The Next Hurrah

The Iowa Crockuses

by emptypockets

As you're no doubt aware, the Iowa crockuses are tonight. They are a folksy homespun tradition -- you can tell it's folksy and homespun by the living rooms and pie -- that was invented by Dr. Alfred Crockus, who believed that participatory democracy would be made most inclusive and the results most accurate if everyone went to strangers' homes at night, got drunk, and performed arithmetic.

This year's crockuses seem, to me, to have less media gravity -- to have sucked fewer words and ink into their orbit -- than the ones in 2004, which took place on Jan. 19 of that year. The Christmas and New Year's holidays provided a nice winter snowstorm of light, fluffy news which is great for packing into cable news, as long as you don't have to shovel it. By comparison, at this time four years ago we had another couple of weeks of Iowa campaign events and media coverage to inflate the significance of that state's results. To my mind, this year's crockuses feel more like a starter's gun than a finishing line.

My favorite site for tracking news about the race is http://www.electoral-vote.com, which has switched fully into primary mode as of the New Year. As you can see there, the polls are essentially "25% +/- 5%" for all three of the Democratic contenders, and they've been that way for nearly a full year. It's difficult enough to interpret poll numbers on a two-way race, where the preference numbers are typically an order of magnitude greater than the error. In a three-way (or more) race, where everyone's close and the fraction favoring any given candidate is small relative to error, the polls are almost as short on substance as the crockuses themselves.

And that's not to mention the funny way the crockuses themselves work, prone to mistakes, manipulation, and mess-ups. There may be disputes about the tally at the caucus site, where the loudest voice usually wins, and misinformation about the numbers and the candidates spread on-site to screw with people's votes. And, after all that vote-wangling and miscounting, we may never know how many individual voters were, in the end, recorded as having voted for a given candidate -- because those person-by-person counts are mailed to party headquarters and kept there, not disclosed to the press or the public. Ever.

I was only beginning to read blogs, and had not been commenting or writing, during the 2004 crockuses, but I recall well watching the broadcast of a couple of individual crockuses on C-SPAN that night, and following along on the DFA blog. I've been looking back at the archive of the site from that night, and find that my reactions were well mirrored by a series of comments from someone commenting as "Perry Young," who was liveblogging (perhaps?) before liveblogging was a word:

69. I am watching the Caucus on CSPAN 2, it is a disorganized mess. The people can't get phone calls out due to Bush callers blocking the line - they are having trouble with the math - and it looks like bedlam!!!! For a person from Texas this looks like madness. People trying to do math and they can't get figures to balance. They are getting cut off. Maybe it is just that I am not used to it, but this looks like a nightmare!!!!!

86. How can anyone assure accuracy in an environment such as what I am seeing on CSPAN-2 right now? It looks really really confused. I think I see why Dean spoke out against the Caucus system. It is a prescription for mass error. Wow, never seen anything like this.

115. Watching CSPAN-2 - this looks crazy. Can these people run a calculator? What is the control for error? I am amazed, I have never seen one of these before. Very very very weird. I am used to primaries.

That's just about how I felt. In fact, this post is something of a political birthday for me -- as best I can remember, the first time I commented on a blog or used the name 'emptypockets' was around Jan. 25 2004, in a sort of talking blues about the Iowa system and the race so far. (And, listening to it again now, it's not half bad!) So, happy birthday to me, and -- to you -- happy crockusing!

A little North of Iowa, but the same system.

by Sara

You all may or may not know that the Iowa Democratic Caucus Rules are the same or similar to the Minnesota DFL Caucus Rules.  Yea, we, maybe made a few changes and all, but the intent is the same.  It is simple, Advantage the activists, and discount the bandwagon.  While I strongly believe that early efforts at organization and with candidate offices can help, no way that late efforts will.  Iowa is about the locals sitting in the cafe, and discussing how to caucus over pie.  If you are not in that clan forget it.  Many issues are involved, and none of the networks seem to be able to report.   

