Would Economic Populism Turn the White Working Class Democratic? By Jason Willick.

Would Economic Populism Turn the White Working Class Democratic? By Jason Willick. The American Interest, July 29, 2015.

What is the matter with America? By Hisham Melhem. Al Arabiya News, July 26, 2015.

Revenge of the Radical Middle. By Matthew Continetti. Washington Free Beacon, July 24, 2015. Also at National Review.

Yes I said it: Donald Trump supporters are living a childlike fantasy land. By Joan Walsh. Salon, July 31, 2015.

This is how the clowns took over: The sad history of the spectacle of a Fox News debate starring front-runner Donald Trump. By Heather Cox Richardson. Salon, August 2, 2015.


Willick:

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders delivered a sharp critique of the state of the Democratic Party in an extensive interview, released yesterday, with Vox’s Ezra Klein:

I think it would be hard to imagine if you walked out of here or walked down the street or went a few miles away from here and you stopped somebody on the street and you said, “Do you think that the Democratic Party is the party of the American working class?” People would look at you and say, “What are you talking about?”

There was a time — I think under Roosevelt, maybe even under Truman — where it was perceived that working people were part of the Democratic Party. I think for a variety of reasons, a lot having to do with money and politics, that is no longer the case. In my view that is exactly what shouldn’t be happening. Instead of spending all of our time raising money, I think we should go out organizing people and getting them to unite around a progressive agenda which expands the middle class which tells the billionaire class that they cannot have it all, which says to corporate America, “You’re going to have to start paying your fair share of taxes,” which says we’re going to raise the minimum wage, we’re going to make college available to all regardless of their income, that we are going to have pay equity for women workers, that we are going to create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. You need a progressive agenda, then you need the ability to go out and organize people.

Sanders’ central insight—that the New Deal Democrats were a working class party, but the modern Democrats are not—is clearly correct, even if the party doesn’t like to acknowledge it. Blue collar workers were at the center of the New Deal coalition, while today’s white working class voters cast their ballots overwhelmingly for the GOP.

Why the shift? Sanders suggests that it has to do with “money and politics.” He doesn’t spell out what that means, exactly, but it seems to points to his belief that the Democrats have abandoned robust social welfare programs in favor of a more centrist, pro-corporate economic program. This contrasts with the rather more self-satisfied explanation that some on the elite left have offered—namely, that whites without a college education are a lost cause because conservatives trick them into voting Republican by exploiting their latent prejudices and resentments.

Sanders’ proposed solution to the Democrats’ poor showing among the white working class is well known: a hard-left economic populist agenda, complete with dramatic minimum wage increases, high-end tax hikes, massive government spending on and infrastructure and education, and invective against the superrich—in other words, a restoration of the blue model and then some. He’s not alone; the rest of the party is signing on to some of these economic proposals as well.

But would an economic populist program actually wrest the white working class from the GOP? Perhaps it will move the needle temporarily, but the genuinely working class party of Truman and Roosevelt simply cannot be resurrected in the foreseeable future. The economic model that existed in the New Deal era, and that the New Deal political coalition relied upon, is deteriorating—not only because of policy choices, as Sanders suggests, but also because of irreversible trends in technology, globalization, and demography. Private sector unions will never reattain the level economic and political might they wielded in the 1950s no matter how the Supreme Court rules on right-to-work statutes. And shoring up the public benefits system devised in the New Deal would require large tax increases—not only upper-end tax hikes, but middle-class tax hikes as well—that would risk splintering the Democratic coalition.

Then, of course, there is culture. As the white working class began to slip away from the Democrats in the 1960s, the party drifted leftward culturally—a process that is once again picking up steam today. In important (though qualified) ways, upper class liberals are further to the left culturally than working class voters. So in addition to economic populism, winning back blue collar whites would probably require adopting a softer tone on cultural questions—something that would not please culturally liberal constituencies (like Silicon Valley tycoons) that provide the Democratic party with critical support.

Matthew Continetti has perceptively written that “there are two Republican parties, an elite party of the corporate upper crust and meritocratic winners that sits atop a mass party of whites without college degrees whose worldviews and experiences and ambitions could not be more different from their social and economic betters.” In the same way, there are two Democratic parties; an elite party of affluent white urban cultural liberals that sits atop a coalition of identity groups—blacks, hispanics, LGBT people, single women, and young people. Bernie Sanders wants to win back some of the disaffected whites who currently find themselves in the Republican camp, and re-constitute the singular New Deal Democratic Party of yore. But given existing economic and social trends, we may be stuck with two Democratic parties—and two Republican parties—for the foreseeable future.

