Practical History

Teaching Failed Ideas: Jefferson Davis’ Inaugural Address

Good men can, and probably should, contemplate evil, to prevent its re-occurrence. When we know an idea’s danger, or its falsity, there’s no danger in studying where it goes wrong.

This reasoning emphatically does not control in the primary school setting. So why is Texas pointing  kids towards the first (and only) Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, and setting him up as not just Lincoln’s foil, but his moral equal?

There are academic reasons, but they don’t apply here. Devotees of the Lost Cause will correctly point out that Davis’ inaugural address, the resource proposed for inclusion in Texas textbooks, is not actually a pro-slavery tract. It’s a long discourse on the concept of states’ rights. But it’s one that struggles, to the point of dishonesty, to avoid discussing the primary “right” the South sought to assert, and that’s more often than not simply factually wrong. For example, Davis tries to frame the Confederate ideal as a fulfillment of the federal Constitution –

We have changed the constituent parts, but not the system of our Government. The Constitution formed by our fathers is that of these Confederate States, in their exposition of it, and in the judicial construction it has received, we have a light which reveals its true meaning.

But the federal Constitution was drafted to provide a strong Commerce Clause, to replace the comically ineffective Articles of Confederation. By utterly abolishing any congressional ability to build internal improvements, for example (see Art. I, § 8, cl. 3) the Confederate Constitution attempts a reversion to a period before the Federalist Papers, before the Articles of Confederation, to some nightmarish twilight between colonization and true union. For anyone interested in a serious conception of “states’ rights,” consonant with our federal structure, the Confederacy is a terrible place to start.

The bottom line is, you don’t teach Confederate history for an honest look at the debate on federal power. Studying its history, divorced from its moral failings, and bereft of any discussion of where it went intellectually wrong, provides little if any information on the subject, and presents a real risk of confusion. So why study it, at the primary level?

Of course, the answer must be “politics.” Even if we acknowledge that our honorable friends opposite aren’t arguing for the radical de-federalizing that defined the Confederacy, they see, in that past, some virtue that we’ve forgotten, and seek to promote it by engaging in the fiction that the Confederacy only ever symbolized that value, and nothing else. That’s a terrible way to approach history, because it means never having to come to grips with the consequences and causes that define history. Maybe the Civil War wasn’t just about slavery, but it certainly wasn’t a model for a functional federal system, either.

Party & Identity Politics

RedState continues an argument we regularly hear: that the Democrats, not the Republicans, and not any other amorphous entity, were to blame for the racial politics and discord that prevailed after the end of the Civil War, and regularly culminated in violence. The author is entitled to a rebuttal not due to the elegance of his phrasing, but on account of the frequent resurgence of the issue.

Odds are you’ve heard the general argument. It works by two syllogisms. First:

1. Democrats in the past were racist.
2. Modern Democrats are ideologically equivalent to former Democrats.
3. Ergo modern Democrats are racist.

And, assuming the validity of the first conclusion:

1. Democrats are inextricably linked to liberalism.
2. Democrats are racist (see supra).
3. Ergo liberalism is racist.

We can (and must) concede point #1 of syllogism #1, without harm. Let’s start with the first argument.

We should acknowledge at the outset that there’s a certain unfairness in holding any modern entity to account for the crimes of the past. If we were to carry forward the sins of all prior generations, and attribute them to their modern progeny, whether by a rubric emphasizing formal labels, or general intellectual inheritance, no religion, government, or philosophy of government would be blameless. In fact, all would be utterly insupportable.

Further, were we to decide to carry forward intellectual blame, apportioning it on the basis of party name would be an especially inelegant method. Party labels shift over time. E.g., Democrats were the segregation party at least pre-Thurmond; but it’s generally accepted that that changed sometime thereafter. Similarly, Democrats were the Southern party, but that changed completely by the 1984 election. Since party labels change, the critical premise of the first syllogism breaks down.

To avoid this conclusion, attribute the blame for Jim Crow to modern Democrats, and then draw some conclusion about the evils of an amorphous Progressivism, conservatives must assume constant labels, and then conflate “Republican” with “conservative,” and “Democrat” with “liberal.” The first component fails because labels change, as noted; and the second fails almost as quickly.