A little North of Iowa, but the same system.

by Sara

Sara,

a bit off Topic, but I was in my Physical Therapist's office today checking out my knee. Old basketball injuries! I saw a copy of The Weekly Standard, Nov 12, 2007 which had an extensive article on Antioch College.

i.e. Death by Political Correctness (Who killed Antioch College?)

Very interesting read. - - - - -

- - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - -

Yes, I suspect most interesting.   Jodi, remember, I am a child of the old Trots from back in the 30's.  But I grew up and thought for myself.   I own a lot of old manuscript, and control a bit more, but I am also a Historian and believe in putting documents and all the rest in the public domaine. 

I doubt if you know what an interesting read is all about. 

New Year's Hope -- it is not in my power to resolve

by Sara

I was invited to two New Year's parties tonight, but I am tired of not being home and among my books, and cooking the food I like.  Later tonight I will make the second installment of Oyster Stew -- having bought two pint's of good Oysters prior to being diverted to emergency duty. 

But my New Year's hope is that the Alumni and the donors to Antioch College, and others who understand the need for strong Progressive Institutions, will succeed in rebuilding what Holiday Magazine called, in 1956, that Great Quaker Workcamp in the Woods.   The College is not really a Quaker institution -- hardly, in the last several decades, but elements of it have survived the onslaught of business minded boards of trustees, (business sometimes is about mergers and acquisitions actually and too many folk who keep secrets as if they were CIA and FBI and all rolled into one.)   Too many folk went around quoting Horace Mann about winning victories for Humanity, without a grounding in what dear old Horace really meant.  Hard to win one unless you have a sense of what contemporary mass humanity is all about. 

Horace Mann's great contribution to American Culture was an understanding of what was necessary to "keep a Republic" as Ben Franklin expressed it -- Mann was, as I see it, the second generation of the Founding Fathers.  He spent his political career, I think it was 18 years in the Mass. Legislature, and 2 years in Congress, advocating free public education for everyone.  His years as a legislator were involved with finding a means to both tax for a public education system -- and provide oversight on the funds thus raised to see to it that they were honestly spent for that purpose.  He did not succeed till 1839, but when he did, he assumed the leadership of the Boston School Committee so as to set an example as to what oversight of Public Education would involve, and in those days it involved three things.  First, Set a secular curriculum.  Second, build the necessary schools, buy books, and fuel the classroom stoves, but make certain no dollar is misspent. Third, accredit teachers as at the time no teacher training academies existed.   

After more than a decade setting the Boston School Committee as the leading example of how to administer a Public School System, Mann was attracted by a project of his friends, some of them Brook Farm Folk -- the locus of Jo's father in Little Women -- Lousia May Alcott's father -- but also a mite of Emerson and Thoreau.  But the project was that of the Christian Connection -- an early effort at ecumentalism that was less than successful because of hidden sectarian tendencies, but just the same, they tried around the matter of abolitionism.  Some of them were also transendentalists.  That idea survived but without sharp defination.  Yes they were abolitionists -- afterall they founded a school with no gender or racial proscriptions.  Beyond that they did not go -- at least for the next 60 or so years after Horace Mann charged the first graduating class with the mission of winning victories for Humanity.  (many died or were seriously wounded in the Civil War -- the college closed so the students could join the Union Army.)

In 1866 Antioch beat Ohio State 66 to 0 in a football game.  We hold that victory out as "fair game" -- given that we have more prizes for non- muscle competitions. 

Antioch went into dead null after the Civil War -- they had a religious war about doctrine, and all the rest, and the place went dead.  (Lesson).  What was that Christian Connection all about?  Well it was not settled. 

What brought life again was an odd sort of Capitalism. Very few folk these days know much about Arthur Morgan's ideas about the importance of small communities owning their own industries and capital formations, but Morgan was the source of rebuilding Antioch in the 1920's. and he was favored by FDR and Eleanor until he opposed the court packing plan in 1937. and published his objections in the Wall Street Journal.  FDR fired him from his TVA Trusteeship, and that was that.  (Personally, I think Morgan should have known better.)

