Reason Magazine - Staff > Michael C. Moynihan

'The Patriarch of Liberty'

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:00:00 EST

When John Adams traveled to France in 1779 to confer with America's Revolutionary War allies, Parisians lamented that they would not be playing host to "the famous Adams." That title was reserved for the future president's cousin, the muckraking journalist turned zealous revolutionary, Samuel Adams.

So it is odd, then, that this Zelig of independence, present at virtually every revolutionary convulsion of early America, is now remembered mostly for lending his name to a popular brand of beer. As Ira Stoll observes in Samuel Adams: A Life, his engaging and hagiographic biography of this forgotten founding father, a name once synonymous with the American independence movement was "lost in the attic of history."

This is unfortunate, says Stoll, the former managing editor of The New York Sun, because it was Adams who acted as the "moral conscience of the American Revolution." Indeed, it was Adams who helped precipitate the revolutionary unrest, skillfully whipping up public sentiment against British attempts to tax his fellow colonists without allowing them parliamentary representation and, through his pseudonymous newspaper column, inflaming public passions following the Boston Massacre.

Adams was an early and unwavering supporter of separation from Britain, and totally uninterested in compromise or reconciliation with America's imperial masters. When King George III asked Thomas Hutchinson, the former colonial governor of Massachusetts, to provide intelligence on the situation in America, he singled out Adams as "the first that publically asserted the independency of the colonies." As a measure of Adams influence, Stoll points out that when England proffered a pardon for all citizens engaged in revolutionary activity in exchange for a cessation of violence, the only two Bostonians exempted from the deal were Adams and his friend John Hancock.

But Adams was not merely an agitator of mobs. The Massachusetts constitution (1779), which Adams "patiently navigated .ñ.ñ. through revision after revision, and then to ratification," enumerated the "natural, essential and unalienable rights" of "all men." And as Stoll notes, it not only provided the foundation upon which the federal constitution was built, but was later cited when state courts abolished slavery and legalized same-sex marriage.

Stoll argues that, for a man of his times, Adams possessed enlightened, if imperfect, views of slavery and religious liberty (excepting his fanatical anti-Catholicism), and understood that the foundation of a free society was the constitutional guarantee of private property rights. "Property rights, after all," Stoll writes, "were one of Adams's main arguments against taxation by the British." It was the one issue he stressed "almost as much as religious rights in arguing against Britain's treatment of the colonies."

But Christianity was the dominant theme of his writing. He argued strenuously that liberty and religion were inextricably linked, commenting that "whether America shall long preserve her freedom or not, will depend on her virtue" because once Americans "lose their virtue they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader."

But he could also be a moral scold; at times sounding like a proto-social conservative. Adams stridently campaigned against "theatrical entertainments," inveighing against the supposedly deleterious effects of horse racing, theater-going, dancing, card playing and salty language. The curbing of such "idle amusements" was necessary, he believed, to restore virtue and to preserve revolutionary gains.

Stoll offers not only a compelling portrait of an overlooked figure, but a crisp intellectual history of the American Revolution and its main players. And he reminds readers that it was John Adams who remarked upon his cousin's death that "Without the character of Samuel Adams, the true history of the American Revolution can never be written." With Samuel Adams: A Life, Stoll has succeeded in returning the man Thomas Jefferson called "the patriarch of liberty" to his proper place in the pantheon of great revolutionaries.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor at reason. This article originally appeared at The New York Post.

Manufacturing Dissent

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:00:00 EST

Before an unfortunate encounter with his television show on Tuesday night, I had never heard of Gideon Yago. According to Wikipedia, Yago is a former correspondent for MTV News, an occasional print journalist, and an aspiring screenwriter. He dresses the part too—hipster glasses, a wispy beard, low-cut Doc Martens boots. A Wisconsin native, Yago is the Midwesterner-as-refugee, keeping it real in New York; outraged by the "corporate media," yet with a minor corporate media pedigree. When asked by The New York Times if he is cynical about the American media, Yago told the Times, "That, my friend, is the understatement of the year."

Yago is the host of The IFC Media Project, a six-part documentary series on the Independent Film Channel (IFC) arguing the anti-media brief for the "change we can believe in" crowd. According to the show's creator and producer, Meghan O'Hara, Yago will look at the "influences shaping today's media coverage including journalistic integrity, biases, corporate influence, profits, ratings, propaganda, agendas, obsessions and more." It is also the intention of these brave souls to demonstrate "how the government uses propaganda in the media to sell policy decisions to the American public." In an apparent conflation of shows like Today with actual news programs, Yago told the Times that he was tired of “news stories that were super-relevant [that] get the kibosh because Purina had bought the first hour of the morning show and they wanted to do a profile on fat cats.”

Case in point, according to the debut episode, is the media's treatment of the Israel-Palestine issue. American foreign policy, says segment host Mark LeVine, is in "lockstep" with Israel, a fact that is "difficult to discuss," the "third rail of journalism," something we Americans "don't debate," and speak of only in "hushed tones." There are critics, he concedes, but "the lobby monitors these people." It is unclear where these brave dissenters are airing their opinions, considering that the mainstream media doesn't allow them a voice, and just why "monitoring" (which, in this case, is a euphemism for criticism) is such a bad thing. In fact, isn't this what The IFC Media Project is doing?

Stressing that "the media"—which is never adequately defined—genuflects at the feet of pro-Israel hawks, Yago and Levine present a clip of Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol (an opinion journalist) on Fox News. In a 2006 interview with Neil Cavuto, conducted at the start of the Lebanon war, Kristol comments that, "It's unfortunate that Lebanese get killed in the cross fire, but at the end of the day, this is really much better for Lebanon..." Cut.

But hang on. Here is, according to the Fox transcript of the exchange, Kristol's unexpurgated quote:

"It's unfortunate that Lebanese get killed in the cross fire, but at the end of the day, this is really much better for Lebanon than them being forced to tolerate Hezbollah, as they were forced to tolerate Syria for all those years, occupying their territory."

As tempting as it might be, pay no attention to the substance of Kristol's argument—it is irrelevant to the point at hand. For a television show accusing the mainstream media of selectivity and dishonesty, Yago and Levine don't seem to mind taking some liberties in the editing booth themselves.

The other "pro-Israel" clips are even more bizarre. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer, former Secretary of State Alexander Haig proclaims that "we've got to stick with our ally" (though a comment about the Israel-U.S. relationship not actually being "down the line support" is excised), once again demonstrating that people with opinions are invited on television to express them. A brief clip of MSNBC's only conservative host, former Republican Florida Rep. Joe Scarborough, asking a question of his guest is also truncated. But on the receiving end of Scarborough's interrogation is—surprise!—the anti-Israel pundit Pat Buchanan, a frequent MSNBC guest who has managed to evade the omnipotent and omnipresent Israel lobby.

And so on.

It's hard to know what to make of all of this. One wonders if media criticism is—or has become—merely an expression of ideological frustration. If the deeply held views of the complainant are not represented on CNN's Situation Room, it's the result of a shadowy conspiracy. That IFC doesn't make a convincing case for a uniformly pro-Israel media didn't bother the Columbia Journalism Review, which enthusiastically wrote that "kudos are in order to any project that explores, as [host Gideon] Yago puts it, 'what the media gets right, what it gets wrong, and who calls the shots that influence what you actually see.'" [emphasis added]

This is, in a sense, the political version of Tipper Gore's Parents Music Respurce Center (PMRC), relying as it does on a reductionist argument that the plebians will uncritically swallow whatever the networks feed them (and like Gore, it vastly overstates the broadcast media's influence). But Yago considers himself a member of the resistance, a heroic figure to be celebrated for struggling mightily against the media "noise machine," for being a terribly clever person that watches the BBC. (Yago repeats the hipster cliché that "the foreign press [is] often far more sophisticated and far more nuanced, subtle" than the American media. Has he never heard of the Daily Mail, The Sun, or Bild?)