First, we have to define our terms. When we say “liberal” or “progressive,” we refer to a philosophy that prefers individual liberty to state power, at least along social dimensions; thus, faced with a choice between inclusiveness and stability, a liberal will deflect error towards inclusiveness. Conservatives will take the opposite choice, erring towards tradition or security, and they embrace that definition (Bill Buckley: conservatism “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it”).

This country enjoys a history of increasing liberty, but it’s never been easy. It is axiomatic, then, that the partisans in any single battle, fighting against progress, were “conservative,” at least relative to their time. In context, then, history’s villains are always, and have always been, throughout American history, from Royalists and Tories to the last segregationists, conservatives, relative to their contemporaries. Further, properly defined, Republicans have not always carried the conservative torch, nor Democrats the liberal one; in fact, this country’s greatest Republican heroes were all, truly, avowed liberals, or progressives, relative to their time — Teddy Roosevelt saved the national parks, Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, etc.

Modern conservatives will bristle at the characterization of their ideology as necessarily villainous. And they should, but only if we attempt to draw modern conclusions from this idea. Because the battlefield of the moment changes almost daily, a 1960′s conservative is not a 2010′s conservative. Therefore, the conservative cause must rest not on a general need to push society backwards, or the assertion that all change is bad, but rather the idea that change after a certain point is bad. However, when conservatives undertake that definitional act, as they must, they acknowledge that association with past heroes is necessarily slippery. As conservatives relative to their peers, they shun conservatives of eras past, and while embracing yesterday’s liberal heroes.

This is what happens when you define ideologies based on change: when the changes themselves change from proposal to status quo, you change, as does your adversary, and you have to change which changes you look at when defining yourself, or risk changing history. Alternately, you can always change your argument.

By Republican Logic, What Else Is Unconstitutional?

CNN’s newest correspondent, Erick Erickson of RedState, offers this explanation of why the new healthcare act is unconstitutional:

Insurance contracts are not within the stream of interstate commerce. That’s why when you buy insurance for your house, your car, or your health you deal with state insurance commissioners, not a federal insurance czar.

Congress does not really regulate insurance contracts. They are contractual obligations at the state level, not goods and services in the stream of commerce. So can Congress then force you to buy a product not in interstate commerce to regulate interstate commerce, when insurance regulations are clearly within the purview of the states?

He goes on to argue that, a fortiori, this means that you’re now a slave. To a black man. Yeah, the rest of the article is worth a read, and it’s not race-baiting at all. Three cheers for intellectual integrity!

Anyways, try to parse the law from the rhetoric. It’s not easy, but Erickson’s argument seems to be that insurance contracts are regulated by the states, and therefore not “interstate”; and further, they’re not “goods,” and therefore not within the stream of commerce anyways, so neither do they constitute “commerce.” Let’s unpack and apply.

If state regulation rebutted the interstate quality of a good, nothing would be within Congress’ power. Most regulatory regimes consist of overlapping zones of federal and state power. For example, federal securities laws, like § 10(b) of the Exchange Act and its critical Rule 10b-5, coincide with state “Blue Sky” laws to create a regime for the punishment of fraud. None dispute that, despite state “Blue Sky” laws and strong state regulation, these financial products constitute “interstate”

In much the same way, “contractual obligations” are most certainly commerce, and comprise the greater part of the American economy. When I walk to work in the morning, I don’t pass factories: I pass securities clearinghouses, and the law firms that represent them. If you live in a city, you do too. These financial products enter the stream of commerce and have the potential to enrich, or wreak havoc on, the parties that control and are controlled by them. None dispute that they constitute commerce.

But under Erickson’s view of the Constitution, because they supplement or preempt state solutions, and concern neither goods nor services in the traditional sense, the Securities Act of ’33, the Exchange Act of ’34, and all related acts are flat-out unconstitutional.

Similarly, if you work for a large company, or state government, odds are your retirement plan is backed by the federal ERISA regime (Employee Retirement Income Savings Act). This is a good thing. It’s like an FDIC for your pension — at least in that it’s a safety net, and requires state-law plans to meet certain federal minima to guarantee solvency. Under Erickson’s logic, ERISA is gone too.