Morgan had a unique sense of who should teach at Antioch.  He needed a Historian, so he hired a former Monk to do European History.  He ran into Manmatha Nath Chatterjee at an engineering Conference in Chicago in 1928. and he instantly converted him into a Sociologist, in large measure because he was the personal representative of Gandhi in the US, and it was Chatterjee who taught Coretta, and it was Coretta who taught Martin.  Virtually every Historian of the Movement has missed this as too many are overly male oriented. 

But that is not why Antioch should survive -- it is about moving that tradition into the future.   Right now as the Alumni Association is essentially buying back the college from the board that wanted to destroy the college -- it is hard to make all the arguments, but once things are settled and determined, the story is going to blow minds. 

Jodi -- much of what you read in the Dentist's office was swiped from my posts to private Antioch lists. I recognize my wording.   I too have read that article, and I have done the contrasts/comparisons with my own materials, and yep, whoever wrote it, had access to my (password protected) materials.  Of course I am a critic of a Board and all the rest who crashed my college.  Remember, I was there between 1957 and 1962.  But I know a good deal about what happened after I graduated. 

My hope is that you would wish us well in fixing things so that we can educate and train 10 Martin's and 10 Coretta's in each graduating class.

But it is going to take hard work  -- very hard work. 

And that is my wish of 08 -- Hard Work that manifests itself.

- - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - -

Save your money honey

put it in a sock

When your kids grow up don't send them to Antioch

Save your money, S----ave your money,

Save your Money Honey, ..CCNY is Free.

(folk song from the late 50's)

 

Out of Sequence -- Pakistan and Nuclear Jihadists

by Sara

Again, needs to help a friend took me away from the book-stack and the computer for over a week -- sorry about that.  But while away, I did grab an unread book off the stack, and sadly it was all too much to the point while trying to follow the Bhutto Murder on someone else's TV.  Nonetheless I want to highlight it, since it is currently available at your local Bookstore. 

