Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 558

TransCanada to Obama: Forget About Keystone

The company in charge of actually building the controversial Keystone pipeline that’s been more of a political football than hydrocarbon conveyance in recent years has asked the White House formally to suspend its already decidedly suspended permitting process. After waiting seven years in regulatory limbo, TransCanada doesn’t seem to have faith that the Obama administration is capable of making its mind up on the project that would connect Albertan oil sands projects with U.S. refineries on the Gulf coast. The FT reports:

[TransCanada] said on Monday it had written to John Kerry, the US secretary of state, saying it believed that “it would be appropriate at this time for the state department to pause in its review of the presidential permit application for Keystone XL.”

TransCanada explained that it had filed an application with the energy regulator in the state of Nebraska, which the pipeline is intended to cross, to take its preferred route. The regulator is expected to take seven to twelve months to review that proposal, the company said. While that process was going on the state department should suspend the federal decision, as it did during a previous period of argument over the route through Nebraska, last year.Unless Mr Obama chooses to rush a decision through in his last few months in office, that would mean a decision would be left to his successor.

There could be a number of factors at play in TransCanada’s decision. The company could simply be exhausted with dealing with the Obama administration, and might see continuing to pursue a permit in Obama’s final year in office a fruitless endeavor.

It likely also has an eye on oil markets and the shrinking (and in some case non-existent) profit margins in the oil sands projects Keystone is meant to service. In that context, requesting a postponement might be done with the hope that oil prices might rebound sometime in the coming years, and that, when that happens, Keystone will once again be up for review.Finally, it’s impossible to ignore the political calculus of TransCanada’s decision with next year’s elections looming. If that’s the real reasoning behind the company’s new strategy, it doesn’t seem to place much faith on its part in Hillary Clinton’s chances—she’s already come out against the pipeline.Up until now the White House was doing all of the can-kicking on Keystone, but now it seems all parties involve have an interest in delaying a final decision further. The rest of us will just have to endure the project’s lengthening life as a political football.

A Sea of Glory

In 2010 the Folger Theater presented Henry VIII, one of those plays by Shakespeare too rarely seen on the stage. Some scholars have even argued that John Fletcher wrote much of the play, with Shakespeare contributing only the punchier parts. Theater folks, who can be a superstitious lot (hence the practice of only referring to Macbeth as “the Scottish play”), are wary of it. Reportedly, a cannon fired as a special effect in one of the original productions of the play started a fire that burned the Globe Theater to the ground.

The Folger production was wonderful, and no unseemly pyrotechnics ruined the performance. One speech stuck out above all others—so much so that the day after seeing the play I edited it down a bit, Xeroxed it, and distributed to some of my students with whom I’d had an idle chat about how Shakespeare had never really spoken to them.The moment comes at the end of Act III, when Henry VIII’s puissant minister, Cardinal Wolsey—a commoner by birth, cunning, opulent, self-indulgent, pragmatic, and a loyal servant of the king—learns that Henry has decided to strip him of his titles and possessions. He addresses his remarks to his own loyal servant, Thomas Cromwell, who will in turn rise in the king’s favor—a tale recently and brilliantly retold by Hilary Mantel in her trilogy of historical novels beginning with Wolf Hall.

Farewell! a long farewell, to all my greatness!

This is the state of man: to-day he puts forthThe tender leaves of hopes; to-morrow blossoms,And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,And, when he thinks, good easy man, full surelyHis greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured,Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,This many summers in a sea of glory,But far beyond my depth: my high-blown prideAt length broke under me and now has left me,Weary and old with service, to the mercyOf a rude stream, that must for ever hide me.Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye:I feel my heart new open’d. O, how wretchedIs that poor man that hangs on princes’ favours!There is, betwixt that smile we would aspire to,That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin,More pangs and fears than wars or women have:And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,Never to hope again.….here take an inventory of all I have,To the last penny; ’tis the king’s: my robe,And my integrity to heaven, is allI dare now call mine own. O Cromwell, Cromwell!Had I but served my God with half the zealI served my king, he would not in mine ageHave left me naked to mine enemies.

“That’s Washington for you,” I told the students. Actually, Wolsey has something over a lot of contemporary politicians. Like many of Shakespeare’s greatest figures (think Richard II, for example), in the final calamity of his life he has learned something profound about himself. Admittedly, he has become wise too late, but then again, you can go through a great deal of wretchedness in politics without learning anything at all.