Erickson’s is not a responsible way of looking at the world. Going beyond these examples, Erickson’s reasoning would gut the Department of Labor — so long OSHA Occupational Safety and Health Act), FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act), etcetera. That means a return to child labor, and a thousand new Triangle Shirtwaist incidents.

This is the world in which the newly mainstreamed, radical right wants you to live: a world where the Progressive Era and the 20th century never happened, where employees and families remain at the mercy of the unregulated market. The 1800s were not a happy time. We forget that at our peril, and repeat it at our pain.

CNN — fire this man.

This Week in Red-Baiting

A new chain e-mail making its way around the internet cites to a political cartoon from the Chicago Tribune which, in 1934, made the same allegations against President Franklin Roosevelt that the “tea parties” make against President Obama.

Click to enlarge. You don't want to miss a thing.

It’s all there. The nasty, senseless anti-elitism (“Young pinkies from Columbia and Harvard”); obligatory reference to Stalin, at the time history’s most recent monster (it would be Hitler, but he wasn’t around yet); the pathos-laced reverence for constitutional restraints that had already been dead for 35 years (“Junk the Constitution and declare a dictatorship”); and the notion that every dollar spent improving our country somehow brings us one step closer to socialism and monarchy. Truly, all it’s missing is a tea partier standing athwart the carriage, decked out in Revolutionary War garb, waving a Gadsden Flag or “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” sign, and shouting,  “I JUST LOVE MY COUNTRY.”

The e-mail closes with a grim foreboding, in obligatory blue font:

Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Santayana

Apparently, the lesson we’re to take is that the same fears adhere with equal force today. But that’s not the conclusion I draw. This comic is from 1934; seventy-six years and one massive New Deal later, we’re no closer to socialism, Communism, or tyranny, and the Constitution is doing quite fine, thank-you-very-much. Might we instead take the cue that red-baiting back then was about as based in fact as red-baiting is today, which is to say, not at all?

Multiple Narratives in the Founders’ Legacies

Although incapable of articulating (much less defending) a single policy position, the conservative movement and the tea party groups that together pass for its intellectual core seem brilliantly capable of making sweeping appeals to (putatively) originalist values. The latest is a “Mount Vernon Declaration” — named for and dedicated to President Washington’s ideals, but signed fairly far away from the actual presidential residence. Mount Vernon wouldn’t have them.

The humor is obvious, but tea party “patriots” should take the hint. Any attempt to ground “Constitutional conservatism” (what is that?) in pathos-infused appeals to history must fail at the threshold, because on most subsidiary issues of consequence, the Founders never spoke with a unified voice.

I don’t mean to dispense with the idea that the Founders’ example should serve as a political and moral guide — it should, and does, speak a great deal about the importance of service, sacrifice, and the rule of law. But beyond these and other abstract values, the theory of a unified narrative decays. Members of the Founding generation, during and after the Constitutional Convention, disagreed sharply on what manner of government they’d created. Thomas Jefferson regarded Adams’ presidency — and, to a lesser extent, Washington’s — as imperial, almost monarchical. On some points he was even right: Adams’ conception of the freedom of speech leaves, ah, something to be desired by modern standards. Hamilton fought for (and won, briefly) a national bank, as a clearinghouse for state debt and a necessary tool to build American credit. Whole swaths of the country saw this, in turn, as the death of sovereign states.  Relatedly, John Calhoun, in living memory of the Founders, thought the Tenth Amendment permitted nullification of federal acts. Every President of the era, and most signatories to the Constitution, disagreed.

This should not be surprising. The drafting of the Constitution was a political act. We can attempt to discern the compromise on which the Founders settled — as we must, when determining legal controversies — but that’s a damn sight harder than looking at a complicated era of history and terming it “conservative,” especially when that word, as it’s used today, didn’t even exist at the time. Superficial answers to complicated questions will always fail: for example, “we’re a government of enumerated powers” is no answer to the question, “is healthcare reform constitutional?” Not, at least, with full knowledge of the fierce debate over the “necessary and proper” clause, and the context of its necessity after the Articles of Confederation — we rejected a form of government limited to enumerated powers. Questions like “what powers are ‘necessary and proper?’” are worth asking, but rarely asked, and notably avoided by appealing emotionally and exclusively to abstracted, simplistic theories of history.