Mayor “Know-It-All” Could Use a Lesson in Humility. By Michael Goodwin.

Mayor “know-it-all” could use a lesson in humility. By Michael Goodwin. New York Post, July 22, 2015.

Goodwin:

The lefty mayor traveled to the Vatican to meet the lefty pope yesterday, but failed to learn anything new. Count that as another missed opportunity to be a better mayor.

Had Bill de Blasio done his homework, he would have copied Pope Francis’ recent confession that he, the pontiff, was wrong to ignore the middle class.

Asked during his down-with-capitalism trip to Latin America why he rarely speaks about the “working, tax-paying” middle class, the pope reflected a humility that would be shocking if it came from Mayor Know-It-All.

“You’re right,” Francis admitted. “It’s an error of mine not to think about this.”

Bill de Blasio, pay attention!

Instead, the mayor is so hellbent on beating to death the income-inequality, climate-change spiel that he forgets the middle class is in the middle for a reason — it’s the largest segment of the population. The pope noticed the middle is shrinking, and perhaps one day, he’ll also come to realize that the progressive policies he and de Blasio push are a big reason why.

Soak-the-rich nostrums, coupled with invitations for the poor to sign up for permanent government dependency, hurt everyone except the ruling class. As Willie Sutton might have said, the middle class is where the money is, so it always gets stuck with the bill.

Now, the middle class is as much a state of mind as it is an income group. The term defines the broad mass of people who live an ordered, responsible life in the expectation they are creating a better future by sacrificing now.

They are aspirational investors who believe life’s compounded benefits are produced by hard work and delayed gratification. Whatever their race or ethnicity, they practice the Protestant work ethic, which formed the backbone of American capitalism.

The middle class works for a living, pays its own way and raises children to be good students and law-abiding citizens. They make good neighbors and stable communities, and struggle up life’s hills without undue complaints or demands for the fruit of others’ labor.

Naturally, de Blasio ignores them when he isn’t undermining them. They are irrelevant to his vision of New York, where government commands the heights and presides over redistribution schemes that, despite good intentions, never lift the poor.

As historian Fred Siegel says, liberals want to deregulate morals and regulate everything else. True to form, de Blasio demonizes cops and orders them to cut down on aggressive policing and forces schools to stop suspending disruptive students.

In both instances, bad behavior is endorsed as normal, while those who behave properly wonder why they bother playing by the rules. The lack of clear incentives and disincentives corrodes the quality of life for everyone.

The de Blasio ilk also undermine social norms by accusing the nation of being unfair, unjust and in need of sweeping change. They treat as shnooks those who believe America is still the land of opportunity, while rewarding those who burn, riot and loot. Illegal immigrants are welcomed with open arms and handouts, while taxpayers struggling to make ends meet are deemed bigots if they object.

Their policies help create the problems progressives rail against. By grabbing ever more power, socialist-style planners sap private initiative and curb the liberty necessary for the pursuit of individual happiness. Government then promises to solve resulting unhappiness with even more government.

Their failure is proven repeatedly throughout history, but arrogant progressives can’t resist the temptation to spend other people’s money, so history repeats itself.

Any excuse for more power will do, though few are as flimsy as the Vatican meeting on “Modern Slavery and Climate Change.”

It sounds like an old Flip Wilson joke — “the devil made me do it.” Yet there they were, the pope and about 60 mayors, promising to shackle entrepreneurs and save the middle class from freedom.

“Is it not the definition of insanity to propagate corporate policies and consumer habits that hasten the destruction of the Earth?” Rev. de Blasio asked.

There’s no chance our moralizing mayor will lead by example, so walking to work and giving up air conditioning are out. The most we can hope for is that, upon his return, his day job leaves him no time for preaching about the evils of progress.

Tomi Lahren: A 22-Year Old Jacksonian News Anchor Blasts Obama’s Failure to Confront Radical Islam.

Tomi’s Red, White, Blue & Unfiltered Final Thoughts the Slaughter of 4 Marines by Another “Mohammad.” Video. On Point with Tomi Lahren, July 18, 2015. YouTube.

On Point with Tomi Lahren YouTube channel.