"The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets...and How we could Have Stopped Him." by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins; Twelve, (Hachette) 2007. attracted my attention because of the author -- and ultimately the subject.  Frantz was co-author back in 1992 of an excellent piece of investigative journalism, "A Full Service Bank" -- a very significant work about BCCI, and its crash in the late 1980's, that depended in no small way on the cooperation of John Kerry and his Senate Investigative Staff.  In fact it was in 2004 that I pulled the book off the shelves for a careful re-reading fully expecting Kerry to totally unload on George Bush during the campaign, all of the involvement of the Bush Family in the BCCI.  Sadly, I was most disappointed.   I still think one of the hidden secrets of that 2004 campaign involves why Kerry did not use what he clearly knows, and what he had much earlier made available to Frantz.  Be that as it will -- perhaps some day Kerry will spill the beans -- but while wandering through new books at B&N, Frantz's name on a new book about the A.Q. Khan Nuclear Supermarket attracted attention, and sure enough, Frantz does more or less take up the topic where he left off fifteen years ago.  You see, one of the clear objectives of BCCI's international finance super fraud was the provision to Pakistan (privately and through public finance) of the means to create the necessary Nuclear Industry as the foundation for their weapons program.  Thus in "The Nuclear Jihadist" Frantz picks up the story where he left off in the early 1990's, makes a few minor corrections, and advances the story right up to recent months.  Frantz reported the earlier BCCI story for the NYTimes, won a Pulitzer for his investigative reporting, went on to be Managing Editor of the LA Times, left over the decision to downplay investigative work, and now is mostly free lance.  I would suggest that any Plameologist hereabouts would very much enjoy this book as well as the earlier one.  In fact, I detect a good deal of framing of Valerie's CIA career in this book, though of course she is only mentioned in otherwise public information about her outing and the Libby Trial.  Frantz, in fact, is very critical of the CIA approach to Nuclear Non-proliferation.  He observes that at each juncture over more than twenty years, the CIA had both the clear evidence, and the means for stopping the Pakistani Project, but in each instance decided against that track and in favor of more passive watching and waiting in hopes of finding yet more tentacles of Khan's Nuclear Marketplace.  One cannot help but reach the conclusion that once the compromises were made during the Reagan years to downplay any aspect of non-proliferation policy in favor of short term political interests, (such as maintaining Pakistani support for the war in Afghanistan during the 1980's), virtually any Bush or Reagan official can be tagged with responsibility for the Khan Network's success in not only building the Pakistani Bomb, but spreading the industrial knowledge necessary to wide-spread proliferation -- and we should entertain the possibility that the Plame outing was not just vengence for Joe Wilson's speaking up about Yellow Cake from Niger being of interest to Iraqis, but could well have been about the destruction of the Network the CIA had carefully built for the passive watching and waiting operations.  Mounting the wars you want is much easier if you lack strong intelligence.  At any rate, those who followed Plame as far as it went will find this piece of investigative work fascinating -- a huge addition to existing knowledge, and a decent basis for careful guesses as to what else might be involved here.  Just one nugget -- apparently AQ Khan invested many of his millions in luxury hotels in Mali -- in Timbukto in fact.  This is right next to Niger.  To furnish his Hotel he arranged many freight C-130 flights from Pakistan to Mali, supposedly taking furniture and building supplies.  One wonders whether he might have also taken some "industrial" supplies along too?  A Luxury Hotel in Mali is just a little strange.  It would be so much easier to ship processed Uranium Ore than unprocessed Yellow Cake.  I doubt if that hotel fact is in Frantz's book for pure entertainment.   At any rate I was thinking about Khan's hotel in Timbukto when the shooting of Bhutto at a political rally first broke on the Radio -- and I must admit that much of what Frantz has to say about Bhutto and her apparent intentional lack of awareness of what Khan was really up to during her Prime Ministership, made for a somewhat different coloring of the increasingly awful news.  In fact while I watched a good part of the CNN and MSNBC coverage, and listened to the NPR and BBC coverage, I didn't note any reporter taking up the role of Bhutto in making possible the Khan network, or discussing Nuclear Proliferation with regard to her career.  (It was, afterall, her Father who set the Khan Network in motion.)  Fate would have it that I was reading precisely that book at the point when asking that question about Bhutto became appropriate.  (Indeed, asking it about any Pakistani leader since 1975, and in parallel, American and European leaders since then, is appropriate.  Apparently the reason the Dutch Security did nothing about Khan even after discovery of his breaches of security had to do with Dutch competition with a German firm in the European consortium to process Uranium -- it was all about Guilder and Marks in those days.)  (and it was about running the money through BCCI in those days too -- which is why Frantz's earlier work is so important.  Last week I was pissed I was not home and able to dig out that book and do Index work.)

Frantz open's his book with a scene ready for Hollywood, in which a blond Female CIA agent makes a date at a Starbucks Coffee Shop in Vienna Austria with the top IAEA investigator, (a blond man from Finland) and hands off to IAEA much of the structure of the Khan network.  Frantz clearly respects the work of IAEA, but as with most others associated with that UN agency, recognizes that it is profoundly hamstrung by its own charter -- it cannot create its own intelligence gathering operation, it must subsist on what is handed over by national intelligence authorities, and that is pretty thin gruel as you follow the story.  What's critical is that in 2004 (May to be specific) CIA handed over many of the family gems to IAEA, by sending a blond female officer to a Vienna Starbucks to do the deed.  (Probably not VPW -- they must have a number who fit the description.  VPW was outed, remember, in July, 2003.)  This was nine months later.  In the meantime Libya had turned over what they claimed was all they had received from the Khan network.  It was detail, not the guts of what CIA knew.  In fact, one detail Frantz points out is that British Intelligence wanted to make the whole saga public before the invasion of Iraq -- it was Bush and Cheney, and particularly John Bolton who did not want IAEA to have it till the US Military was in Baghdad, if then.  In fact the turn over of Khan intelligence to IAEA only took place after it was damn clear that there were no WMD in Iraq, and there was no way to fake it. 