Wolsey’s words describe a complete Washington career. His are better than the usual metaphors of climbing the rungs of a ladder or shimmying up a slippery pole. The “tender leaves of hopes” followed by the “blossoms” and then being covered with thick heaps of “blushing honours” captures the springtime giddiness of a sudden ascent. The Wolseys of this world don’t climb step by step: they aspire, they flourish and flower, they spring into magnificence in some cases, not realizing, or perhaps not accepting, that blighting frosts come suddenly. They see the fruits of their greatness ripening, and, eyes fixed on those lovely things, do not notice the withering of the subterranean roots until it is too late.More poignant is his second metaphor: the boys gamboling about in the water on floats, not realizing that their sea of glory is, in fact, a deep and turbulent river in which they can drown, and that the swelling pride that keeps them buoyant can be pricked and deflated in a moment. And at that moment, it is not merely drowning, but rather an irreparable fall from grace, “like Lucifer, never to hope again.” Wolsey is left only with regret, and his compromised “integrity to heaven.”The irony of this is that Thomas Cromwell, to whom these parting words are addressed, will come to an even worse end. He will serve the king no less faithfully, and die on the scaffold—something of which Shakespeare’s audience would have been acutely aware. Some truths, unfortunately, are rarely learned from watching others. The Cromwells of this world may convince themselves that their blossoms will not delude them, or that the frosts won’t reach their roots, or that their floatation devices are made of durable stuff. But in the end, it is the same.It was refreshing the other week to see Congressman Paul Ryan thrust into the Speakership of the House of Representatives, a powerful position that he did not desire. He is a very un-Wolsey like figure, and he is highly unlikely to have occasion to make a Wolsey-like speech, but then again, in many respects he is unusual. Most aspiring politicians and officials—even some of my students, perhaps—think of the Potomac as a sea of glory. Those of us who have hiked the trails around it and observed it from the shore, however, know that below the surface its currents are treacherously swift, and that people really do drown in it.By the way, after discussing Wolsey’s speech, the students asked if we could begin reading Shakespeare together—and so we have, five years and going strong.

Whitewashing Putin’s Kleptocracy

It takes no less of an author than Peter Pomerantsev to write an extremely insightful book like Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible that reveals the surreal heart of Putin’s Russia. It is much harder to say what kind of author it would take to write a book on the surrealism penetrating America and the West as a whole, but Pomerantsev’s title would be a good fit if we could re-use it.