Conservative anchor Tomi Lahren, 22, becomes viral star with passionate rant against Obama. By Kelly McLaughlin. Daily Mail, July 20, 2015.

The one-time intern dating a SEAL who is the Right’s new poster girl: How gun-loving, straight-talking Tomi Lahren became the newest thorn in Obama’s side – but don’t dare call her a bimbo! By Kelly McLaughlin. Daily Mail, July 21, 2015.

This is the hunky Navy SEAL boyfriend of conservative TV news anchor Tomi Lahren – who inspired her tirade against President Obama and his “half-baked” ISIS policy. By Ryan Parry. Daily Mail, July 22, 2015.

Watch This TV Host SCHOOL Obama… Says What We’re ALL Thinking. By Michelle Jesse. Allen West.com, July 19, 2015.

Fox News interviews Tomi Lahren about viral rant demanding Obama call Tenn. shooting radical Islam. Video. The Right Scoop, July 21, 2015. Also at Daily Mail.

News anchor slams Obama, his “half-baked, tip-toe” Middle East policies in on-air rant: “Put the fear of God in their desert!” By Meg Wagner. New York Daily News, July 21, 2015.

News Host Tomi Lahren’s Obama Takedown Is a Hit in Certain Circles. By Ron Dicker. The Huffington Post, July 21, 2015.

How One America News Is Positioning Itself to be the Next Fox News. By Emma Roller. National Journal, March 17, 2015.

CPAC 2015: Tomi Lahren OANN. Video. The ACU, February 28, 2015. YouTube. Also here, here.




CPAC Speaker Tomi Lahren Zings Hillary’s Mannish Pantsuit. By Pam Key. Breitbart, February 28, 2015.

CPAC speaker calls Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren “old, rich, white, males.” By Tony Ortega. Raw Story, February 28, 2015.

Israel and the Palestinians: An Existential War of Blood and Faith (incomplete draft 1)

I and my brother against my cousin. Middle Eastern tribalism: A Bedouin camp in the Transjordan in the 1890s. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

By Michael Kaplan

The conflicts of the twenty-first century are shaping up, as strategic analyst Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters predicted, to be “wars of blood and faith.” This is true of the civil war in Syria and similar conflicts across the developing world, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and even America’s post-9/11 war with radical Islam. Jacksonian America is after all a folk community that embodies the blood and faith element of American life (just listen to Toby Keith). These wars are driven by the existential issues of tribal and religious identity: Who am I and who is God? Is God a kind, loving, and merciful father, or is he a harsh, hate-filled, and punitive tyrant? “Will the god of love and mercy triumph over the god of battles?” Colonel Peters asks. Millions will die in the coming years trying to answer these questions.

These conflicts are made even more savage by the pressures of globalization. A recent study by Hebrew University political scientist Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom asserts that while globalization “has increased interpersonal contact between individuals from culturally diverse backgrounds,” it has not promoted greater tolerance or acceptance of difference. Nor has it promoted religious liberty and protection of minority groups. Just look at the Muslim Brotherhood’s bloody jihad against Coptic Christians in Egypt. Instead globalization’s freewheeling cultural diversity and upheaval “induces perceived threat to a hegemonic religion, which leads to more restrictions on religious freedom.” People really don’t like having cultural and religious differences shoved in their faces. This is just as true of subgroups – smaller tribal, family, and cult identities – within an ethno-religious society, as for example the intensifying conflict between ultra-Orthodox Haredim and the Israeli mainstream over issues of female sexuality and military service. Ben-Nun Bloom and her co-authors conclude:

that increasing awareness of diverse cultures, ideas and traditions as a result of globalization increases the perception of threat to religious, cultural and national integrity and results in a backlash that manifests itself in distrust of and even aggressive attitudes towards alien cultures and lifestyles. Globalization thus creates a threat to the sense of group integrity, which in turn leads to fears of loss of identity and the sense of a disintegrating community and generates strong resistance towards other value systems, such as other religions.

In fact globalization is provoking its opposite: a re-tribalization of much of the world. Faced with moral chaos through the overthrow of age-old customs and values by globalization, people are falling back on their primal tribal identities. Or to borrow Tom Friedman’s metaphor, people are rejecting the Lexus for the Olive Tree. Ethnic street gangs, usually linked to the drug trade, are the new tribes of urban America’s economic and spiritual wastelands. God Himself, Ralph Peters writes, is being re-tribalized. “Far from monolithic, both the Muslim and Christian faiths are splintering, with radical strains emerging that reject the globalization of God and insist that His love is narrow, specific, and highly conditional.” This is not a recipe for peaceful coexistence.