Frantz ends his book with a description of the movement of the hands on the Nuclear Clock forward to a point equal to the worst days of the Cold War, and then he makes clear that it is probably only through true international intelligence, transparency and control that any security can be achieved.  There is so much not known about what was really included in the Khan network, that national means that put proliferation at a much lower place in the pecking order than Guilder and Marks, or Euro, Dollars and Rupees (and covering up that reality) can possibly deal with.   An IAEA with a lot more guts and power is probably a pipe dream, but as he introduced his book with the writings of John Hersey in Hiroshima, maybe we should conclude this review with a reminder of the human costs of these games.  Hersey described people trying to hold their flesh onto their faces, he described how women wearing white kimonos had the patterns of the flowers in the print inked on to their flesh -- white repelled the radiation, the flower patterns absorbed it.  Men had similar marks -- dark suspenders under light colored work clothers left similar radiation marks. 

He also quotes Albert Einstein...

"The Splitting of the Atom has changed everything,

Save our mode of thinking, and thus

We drift toward unparalled Catastrophe."

I really recommend this book -- Bhutto dead or not, died of bullets, by the hand of al-Qaeda, The Taliban, some idiot promised 77 Virgins and a load of money for his family, the handle on a sun-roof, or a well trained sniper set up for the kill in a kill box arranged by the ISI.   All this is hardly the issue. 

Hillary Clinton surprised me -- she actually had something new to say.  She suggested what could be a reasonable and fair investigation of the facts.  If I read Frantz correctly, it is that notion of impartial yet international investigative work that is the main hope...thin though it is. 

   

 

American Theocracy -- back to Kevin Phillips

by Sara

Transiting from Mearsheimer and Walt to Phillips, is something of a leap over a creek with only a few small, slick stepping stones.  The M&W focused on a lobby, created in the cast of traditional American Interest Group politics, with that huge anomaly that one part of the interest group, the Lobby, is identified by its belief that success involves the spiritual, cultural if not physical elimination of the other.  But taste if not taboo prevent us from focusing our gaze on this fault line that in most political science oriented analysis of a Lobby, would be a significant dysfunctional trait at the core of analysis.  The irony is complete once one comprehends how influential the Lobby has been in the formulation and practice of American Foreign Policy, and that those who question one or another tenet of it are the likely targets of smear and accusations of anti-Semitism.  Apparently, when the New York Sun sought to review M&W's book, they first called David Duke of the KKK, and after describing for him several themes of the book (he had never heard of the book or the authors), he apparently offered up some approving language, resulting in a review that Headlined David Duke as "recommending" the book.   Aah the practice of the Journalistic Smear!  Of course the irony is that those who predicate their world view and thus their notions of foreign policy on an End-Times narrative that would eliminate their political partners never have to answer the key question -- is that Narrative essentially anti-Semitic?  Among other things, M&W suggest breaking the taboo, and asking that question.   

Phillips approach to this question is quite different -- he is less concerned with the sociological approach (a study of the social bond that forges institutional social structures such as a Lobby), and much more concerned with cultural history, and his thesis emerges from his study of American Protestant History rooted in the largely British sects and cults that initially settled the US, and essentially continued in an American context, the conflicts that date back to the English Civil Wars of the early 1600's.  Phillips sees both the American Revolution and our own Civil War -- reconstruction, and ultimately the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's - 1970's, as a continuation of that 17th Century conflict transported from the United Kingdom to the US.  Through a process of repeated "Revival" movements, American Protestantism constantly churns, first, through sectarian emotional rejection of institutionalized religious forms for having "compromised" in building the new Jerusalem in the American Wilderness, second, by creating a less worldly and more uncompromising loose institutional structure (or new cult), and third, as that new structure makes the necessary accomodations, setting the stage for the process to repeat itself in the next or a near future generation.  Phillips contends that it is this pattern of cycles that constantly return to the theme of building the new Jerusalem in the Wilderness -- that is the foundation for the belief in American Exceptionalism, with all the baggage that carries.  Phillips comprehends Wilson, for instance, sailing off to the Versailles Conference with his 14 points as a Preacher for American Exceptionalism, a theme repeated in the current administration with GWB's neo-Wilsonian waving the flags of Freedom and Liberty and a thin gruel notion of Democracy.  Phillips sees this "process" as easily co-optable by those who do politics by putting a religious veneer on essentially political power objectives, and thus he sandwiches his religious cultural history analysis between a first and third part of his book, the first devoted to Oil, and the rather high probability of a world war for Oil Resources -- and the third devoted to the implications of the Financialization of the US, and the likely social and political decay resulting from the US debt, the collapse of the dollar, the bursting of various bubbles, (Phillips predicted the real estate bubble bursting in 2005), all of which, he further predicts, will be offered up to America in the Theocratic garments he describes in the middle core of his book. 