At a moment when Russia is under a richly deserved sanctions regime, when some call the present state of affairs a New Cold War, and when Putin’s ambitions are called the most dangerous threat to America by several high-ranking Pentagon and U.S. military officials, it doesn’t seem like the most propitious moment for an awards dinner for one of Putin’s “cronies”—much less one held in Washington by a federally funded U.S. institution.But, as the book says, everything is possible. And on November 3 the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a think tank that receives U.S. government funding, will bestow the Woodrow Wilson Award for Corporative Citizenship to Petr Aven, the chairman of the board of directors of Russia’s largest commercial bank, Alfa-Bank, and a member of the board of directors of LetterOne Group.It is true that Mr. Aven, unlike several other Russian businessmen, is not a subject of U.S. sanctions. It is also true that, by some accident or oversight, he is not often publicly presented as a “crony” of Putin. However, it is no less true that, prior to the Wilson Center’s award, Mr. Aven, unlike sanctioned Russian oligarchs, was endowed with a Russian state award by Putin personally.A brief review of the business record of Mr. Aven’s companies should be sufficient to add a not of controversy to the decision to give an award for corporate citizenship to such a businessmen. Aven’s record is marked by repeated and often acrimonious commercial or even legal disputes with partners, especially in the West. Cases such as Norwegian Telenor v Altima and British BP v AAR , in which BP’s U.S. CEO Robert Dudley was literally expelled from Russia and BP threatened to snatch homes of Russian oligarchs in London in return, are the first that come to mind.But the plan evidently is to convince us that nothing is true, and the Wilson Center has engaged powerful advocates who understand that this means everything is possible.The first of these is former BP CEO Lord Browne, who has apparently buried his personal knowledge of his Russian partners’ being “ruthless and dishonest”, as some documents submitted to court later revealed: last February he agreed to join ranks with them again. On November 3 Lord Browne will co-chair the awards dinner for Mr. Aven. In Putin’s Russia, it seems, “it’s nothing personal, just business.”Another co-chair of the event is no less prominent, and no less informed about the true state of play in Putin’s Russia, as well as the way Mr. Aven and his friends have been operating their business in Russia: former U.S. Ambassador to Russia James F. Collins, a senior associate of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.It is hard to believe that a former Ambassador to Moscow does not know (from “WikiLeaks” at least, if from no other source) how business transpires in a country described by Spanish prosecutor Jose Grinda Gonzales as a corrupt, autocratic Kleptocracy, centered on the leadership of Putin, in which officials, oligarchs, and organized crime are bound together in the creation and maintenance of a “virtual mafia state.” One supposes Ambassador Collins is going do his best to convince us that nothing is true—or at least that these things have nothing to do with Mr. Aven and his business record.The timing of this award seem rather propitious as well. But perhaps it is just a coincidence that Mr. Aven and LetterOne have recently initiated a charm offensive in the West in the wake of the British government’s decision last spring, citing concerns for national security, to order LetterOne to sell its North Sea gas fields within six months. Though Aven’s name was rarely mentioned publicly in regard to that British government order or the aforementioned business disputes, he was involved in more ways than just as a shareholder or corporate officer.Mr. Aven’s long-standing business relations to Putin personally are no big secret in Russia. The late Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who once was dubbed by Paul Klebnikov as “a Godfather of Kremlin,” admitted that it was Mr. Aven who introduced him to Putin. And Mr. Aven’s role during the birth of Putin’s kleptocracy, perfectly described by Karen Dawisha in her book Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia is certainly controversial, to say the least. It was Mr. Aven, who made it possible for Putin to originate at least part of his corruption schemes in St. Petersburg, which were later unsuccessfully investigated by the Sal’ye Commission and others.There is an abundance of other public information that ought to make one think twice before offering him anything like an Award for Corporative Citizenship. In normal circumstances such allegations would warrant, at a minimum, some in-depth investigation prior to the bestowal of any award.But then again everything is possible. All it takes a lucrative deal involving the sale of TNK-BP to Rosneft and a slick PR campaign to whitewash a soiled reputation. The same Wilson Center that not so long ago hosted a public presentation for Karen Dawisha’s aforementioned book—a book that, not incidentally, makes a number of accusations against Mr. Aven—now turns a blind eye on those accusations, as if nothing is true.If a Russian plutocrat can have his record whitewashed with the help of a federally funded U.S. institution, please tell me what, if anything, is not possible. And if you don’t accept this as evidence of the penetration of the Russian kleptocracy into the United States and the West as a whole—what Ilya Zaslavski characterizes as the Export of Corrosion —then please tell me what kind of evidence you would accept.

South Korea and Japan Draw Nearer

In the first bilateral talks between the two countries since 2012, South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed to speed up the resolution of the “comfort women” dispute, according to Reuters:

“Regarding the issue of “comfort women”, I believe we should not leave behind difficulties for future generations as we try to build a future-oriented cooperative relationship,” Abe told reporters in Seoul after the talks, which lasted about an hour and 40 minutes.

“It’s the 50th anniversary of the normalization of (Japan-South Korea) ties this year. Keeping that in mind, we’ve agreed to accelerate talks for the earliest possible resolution.”

The meeting was a diplomatic plus for Abe, who had sought two-way talks with Park amid a push by the United States for Japan and South Korea to improve relations in the face of an increasingly assertive China and an unpredictable North Korea.

Park told Abe that the dispute, which is over Japan’s responsibility to make amends for the sexual enslavement of Korean women during the 1930s and ’40s, was the “biggest stumbling block” in the path of better bilateral ties. Both leaders seemed to indicate that an agreement might come soon, perhaps even before the end of the year, though neither gave details about what it might look like.

The bilateral meeting came on the heels of a trilateral summit between Park, Abe, and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Seoul. China had been signaling a desire to ease tensions in the north, even as it raises them in the South China Sea. Beijing has sought to give the impression that it got what it wanted in Seoul, and all three leaders said that cooperation has been “completely” restored between them.Although the three countries did agree to resume negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear program and to work towards a free trade agreement, plenty of cause for tension remains. Japan and China continue to squabble over islands in the East China Sea, and Japan contests China’s activities in the South China Sea. In his meeting with Park, Abe made sure to emphasize the importance of U.S. freedom of navigation exercises.South Korea and Japan only hug when they must. If Tokyo and Seoul are talking about cooperating on contentious issues like comfort women, that suggests the two aren’t naively entering a détente with Beijing.