The IFC Media Project isn't actually engaging in any real media criticism; it's merely signaling to those who are already on his team. No one who has spent significant amounts of time on a college campus in the past 30 years will find anything new or novel in this type of kvetching. But unlike those campus activists who knew how to complain but failed to offer solutions, Yago thinks that media freedom is the problem, not the solution, telling Mediabistro that news is "a public service and for the common wealth."

Perhaps, he continued, we need the government to intervene and force us—a sort of media dictatorship of the proletariat—to watch the correct programming: "I wonder if it has to come down to the federal government coming in and re-regulating what it is that's [on during] prime time, or the way [news] budgets can be allocated, or even creating some sort of government-trusted or government-bonded or government-subsidized media outlet that doesn't have to compete in the marketplace."

That way, the Purina Cat Chow executives and the Israel lobby can't monopolize the flow of information and obscure the truth about the Middle East.

Michael Moynihan is an associate editor of reason magazine

"Socialist" Is Not A Racist Smear

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Is there anything more tedious—or perhaps pernicious—than the confident, outraged, and half-educated political pundit? Thank goodness for the Drudge Report, without whom this latest manifestation of racial cryptography would have likely passed unnoticed. One Lewis Diuguid (pronounced 'Do-good,' I suspect), editorial page columnist for the Kansas City Star, is horrified to note that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has called his opponent, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), a "socialist." Now let me, as a card-carrying member of the libertarian establishment, say from the outset that while the prospect of an Obama presidency and large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate stimulates my acid reflux, I am optimistic that our presumptive leader will govern more in the style of L.B.J. than Eugene Debs. Thank heaven for small mercies. So yes, I expect the next four years to be pretty grim, but those who foretell massive grain collectivization, the requisition of SUVs, a liquidation campaign against the kulaks, would be advised to take a deep breath.

But buried in these charges of socialism, Diuguid, the Star's in-house racial cryptographer, finds clear racist intent. He explains that "J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI from 1924 to 1972, used the term liberally to describe African Americans who spent their lives fighting for equality." Indeed, "freedom fighters" like "W.E.B. Du Bois, who in 1909 helped found the NAACP which is still the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization [and] Paul Robeson, a famous singer, actor and political activist who in the 1930s became involved in national and international movements for better labor relations, peace and racial justice..."

This is a sort of reverse McCarthyism; the presumption that because an activist was denounced as a 'socialist' he was obviously no such thing. But here Diuguid is, whether out of luck or ignorance, partially correct. Du Bois and Robeson were most certainly not socialists—they were Stalinists.

Du Bois, who renounced his American citizenship and formally joined the American Communist Party in 1961, five years after Khrushchev's secret speech, two years after being awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, made no secret of his "socialism." Indeed, here is a representative selection from his bootlicking obituary for Josef Stalin:

"Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered his problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly; never yielded to ostentation nor coyly refrained from holding his rightful place with dignity...He was attacked and slandered as few men of power have been; yet he seldom lost his courtesy and balance...His judgment of men was profound...Such was the man who lies dead, still the butt of noisy jackals and of the ill-bred men of some parts of the distempered West. In life he studied under continuous and studied insult; he was forced to make bitter decisions on his lone responsibility. His reward comes as the common man stands in solemn acclaim."

A one-off mistake, perhaps? Three years later, in June 1956, tens of thousands of Poles took to the streets of Poznan demanding democratic reform. As was customary in occupied Eastern Europe, the occupation army was dispatched to quell the demonstration, leaving 60 protestors dead (some estimates put the number in the hundreds). In a letter to a friend, Du Bois admitted that "Not even the upheaval in Poland disturbs me," for the demonstrators were likely "landlords" and members of the "military clan" in the pay of the United States.

Or how about this: Confronted with Khrushchev's secret speech, in which the Soviet leader broadly revealed the institutional terror of his predecessor, Du Bois protested that the revelations were "irresponsible and muddled." In a letter to a supporter, he explained that while perhaps "probably too cruel" at times, he nevertheless "regard[ed] Stalin as one of the great men of the twentieth century." And Stalin's brutal purges of 1936-38, during which over a million class enemies were murder, he argued, were entirely justified:

From the testimony I read at the time, I believe that justice was done to these men on the whole. In the critical struggle then going on, some innocent men might have suffered, but as to the general fairness of these trials, even reliable American observers like Raymond Robbins (sic) testified.

These were, Diuguid might be interested to learn, views shared by Paul Robeson, the great campaigner for "justice," and 1952 winner of the Stalin Peace Prize. It should suffice here to briefly excerpt Robeson's eulogy for Stalin:

"Forever [Stalin's] name will be honored and beloved in all lands! In all spheres of modern life the influence of Stalin reaches wide and deep. From his last simply written but vastly discerning and comprehensive document, back through the years, his contributions to the science of our world society remain invaluable."

After Robeson beseeched his fellow African-Americans not to fight against the Soviet Union, whom he argued viewed race relations through a progressive lens, boxer Sugar Ray Robinson told a reporter that if he ever crossed paths with Robeson he would "punch him in the mouth."

But there is a surface stupidity in Diuguid's piece too; the very modern usage of the phrase "racial code." Perhaps his historical illiteracy is forgivable (I was taught the same thing about Du Bois and Robeson, and my alma mater named its library after him), but does he truly believe that, in the bad old days of J. Edgar Hoover, those wished to speak ill of African Americans were forced to revert to some sort of secret language?

Michael C. Moynihan is a reason associate editor. This article originally appeared in Jewcy.

The Rise of Disaster Socialism

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In Naomi Klein's schizophrenic indictment of economist Milton Friedman, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, it is argued that in times of great social and economic upheaval sinister free market advocates push their ideas of limited government and minimal state interference in the economy upon the vulnerable and the unsuspecting. The major points upon which this argument rests are dubious, if not outright false, and have forced her critics to ignore a more remedial point: Why is it considered sinister that, upon the spectacular failure of Marxism-Leninism, for example, it would be suggested that it was time to give classical liberalism a try? Indeed, why not encourage a scofflaw and killer like Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (or the brutal thugs of the Chinese Politburo) to liberalize the economy? And it hardly merits repeating that both Chile and China today have significantly higher standards of living than Cuba, an authoritarian regime Klein finds little time to condemn.

So it's equally unsurprising that we are now seeing Naomi Klein's thesis in reverse—the rise, amongst many in the pundit class, of "disaster socialism." As markets tumble and the world economy convulses, market-unfriendly ideologues are rushing in, seizing an opportunity to argue that they were right after all; to argue in favor of a rollback of "extreme" capitalism; and to suggest further government regulation and control of the economy. The gravediggers are leaning on their shovels, waiting for capitalism to expire, despite conflicting diagnoses on a patient very much alive.

So here, as an example of the recent dying-capitalism meme, is a front page story from The Washington Post, under an ominous (or is it triumphant?) headline presaging the "end of capitalism." The story begins with a bold, if entirely unverifiable, claim: "The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is claiming another casualty: American-style capitalism." Now, it's anyone's guess what exactly this means, or just what qualifies as particularly American capitalism, as the effects of the crisis ricochet around the globe, and no data is offered to substantiate the claim. Wishful thinking, perhaps. A Reuters columnist was equally categorical, proclaiming "Capitalism as we used to know it is on its deathbed" and celebrating the turgid "scientific socialism" of Karl Marx, "whose thinking on banks seems oddly contemporary these days." Noted novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi sees a fulfillment of Marxian prophesy—the need for total capitalism in order to reach the first stages of revolution. "Marx always said that capitalism would rise and then collapse, and this would be a continual process, it was built on that, and this is what's happened. And what can you do but laugh?"