Phillips offers up many perhaps stray issues around which he makes a fairly weak but still plausible argument for a better than worst case outcome.  (Phillips has to be understood as publishing in early 2005 -- before Katrina, before Bush's poll numbers started going south, and before the press aroused itself, and began to critically examine many parts of the Republican Religious Establishment.)  Nonetheless, Phillips finds hope in the fairly substantial statistical disagreement between hard theologically based positions of the religious right (the litmus test issues) and academic studies and public polling around these issues, and suggests many of these may be keys to understanding the phase of the cycle or pattern at the core of Phillips thesis about the theocratic tendency in American Protestantism, leading to the kind of compromises Phillips postulates eventually lead to a weakening in evangelical revivalist movements.  And because at heart, Phillips started his publishing and consulting career as a Republican Strategist for that "new new Nixon" movement in the late 1960's, in essence his purpose is to suggest the terms of divorce more moderate Republicans might use to end their dependence on the Religious Right that has captured control of his, (Kevin Phillips's) party.  In essence his argument is that Republicans have to propose solutions to Oil dependency that work -- without having a world war for control of commidities, colored as a religious war -- and at the same time, fashion some new form of "sound dollar" economic program that addresses the profound economic inequalities Phillips addressed in "Wealth and Democracy" that he contends have been legitimized by the "Wealth doctrines" of many Republican linked evangelical movements. 

Where I suggest Mearsheimer and Walt essentially agree with Phillips is on the matter of the distorting power of the religious right -- more general in Phillips analysis, more specific in M&W's analysis of the place of the Christian Zionists in the Israel Lobby coalition.  Their frame of analysis is very different -- M&W as International Relations Realists see the distortion in the rejection of normative national interest approaches to setting American Foreign Policy and the willing incorporation of the End-Times narrative as the core of policy, whereas Phillips comprehends the distortion in the willing electorial dependence of Republicans on theologically based irrational beliefs that prevent Republicans -- and indeed many independents -- from straightforwardly addressing real problems, such as Oil Dependency or the collapse of segments of the US financial system, and the profound weakening of the dollar. 

In the case of Phillips, this leads to his essential prescription, with which I strongly agree -- and which I can reduce to a simple political slogan, namely BRING BACK THE ENLIGHTENMENT!  In the case of Mearsheimer and Walt one might phrase it as FORGET THE TABOOS, LET'S TALK. 

Summed up, and coming from very different directions, these books do converge on the core distorting character of the American Religious Right.  Our next book -- Damon Linker's insider's tale "The Theocons" will take us inside the movement.  Linker was for a number of years editor of "First Things" -- the leading Theocon Journal, and his "tell all" story adds more flesh to the necessary comprehension of the Politics - Religion relationships. 

A flash of grey flannel, a whiff of BenGay...

by Kagro X

When is an Internet-based, third party organizing effort a Very Serious Idea?

When David "Wild Man" Broder f*cking well tells you it is. That's when. You lowly moron.

Until plans for this meeting were disclosed, the most concrete public move toward any kind of independent candidacy was by Unity08, a group planning an online nominating convention to pick either an independent candidate or a ticket combining a Republican and a Democrat. The sponsors, an eclectic mix of consultants who have worked for candidates including Jimmy Carter (D) and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), have not aligned with a specific prospect.

Now, some people with high-level political and governmental credentials are moving to put muscle behind the effort.

What meeting, you ask? Why, the Big Bipartisan Serious Person's Kumbaya Love-In for America, of course.