Breaking the Ivy League Monopoly

America’s top universities, for all their rhetoric about equality, diversity, and social justice, actually do far more to perpetuate and sustain the upper class than they do to promote those values, racking up billions in tax-exempt donations, connecting their disproportionately wealthy students to lucrative job opportunities, and fostering exclusive social networks of the rich and powerful. In his latest USA Today column, Glenn Reynolds highlights the extent of this problem, and offers a trio of (mostly) tongue-in-cheek proposals for bringing the Ivy League to heel:

We should eliminate the tax deductibility of contributions to schools having endowments in excess of $1 billion. At some point, as our president has said, you’ve made enough money. That won’t end all major donations to the Ivy League, but it will doubtless encourage donors to look at less wealthy and more deserving schools, such as Northern Kentucky University, recently deemed “more inspirational than Harvard” in the London Times Higher Education magazine.
We should require that all schools with endowments over $1 billion spend at least 10% of their endowment annually on student financial aid. That will make it easier for less wealthy students to attend elite institutions.
We should require that university admissions be based strictly on objective criteria such as grades and SAT/ACT scores, with random drawings used to cull the herd further if necessary. That will eliminate the Ivy League’s documented discrimination against Asians.

We don’t think this kind of heavy-handed state intervention is necessary—and Professor Reynolds, libertarian that he is, surely doesn’t either. But there are less extreme measures that really could be effective at knocking the Ivy League off of its pedestal.

One possibility is a system of national exams, sponsored by employers, that would allow students from less prestigious schools to demonstrate that they had learned as much as or more than Ivy grads. As it stands, the top companies companies tend to recruit only at the top schools, so it is difficult for students from West Texas University or California State Chico to demonstrate their qualifications. Hundreds of companies use university prestige as an imperfect proxy for intellectual ability.Needless to say, this system is deeply unfair. Whether or not someone impressed an admissions committee at age 17 (and admission committees are imbued with the usual higher education pieties and prejudices) is hardly the best way to measure what he or she has learned by age 22. People mature in different ways and at different paces, and use their time in college differently as well. Since it can be hard to perform poorly at grade inflation mills like Harvard, especially in the soft subjects, almost everybody who gets in graduates—no matter how little they learn.Imagine if a coalition of companies that hire large numbers of recent graduates (Bain, McKinsey, Google, Teach for America, etc.) on a national basis were to set up a system of exams that allowed students to demonstrate what they had learned and what they can achieve—and then those companies chose employees based on scores, with no regard to undergraduate institution. Some British companies have already taken steps in this direction. If American companies followed suit, they would unleash tremendous potential by broadening their applicant pool to a much greater number of potentially qualified candidates. They would also do more to promote social justice in America than armies of Ivy League diversity bureaucrats and Halloween costume police could do in a lifetime.

What Would Lincoln Do?

In the late 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt, outraged over U.S. Supreme Court decisions hostile to the New Deal, proposed expanding the number of Supreme Court justices. His “court-packing” scheme failed, and few of FDR’s admirers today view this episode as an admirable moment in his presidency.