Or take this bit of wisdom from Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, gleefully sounding the death knell for "unregulated capitalism." Two weeks previous, Meyerson bemoaned the "ideology of unregulated capitalism—of Reaganism" and predicted that the current economic crisis "may ensure that the GOP itself becomes one more casualty in the collapse of laissez faire." Both columns are laced with a series of little idiocies that, if true, would surely spell doom for the American economy. Meyerson, a former leading light in the Democratic Socialists of America, flatly states that "laissez faire" is in collapse, that financial markets were operating without regulation or oversight, and that Reaganomics and Bushonomics are analogous. (And as David Boaz points out, there is a certain perversity in Meyerson's comparison of free market advocates and those who stood four-square behind Stalinism.)

Nor are such sentiments isolated to the American debate. It is unsurprising that both the Mini-Mullah of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the unstable revolutionary of Caracas, Hugo Chavez, both declared "the end of capitalism." Australia's Labour Prime Minister Rudd added a modifier, stating that we were now seeing that "comprehensive failure of extreme capitalism." Par for the course from a Labour government. But it was with some surprise that I read that Swedish parliamentarian Rolf K. Nilsson, a member of the right-wing Moderat party, had declared that all was lost, because it was time to admit that "Capitalism is a bloodsucker system and a threat to the civilized world."

As most economists sort through the rubble, most pundits are trying to seize upon a narrative that, evidence be damned, will help advance a particular economic cause. (Meyerson has long played this game, telling the Baltimore Sun in 1994 that American capitalism and "globalization of markets" has "turn[ed] us into a nation of temps.") In his invocation of Reaganism, Meyerson is, of course, making a partisan point that has echoed across the blogosphere: We are witnessing the last gasp of Reaganomics. But when the 1987 stock market crash failed to provoke a depression, and when capitalism not only refused to die but appeared to have suffered little lasting damage, it was, liberal economics expert Paul A. Samuelson said, because Reaganomics wasn't "pure capitalism": "The 1929 panic was no greater than the 1987 panic. Black October 1929 was followed by a great depression because we lived under pure capitalism in those days. Laissez faire economics allowed 8,000 banks to fail." Not so with the regulatin' Reagan. John Heimann, vice chairman of Merrill Lynch Capital Markets, told an audience the same year that, "It may well be that historians, looking back at the '80s, will pronounce it an era in which a peak of government economic intervention was reached..."

But political hacks, like Robert Kuttner, were waiting in line, ready to blame unfettered markets and to dance on capitalism's grave. A week after the 1987 crash, future American Prospect co-founder Kuttner wrote in the Los Angeles Times that, "The stock market has signaled a warning: If they continue the economics of fiscal fantasy and extreme laissez faire, depression will follow market crash as surely as it did last time." Twenty years ago yesterday, economist Ravi Batra's paranoid treatise Surviving the Great Depression of 1990 ranked fifth on The New York Times bestseller list.

The point here is simple: Trust no one who declares an end to a system as complex and successful as capitalism, or who sees the current crisis as the long-awaited fulfillment of Marx's voodoo economics. It was The Guardian's Simon Jenkins—yes, that Guardian—who first noted that the current meltdown was immediately followed by "journalistic wish-fulfillment and glee," and observed that his fellow "Guardian writers and Labour politicians have been drooling all week over what they call the ‘collapse of the free market model.'" Now that globalization has brought unprecedented wealth to developing countries, and has lifted millions out of poverty, it's time, say the "disaster socialists," to try it our way.

But capitalism, globalization, and the free market aren't going anywhere. Yes, unemployment is still only 6 percent—it will most certainly rise—and the stock market isn't quite in full collapse, but is suffering from periodic seizures. And indeed, we are most certainly heading towards a severe recession. But capitalism is durable, and has sustained itself in far worse situations. So ignore the disaster socialists: They are, after all, only taking advantage of the current crisis to try a little shock therapy of their own. And who could blame them?

Michael C. Moynihan is a reason associate editor.

Shoeless Joe Biden and the Snowbilly Hockey Mom

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:30:00 EDT

So the media narrative has shifted. Last night’s debate wasn’t the colossal disaster for Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that many pundits had predicted and many Republicans feared. As the McCain campaign privately acknowledged, her confused, cringe-inducing performance with Katie Couric opened a deep wound, but after a 90-minute blitzkrieg of aw-shucks folksiness, the well-scripted cauterization began. It is, however, a stretch to conclude that she recovered in any appreciable way—she advanced the line slightly, but this was no Battle of the Bulge breakout.

Like most pundits, Roger Simon, chief political columnist for The Politico, set a low bar for success, offering Palin back-handed praise: “She smiled. She faced the camera. She was warm. She was human. Gosh and golly, she even dropped a bunch of g’s.” And, like a chipper Waffle House waitress, she winked at us (repeatedly), called us “hon,” refilled our coffee, and straight-talked about issues she didn’t entirely understand.

You know, I want to like Palin, if just to irritate those who feign apoplexy at the very mention of her name. But it seems clear that, like most hockey moms, she has proven an extremely weak extemporaneous debater, frequently consulting her index cards and resorting to platitudes when substance proved elusive. In the American political milieu, this isn’t necessarily a handicap, provided you have been sufficiently media-trained or spent five days in debate boot camp with Randy Scheunemann. But who doubts that in a Prime Minister's Questions-type format—an import that Sen. McCain has long advocated—Palin would be cut to ribbons?

With media attention directed at Palin’s pronunciation of “nu-cu-ler” and her failure to address a number of moderator Gwen Ifill’s questions head-on, it’s easy to see how this debate could work heavily in favor of Sen. Joe Biden’s (D-Del.). But it wasn’t his “more substantive” answers that tipped the balance—his responses were frequently vapid, evasive, and confused. It's the fact that, post-Couric, hardly anyone was concerned with the substance of such arguments. What mattered was the style with which they were presented. Biden was Biden. It was Palin the underdog rookie we should all be interested in.

The Atlantic’s Clive Crook makes the rather straightforward argument that Biden was on a short leash, tempering his responses, refusing to go for the jugular, and was instead studiously self-effacing, chuckling at some of Palin’s more pointed digs. As Crook argues, this was probably a winning strategy. But this line of argument, along with the obsessive focus on “freeing” Palin from constraints imposed by the campaign, also has the added benefit of turning the focus away from many of Biden’s clunky answers.

For instance, attempting to stanch the surge-as-success narrative, Biden argued that “our commanding general in Afghanistan said the surge principle in Iraq will not work in Afghanistan,” despite Obama’s previous calls for a surge of troops into that country to fight al Qaeda. (Unsurprisingly, Biden did pirouettes around his vote authorizing the president to wage the Iraq War.) The pie-in-the-sky Biden plan, he said, would include building schools on the Pakistan border and “establishing” a stable government in Islamabad.

Palin, it was noted repeatedly today, mistook the Civil War general who lead the Army of the Potomac, George McClellan, for the general in charge of NATO forces in Afghanistan, David McKiernan. But it will only be specialists that pay attention to Biden’s bizarre—and more damaging—claim that the United States and France “kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon,” only to see the group return and join the government. Even if he meant Syria, which is the most charitable reading of his argument, this would be at odds with reality, as most any Lebanese citizen who suffered at the hands of Hezbollah could attest.

There is, after all, an easy solution to the situation in Lebanon, said Biden: “I said and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't know—if you don't, Hezbollah will control it.’” It is unclear if either Biden or Obama ever actually suggested such a mad scheme—let’s hope they didn’t—but for those voters seeing the Obama campaign as an alternative to the muscular foreign policy of the past eight years, one wonders if they're alarmed at the thought of potentially employing NATO (!) forces to occupy a powder keg like Lebanon.