IV, Mearsheimer and Walt, and moving on.

by Sara,

Delighted that at least one reader will pick up a copy of Mearsheimer and Walt and actually read it.  I had ordered an advance copy at my local B & N before it was released, and then during a visit found the stock person putting 20 or so copies on the shelf about a week before the announced release.  But because of advance reviews, they advanced the release date.  Signed on to Josh's place after coming home with book in bag, and there were already about a hundred folk ready to bash the book -- and they could not have possibly read it.   I recommend reading it before making a judgment. 

Next Book -- Kevin Phillips on Theocracy.  Perhaps his dedication says it all, "...dedicated to the millions of Republicans, past and present and lapsed. who have opposed the Bush Dynasty and the disenlightenment in the 2000 and the 2004 elections."

Disenlightenment;  that is a profoundly important invented word -- Thanks Kevin. 

Actually I have been a reader of Phillips since the early 1970's.  If one remembers the Emerging Republican Majority, he invented the Dayton Ohio Suburban woman who had a husband who was a tool and die maker, and had several children, and they were in the midst of discovering that there was no future for tool and die makers at National Cash Register.  Well -- that woman was my former back door neighbor, and I had added to my account for my year in Europe by babysitting her kids over several years.  Skilled labor was the first to be roughed off during the conversion to rust belt status --  so I have always understood Phillips.  (In fact my back door neighbor who became a Reagan Democrat, and not so obviously blamed race for her problems, is indeed someone I disagree with, but understand.)  But in "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century,"   Kevin Phillips asks us to understand much more than the archtype of my backdoor neighbor of the late 1960's.  In fact you actually have to read a couple of other Phillips books to understand his points.  In fact, I doubt if "American Theocracy" comprehends without an understanding of his earlier work, "The Cousins' War."  In my mind Phillips achieved "read and seriously consider status" when I thought he aptly described my former babysitting customer in the late 50's, as he described her in the late 60's about when National Cash Register not so gradually no longer needed any tool and dye makers, because cash registers depended not on gears and springs, but on chips, and backyard neighbors became rust belt victims.  While Reagan may have appealed to these folk (and he did --they voted for him) when I finally went back to visit I found them holding down four low skilled part time jobs, but unable to manage an education for their children, and one was quite talented.  Phillips accurately predicted what Nixon's politics and policy should be (Southern Strategy and racial politics) -- but he sure as hell did not offer much to his respondants.   Which is how I read him now. 

Essentially, Phillips rips Republicans from Nixon through GWB through their hide, largely because they did not comprehend that the Oil was a commodity that was running out, and they had no idea how to replace the asset.  He argues that they thought it (and related power afterall) could be turned into a financial asset where the US would dominate, and they failed to listen to alternative views. 

In essence, Phillips suggests that into this failure, the Republicans introduced the dimension of fundamentalist and individualist salvation religion. 

And on that point, we will later take up this review of books. 

 

 

 

III Religion and Politics - The Double Irony

by Sara

Just over the past day, a new set of reviews by professional diplomatic Historians has become available on an open list to which I subscribe regariding the Mearsheimer & Walt Book, "The Israel Lobby" -- and I recommend reading these, to be found at:  http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/#8.18   I profoundly disagree with one, and more or less agree with one or two minor points of difference, with the other three.  Anyhow, I didn't move on because I wanted to digest these serious reviews. 