Political scientist Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom, Hebrew University

Ethno-religious conflicts are prime examples of a central paradox of human nature: the connection between violence and sociality. Human nature is tribal and people divide the world into “us” and “them”; and while the boundaries of what constitutes “us” and “them” changes over time, “them” are by definition the enemy who must be defeated and annihilated. Sociability, kindness, and empathy are reserved exclusively for those who are within the group. Those outside the group are treated as less than human. These traits have deep roots in our evolutionary past; we share them with our closest relatives, the chimps. Conflict and violence between groups (such as rival bands of chimps, Jacksonian America and the Indians, or Israel and the Palestinians) actually fosters social cooperation, altruism, and even self-sacrifice within the group or tribe. Those groups that are more cohesive and organized are in a better position to defend their existence and triumph over less cohesive enemies. Along these lines, the late Judge Robert Bork observed, “Real human beings do not have any unfulfilled capacity for love, or at least not a large one; they simply do not regard men as infinitely precious, whatever the homilist may say on Sunday; and they lack the boundless energy and selflessness required to will themselves to brotherhood.” This is especially true for those outside one’s tribe. These tribal imperatives continue to drive much of human behavior in the globalizing world of the twenty-first century, making it more difficult for communities divided by blood and faith to coexist in peace.

We should also note the sexual and demographic dimension in ethno-religious violence. It’s no coincidence that Islamist terrorists from Al Qaeda to Hamas are drawn to martyrdom by the promise of 72 virgins awaiting them in Allah’s paradise. The Arab Muslim world has a serious demographic problem: a surplus of young men with little prospect of productive employment or marriage.

Abstract principles of justice and morality, the fruit, as Amos Oz says, of the union between the Judeo-Christian tradition and Western liberal humanism, are the hallmark of a civilized society. They are the building blocks for the rule of law, democracy, and the culture of liberty, and should always be fostered in the life of a nation, which for 65 years Israel has strived to do. In the fullness of time the Palestinians and the Arab Muslim world may come to share these values with Israel. But despite a century of Wilsonian idealism, these principles have little or no place in the Hobbesian world of international relations. For a nation surrounded by immemorial tribal enemies waiting to devour it, the only morality is survival. In the existential war of blood and faith in which Israel is engaged, there is no substitute for victory.

See also: The Middle East’s Tribal DNA. By Philip Carl Salzman. NJBR, November 5, 2013.

The Breakup of the Kingdom of David: Biblical Geopolitics and the Limits of Statism (incomplete draft 1)

By Michael Kaplan

Limestone relief of Pharaoh Shoshenq I (biblical Shishak), Temple of Amun at Karnak, Egypt, listing cities conquered in his invasion of Israel.  Digital Karnak, UCLA.

In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, King Shishak of Egypt came up against Jerusalem; he took away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king’s house; he took everything. He also took away all the shields of gold that Solomon had made; so King Rehoboam made shields of bronze instead, and committed them to the hands of the officers of the guard, who kept the door of the king’s house. As often as the king went into the house of the Lord, the guard carried them and brought them back to the guardroom.

—1 Kings 14: 25-28. New Revised Standard Version


Israel’s King Solomon, whose wealth and wisdom have become the stuff of legend (and in the judgment of some scholars greatly exaggerated), died in 922 BC after a reign according to the Bible of nearly forty years. The king’s death was a moment of grave crisis for the Israelite monarchy created by Solomon’s father King David some 80 years earlier. Through war, diplomacy, treachery, and occasional cruelty, David had succeeded in forging a disparate group of loosely confederated highland tribes, clans, independent villages and Canaanite city-states, under constant threat from their richer and more powerful Philistine neighbors, into a new bureaucratic dynastic state: Israel. David’s Israel, with its new royal capital Jerusalem, was the first independent territorial state under local leadership ever to emerge in the land then called Canaan, later to be called Eretz Yisrael or Palestine.