And while it is easy (and entertaining) to poke fun at Palin’s “I’ve only been at this, like, five weeks,” working-mom routine, let’s not forget that Biden too employs a particularly noxious form of populism. It's worth reminding debate viewers that Scranton is not in Delaware, and that the senator is more likely to be found at Morton’s than at “Katie's restaurant,” a greasy spoon referenced during last night’s debate—and which, according to his hometown paper, closed in the 1980s. In one of his many pro-regulation, pro-big government paeans, Biden blustered that “they” don’t call it “wealth redistribution in my neighborhood.” Of course, in his hardscrabble yet hyper-bourgeois neighborhood of Greenville, Delaware, he owns a $2.5 million waterfront estate, according to the News-Journal.

As a journalist comrade commented during the debate, Biden’s working-class shtick seemed lifted from a Billy Joel lyric sheet—Allentown as Scranton-town—or a particularly unconvincing Bruce Springsteen B-side. So let’s all agree that Palin’s “maverick hockey mom” routine is growing as unappealing as Gump Worsley's scarred face, that her attacks on “greedy capitalists” and her demand that teachers require even higher salaries are absurd, and that her grasp of economics is tenuous at best.

But as the Palin pile-on continues (something the McCain campaign could have prevented by making her more accessible) let’s not forget to pay attention to “Shoeless Joe Biden,” the scrappy millionaire from Scranton, who will send troops to Lebanon and build Montessori schools in Waziristan.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

A Transformation on Race

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:30:00 EST

Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal, by Randall Kennedy, New York: Pantheon. 228 pages, $22.00

Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, by John L. Jackson, Jr., New York: Basic Civitas, 274 pages, $26.00

When New York magazine's "race issue" hit newsstands in early August, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama held a formidable, though hardly insurmountable, lead over Republican rival John McCain—49 percent to 41 percent, according to Gallup's daily tracking poll. Despite Obama's advantage, an article titled "The Color-Coded Campaign," by New York political correspondent John Heilemann, wondered why Obama wasn't "doing better" and warned that it was because of an "answer that no one wants to hear."

Contrary to Heilemann's claims of originality, this "answer" has been parsed endlessly on blogs, talk radio, and Sunday chat shows. It goes roughly like this: Almost 50 percent of American voters backed Barack, but this transcendent, inspirational politician hasn't yet reached Vladimir Putin levels of popularity, where Heilemann and New York think he belongs, because too many Americans are racists. Whether or not most voters realize it, Obama's supporters explain, his campaign provides an opportunity for a long-overdue reassessment of American attitudes toward an integrated, multiracial society.

Lacking clear-cut examples of racist campaigning against Obama, the defenders of this position turned to what we might charitably call nonobvious examples. Those Britney Spears ads accusing Obama of vapidity and "celebrity," we were told, transmitted a racial code, because the juxtaposition of the candidate with young white women subconsciously stoked fears of miscegenation. The phallic monument in Berlin where Obama gave his speech? The ad included that icon to play on old stereotypes of black male supersexuality. "Race will be central to this campaign because McCain needs it to be," former New Republic Editor Peter Beinart wrote in The Washington Post. "He simply doesn't have many other cards to play." The media sophisticates, having long been warned about unconscious and subterranean racism, knew the racial attacks would happen, even if they weren't visible to the naked eye.

As television pundits debate the unquantifiable American racial subconscious, the more interesting question of how Obama would lead on the issue of race has received significantly less attention on the O'Reilly-Olbermann circuit. Would the first African-American president herald the beginning of a "post-racial America," as his boosters promise, or would he hew closer to the standard views of the post-Martin Luther King civil rights movement? And if Obama ascends to the White House, what will black Americans make of his complicated racial politics?

Entering the home stretch, both candidates have treated race gingerly, though during the Democratic primaries questions of ethnic identity were far more pointed. A questioner in the July 2007 YouTube presidential debate wondered whether Obama, the half-Kenyan, half-white Harvard law graduate, was "black enough" for African Americans. Was he, as PBS shout fest host John McLaughlin bluntly inquired, "an Oreo"? Writing in the New York Daily News, columnist Stanley Crouch declared, "When black Americans refer to Obama as ‘one of us,' I do not know what they are talking about." The Los Angeles Times wondered if the candidate was "really black," and 60 Minutes inquisitor Steve Croft pushed the candidate to admit that he had grown up identifying as white. It was a common enough question that Obama felt compelled to respond, relating that even his "black activist friends from here to Boston say that you are not black; you are multiracial."

So the first broad discussion of the “race issue” was not whether white Americans would accept Obama as an African-American president but if blacks would. That question has receded into the background since Obama grabbed the party’s nomination—most of his supporters are now distracted by the prospect that he might actually win—but it periodically re-emerges, as in his August back-and-forth with a group of African-American hecklers in St. Petersburg, Florida, who accused him of selling out blacks to be accepted by whites. It’s the latest incarnation of an old idea: that blacks should have a broad unanimity of political opinions, that some opinions and actions are disloyal to the race, that political success is incompatible with political principle.

The history of that idea is engagingly recounted and dissected by Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy in his latest treatise on race in America, Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal, one of a passel of recent books on race relations that illustrate how far the national debate has progressed even since the 1990s. Race treason is a concept so prevalent in black culture that Kennedy can open with a quote from Oprah Winfrey, a rich celebrity adept at bridging cultures, who in 2007 instructed an audience of graduating Howard University students that they mustn’t “be a slave to any form of selling out.”

Kennedy explores the views of black critics of affirmative action and race-based college admissions, such as the novelist and Yale law professor Stephen Carter, who “seek to embrace libertarianism on behalf of group advancement.” By rejecting what has become a key plank of the civil rights agenda, are opponents of racial preferences engaging in “racial betrayal”? Kennedy says no, but he also argues that “every group confronts the task of free riding and defection.” Indeed, Kennedy sees “no reason why, in principle, an African American should not be subject to having his citizenship in Black America revoked if he chooses a course of conduct that convincingly demonstrates the absence of even a minimal communal allegiance,” though it is unclear just who would adjudicate a case of racial treason.

Critics like Carter, Kennedy writes, “speak as if ostracism, per se, is wrong” and ignore the “ostracism that is good—ostracism of racists, misogynists, fascists, and purveyors of other hateful ideologies.” The reader can reasonably trust that Kennedy doesn’t mean to compare proponents of race-neutral university admissions (or Carter himself) with fascists. His point is that ostracism is not always wrong but that exiling certain blacks from polite company for holding “inauthentic” views borders on the Stalinist.

Sellout is filled with blacks speaking of other blacks in terms of treason and warfare. Former Rep. Major Owens (D-N.Y.) thunders that the elevation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court was as if “the collaborator Marshal Petain had been awarded a medal after the liberation of France in World War II, or if in Norway Quisling had been made a high official in the government.” Columnist Carl Rowan unloads on the conservative black economist Thomas Sowell: “Vidkun Quisling, in his collaboration with the Nazis, surely did not do as much damage to the Norwegians as Sowell is doing to the most hopeless of black Americans.” The psychologist Halford Fairchild warns that dating or marrying a white woman is an unforgivable act of betrayal. “We are under siege,” he says. “We are at war. To sleep with the enemy is treason. Racial treason.”

Yet the concept of selling out may be losing its resonance with black voters. Take Newark Mayor Cory Booker. When Booker ran against Newark’s then-incumbent mayor, Sharpe James, in 2002, the Yale—and Oxford—educated son of bourgeois parents was told that his blackness would be a focus of the campaign. “I’m going to out-nigger you in the community,” James hissed. James did just that, winning a fifth straight term. But Booker prevailed in 2006 over James’s handpicked successor, suggesting such tactics may have a limited future. (In April, James was convicted of fraud for embezzling money from programs designed to help Newark’s poor.)

A 2001 report from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found significant “generational differences among black elected officials.” The younger ones, the study found, “more strongly support school vouchers, are less positive toward the federal government and more in favor of devolution, are more supportive of the partial privatization of Social Security, [and] are more pro-business.”

