New Republic

This nation and its leaders have been humbled over the past decade by the ambiguous results of the American military power unleashed in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is customary to think in terms of wars won and wars lost—but what was Iraq? Certainly not a victory, though Saddam Hussein is history. But not a defeat, either. A tie, perhaps, but with whom? Maybe it’s that the war inside Iraq isn’t over, and that the future of Iraq is highly uncertain; but for the United States, the war has ended, in the sense that our troops have come home and it is all but unimaginable that they will go back. Afghanistan similarly looks to be shaping up as something that will end in neither victory nor defeat nor stalemate.

And yet, despite all this, the United States remains unquestionably the world’s predominant power. As my Hoover Institution colleague Kori Schake has observed, nowadays America has the luxury of not having to win its wars. For a country to find itself in such a position, with so much margin for error, must be some sort of triumph of grand strategy.

But no one in America feels triumphant, and no one is satisfied. Continue reading →

Commentary

The question is not so much about the future of conservatism in America as it is about the future of America. The country cannot thrive in the absence of a conservative counterweight to the progressive strain in American politics.

The progressive strain is more or less baked into the American cake, and it is a good thing that it is. Our liberalism (in the classical sense) has done wonders for the expansion of freedom at home and abroad. This expansion requires a group of people more zealous than most Americans in its pursuit. At home, these are the progressives–liberals in the distinctly American sense.

Against the ambitions of today’s progressives, the counter that conservatives generally offer, without irony, is a robust defense of the fruits of the progressivism of previous generations. When Republicans say they are the ones who really want to save Medicare, because an unreformed Medicare program is fiscally unsustainable, they are conceding that there is no going back to an era when universal entitlement to health care for older Americans was no more than a progressive’s dream. Continue reading →

Commentary

“Bush Lied, People Died,” said the post-Iraq bumper sticker. “You lie!” shouted Rep. Joe Wilson at President Obama during a 2009 speech to a joint session of Congress. The two examples constitute, respectively, Exhibit A for the GOP lament of the decline of civility in American life and Exhibit A for the same lament from the Democratic side.

Despite what you have been hearing lately, incivility is nothing new in American politics. As Daniel M. Shea and Morris P. Fiorina note in their new edited volume Can We Talk? The Rise of Rude, Nasty, Stubborn Politics, incivility has a long pedigree in American political discourse. Consider the warning the Connecticut Courant issued about the consequences of a Thomas Jefferson victory in the presidential election of 1800: “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced….The soil will be soaked with blood.” Or the taunt in 1884 arising from allegations that Grover Cleveland had had an affair with a young widow and fathered an illegitimate child: “Ma, Ma, where is Pa? Gone to the White House, Ha! Ha! Ha!” Continue reading →

Commentary

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) ranks at or near the top of lists of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, thanks especially to his magnum opus, Being and Time, published in Germany in 1927. Beginning in 1933, when Hitler came to power, Heidegger was also a member of and advocate for the National Socialist Party, to whose “inner truth and greatness” as a movement he attested in a lecture course at the University of Freiburg in 1935.

The relation of Heidegger’s philosophy to his Nazism has long been a matter of controversy. Some have tried to paint Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism as no more than a flirtation in the early days of the German Reich, against which he subsequently turned (though only to the extent commensurate with maintaining his position under Nazi scrutiny as a professor at Freiburg). In this telling, Heidegger’s Nazism was largely irrelevant to his philosophy. Continue reading →

Commentary

Have you ever found yourself in the position of asking, on your own behalf or on behalf of others, how many or precisely which people it would be useful to kill in order to secure a benefit for yourself or your cause? And just how to do it? No? Others have. Their answers have ranged from Cain’s original “Abel, with my bare hands” to Hitler’s “all the Jews, mainly by gas,” and the widespread Hutu view in the Rwanda of 1994, “the Tutsis, with machetes.” The question burns today for the government of Sudan and in the Congo. Continue reading →

Commentary 

The Essential Guide to the Bush Tax Plan by Paul Krugman, Norton. 128 pp. $17.00

PAUL KRUGMAN is an economist at Princeton University and a twice-weekly op-ed columnist for the New York Times. The two occupations would seem to be conjoined in Fuzzy Math, a slim but energetic polemic against the tax-cut proposal that George W. Bush made the centerpiece of his 2000 presidential campaign.

The timing of Krugman’s book turned out to be inauspicious: Fuzzy Math had barely made its way to bookstores before Congress reached final agreement in late May on a major tax cut only slightly modified from what Bush had proposed. Krugman’s “Essential Guide to the Bush Tax Plan” is thus somewhat less essential than it might have been. But in any case, the illumination it casts on the debate over the tax cut is mostly of the inadvertent kind.

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Commentary

Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas. By Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. Houghton Mifflin. 406 pp. $24.95.

The media blitz that accompanied the publication of Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, by Wall Street Journal reporters Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, ought to be studied and analyzed by publicists much as the campaigns of Hannibal, Nelson, and Rommel are studied by military tacticians. Now here was a brilliant public-relations barrage: a massive excerpt in the Wall Street Journal; an hour-long edition of ABC’s Turning Point devoted to the book, with Ted Koppel’s Nightline and Larry King Live in tow; a volley of morning shows; articles landing everywhere from Newsweek to Mirabella; and even a National Book Award nomination announced in a feat without precedent in the annals of history before the tightly-held volume was in the hands of anyone but the publishers and the competition’s judges.

This tally is hardly exhaustive, merely illustrative. Strange Justice clearly struck a chord that set virtually the entire American media culture humming in sympathetic vibration.

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Commentary

IS THERE a more celebrated journalist, or for that matter a more reviled one, than Bob Woodward, the Pulitzer prize-winning assistant managing editor for investigations at the Washington Post? No one can deny that, for better or worse, his daily reporting with Carl Bernstein on Watergate contributed mightily to the downfall of the Nixon administration twenty years ago. The two books that came out of that episode, All the President’s Men and The Final Days, are as classic as they are controversial still.

Since then, Woodward has given us a look inside the Supreme Court (The Brethren, written with Scott Armstrong); an explosive and heavily litigated biography of a Hollywood superstar (Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi); Veil, a chronicle of “the secret wars of the CIA” during the Reagan administration, including, incredibly, a purported death-bed interview with the CIA’s William Casey; and The Commanders, a portrait reaching to the very top of the United States military establishment, published as the nation prepared to go to war in the Persian Gulf.

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Commentary

Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government. By Jonathan Rauch. Times Books. 250 pp. $22.00.

“Demosclerosis,” in Jonathan Rauch’s diagnosis, is “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt.” Ever since World War II, he maintains, powerful underlying social forces have intersected with a structural weakness in modern democratic politics to allow entrenched interests to dominate government. This brief but sweeping book, by a contributing editor of the National Journal, is an attempt to describe and analyze those forces. Rauch’s hope is that if we cannot liberate ourselves from their grip, we can at least prevent them from choking off whatever vitality remains in American life.

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