Turning to Revolutionary War symbols to argue against discrete and identified policies is off point at best — an act of appropriation, not reverence — and insulting at worst. Our national symbols should remind us of who we are vis-à-vis the world, not each other. Put down the Gadsden flags; pick up a book.

The Use of Narratives in History: the Ancient Streak in “Game Change”

Heilemann and Halperin’s Game Change hit book stores with all the fanfare we’ve come to expect from a campaign postmortem in the modern era — villains are vilified, careers threatened by non-events, and the game not so much changed as reinforced. Even the particulars are unsurprising: the Clintons are painted as defeated Machiavellians, and Palin as an “unstable ignoramus.” Haven’t we read this book before?

What sets Game Change apart is that even its most “damning” stories are substantially unsourced. Although Politico strains to call this a necessity (query whether they have a horse in that race), the book’s tendency to treat its subjects as characters, speaking dialogue and feeling emotions that the authors can’t possibly have heard or known (read the first pages to see what I mean), makes its inventiveness feel more like a feature of this kind of storytelling, and less like a concession to the exigencies of political reporting. We’re left with a book where major players don’t just act, but speak and emote in ways that are distinctly human and irreconcilably divorced from fact. Admittedly, it makes for a better story, but when a historian’s subjects are analyzed personally, through and for the content of their character, rather than just their deeds, the work also starts to shade towards fiction.

For these faults — or, “unique narrative traits” — the book seems to share more with ancient histories than with today’s blasé-but-factual recitations of events. Heilemann and Halperin’s characters, for so they are, breathe, feel, and live in ways that historical figures usually don’t. They have dialogue, both external and internal, and near-Shakespearean character flaws, the kind that determine their destinies even before page one. Similarly, ancient historians had discernable agendae, and unique vehicles for realizing them. Plutarch’s Caesar, Marius, and Sulla, etc., exist as vehicles for moral lessons, who make their mark in history because of (and rarely despite) the flaws that ultimately crush them. Livy’s narrative builds to an inevitable conclusion — the glorification of Augustus as the pinnacle of Roman history. To that end, both pen extensive dialogues, spoken by people they never met at events they never attended, and selectively emphasize some events while downplaying others, the better to build real villains and real heroes from factual skeletons.

The narrative elements in these ancient tales don’t deprive them of their historical value. Indeed, although they must be taken with a grain of salt, Livy and Plutarch are among the definitive accounts of ancient history, partly because they’re among the only surviving accounts, and partly because Their decisions about how to color history show almost as much about their era as a purely objective recitation would. Increased historiographical value makes up for lost historical value.

But because we need less instruction on modern culture, Game Change can’t claim that as a redeeming quality. Admittedly semi-fictionalized history is a lost art form, and its revival ought to put a knowing smile on the face of any classicist, but we shouldn’t see Game Change as anything other than a fun, gossipy substitute for the truth. It’s possible to enjoy a book like this to the extent that you’re willing to read a non-fiction book for something other than the “truth of the matter asserted,” but there’s danger in treating it as something more. Ancient historians typically began their works with a humble disclaimer, apologizing for the author’s lack of skill and infidelity to fact. Perhaps Heilemann & Halperin could’ve benefited from this ancient style point, too.

Terrorism’s Targets: Infrastructure or Psychology?

Matt Yglesias bills yesterday’s attempted terrorist attack as an “a pretty unserious plot,” unlikely, even if successful, to cause any long-term damage:

Ultimately, it does no favors to anyone to blow this sort of thing out of proportion. The United States could not, of course, be “devastated” by anything resembling this scheme. We ought to be clear on that fact. We want to send the message around the world that this sort of vile attempt to slaughter innocent people is not, at the end of the day, anything resembling a serious challenge to American power.