David, in the judgment of his most recent biographer, “was a successful monarch, but he was a vile human being.” He is the pivotal figure of the Bible and the central political figure in Jewish history: the founding father of the Israelite nation who established Jerusalem as the focus of Jewish, and later Christian, religious faith, achievements which reverberate to the present day. The historical David was a masterful political leader and military strategist. He was also a cunning Near Eastern warlord and despot in the mold of Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad, who was transformed over the course of several centuries into the ideal king of the Judeo-Christian tradition, “a man after God’s own heart,” and the prototype of the Messiah. This process began during Solomon’s reign with the writing of an apology for David’s life and actions, a masterpiece of literature and propaganda later incorporated into the biblical books of Samuel. The Israel reborn in 1948 was the deliberate re-creation of David’s Israel in modern guise. As Joel Baden writes, the founders of the Zionist state “chose the name of David’s unified nation, linking the emergence of Israel in the twentieth century CE with the emergence of Israel in the tenth century BCE. . . . Geographically, politically, and ideologically, the Israel we know today is the embodiment of David’s legacy.”

The idealized David by Michelangelo. Wikipedia.

In 961 BC as David lay dying, his favorite wife Bathsheba, in league with her one time adversary the Prophet Nathan, engineered a palace coup that brought her son Solomon to the throne. Solomon built on David’s achievements, using diplomacy and dynastic marriages with princesses from neighboring states, to create a network of trade and commerce that enriched his kingdom. Yet Solomon’s autocratic rule, his imposition of high taxes and forced labor to support his public works program and opulent royal lifestyle, his favoritism toward his own southern tribe of Judah at the expense of the northern Israelite tribes, led to growing popular resentment. When Solomon’s son and successor Rehoboam went to the northern Israelite cultic center at Shechem (modern Nablus) to be anointed king by an assembly of northern elders, he arrogantly refused their demands that he lighten the state’s burden of taxation and conscription. Rejecting the counsel of his father’s advisors who urged him to compromise with the elders, and goaded on by his hotheaded young retainers, the king told the assembly, “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke; my father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.” (1 Kings 12:14). This was not what the elders hoped to hear. Seeing that they could expect no redress from the king the northern Israelites raised the banner of rebellion:

What share do we have in David?

   We have no inheritance in the son of Jesse.

To your tents, O Israel!

   Look now to your own house, O David.

When King Rehoboam, in a further display of royal arrogance and stupidity, sent Adoniram ben Abda, his minister of forced labor, to whip the rebels into submission, they stoned the hapless official to death. The king barely escaped with his own life by jumping into his chariot and fleeing back to Jerusalem. The northern assembly then chose Jeroboam ben Nebat, a former Solomonic administrator who had launched an unsuccessful rebellion against the old king, as king of a separate northern kingdom which took the name Israel. Rehoboam was left to rule the rump southern kingdom of Judah. The unified Israelite monarchy was never restored.



Khirbet Qeiyafa, a Judahite fortress in the Elah Valley, where the Bible says David slew Goliath. Excavations by Yosef Garfinkel unearthed a multichambered gate and artifacts dating to David’s time in the early 10th Century BC.  Greg Girard/National Geographic.

The breakup of the Israelite kingdom is an object lesson on the excesses of statism (while keeping in mind that 10th-century BC statism was quite different from and far less advanced than its 21st-century AD counterpart). American patriots in 1776 saw in Rehoboam’s abuse of the northern Israelites a paradigm of their own mistreatment at the hands of King George III, while the Israelite rebellion against the Davidic monarchy provided sacred legitimation for the American Revolution. The northern Israelite tribes valued their traditional autonomy and freedom from the burdens of intrusive and overbearing royal government. The richer and more culturally sophisticated northerners also resented having to bend the knee to a dynasty of jumped-up southern hillbillies. David and Solomon may have forcibly unified the tribes and subjected them to the royal establishment in Jerusalem, but they were never able to heal the social and political fissures in the kingdom. Indeed David’s, and especially Solomon’s, policies only widened those fissures by making the northern tribes bear the financial and human burdens of a monarchy that ignored their interests while devoting itself to the power and prosperity of Judah and Jerusalem. Hebrew University archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel concludes from recent excavations that the development of a centralized state was a century more advanced in Judah than among the northern Israelites (a conclusion disputed by other archaeologists). So when pushed to the brink by Rehoboam, the northern Israelites pushed back.

Solomon’s glory through Victorian eyes. The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon, by Sir Edward John Poynter, 1890. Wikimedia.

Israel first emerged as a people over three thousand years ago in the land then known as Canaan, later to be called Israel, Judah, and Palestine. It is the central article of the Jewish faith that God made a covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, promising the land to their descendants, the Children of Israel (benei-yisra’el), who would be as numerous as the stars, with the Bible as the record of Israel’s birthright.