Here’s a footnote to this bit of history: Both FDR and his Attorney General, Homer Cummings, tried to recruit Abraham Lincoln to their cause. After all, Roosevelt pointed out, the Great Emancipator himself had favored expanding the number of Supreme Court justices. After all, Cummings added, after the infamous Dred Scott case of 1857, in which the Court held that African Americans could not be citizens and that Congress had no power to exclude slavery from the territories, Lincoln too had strongly condemned the Supreme Court. He and FDR were of like mind on this point!The great Lincoln scholar David Donald, under whom I studied, years ago wrote a wonderful essay called “Getting Right with Lincoln.” Donald shows that, beginning shortly after Lincoln’s death in 1865 and continuing through the present, one of the most predictable and frequently recurring strategies in U.S. partisan politics is the attempt to recruit Lincoln. For example, during the political battles over Reconstruction in the late 1860s and 1870s, both Radical Republicans in Congress and their most hated enemies claimed Lincoln as their hero and guide. The result was what Donald calls “a ghoulish tugging at Lincoln’s shroud.”And that was only the beginning. In countless utterances over the decades, politicians and activists have cited Lincoln’s words and deeds in defense of—and also opposition to—the Greenback movement, Prohibition, the New Deal, states’ rights, socialism, communism, the Republican Party platform of the day, the Democratic Party platform of the day, and sundry other philosophies and causes. One of those recent causes has been gay rights.In the mid-1990s, shortly after David Donald published his award-winning biography, Lincoln, I had lunch with him in (yes, this is true) Lincoln, Massachusetts. He’d just completed a national book tour, and so I asked him: What question had he heard most often? Answer: “Was Lincoln gay?” It seems that many writers in recent years have speculated about Lincoln’s friendship with a young law partner, Joshua Speed, although most historians (Donald included) find little or no evidence that Lincoln was gay or that he ever had homosexual experiences. Nevertheless, by the 1990s, Lincoln had been recruited to yet another cause.Today we see another interesting effort to recruit Lincoln, this time in opposition to gay rights. And this time, as in the case of FDR’s defense of court-packing in the 1930s, the evidence on display consists of Lincoln’s views of the Supreme Court at the time of Dred Scott.Several weeks ago, more than sixty U.S. scholars—several of whom I know and respect—issued a public statement and a “Call to Action” in response to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the Court held that gay couples have the right to marry. The scholars find that the Court’s decision legalizing gay marriage nationwide is based on “no compelling reasoning” and is “without the slightest warrant in the text, logic, structure, or historical understanding of the Constitution.” As a result, they assert that the Court’s decision in Obergefell is “not the law of the land” and need not be treated as such by citizens and by U.S. elected officials. They repeatedly cite Lincoln to support their arguments and conclusions.Similarly, a small but visible group of writers and leaders in recent months—including two Republican presidential candidates, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum—have also cited Lincoln to justify their conclusion that U.S. public officials, individually and in tandem, have both a legal right and a moral obligation to refuse to obey the Court finding or recognize it as law.My own view is that the Supreme Court is and must remain our final arbiter regarding the Constitution’s meaning, the only exceptions being the processes of Constitutional amendment and the Court itself overturning previous decisions. Consequently, I do not believe that elected officials can lawfully choose to ignore decisions of the Supreme Court. Nor do I believe that state governments have a legal right to nullify Federal laws, including those stemming from the Supreme Court. Such actions are not lawful but revolutionary, and therefore can only be grounded philosophically in the right of revolution, which our nation’s founders admirably recognized and exercised in 1776.For these reasons, I reject as an appeal to lawlessness the astonishing claim made by the “Call to Action” scholars that U.S. citizens and officials are at liberty under our Constitution to defy the Supreme Court, provided that they have personally decided, as these scholars have, that the Court’s findings lack compelling reasoning and are without warrant in the Constitution. But I reject even more the hijacking of Abraham Lincoln to make this dubious argument, and now I’d like to try to explain why.In some cases, presenting as dispositive one or a very few sentences selected from a much larger corpus—let’s call this practice versification—is legitimate. If I ask you what the U.S. Constitution says about the establishment of religion, simply citing the First Amendment is enough to do the trick.With Lincoln, however, versification rarely works. In their “Call to Action,” defending their conclusion that Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage is “not the law of the land,” our scholars, citing one portion of one sentence from Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, report that

Lincoln warned that for the people and their elected leaders to treat unconstitutional decisions of the Supreme Court as a binding rule on anyone other than the parties to a particular case would be for “the people to cease to be their own rulers, having effectively abandoned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

Our scholars attempt to make very much of these 21 words from Lincoln. Indeed, on these thin grounds they erect three big claims.

They claim that Lincoln asserted that what he, Lincoln, viewed as erroneous Supreme Court decision is not binding on anyone except the parties to that particular case.


They assert that their proposed massive resistance strategy for opposing Obergefell is the same as Lincoln’s course of action in opposing Dred Scott.


They claim that for U.S. elected officials to defy or refuse to conform to the Obergefell decision (as Kim Davis, an elected county clerk, recently did in Kentucky) is to “stand with Lincoln against judicial despotism.” They add: “Like Lincoln, we will not accept judicial edicts that undermine the sovereignty of the people, the Rule of Law, and the supremacy of the Constitution.”

If these claims are true, Lincoln has been successfully recruited. But are they true? Does the verse these scholars cite adequately summarize what we need to know? Perhaps not.

Here is Lincoln in a campaign speech in July of 1856, a few months prior to the Dred Scott decision: “The Supreme Court of the United States is the tribunal to decide such questions [the constitutionality of laws on slavery], and we [Republicans] will submit to its decisions; and if you [Democrats] do also, there will be an end of the matter.”Here is Lincoln in June of 1857, responding to the recently announced Dred Scott decision:

We believe, as much as Judge Douglas, (perhaps more) in obedience to, and respect for the judicial department of government. We think its decisions on Constitutional questions, when fully settled, should control, not only the particular cases decided, but the general policy of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendments of the Constitution as provided in that instrument itself. More than this would be revolution. But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this. We offer no resistance to it.

Here is Lincoln in 1861, in his First Inaugural Address:

I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the Government. And while it is obviously possible that such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that it may be overruled and never become a precedent for other cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice.