While he’s surely right that isolated attacks on single airliners will never present, as he says, “a serious challenge to American power,” this sort of analysis ignores history, and mistakes the number of ways in which a nation can be affected by her enemies. September 11th was not, of its own accord, truly devastating. Our greatest metropolis lost its tallest building, the Pentagon lost 1/5th of its circumference, and 3,000 people lost their lives. Tragic, yes, but no threat to America’s existence. Still, the events plunged the nation into a panic, threatened a travel-based economy, prompted sweeping legal changes, and generally shattered our notions of invulnerability. Terrorism doesn’t depend upon a loss of infrastructure, or a loss of lives, for its effect. The simple fact of a successful attack, regardless of its scope, can profoundly alter the world.

Consider the sack of Rome in 410 C.E. True, Rome lost much of her infrastructure and the spoils of a millennium, but the government was under no threat (the Western Empire’s capital had already moved to Ravenna), and the invading Visigoths departed immediately. But the event sent shockwaves throughout the modern world. Rome was not invincible.

It’s good not to live in fear of our enemies. But we should appreciate what they’re capable of, the better to prevent them from altering our way of life, should individual attacks prove successful. Terrorists can strike individual targets, and they can kill, but they can’t destroy our nation, and they can’t break our spirit, unless we let them. To prevent that result, we should steel ourselves against fear, but be aware of its potency.

Military Analogies and the Health Care Debate: a Pyrrhic Victory?

Attention, Bill Kristol: I don’t think that phrase means what you think it means.

When we speak of a Pyrrhic victory, we refer to one so costly as to make defeat preferable — as when Pyrrhus of Epirus’ “victory” at Heraclea proved so costly that it foreclosed a further incursion into Roman territory. A Pyrrhic victory must not just be devastating: it must make strategic victory, in the broader sense, impossible.

There’s no indication that the Democrats’ victory in the health care debate is even nearly Pyrrhic. Admittedly, we had to give up the public option — for now — and it sure took us long enough. But health care reform will bring real savings to real people, at a relatively low price, and as Kristol readily concedes, any exhaustion in the Democratic ranks is temporary. This is a qualified victory, but still a real one.

If Kristol is looking for a historical analogy to open with and then facetiously discard, he might turn to Quintus Fabius Maximus (Cunctator) instead. Like Fabius, congressional Republicans have built a strategy on the premise that delaying a difficult battle is its own reward. Of course, Fabius’ strategy was incomplete: it lacked an ultimate engine for victory, which later materialized only through the ingenuity and bravery of Scipio the Elder, who broke the stalemate and took the fight to Carthage.

Republicans have no Scipio, and more importantly, they aren’t looking for one. As even a casual observer of the health care debate must know, Republicans did not enter this fight to win it. At no point in this year’s long, strange health care debate did Republicans ever offer (and defend) a serious alternative plan. Delaying is all they know, all they cared to do, and all they did. This isn’t just a bad strategy: it’s no strategy at all.

Conservapedia Rewriting the Bible

Really. It makes too much sense, doesn’t it? The life of Jesus fairly read makes him look like anything from a social reformer to, in the Gospel of Thomas, a quasi-anarchist or, in the Acts of Paul & Thecla, a feminist. It was only a matter of time until conservatives ditched the substance of his theology, to embrace only the steady-state implications of institutional religion.

This in flagrant violation of Revelations 22:18 –

For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.”

Of course, presumably that passage was added by liberals.

Thus the routinization of charisma has come full circle: Jesus challenged the status quo, Paul regularized his teachings, and with the passing of millenia, Christianity became the status quo. Now, conservatives would have Christianity used to roll back the clock — once the extirpation of its revolutionary roots is complete.

Whether mankind needs an intermediary on earth, between him and God, is a theological question. Historically, Protestants believe that mankind can speak directly to the divine, while Catholics require a church intermediary. Conservapedia’s approach appears to combine the worst of both worlds: the Bible is mutable, but the only authority is a fundamentalist website. No man comes to the kingdom — but through the Republican Party.

Towards a Responsible Definition of “Socialism”

“Red baiting” — the process of referring to one’s opponents as “socialists,” and relying on that word alone to silence opposition — remains one of the oldest tricks in the right’s playbook. Its return to the front lines for usage against our new Democratic President was eminently predictable, but still disappointing. In the likely-futile hope that our opponents will listen to reason, and accord to words their actual meaning rather than the meaning they wish them to carry, then, consider this brief history of socialism.