The first reference to Israel outside the Bible – the first anywhere in fact, as it pre-dates the oldest written portions of the Bible by at least 200 years – was in a hieroglyphic inscription on the stele of Egypt’s Pharaoh Merneptah in 1207 BC. Israel is depicted in the stele as a socioethnic entity (a “people” rather than a city-state or territory) living in the central hill country of Canaan, the region now called Samaria. Ironically, the pharaoh claimed to have been the agent of Israel’s destruction: “Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.” Like many later would-be destroyers of Israel, Merneptah, whose father Rameses II was the most likely pharaoh of the Exodus, spoke too soon. (Percy Bysshe Shelly had some choice things to say about Rameses II and the hubris of kings in his poem “Ozymandias.”)

The Merneptah Stele

Civil strife and discord at home often leaves a nation vulnerable to threats from abroad. So it was with the now rival kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Pharaoh Shoshenq I (935-914 BC, the biblical Shishak) the Libyan warlord and usurper who established Egypt’s XXII Dynasty, tried to weaken Solomon’s grip on power by giving refuge to Jeroboam after his failed rebellion.

The Kingdom of Judah, ruled by the descendants of King David, along with the First Temple in Jerusalem, was destroyed by the Babylonians (modern Iraq) in 586 BC, and much of the population sent into exile. Fifty years later a restored Judahite commonwealth was established as a province of the Persian Empire and a Second Temple was built in Jerusalem. From this time forward a diaspora of Jewish communities were established throughout first the Persian, and later the Hellenistic and Roman empires. An independent Judaea under the Hasmonean Dynasty (which is celebrated at Hanukkah) would have a stormy existence for 80 years until falling under Roman rule in 63 BC. In the wake of violent and unsuccessful revolts against Rome in the first and second centuries AD, the Second Temple was destroyed (70 AD), and in 135 AD the Roman Emperor Hadrian changed Judaea’s name to Palestine in honor of Israel’s ancient enemies the Philistines. Palestine remained a province of Rome, which became a Christian empire in the fourth century, until its conquest by the armies of the Caliph Omar in 638 transformed it into an Arab Muslim land.

Meanwhile, the center of Jewish life would shift to the diaspora.






The Party of Andrew Jackson vs. the Party of Obama. By Jonathan Chait.

The Party of Andrew Jackson vs. the Party of Obama. By Jonathan Chait. New York Magazine, July 5, 2015.

Keep Andrew Jackson on the $20. By David Greenberg. Politico, June 14, 2015.

1913: Seeds of Conflict

1913: Seeds of Conflict. A film by Ben Loeterman. Video. PBS, June 30, 2015. YouTube. Also here.

1913: Seeds of Conflict website.





“Seeds of Conflict” could sow confusion. By Lyn Julius. The Times of Israel, June 29, 2015.

Can China Be Contained? By Andrew Browne.

Can China Be Contained? By Andrew Browne. Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2015.

Cold War Without the Fun. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, June 24, 2015.

H. W. Brands: “Liberals Still Don’t Take Reagan Seriously Enough.” Interviewed by Elias Isquith.

“Liberals still don’t take Reagan seriously enough”: New biographer says Reagan was postwar America’s FDR. By Elias Isquith. Salon, June 9, 2015.

Despite his giant influence on U.S. politics, many of us still don't understand the Gipper, H.W. Brands tells Salon.

Isquith and Brands:

For American political junkies — especially those who never liked him in the first place — it’s hard to imagine a figure in living memory whose persona and worldview has been more thoroughly combed-over, scrutinized and disseminated than that of the country’s 40th president, Ronald Wilson Reagan.

The Republican Party rank-and-file, of course, can’t get enough of him. Nary a day goes by during the 2016 campaign (which is happening more than 10 years after Reagan’s death, incidentally) without one or more high-ranking GOP candidates promising to be Ronaldus Magnus for the 21st century. But Democrats often have Reagan on the mind, too — especially the current president. In ways big and small, we seem to still be living in the house Reagan built.