The following sentences in this Address—including the 21 words from which the “Call to Action” gleans so much meaning—are these:

At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal. Nor is there in this view any assault upon the court or the judges. It is a duty from which they may not shrink to decide cases properly brought before them, and it is no fault of theirs if others seek to turn their decisions to political purposes.

If any reader can derive from these statements a coherent position—much less a clear statement of principles—about the Supreme Court generally or the Supreme Court in light of Dred Scott, that reader is more capable than I am.

Let’s try to pull the threads together as best we can. As late as 1856, Lincoln was asserting without qualification his view that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter on questions of slavery. But then came Dred Scott, which seems to have caused Lincoln to rethink his position. And what is that revised position?

He says that he opposes as “erroneous” the Court’s decision on slavery and wants to “do what we can do” to have it over-ruled, either by the Court itself or by amending the Constitution.


He says that that he and his allies offer “no resistance” to the Court’s decision.


He says that he “does not forget the position assumed by some” that the Supreme Court is the final authority on Constitutional questions.


He suggests that even what he and others view as “erroneous” Supreme Court decisions are not only “binding” on the parties themselves, but also deserve from all departments of government “very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases.”


He says that, in a free society, policies regarding “vital questions” cannot be “irrevocably fixed” by the Supreme Court “the instant they are made in ordinary litigation.”


He says that Supreme Court decisions on Constitutional questions, “when fully settled,” should control “the general policy of the country,” and he warns that any alternative to this principle would be “revolution.”

While it may be hard—certainly I find it hard—to deduce from these various statements a clear understanding of what, exactly, Lincoln is saying, it seems very clear that there are certain things that Lincoln is not saying.

He did not say (as our scholars say he did) that what he or others view as an erroneous decision of the Supreme Court is not binding on anyone except the parties to the dispute.


He did not say (as our scholars do, in his name) that Americans should rise up against “lawless judges” and “refuse to accept judicial edicts” which they find offensive or believe to be unconstitutional.


He did not say (as our scholars do, in his name) that under our Constitution, U.S. elected officials may lawfully defy rulings of the Supreme Court with which they disagree.

In other words, he did not say any of the main things that our scholars, in their “Call to Action,” assert or strongly suggest that he did say.

It strikes me as ironic that the “Call to Action” scholars ascribe to Lincoln a political temperament that in truth was wholly alien to him: the temperament of extremism. It commonly expresses itself in insular self-righteousness, angry denunciations of everyone except fellow true believers, and political action in which doctrinal purity is the highest concern. Lincoln was often surrounded by such people, as the mid-19th century was arguably the angriest and most polarized era in U.S. history. But he was never one of them.Lincoln had deep convictions, and ended up giving his life for them, but he was remarkably non-dogmatic. Politically, he was often noncommittal and often seemed to want things both ways. He would confuse his friends and incite his enemies by frequently telling them, “My policy is to have no policy.” He would change his mind, equivocate, propose half-measures which displeased everyone. The ideologues and purists within his own party—men such as Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and Horace Greeley—were usually exasperated with him and often even furious.Stylistically, he nearly always chose humor over vitriol, understanding over judgment, telling stories over delivering lectures, and making suggestions over giving orders to those who reported to him. A strong and confident man, but one who also experienced dark depression, he was mild-mannered. His capacity for empathy was striking to the people around him.He was not a member of a political faction or caucus. He was not the advocate of a doctrine. He had a remarkable ability to work with, and ultimately win the loyalty of, leaders of nearly diametrically opposed views. All his life Lincoln told people that Henry Clay of Kentucky, often called “The Great Compromiser”, was his “beau ideal of a statesman.”But our scholars want to turn this decidedly non-dogmatic man into a dogmatist. They seek to enlist Lincoln in support of an extremist idea that Lincoln not only never endorsed, but that he opposed vigorously. Lincoln deeply opposed slavery. That’s one reason why the Dred Scott decision so shocked and distressed him, and why he was so determined to oppose it. But even more than slavery—as Lincoln made clear beyond doubt in his famous letter to Horace Greeley in 1862—Lincoln opposed the idea that Americans may lawfully defy or abrogate Federal laws that they oppose.Indeed, as Lincoln understood it, the Civil War was fought over precisely this issue. The entire goal of his presidency, as he told Greeley, was to “save the Union.” And in Lincoln’s view, what exactly would destroy the Union? Not slavery, as much as Lincoln detested slavery, and not flawed Supreme Court decisions. Lincoln believed that the Union would only be destroyed—just as for four terrible years it nearly was destroyed—by some states and leaders successfully claiming the right to take the nation’s laws into their own hands, defying the national government and flouting our only established procedures for deciding, even as we painfully disagree, what the Constitution means. Far from endorsing a way of thinking and acting that is so conducive to lawlessness, Lincoln gave his life in order to defeat it.Lincoln was a poet-president and probably the greatest American of his generation. Our least-educated President, he may have been our wisest and most empathetic. He likely saved the country that he died for. We continue to live in his shadow, and his words continue to haunt and inspire us. As Edwin Stanton said on the morning Lincoln died, Lincoln belongs to the ages.In this light, asking ourselves today “What would Lincoln do?” is understandable and proper. But we should also appreciate why the world has little noted and not long remembered those countless attempts since 1865 to use Lincoln in the service of small orthodoxies and partisan political quarrels. Lincoln’s legacy—everything he stood for—is unsuited to these narrow purposes, which helps to explain why we care about him in the first place. We’ll always be trying to get right with Lincoln, but our efforts will disappoint unless we also try to get Lincoln right.