In other words, they are more likely to be libertarian in their leanings than older, more traditionally leftist black politicians such as Barbara Lee, Cynthia McKinney, Ron Dellums, and Maxine Waters. (African-American politician Harold Ford Jr., a rising star in the Democratic Party, was a keynote speaker at this year’s Milton Friedman dinner, sponsored by the libertarian Cato Institute.) “Out-niggering” might have delivered the 2002 election to James, but it also coincided with the birth of a new generation of successful black political leaders who focus less on “authenticity” and more on innovative ways of alleviating poverty and fixing inner-city schools.

Obama is largely immune from accusations of selling out (though not entirely, as demonstrated by Jesse Jackson’s whispered threat to castrate him) because, for the most part, he has maintained the “correct” ideology. But there are notable exceptions. In his 2005 manifesto The Audacity of Hope, Obama advises readers to “acknowledge that conservatives—and Bill Clinton—were right about welfare as it was previously structured.” It isn’t a throwaway line, for he repeats the point later in the book, declaring that “Reagan’s central insight—that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie—contained a good deal of truth.” According to many black leaders quoted by Kennedy in Sellout, such opinions would qualify as race betrayal, on the grounds that African Americans were disproportionately affected by welfare reform. Having broken with his controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright; emphasized class over race in affirmative action; rejected the idea of slavery reparations for black Americans; and suggested that absent fathers are just as much the architects of their children’s misfortunes as “society,” Obama might be a pretty standard Democrat, but he also fits comfortably with the new generation of “post-racial” black leaders.

Speaking to The New Yorker, the black author and TV host Tavis Smiley bristled at Obama’s post-racial approach, grumbling that “optimistic Negroes scare me.” Smiley, a hugely influential figure in the black community, initially resisted endorsing Obama, and he recoils at talk of the candidate “transcending race.” Along with his close friend Cornel West, the celebrity African American studies professor from Princeton, he seems slightly uncomfortable with the prospect of the first black president not being a dyed-in-the-wool “race man” who speaks in the cadence of a black preacher and sees racism as the largest obstacle facing black America.

In Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, John L. Jackson Jr., an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that “racial paranoia isn’t about seeing racism where it doesn’t exist” but rather acts as “a rudimentary and imperfect recognition that spotting racism at all these days demands new ways of seeing altogether.” Since racism has gone underground, Jackson maintains, paranoia has become an effective, if imperfect, means of identifying it.

Paranoia is certainly prevalent among famous African Americans. One of the world’s most popular hiphop artists, Kanye West, has publicly stated (and rapped about) his belief that AIDS is used by “the government” to destroy blacks in both America and Africa. Nor is his an anomalous opinion. A recent poll by the RAND Corporation and Oregon State University found that 50 percent of African Americans believe AIDS is man-made and 25 percent think it was concocted in a “government laboratory,” presumably with the idea of unleashing it on blacks. Even Bill Cosby, scourge of the black intellectual establishment and much-derided “sellout” for his jeremiads against the black underclass, endorsed the AIDS conspiracy theory in 1991, when the New York Post quoted him as saying the virus was “started by human beings to get after certain people they don’t like.”

On a recent edition of Real Time With Bill Maher, Cornell West told rapper Mos Def that while he didn’t
agree with Def’s similarly far-fetched 9/11 conspiracy theories, he thought that, considering the amount of institutional racism in America, such “paranoia is justified.” Jackson offers a similar explanation for paranoid behavior: The success of driving racism from the public square “happened so fast, in just one generation or so,” that African Americans were left wary of this new, rather sudden, racial placidity. “The subtler racism gets,” Jackson argues, “the more paranoid people become about hidden racial motivations and intentions.” By this reading, such paranoia can never go away; each advance in racial progress—even an Obama presidency—would drive many to an even deeper paranoia.

But like radical Islamists who blamed the 2005 tsunami in southeast Asia on secret underground Israeli nuclear tests, or those who see a Jewish plot in the 9/11 catastrophe, people who peddle such paranoid explanations for historical events can be deeply poisonous. Rather than indulging the “root causes” of hateful irrationality or explaining them away as wrong but understandable, public intellectuals such as West, who treated Mos Def’s ranting on Osama bin Laden’s innocence with undue respect, might want to care a little less about appearing authentic and more about the corrosive consequences of racial paranoia. The bland acceptance by African American studies departments of such anti-Semitic books as The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews comes from the same noxious spirit that fueled the anti-Jewish violence of the 1991 Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn.

Interestingly, Jackson blames the rise of political correctness for the persistence of racial paranoia, writing that “political correctness has proven tragically effective at hiding racism, not just healing it.” He would, it seems, prefer recrudescent racism to excessive racial sensitivity. “It is racism that is most terrifying because it is hidden, secret, papered over with public niceties and politically correct jargon,” he writes. Jackson repeatedly argues that racism has been driven “farther underground into intraracial ‘safe’ spaces where people can vent about ‘others’ under the cover of communal sameness.” The repeated references to the vast network of “underground racism” can at times make Jackson himself sound slightly paranoid. “Public tolerance doesn’t necessarily mean the absence of racism,” he writes, “and liberalism might just as likely be a cover for continued racial malice, racism with a poker face instead of a Klansman’s mask.” Such sentiments encourage the racial paranoiacs to distrust their erstwhile liberal allies.

Even if Jackson’s diagnoses are correct, his prescriptions are often weak. He writes, for instance, that you can work toward extirpating racial paranoia by “renting apartments and buying homes with an eye towards ethnic and racial diversity in your neighborhood.” And how will racial paranoia manifest itself if Obama is elected president? Will conspiracy theorists who worked against the current president—such as Kanye West, who famously said that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”—arise in defense of his African-American successor?

Despite the overheated rhetoric of the racial paranoiacs and the guardians of authenticity, the racial
paradigm has clearly and decisively shifted from the days of the civil rights struggle. After a post-King interregnum that saw the increased prominence of nationalism, Afrocentrism, and militance, black politics seems to be trending to figures like Obama and Cory Booker. It would have been unimaginable, in the thick of the old culture wars, for liberal African-American academics such as Kennedy and Jackson to write monographs on the meaning of “racial paranoia” and “selling out” without being themselves denounced as right-wing shills. Likewise Richard Thompson Ford, a black liberal who recently wrote a book denouncing overuse of “the race card.” Nowadays, by contrast, if any of these authors categorically defended conspiracy theories or the concept of race betrayal (as opposed to exploring their root causes), they would seem like relics from another age.

Racism may not be a defeated force in American life, but it is greatly embattled, with even a hint of racial impropriety being enough to throw a successful professional career into tumult. (Just ask radio provocateur Don Imus.) It is therefore encouraging to see so many academic thinkers dealing sensitively and fearlessly with the complex issue of race, rather than relying on the increasingly unconvincing monocausal theory that racism alone accounts for the troubles that continue to hobble black America.

Which leads back to the Obama phenomenon. It is both unexceptional and discomfiting that Obama’s previous views on race and his association with the paranoid preacher Jeremiah Wright have been so thoroughly investigated. But Obama’s attendance at the rabblerousing Trinity Church probably doesn’t reflect his “real views” on race as much as a keen attention to political expediency. When he was running for office in Chicago (against the far-left ex-Black Panther Bobby Rush), it was necessary for Obama to show an allegiance to the black community and to black authenticity—to balance his Harvard résumé with something more street.

But Kennedy’s and Jackson’s books presage the arguments of a new racial politics that could challenge an Obama administration. If racism resides underground, lives deep in our subconscious, and can produce misunderstandings, overreactions, and paranoia, how can we combat this immeasurable, invisible force? If the legal apparatus to fight racial discrimination is already in place, what more can an Obama administration do to combat race hatred?