Yet while most of us are familiar with “Ronald Reagan,” the icon and lightning rod, fewer of us quite understand Ronald Reagan, the man. And according to the celebrated historian H.W. Brands, who’s authored a new biography — titled, fittingly, “Reagan: The Life” —  the real Gipper was both more and less than the myth suggests. Recently, Salon spoke with Brands over the phone to discuss Reagan, his presidency and his ultimate legacy. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

Right off the bat, you argue that Reagan is to the second half of 20th century American politics what FDR was to the first half. That’s a strong claim — how do you defend it?

If you look at what happened during the Reagan years, there is a big change in American domestic politics and a big change in American foreign policy. Those are two ways by which presidents and their presidencies are measured.

Reagan began his presidency famously — or notoriously, depending on your point of view — by saying that government is not the solution, but the problem. I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that that is the attitude that has guided American politics pretty much ever since. If you look at the course of American history from the 1980s until now … from the ’30s to the ’60s and ’70s, new government programs came often and easily. You could look at the New Deal in the 1930s and the Great Society in the 1960s. Even Richard Nixon’s administration was liberal by today’s standard.

Since Reagan, new government programs have come rarely and with great difficulty. With Reagan, the conversation in American domestic and political life shifts in a conservative direction.

What about foreign policy?

In foreign policy, Reagan inherited the Cold War and the struggle against totalitarianism that began, really, at Pearl Harbor but continued into the Cold War. By the time Reagan left office, communism was on the verge of dissolution — within a very short time, within two years after Reagan left office, Soviet communism as a guiding principle was a deadletter.

So those areas — changing the conversation in a markedly conservative direction domestically; and essentially leading the United States to the brink of victory in the Cold War — are the two strongest pieces of evidence that Reagan’s presidency was extremely important.

How much was this because of Reagan’s individual talents, and how much was this the product of his being in the right place at the right time?

Any successful leader — especially a political leader in a democracy — is someone who has to suit the times. You can be the most talented person in the world and if the times aren’t appropriate, you’re not going to get anywhere.

I do make the point [in the book] that Reagan was exceedingly fortunate in his timing. If [former Federal Reserve chairman] Paul Volcker had come along later — if the recession that happened in 1981 and early ’82 had happened in 1983 and 1984 — then Reagan would have probably been swept from office in 1984 the way Republican members of Congress were swept from office in 1982.

The timing is very fortunate for Reagan; [upon leaving office], he could claim victory for his economic program. But, in fact, the victory, the improvement in the economy, owed a lot to forces beyond Reagan’s control.

Would you argue the same is true vis-à-vis the Cold War?

Reagan was looking for an interlocutor in the Soviet Union. He wanted somebody to talk to. He reached out to Leonid Brezhnev, but Brezhnev was too old and too set in his ways.

But then comes Mikhail Gorbachev, someone who is of a reform-framed mind, who is willing to look at the Soviet Union differently, and who is therefore willing to look at the United States differently. If not for Gorbachev, Reagan’s desire to lead the world to a situation beyond mutual assured destruction, beyond the shadow of nuclear war, would have been utterly frustrated; and Reagan would not be remember as somebody who led the United States to the brink of American victory in the Cold War.

The timing was everything. Reagan himself — his talents, his background — was probably a necessary condition to the things that happened. But he certainly was not a sufficient condition.

How do you understand Reagan’s relationship with white supremacy and racism? This has been one of the more contested elements of his legacy in recent years.

The first thing I’ll say is that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever — and in fact that there is evidence that would contradict it — that Reagan himself was a racist, or had any tendencies in that direction. Reagan was one who took equality seriously, and no one has ever charged that Reagan was a personal racist.

The fact of the matter was that Reagan was the candidate of a party, and the president of a party, that included a lot of people who had racist ideas. Reagan didn’t believe that it was any obligation of his to call out the racists in his party; he understood that if he could get racists to vote for him, he wasn’t going to reject their votes.

What about his frequent talk of states’ rights? That’s pretty widely seen as coded language intended to appeal to Southern whites who opposed African-American equality.

Reagan was a believer in states’ rights. This was independent of the question of race. Now, it definitely was the case that Southern reactionaries all cast their opposition to the civil rights movement in terms of states’ rights. There were those people who used states’ rights as a code word to go ahead and try to defend those white supremacist policies. But Reagan believed in state’s rights; he could say with a straight face that, generally speaking, policies that are made at the state-level are better than those made at the federal-level.

Reagan was smart enough to understand that there were people who would interpret this in a particular way. He did not feel obliged to disabuse them of that notion. In fact, he would use that notion in order to gain votes and get elected.