Where I differ with all of these reviews is the fact that they skipped over what is actually quite unique in M & W's work -- namely their recognition that an extreme of contemporary right wing and literal fundamentalist American Christianity was very much a central player in the Israel Lobby, as M & W describe it,  and that understanding the role of this group in the network or loose coalition that is the "Israel Lobby" becomes necessary if one is to comprehend American Foreign Policy in the Middle East.  The irony (or at least a part of it) derives from what the Christian Zionists (such as the group Hagee leads) actually believe.  and that is the narrative of the Rapture or "End Times" involving the return of all Jews to Israel, the opportunity for all Jews to finally convert, then the battle of Armageddon, and the Rapture -- with the Jews who fail to convert being in the "left behind" cohort.  I noticed today that MJ Rosenberg over at Josh's place picked up on my irony -- I have left a few comments there -- and he picked up on describing "End-Times" as "End-of-the-Jews-Times."  I like his construction of the Irony.   All of this is about a book that finally broke the Taboo of talking about all this.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are about as uber-Establishment as one can get in Academic Diplomatic History and Foreign Relations studies.  Mearsheimer holds a distinguished chair in the department of International Relations and Political Science at the University of Chicago, Walt holds a named chair at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.  They are situated in the midst of the Realist School of Foreign Policy.  Back in 2002 they were asked by Atlantic to write a feature article on the influence of the "Israel Lobby" on the decision to invade Iraq -- and over several years the Atlantic editors revised the manuscript, but ultimately decided not to publish.  Some months later, the London Review of Books did decide to publish, and both that article, and an extended version published on the Kennedy School website (one that included the vast array of footnotes, but not the logo of Kennedy School) resulted in two phenonema -- the Kennedy School site had over 300 thousand downloads in a week -- and the London Review site sans footnotes, was equally stretched.  The authors were immediately attacked as anti-Semites, (mostly by folk who had hardly bothered to absorb the text), and eventually the Council on Foreign Relations organized a forum, (it was on C-Span which is how I found out about the article and the set-to).  It was probably the Council's according these scholars a proper venue with clear rules of discourse, that finally allowed the actual content of their article to be considered for what it said.

M&W's Thesis is fairly simple.  Understanding that Realists in International Relations/Foreign Policy deal in analysis of policy in terms of National Interests, they propound that the US and Israeli National Interests are not necessarly the same.  They were closer during the Cold War, when the possibilities of Soviet Influence spreading more widely in the Middle East were a concern, but since that time, interests have diverged.   In essence they suggest that the "Israel Lobby" had been a barrier to the Foreign Policy Community recognizing this change, and adjusting US policy accordingly. 

Much of the book (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2007) is devoted to a description of the components of this lobby.  The Authors make clear that American Politics from the get-go have always been about interest groups organizing and making coalitions to empower interests, and that the modern form of the lobby is essentially American, traditional, and not at all illegal or even a conspiracy -- they totally reject any form of conspiracy theory.  It is fairly open, and certainly subject to analysis.  The only thing that is really wrong is the Taboo -- the private and public pressures against those who would subject it to analysis by a normal scholar, or scholarly method, -- and the reality that any criticism will result in -- well what -- an attack from Alan Dershowitz?  Yes that, and many other things.  We know about Juan Cole being blacklisted at Yale last year, but just recently I have been reading (with delight) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s Journals, and he tells of an effort (early 1960's) he was involved with organizomg a lunch for Senators, hosted by Bill Fullbright with the Arab Diplomats in DC, and only four US Senators were willing to chance coming to such a lunch.  Point being that what M&W describe is not all that new. 

But what they do publish is the core role that "Christian Zionists" play in the "Israel Lobby" -- and doing some counting, offer lots more Representatives and Senators than are elected by an essentially Jewish electorate.  Perhaps as much to the point, about half of the Jewish Electorate wants not so much a pro-Israel representative, just not a negative one, and otherwise are much more concerned with issues.  In essence, the core of the "Israel Lobby" positions may well not be the position of many American Jews.  In many respects, this is a negation of the "Israel Lobby" position.   As much as anything, many who currently support the "Israel Lobby" want to avoid examination of the Christian Zionist role -- which MJ at Josh's place called the "End-of-the-Jews" lobby, if you take the theology anywhere near seriously. 

Mearsheimer and Walt end their book with lots of recommendations, perhaps twenty, and some negations of recommendations from outside.  For instance, they do not recommend forming an alternative Lobby.  But what they do recommend without any caution is just talking -- get it up and talk about all this.  Deal with the taboos on the subjects.  I think this their greatest contribution, and in the sense that they locate the Christian Zionists with their narrative of End Times at the center of their side of the alliance, I think discussion is well advised.