When he addressed the nation in his now-famous “race speech,” Obama commented that he could “no more disown [Wright] than I can disown the black community.” Perhaps not. But whatever else might be said about his views, Obama clearly has disowned the ossified policies of the post-King civil rights movement. Wright’s brand of paranoia, Obama argued, might be explicable when seen in historical context, but “too often it distracts attention from solving real problems.”

Such attitudes aren’t post-racial; nor are they the words of a race traitor. They are the uncontroversial views of a mainstream black politician who came to prominence in the post-boomer era. And they are, one hopes, the future of American racial politics.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor at reason.

The Brave Young Things

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Most readers will likely be unfamiliar with the work of artist Martha Rosler, but I’d hazard a guess that you’ve seen something stylistically similar sometime in the past eight years. The New York Times describes her current show of photomontages as consisting of “advertising images of idealized American homes conjoined with combat scenes from overseas,” featuring, for instance, a piece that “shows a tank flanked by an army of men in identical black suits.” (Some of those images can be seen here, here, and here.) Materialism, empire, and malevolent corporations: It's an exercise in bourgeois guilt, scolding the viewer for having a downtown loft full of Marcel Breuer furniture and not equally sharing the world’s miseries.

A decade ago, the Times gushed that Rosler was an "art-world provocateur,” tackling issues that even the most jaded observer of political art would identify as tedious and mainstream. According to the Times, Rosler has addressed social issues "as diverse as" the Pinochet coup, "representations of homelessness," media sexism, the war in Vietnam, and consumer capitalism.

For political artists such as Rosler, the past eight years have been boom years, providing much opportunity for outrage (for those who remember the Reagan-era New York art scene, this is hardly surprising). But what will become of the perpetually outraged artist in the event of an Obama administration?

Speaking to The New York Times about Rosler, one gallerist opined that political art goes in and out of fashion, but is “mostly out of fashion.” These fashion trends, though, are predictable: A Republican administration will almost always produce an uptick in the production and popularity of such work. Most readers will appreciate that claims of bravery and heterodoxy—the idea that radical political art is produced irrespective of current art world trends—are manufactured to project an image of the artist as embattled, truth-to-power-speaking minority of one, bravely combating the smelly little orthodoxies of a reactionary culture.

But there is some hope, however small, that when the Bush administration disappears, the heavy-handed and indignant art that it precipitated will give way to more measured work. The motivation to present yet another visual representation of Abu Ghraib (I have seen dozens, none of which could overpower the effect of the original images) will dissipate. But with an Obama administration, it is also conceivable that the dull and sophomoric political art of the Bush years will be replaced by the dull and hagiographic work of the Obama years. In July, The Wall Street Journal ventured into the “Obama art market,” where well-known and almost-known artists paint, sketch, and silk-screen the great agent of change. There was no mention of any art work critical of the Obama cult, a situation that seems ripe for parody. (Satirizing Obama is a dangerous game, as the hysterical reaction to that now-infamous New Yorker cover demonstrates, but one that a “provocative” artist should relish.) A gallery in Austin, Texas currently features work “inspired by Barack Obama,” according to the blog Obama Art Report.

Take the enormously talented Shepard Fairey, a Rhode Island School of Design graduate previously best-known for his "Andre the Giant has a posse" street art campaign of the early 1990s, and now famous as the designer of an already-iconic Obama campaign poster. In the mid-1990’s, Fairey's work took a mildly political turn, when, borrowing liberally from the constructivist and socialist realist schools of graphic design, he produced a series of Aleksandr Rodchenko-inspired poster art, featuring images of political figures such as Lenin, Angela Davis, Richard Nixon, and Saddam Hussein. There was no obvious yearning for the East Bloc, no Baathist or Nixonian proselytizing, and its direct political meaning was unclear, if it existed at all. The chic was primary, the radical secondary.

But more recently, Fairey’s work has fully embraced the agitprop influences of his early posters, producing material that eschews his previous subtlety (such as this piece, which explicitly asks “What is the cost of oil?”) in favor of the politically frivolous, and indulging in the preachiness of a recent convert.

In 2004 Fairey told an interviewer that he has "an audience that listens to me already and plenty of other people to reach, who for the sake of the future of the planet, I hope I can convince not to elect Bush." But Fairey's audience—of which I have long counted myself a part—was most likely already pulling the lever for someone other than Bush, and if they weren’t, he almost surely overestimates his power to influence. As the art critic Clement Greenberg once commented, "Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art." And as an ex-Marxist who once demanded that the artist be drafted into the cause of class struggle, it is an area with which Greenberg was intimately familiar.

There comes a point, irrespective of the viewer's position on American foreign policy or the candidacy of Obama, where the artist's sense of moral outrage becomes annoyingly unidirectional. During the Cold War, one could attend countless openings that fretted about Ronny Ray-gun, but few, if any, that explored the horrifying brutality of the Soviet Union or its satellites. Likewise, in recent years, we’ve witnessed the lopsided skewering of religion. By all means let us irritate the Catholic Church, submerge crucifixes in urine, cake the Virgin Mary with elephant dung. We should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with and defend the rights of those who alarm the sensibilities of the pious.

Yet it's counterintuitive and not particularly compelling to treat the outrage of one community with a shoulder shrug while assuaging the hurt feelings of another. It's worth remembering that that those “offensive” Mohammad cartoons published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten were reprinted in very few newspapers, magazines, and galleries in America.

This isn’t about the Bush legacy, the Iraq War, or who we hope wins the 2008 election, nor is it a quibble with specific points of view raised by modern political artists—some are valid, many are not. And there is nothing ideologically objectionable about Martha Rosler’s vehement anti-war stance on its own. It is, though, about the impulse to praise the pedestrian and puerile as brave, to recast the shallow thinker as penetrating, for no other reason than to reaffirm the political ideas of both viewer or critic. But when confronting ideas that are genuinely controversial, most seem to agree with the editorial cartoonist and artist Khalil Bendib, who told The Los Angeles Times, “The concept of freedom of expression in a democratic society must always be balanced by the no less important notion of social responsibility.”

But with President Bush mercifully retiring to Crawford, Texas, our hyperpolitical artists can return to the business of making generically bad art, shorn of references to a looming fascist takeover. Though don't discount the possibility that Bush's art world tormenters, confused by the peaceful transition of power to Obama, will now engage in the kind of hero worship that Shepard Fairey once so skillfully mocked.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

Sarah Palin's Ripping Yarns!

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:37:00 EDT

It's a question with a depressingly obvious answer, and one asked repeatedly since John McCain (R-Ariz.) announced that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would be his running mate: If challenged to expound on the differences between Sunni and Shia Islam, or if quizzed on the three largest cities in Iraq, or the broad details of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, just how well would the 44 year-old self-described "hockey mom" acquit herself? By her own admission, Palin hasn't "focused much on the war in Iraq," so it isn't unreasonable to expect shallow and platitudinous foreign policy answers, at this point anyway.

The McCain campaign tacitly acknowledged that foreign policy was not Palin's strong suit when a senior advisor commented that she will, after all, soon "learn at the foot of the master." But her record as governor, her pork-busting accomplishments, campaign surrogates stress, will please economic conservatives and libertarians. As anti-Real ID activist Bill Scannell, an Alaska native, told reason's Matt Welch, Palin "has been a pretty freaking awesome governor." Denver Post columnist and reason contributor David Harsanyi says that "for libertarians—in the broadest sense of the small ‘l' word—she's the best candidate they can expect." And I suppose it is encouraging that, as a 2006 opposition research dossier obtained by Politico.com noted, with evident horror, Palin has attended at least one Libertarian Party meeting, at a Denny's restaurant in Anchorage.