Denmark to Bernie: Stop Dissing Us with That Word

The Danes are worried that Bernie Sanders is giving them a bad name. As Matt Yglesias notes at Vox:

Bernie Sanders has long referred to himself as a socialist rather than a member of the Democratic Party, which has naturally lead to a lot of questions about what socialism means to him. He consistently references the social models of the Nordic states — and especially Denmark — as his idea of what democratic socialism is all about. But in a speech Friday evening at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said that while he’s flattered to see Denmark discussed in a widely-watched US presidential debate he doesn’t think the socialist shoe fits.

“I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism,” he said, “therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”In Rasmussen’s view, “the Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.”

No doubt the Danes are worried that if international investors thought they were taking Bernie Sanders’ advice on economics, they would have a much harder time sustaining the high standards of living that come from living in a market-driven economy.

In any case, for many years now the Scandinavian countries, like the rest of Europe, have been moving away from the blue model policies that dominated the postwar era, mostly for the same reasons that we have been doing it here in the U.S. Policies that worked relatively well in a closed, steady national economy don’t work nearly as well in a global economy characterized by rapid economic change and technological progress.There are blue nostalgists in Europe, as there are here, and they attract real public sympathy. The trouble is that the old policies don’t give the old results anymore. Even the French Socialist Party, much against its will, has had to give up much its neo-blue model agenda. Germany’s current success rests on the very non-blue labor market and welfare reforms that the Social Democratic Party enacted into law the last time it was in power. All across Europe, the countries that are reforming their labor markets and pension systems, opening themselves to more competition, fighting structural deficits, and otherwise migrating away from the kind of policies Bernie Sanders longs for are doing better than those who haven’t been able to make the shift.

Abbas Gets Something Right

A third Intifada may be brewing in Jerusalem, but rhetorically at least, the head of the Palestinian Authority has made a few important concessions. (Or, depending on how one looks at it, acknowledgements of reality.) The Times of Israel reports:

Mahmoud Abbas assured Dutch Jews that he neither intends to abandon the Oslo Accords nor insist on the absorption of millions of Palestinians into Israel.

“We never said we were going to cancel the Oslo Accords,” Abbas said Friday during a meeting near The Hague with members of the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, or CIDI, Dutch Jewry’s main pro-Israel advocacy organ and watchdog on anti-Semitism.“We are not going to cancel, we will not cancel anything,” he added, as long as “Israel respects its obligations.”On September 30, at UN headquarters in New York, Abbas said: “We cannot continue to be bound by these signed agreements with Israel” because “the status quo cannot continue.”At the meeting, Abbas also said he and the Palestinian Authority “never asked anyone to boycott Israel,” only products produced in the settlements. Asked about what Ramallah calls the “right of return” of several million Palestinians to what is today Israel proper, he said: “I am not asking for a right of return for six million Palestinians; I want a solution for them.”

Abbas is right: millions of Palestinians can’t and won’t return to Israel. But they need a solution. There won’t be a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute until the international community develops a plan that will grant Palestinians passports, full rights of economic and political integration, and a mix of compensation and assistance to begin new lives. Even then, progress will be slow, as many Palestinians will prefer to remain in the “resistance” rather than accept this kind of solution.

But the Israel-Palestine problem is much bigger than simply drawing boundaries between Israeli and Palestinian states. It is about securing a peaceful and dignified future for both peoples. One of the reasons that the international peace process has made such slow progress is that the wider needs of the Palestinian people have never really been taken into account—and there can’t be a solution for the people of Israel unless there is also a solution for the people of Palestine.

