs up for America’s “all-volunteer” army is disproportionately drawn from if not the poor, the working class, and people of color.

 

Check Your Amnesia, Dude: On the Vox Generation of Punditry

Last night, Donald Trump shocked the world, or at least the pundit class, when the New York Times published a wide-ranging interview Trump had given the paper on the subject of foreign policy.

Trump said some scary things: that he didn’t think, for example, that the US should necessarily come to the aid of a NATO country if it were attacked by Russia.

But he also said some things that were true. Like this:

When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start talking about civil liberties, I don’t think we are a very good messenger.

And while the article makes a muchness of Trump’s refusal to pressure Turkey over its response to the failed coup, the fact is that Obama hasn’t done anything concrete on that score either (as the article acknowledges). Nor did Obama do much about the coup in Egypt or Honduras. To the contrary, in fact.

But that wasn’t the focus of last night’s chatter on Twitter. Instead, the pundits and experts were keen to establish the absolutely unprecedented nature of Trump’s irresponsibility: his recklessness when it came to NATO,  his adventurism, his sheer reveling in being the Bad Boy of US Foreign Policy: this, it was agreed, was new.

In a tweet that got passed around by a lot of journalists, Peter Singer, senior fellow at the New America Foundation (who’s written a lot of books on US foreign policy), had this to say:

It is the most irresponsible foreign policy statement by a presidential nominee of any party in my lifetime. https://t.co/V3C6nbp5wu

— Peter W. Singer (@peterwsinger) July 21, 2016

Hmm, let’s see.

Barry Goldwater said the US should consider using tactical nukes in Vietnam, which prompted one of the most famous campaign commercials of all time.

As Seth Ackerman quipped to me in an email:

TRUMP IS SO UNPRECEDENTED IN HIS RECKLESSNESS HE COULD LEAD TO A NUCLEAR BOMB GOING OFF RIGHT AFTER A LITTLE GIRL PICKS DAISIES IN A FIELD!!!!!!

And as Seth pointed out on Twitter, Goldwater wanted to hand the decision to launch nukes over to field commanders.

But Singer was born in 1974, so let’s stay within his lifetime.

In the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan claimed that:

SALT II was illegal, even though it had been ratified by Congress; negotiated and signed by the Carter Administration (and was only pulled from a Senate ratification vote after the invasion of Afghanistan);
the United States had “no deterrent whatsoever” against Soviet medium-range missiles targeting Europe, even though it had submarines with 400 nuclear warheads patrolling the Mediterranean and the Northeast Atlantic, not to mention the thousands of other warheads that could easily be rained down on the Soviets in a retaliatory strike;
the United States had “unilaterally disarmed” throughout the 1970s, even though the US had built up its nuclear stockpile from four to ten thousand warheads during that decade (actually, he said that in March 1981, two months after his inauguration, though he repeated the charge during the 1984 campaign).

In other words, it should be possible to talk about the very real and undeniable dangers of Trump without ignoring or reinventing the insanity of American history.

(To be fair, I suffer from my own version of this amnesia: every time a pundit makes an ahistorical claim, I shake my head and wonder, have we ever had such a historically unaware media?)

Jamelle Bouie, of Slate, made a similar claim as Singer: 

Seriously, is this the most dangerous thing a modern POTUS nominee has ever said? https://t.co/e9QWWUGLGK

— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) July 21, 2016

“Modern” is a slippery word, though I assume it includes Reagan.

But let’s move beyond the statement to the larger point it seems to be getting at: Trump is like nothing we’ve ever seen before in the realm of foreign policy.

This is a country, remember, where it was the operational policy of the government, at the highest levels, to be able to fight and win a nuclear war. That wasn’t just the crazy talk of Dr. Strangelove. That was the reality that Dr. Strangelove was satirizing.

Up through at least the first term of the Reagan Administration—and probably beyond—high officials in the national security establishment were talking about fighting and winning a nuclear war.

One of the US Army field manuals stated:

The US Army must be prepared to fight and win when nuclear weapons are used.

Richard Pipes, Harvard historian and senior adviser to Reagan’s National Security Council (also father of Daniel Pipes), had his position characterized thus in the Washington Post:

His strategy, which he says reflects official thinking, is a winnable nuclear war.

Even the official US Budget for FY 1983 stated:

US defense policies ensure our preparedness to respond to and, if necessary, successfully fight either conventional or nuclear war.

There’s a reason Bob Scheer titled his classic book on Reagan’s national security policies “With Enough Shovels.” (h/t Josh Cohen)

I’ll admit that I find it hard to take this ahistorical high dudgeon of the pundit class seriously.

Whenever I hear this kind of stuff—with all the faux-seriousness and operatic gnashing of teeth, the pompous heavy breathing, the weird identification with America’s global mission (as Tim Barker mused on Twitter, does Bouie seriously think the “end of US hegemony would be more dangerous than nuking a small post colonial state?”)—I wonder, whom are they performing for? Each other? Themselves? Political elites?

My mind wandered to Ted Knight’s Judge Smails from Caddyshack.

But there may something less funny going on here.

A lot of these pundits and reporters are younger, part of the Vox generation of journalism. Unlike the older generation of journalists, whose calling card was that they know how to pick up a phone and track down a lead, the signature of this younger crew is that they know their way around J-STOR.

Many of them have read the most up-to-date social science as well as the best history, from Ira Katznelson to Eric Foner and so on. Bouie, in particular, is among the most talented and learned of his generation. His articles, even when I disagree with them, are well-researched and grounded in the latest scholarship.

Yet so many of them seem to lack the most basic gut impulse of any historically minded person: if you think something is unprecedented, it’s probably not. Check your amnesia, dude.

Part of this is due, as David Marcus reminded me, to the fact that though some of them do read history, a lot of them tend toward the more ahistorical branches of the social sciences. Psychology and econ or the quantitative or rational choice parts of poli sci, without the more historically focused mediations of a subfield like American political development, which not only teaches us about the temporal dimensions of American politics (that allegedly permanent rules and norms sometimes change) but also about the temporal underpinnings of our knowledge of American politics. But that’s not all of it, I don’t think.

Though I’m a political theorist, one of the things I benefited from growing up when I did was that I had incredible history teachers: first in high school (Allan Damon, Tom Corwin, and Steve Houser, unbelievable all) and then as a history major in college (John Murrin, Arno Mayer, Lawrence Stone, among others). What all of these teachers gave me, beyond some rudimentary awareness of the past, was an unshakeable sense of the historical nature of knowledge. The sense that all of us are embedded in time, that when we look back to the past we’re doing so with questions from our present, that every consensus is contingent and provisional, that today’s knowledge is just tomorrow’s belief. Some people get this from Gadamer, I got it from E.H. Carr, which we read in high school European History. (The buzzing, the buzzing: another image from a book that I’ll never forget!)

I know this is nothing deep or fancy, but it does make me wonder if today’s generation of commentators, raised as so many are on the assumption that the biological sciences and social sciences—with neuroscience as the master mediator—are the source and model of all knowledge, are somehow at a deficit. Even when they read history: because they’re led to believe, once they’ve digested Katznelson or Foner or whomever, that they’re really getting the truth, the past as it was, without that sense that Katznelson on the New Deal is only this generation’s New Deal. And that tomorrow we’ll have another New Deal.

I’m not quite sure how far we can take this—sometimes, often, I feel paralyzed by the sense of relativism this leaves me with—but it does induce a certain humility.

And, as I said, a basic gut check when it comes to claims about the absolute novelty of our situation.