Another point of dispute has been whether he was really that involved in his own administration. There was a narrative on the left — then and now, actually — that he was an empty suit and a salesman and had little to do with actual governance. What did you find in that regard?

Reagan was the quintessential “big picture” guy. He had two goals as president and he reiterated them again and again. One was shrink government at home. The other was defeat communism abroad. When issues that crossed his desk dealt with those, then he was right on top of that. When issues diverged from that, he himself got distracted.

Towards the end of the book, I say that Reagan had these two big goals and he accomplished one and one-half of them. The one that he pretty much decisively accomplished was defeating communism, or putting the world to the edge where communism was about to collapse. The half-successful one was shrinking government at home. Because if you subdivide that into reducing taxes and reducing spending, he got the tax reductions, but he didn’t get the spending reductions. Part of this was a strategic decision on his part to go for tax cuts first; do the easy part first and leave the hard part until the second. And part of it was probably an underestimation by Reagan of the difficulty of getting spending cuts.

When you say he struggled on smaller issues, for lack of a better word, what do you have in mind?

He floundered in the Middle East. The Middle East is an area of policy where the details are everything; it’s not insignificant that Jimmy Carter, the quintessential detail man, achieved his greatest diplomatic triumph in the Middle East. Reagan got nothing like that, because Reagan didn’t master the details. He didn’t have the patience.

The biggest example of a failure on Reagan’s part was exactly where he was looking in the other direction: the Iran-Contra affair. Reagan sort of gave guidance, but then he left the folks in the West Wing — especially John Poindexter and Oliver North — to do what they wanted with minimal oversight. The result blew up in his face.

What are some truths about Reagan that you think liberals still don’t see or won’t acknowledge?

I would say liberals still don’t take Reagan seriously enough. They didn’t take him seriously while he was president and they didn’t think that he would accomplish what he wanted to accomplish.

When I started working on this book, I was kind of suspicious of Reagan being a master of policy. But by reading his diary, by reading minutes of top-level meetings — especially in foreign policy — [I saw] Reagan was really engaged. He knew what he was about. When I read the transcripts of Reagan’s several meeting with Gorbachev at Reykjavik in 1986, [I saw] a guy who really knew what he was trying to get at, was fully engaged, and came very close to getting an absolutely historic agreement that would have gotten rid of nuclear weapons between the superpowers.

And what are some truths about Reagan that you think conservatives still don’t see or won’t acknowledge?

What conservatives are uncomfortable acknowledging is that Reagan was a much better politician, and a much more pragmatic figure, than they would like him to be.

One of the reasons that Reagan remains today an icon for all Republicans, from just right-of-center to the most zealous Tea Party activist, is that Reagan’s rhetoric was 100 percent conservative. Reagan essentially gave the same speech from 1964, when he first hit the national scene, to 1989, when he gave what amounted to his farewell address. It was conservative — chapter and verse; and if you want to place Reagan on a pedestal as conservative Republicans do, then all you have to do is quote Reagan’s speeches.

But there was another Reagan; there was the practical Reagan. There was the rhetorical Reagan on the one hand, and the practical Reagan on the other hand. And the practical Reagan was the one who knew that the point of getting elected was to govern, not simply to just keep making speeches; and that you make progress in increments, that you don’t get the whole program at once. Reagan was one who cut deals. For example, Reagan was the tax-cutter, but he agreed to increase taxes on several occasions in the service of a broader, more important compromise.

President Obama Interviewed by Ilana Dayan on Israel Television Channel 2.

U.S. President Obama interviewed by Ilana Dayan on Israeli television; Extract from Uvda, Mako, Ch 2. Video. Haaretz.com, June 3, 2015. YouTube. Also at Real Clear Politics; Arutz Sheva 7; transcript at Vos Iz Neias?




The Middle East Interview: President Obama on ISIS, Iran, and Israel. By Jeffrey Goldberg. The Atlantic, May 21, 2015.

A Critique of Obama’s Understanding of Israel. By Jeffrey Goldberg and Yossi Kuperwaser. The Atlantic, June 1, 2015.

Obama Cares Too Much About Israel. By Eli Lake. Bloomberg View, May 24, 2015.

Obama Still Doesn’t Understand the Palestinians or Iran. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, June 3, 2015.

Obama says peace talks are pointless because Netanyahu won’t see the “best” in others. By Philip Weiss. Mondoweiss, June 3, 2015.