China Conducts Live Fire Drills

A day after the United States sailed a missile destroyer within 12 miles of one of the submerged reefs built up by China into an island in the South China Sea, the PLA apparently sent a squadron of destroyers from its South Sea Fleet for a series of exercises in the area. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Reports on the exercises, which included live firing, didn’t specify where they took place but said they involved aircraft and warships from China’s southern Guangzhou Military Region and the South Sea Fleet, whose primary area of responsibility is the South China Sea. They featured simulations of actual wartime conditions and were aimed at improving combat readiness, according to the reports published on 81.cn, the People’s Liberation Army’s official web portal.

The reports didn’t refer to the Oct. 27 patrol conducted by a U.S. Navy destroyer close to Chinese-built islets in the South China Sea to assert freedom of navigation in the area, the subject of competing territorial claims between China and several Southeast Asian countries.

The People’s Liberation Army web portal announced that the ships had gone to a “certain” sea and carried out air defense, anti-submarine and surface warfare drills, which included shooting down a target simulating an incoming missile. J-11 fighters were also scrambled from what Chinese analysts are guessing is Woody Island in the Paracels—China’s only active military airbase in the South China Sea—to practice attacking naval targets.

The United States Department of Defense has announced that it plans to carry out as many as two “freedom of navigation” exercises in the South China Sea each quarter and has urged other countries to do the same. In a video conference between PLA Admiral Wu Shengli and his U.S. counterpart, Admiral John Richardson, last Friday, Wu is said to have warned the United States about the dangers of “shooting accidentally while polishing a gun.”Although heightened tensions mean that no one can rest easy, it’s reassuring to hear the Administration sound more definite about its plans. Finally.

Erdogan Divides and Rules

The politics of division and fear win a big victory in Turkey. Reuters reports:

With 99 percent of votes counted, the AKP was on 49.4 percent, according to state-run broadcaster TRT, giving it 316 of parliament’s 550 seats. The main opposition CHP was at 25.4 percent.[..]

The pro-Kurdish HDP, which scaled back its election campaign after its supporters were targeted in the Ankara suicide bomb attack that killed more than 100 people on Oct. 10, was on 10.7 percent, according to TRT. It won 13 percent in June.The nationalist MHP, which was another casualty of the rise in AKP support, saw its share of the vote drop to 12 percent from 16.5 percent in June.

Erdogan came to power years ago winning Kurdish votes on the strength of promises to heal the country’s ethnic divisions and dismantle the authoritarian structures of Kemalist Turkey. This time he won by demonizing the Kurds, fanning flames of division—and winning right-wing nationalist voters who prefer a strong government, even if it is Islamist, to weak coalitions at a time of national emergency.

That Turkish voters went for stability makes a certain amount of sense: a look at neighboring Syria and Iraq provides a powerful reminder of just how bloody chaos and anarchy can be.Turkey today is beleaguered as never before. An aggressive Russia has attacked Ukraine on the Black Sea, established a beachhead in Syria, and violated Turkish airspace. Turkey itself is trapped between its hatred of Assad, its fear of the Syrian Kurds, and concerns about ISIS and other radical groups operating in its near borders. Relations with Egypt have not healed, and its key neighbors—Greece, Iraq, and Syria—are all economic disasters.The strong tilt toward authoritarian rule that President Erdogan has demonstrated in recent years has alienated any friends he once had in the west and divided Turkey’s Islamists. Newspapers and television stations have been closed, journalists killed, and a climate of intimidation and fear has descended on what, just a few years ago, was widely hailed as a role model for Islamic democracy around the world.The external pressures on Turkey seem likely to grow, and so, too, the country’s drift from democracy appears fated to continue. Foreign investors may be temporarily reassured that the question mark over Turkey’s political stability has disappeared, at least in the short term, but it seems unlikely at this point that the overall tendency of Turkish policy will reassure them for long.Erdogan is not without assets, however. The EU desperately needs his help in stemming the flow of refugees. The Europeans aren’t just going to pay him cash for his cooperation on the refugee front; they are also likely to ignore human rights issues as long as they need help. The Americans, too, thanks to a regional strategy that has opened the door to Russia and given Iran some enticing strategic opportunities, are likely going to be too busy fighting fires and looking for allies to give President Erdogan too much of a tongue lashing about human rights. Capitalizing on Turkey’s strategic value looks like his smartest play.It has, all told, been less than a glorious decade for Turkey. This week’s election does not herald a change for the better.