But as the mainstream media checked her "bridge to nowhere" claims—she was for it before she was against it—a small segment of the blogosphere was chasing a bizarre rumor that Sarah Palin's newborn baby Trig was not her son, but her grandson. "It's the wackiest rumor about Sarah Palin or any other politician so far this election," wrote The Huffington Post's Lee Stranahan. At his Time magazine blog, Tom Bevan observed that "all the major media outlets shied away from repeating this crackpot theory."

Well, almost all major media outlets.

Over at The Atlantic's website, writer Andrew Sullivan, a passionate defender of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), posted a series of breathless blog items laying out the case (if it can be called that) against the perfidious Palin. There was no compelling evidence—circumstantial or otherwise—to support such a claim, but as Sullivan argued, it was the media's job to ask the uncomfortable questions.

So based on a hunch, he requested that the campaign "release Palin's medical records for the past year to rebut for good and all the rumors on the Internets and the very, very strange chronology surrounding the pregnancy and birth of Trig Palin." The onus was on the campaign to address every wild conspiracy theory floated online, he argued: "Why not kill this rumor with Palin's medical records?...Just release them, ok?...And we can all breathe a sigh of relief and move on." The frenzied posts continued: "There must be plenty of medical records and obstetricians and medical eye-witnesses prepared to testify to Sarah Palin's giving birth to Trig." Yet another post, demanding that the McCain people respond to his inquisition: "The McCain-Palin campaign can resolve this now with medical records, as are mandated for presidential candidates anyway." And one final request: "What harm would it do to release the medical records showing that Sarah Palin delivered Trig on April 18 in Wasilla?...So let's have them. And then we can move on."

Even after Palin announced that her daughter was pregnant, Sullivan couldn't exactly move on, and despite the chronological impossibility—to which he was previously so attentive—of the child actually belonging to the governor's daughter, Sullivan proclaimed: "Now all we need is confirmation from the obstetrician who delivered Sarah's baby, Trig."

At BeliefNet, "crunchy conservative" Rod Dreher was aghast at Sullivan's obsession with Trig's maternity: "Honestly, this kind of thing from someone whose work I often disagree with, but who I respect, leaves me speechless." Democratic strategist and blogger Jerome Armstrong, who in 2006 co-authored a book with the Daily Kos's Markos Moulitsas, denounced Sullivan for "pushing this nonsense" and equated the rumor with bogus questions about the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate

Questions of Palin's competence and experience, the thoroughness with which she was vetted, and her associations with a batty Christian church are not only legitimate but necessary. And it is probably worth noting that I share many of these concerns. But to camouflage a descent into partisan gutter sniping as the practice of journalistic due diligence is deeply disingenuous. On his blog, Sullivan dryly commented that McCain campaign outrage was itself outrageous: "The press is asking question. In other words: doing their job." Later, he wrote, "The job of a press is to ask questions which have a basis in fact."

What reporters do, as Sullivan surely knows, is ask important questions and address rumors by reporting, and only bringing them to readers' attention upon confirmation. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the crackpot conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Vince Foster contain compelling questions of motivation, chronology, etc.—all conspiracy theories, from the JFK assassination to the 9/11 "truth" movement do. But it's worth calling out those grinding partisan axes—such as the "reporters" at Insight magazine who claimed that Obama was educated in a madrassa, which Sullivan rightly denounced as "sleazy"—who are dodging their critics by claiming that they are "just asking questions."

But rather than puffing his chest about the media's responsibility to seek the truth, Sullivan, as Byron York pointed out, forgot about the media's duty to actually engage in old-fashion reporting: "What is amazing about all this is how making just one phone call to a man like [Ancorage Daily News reporter Michael] Carey could have given some of the bloggers at The Atlantic and DailyKos pause before they wrote so extensively about it. Why didn't they do that?" It's a good question, though one with a disappointingly banal answer: There now exists an idea that bloggers, as part of the broader media landscape, "ask questions" and demand "answers,"

In June, after both Republican and pro-Clinton bloggers spread rumors of a videotape featuring a fulminating Michelle Obama denouncing "whitey," Sullivan responded by quoting science blogger Jonah Lehrer: "Not only are we persuaded by false rumors that get repeated, but we're persuaded even when the false rumors get repeated by one person...That's why one popular and persistent blogger...can do so much damage."

A fair point, yes, Andrew?

Echoes of the Evil Empire

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:15:00 EDT

...

Reading Racial Tea Leaves

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:00:00 EDT

...

Crying Wolf

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:30:00 EDT

The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, by Naomi Wolf, New York: Chelsea Green, 192 pages, $13.95

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, by Jonah Goldberg, New York: Doubleday, 496 pages, $27.95

In a May 2008 essay for The Times of London, playwright Tom Stoppard, the British son of Czech émigrés, explained his long-held contempt for his more hyperbolic comrades in the theater. “I felt myself out of patience with people who, from 1968 onwards, would denigrate this country that adopted me, this country that I’d adopted, as some kind of fascist police state. It just seemed so embarrassing that those countries that truly could be described as such were very, very different from Britain.” In Stoppard’s acclaimed 2006 play Rock ’n’ Roll, a meditation on Czech resistance to Soviet occupation, one character upbraids his daughter for her lazy use of the term, grumbling that many in her generation “think a fascist is a mounted policeman at a demo in Grosvenor Square.”

To anyone that has attended a political demonstration, trawled a blog, or attended a Western university in the past half century, the scattershot use of “fascist” will ring familiar. And almost as clichéd as accusing an ideological opponent of fascist sympathies is the accurate observation that such charges often demonstrate an utter lack of understanding of just what qualifies as fascist, other than “someone I vehemently disagree with.” As an indicator of a particular set of political beliefs, “fascism” has become a perfectly meaningless pejorative, a political cudgel that is obtuse and imprecise by design.

What, if anything, unites such disparate fascist dictators as Benito Mussolini of Italy, Adolf Hitler of Germany, António de Oliveira Salazar of Portugal, and Francisco Franco of Spain? Fascism, the historian Stanley Payne writes in Fascism: Comparison and Definition, “is the vaguest of contemporary political terms.” Few ideologies have produced so many academic volumes dedicated to establishing a singular set of definitional criteria. All of the political movements commonly associated with fascism overlap in key areas (opposition to both classical liberalism and communism, for instance) and diverge in others (the Germans rejected Italian-style corporatism in favor of what one historian called a “racist-totalitarian welfare state”).

While professional historians puzzle over the definitions, pop-culture references to Nazism continue to be flung with distasteful abandon. In a recent ad campaign, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals compared factory farming to the systematized killing at Auschwitz. In a public service television spot produced by MTV, a packed subway car is dramatically raided by a heavily armed SWAT team. At gunpoint, menaced by a pack of German shepherds, terrified passengers are hustled out of the car and onto an empty platform, where shrieking children are separated from their parents. The scene freezes, then the image morphs into an archival photo of passengers disembarking a train at a Nazi death camp. If the visual message was unclear, helpful text fills the screen: “The Holocaust happened to people like us.” Fascism is coming.

Political commentators and actors of all stripes—right and left, Christian and Muslim and atheist—accuse their enemies of harboring fascist tendencies. Radical Islamists are lazily labeled “Islamofascists,” not because they possess an interest in corporatism but because they are brutish and dumb and harbor fantasies of exterminating Jews. Pro-Palestinian groups routinely compare the actions of the Israeli military to the Nazi Holocaust. Evangelical Christians are “religious fascists” duping Americans into embracing theocracy, according to writers such as former New York Times foreign correspondent Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. Creationists attempt to connect Darwinism to Nazism, while atheists counter that Nazism’s nexus with Pope Pius XII was vital to its success.