Our opponents today use the term “socialist” to refer to any increase in government power. That is not strictly — or even loosely — historically accurate. “Socialism” is not a direction, and the adjective “socialistic,” as an indication of a trend towards socialism, has little meaning, unless we’re to conflate all progressive reforms with actual socialism, all increases in police power with actual fascism, etc. Historically, socialism has only one meaning: a system in which the state — or the workers directly — own the means of production.

Loosely, socialism emerged from a discontent with what remained of the feudal state after the French Revolution of 1789, and with the emergent, eminently abusive nature of pure laissez faire industry. For the peasant and working classes, there was a sense that real change had been within grasp at the turn of the 18th century, and yet slipped away. As the middle class emerged, and wealth concentrated in its hands, the industrialists responsible for 80-hour work weeks, child labor, dangerous workplaces, and inhumane working conditions substituted for displaced monarchs as the workers’ enemy. The term “socialism” emerged to express this anger, but lacked real meaning, until the failed revolutions of 1848, and Marx’s Communist Manifesto, which immediately preceded them.

Marx put a name, a theory, and a purpose to this loose discontent: communism, a system in which social distinctions melted away, to be replaced, following a bloody workers’ revolt and a transitional period of “socialism,” by a utopian “communist” society. Socialism — which Marx regarded as a means to an end — was a hybrid capitalist/Communist system, in which the means of production were publicly owned, but working and bourgeoisie classes remained separate, and therefore, to Marx, impermissibly unequal.

For some time, the theories coexisted, and throughout the 19th century, and into the 20th, both remained major intellectual forces. But by the 1900s, socialism stood defanged in most countries, as governments responded to workers’ needs for living wages and social security (small “s”) with reforms that terminated the worst excesses of pure laissez faire capitalism, while retaining a modified free-market system. Otto von Bismark, Chancellor of the new German Empire, famously made the connection explicit, creating various national insurance schemes out of an expressed desire to avoid socialism. It worked, and other industrial nations, the United States included, duplicated the effort. As a consequence, classic socialism vanished as a serious intellectual force in all but Russia and the newly industrialized European east.

So what does this all mean? Simply put, it means there can’t be true socialism without actual, permanent ownership of the means of production. Moves loosely in the direction of actual ownership — like regulation — may, to the modern eye, give the appearance of socialism. But historically, regulatory frameworks, worker’s compensation plans, even national health systems represented an alternative to rather than the victory of socialism, derided by both socialists and communists as inadequate half-measures. If Marx, Engels, and other socialist luminaries considered themselves to have “lost” when sensible social reforms deprived their revolutionary ideologies of a raison d’être, who are we to rewrite history and tell them they won?

Further, American history flatly rebuts the contention that regulation, or even emergency nationalization of select companies or industries constitutes, or necessarily leads to true socialism. Lincoln seized railroads and telegraphs wholesale; Truman famously attempted to nationalize the nation’s steel mills; Nixon permanently purchased failing railroads and converted them to public utilities (you know these lines as “Amtrak”); Reagan nationalized failing banks; and the one million New Yorkers who went to work today on the MTA’s subway lines did so on lines wholly owned by the government, seized by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, a fierce critic of socialism, under highly dubious circumstances.

Some of these politicians nationalized companies reluctantly, like Obama, and ultimately relinquished control. Others, like Nixon and LaGuardia, took deliberate and permanent possession of private property, for the collective benefit of their constituents, and yet neither modern America nor New York City can fairly be called socialist. Simply put, the slippery slope is flat.

Socialism has a long, sordid history, and its only real triumphs come from the lengths to which statesmen will go to avoid it. But whatever else it might be, it is not subtle. Socialism is neither creeping into American politics, nor any part of President Obama’s agenda. His economic theories may have their faults, but if so, conservatives owe it to the public to meet him on the merits, rather than resorting to anti-intellectual, distortive namecalling. It’s time to start stop trying to scare independent voters with “the spectre of Communism” and, as a nation, finally make peace with the fact that America is not, nor has it been for some time, a pure laissez faire nation. And we’re probably better off for it.