More than six decades after the death of Hitler and 30 years since the collapse of Franco’s clerico-military dictatorship in Spain, fascism has returned as the preferred insult of the intellectually careless. In the post-history decade of the 1990s, when Cold War passions deflated along with the military budget, such accusations were largely consigned to the radical fringe. To the mainstream left, Bill Clinton might have been a shameless panderer who punted on gays in the military and co-opted conservative issues like welfare reform, but he was still, after all, a liberal. But with the election in 2000 of a Republican president who greatly expanded executive power and inaugurated a Long War on Terror, it was natural that the fascism charge would once again come into vogue. But this time, after years of politico-linguistic abuse by the left, some on the right have begun to fight back, conflating fascism with the progressivism many liberals hold dear. The insult isn’t just for lefties anymore. Two recent bestsellers exemplify how fascism has evolved in our political discourse. With Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, Jonah Goldberg, a conservative columnist and editor-at-large of National Review Online, attempts to reappropriate the word from those who employ it willy-nilly against enemies to their right. “The major flaw in all of this,” Goldberg writes, “is that fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all.”

While hostile bloggers and reviewers piled on Goldberg, few noticed the runaway success of another, much more shoddily researched fascist-themed tract, this one from the feminist writer Naomi Wolf. According to Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, America is barreling down the road toward a fascist future, following a path well-trodden by Mussolini and Hitler. The Bush administration’s spotty record on civil liberties and the growth of executive power aren’t temporary phenomena, Wolf argues, but portend a greater “fascist shift.” America, she writes, is in the late stages of our own Weimar Republic —it’s a partially free society nearing collapse, “on the verge of a violent police state.”

As overheated as such sentiments seem, they are increasingly infiltrating the cultural mainstream. The End of America spent 15 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and nearly six months fluttering around the Amazon top 50. Before hitting bookstores, it was awarded a coveted “starred review” from Library Journal and named the “best political book” of 2007 by The Nation’s John Nichols.

At a taut 180 pages, The End of America offers a Monarch Notes recapitulation of German and Italian fascism in an attempt to draw parallels between various 20th century totalitarianisms and the numerous “examples of [America’s] shift into a dictatorial reality.” Wolf insists this is no exercise in hyperbole. “Every argument I make is strictly on the facts,” she writes. “I am not being heated or even rhetorical. I am being technical.”

By Wolf’s estimation, there are 10 warning signs that presage a fascist takeover: A pre-fascist government will invoke an internal and external enemy, establish secret prisons, develop a paramilitary force, surveil ordinary citizens, infiltrate citizen groups, arbitrarily detain and release citizens, target key individuals, restrict the press, cast criticism as “espionage” and dissent as “treason,” and subvert the rule of law.

Several of these steps aren’t particularly “fascist” at all. Non-fascist authoritarian states such as China, Cuba, and Vietnam are known to “establish secret prisons,” “target key individuals,” and “subvert the rule of law,” for example. Nor does Wolf seriously consider the fact that many of her steps—carefully selected to hew close to the controversies of the Bush years—would also apply to previous American presidents, including the liberal titans Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Abraham Lincoln.

When asked for a single-line definition of fascism, Wolf is equally murky, telling Democracy Now host Amy Goodman last year that “one dictionary definition is when the state starts to use terror against the individual in an effort to oppose democracy. And that’s what we’re seeing in the United States right now.” Wolf would be advised to invest in a new dictionary.

By seeing no doctrinal distinctions between the various authoritarian and dictatorial regimes she invokes, Wolf instead draws upon a series of dubious parallels between American foreign and domestic policy and the crimes of Nazi Germany, East Germany, fascist Italy, Maoist China, and Stalinist Russia—all presented as evidence of the “fascist shift.”

When describing the overzealous apparatchiks of the Transportation Security Administration, Wolf recounts a familiar tale of mothers forced to sample their own breast milk to demonstrate that their baby bottles were not, in fact, transporting liquid explosives. The payoff: “In Benito Mussolini’s era, one intimidation tactic was to force citizens to drink emetics and other liquids.”

Referring to the so-called Brooks Brothers riot, during which Republicans attempted to thwart a hand recount of votes in the 2000 election, Wolf wonders, “What was it about the image of a mob of young men dressed in identical shirts, shouting at poll workers outside of a voting center in Florida during the 2000 recount that looked familiar?” Well, the Nazis wore “identical shirts” too. (Incidentally, Wolf’s footnote points to a New York Times story that makes no mention of the protesters’ clothing.) Those who objected to the Dixie Chicks’ antiwar stance by publicly destroying their CDs—private citizens, all—are likened to the Nazis’ government-sponsored burning of books.

Bush’s ridiculous May 2003 aircraft carrier stunt, in front of a fluttering banner declaring the Iraq “mission accomplished,” is compared to the Albert Speer-orchestrated Nuremberg Rallies. For Wolf, the parallels are eerie: On one occasion Goebbels thanked the obedient volk for their “support in the accomplishment of this mission.”

It’s not just these “similarities” that convince Wolf of where America is headed. Chest-puffing that she is a “student of language,” Wolf claims that soon after the 1933 Reichstag fire Hermann Goering declared that the country was to prepare itself for “kriegsfusz” (sic)—war-footing. (It’s actually spelled kriegsfuss.) In order to underline the similarities between Nazi and American rhetoric, she writes that “After 9/11, then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney coined a new phrase: America was now on a ‘war-footing.’ ” This is a very odd claim; the term “war-footing” is centuries old and registers tens of thousands of results in newspaper archives dating back to the 1850s. Indeed, on September 12, 2001, before Wolf cites any administration official using the phrase, The Guardian headlined a story: “US on war footing as thousands die in hijack jet outrage.” The German word kriegsfuss also predates the establishment of the Nazi Party.

Turning from philological issues to instances of state repression, Wolf offers several alleged examples of fascist-style suppression of dissent. When former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales discussed the “collective purge of all the [U.S.] attorneys,” which resulted in the dismissal of seven not considered “loyal Bushies,” it was certainly a matter of serious concern. But it did not, as Wolf writes, amount to “a professional Night of the Long Knives,” a reference to Hitler’s violent 1934 putsch against the powerful, street-brawling brownshirts. One act provoked a media outcry and led to the perpetrator’s resignation, and the other led to the brutal murder of 100 political rivals while solidifying Adolf Hitler’s power base. Wolf commits a bewildering series of mistakes that demonstrate not even a rudimentary understanding or familiarity with the subject of fascism. Readers are told that Hitler was a propaganda master because he was “trained as a visual artist.” (He was not.) Readers are informed that the “formal extermination camps” were “not established until the very eve of war.” (They were established in 1942.) Nor did Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels “develop the practice of embedding journalists.”

Like countless leftists before her, Wolf wildly exaggerates the alleged fascism of the modern democratic Right while inexcusably minimizing the dictatorial crimes of the historical communist Left. The early Bolsheviks, she claims, don’t deserve to be sullied by a comparison to modern America, because “The Communist revolutionaries of 1917 were opposed to torture, having suffered it themselves at the hands of czarist forces.” Wolf would be advised to investigate the gruesome crimes perpetrated by Felix Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka, the secret police founded at the outset of the Russian Revolution.

Even when not flubbing or oversimplifying the broad details of fascist ideology, The End of America commits the fatal sin of contorting every sinister moment of the 20th century to ensure that it lines up with some aspect of the “war on terror.” It is clearly with Al-Qaeda in mind that Wolf wrote this stunningly ignorant passage on the construction of phantom enemies: “What matters to a fascist leader is not to get rid of the enemy but rather to maintain an enemy,” a piece of analysis that would certainly surprise the families of untermensch liquidated during the Second World War.

None of this is to suggest that concerns over the Bush administration’s view of civil liberties and expended executive power aren’t legitimate. But there exist many sober treatments of this subject, such as Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency and Charlie Savage’s Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy. To suggest with a straight face that the modern United States is on the verge of slipping into German- or Italian-style fascism is to ignore the necessary preconditions that precede such takeovers, none of which are likely to arise in the contemporary United States. Nowhere in “Bush’s America” (an almost entirely meaningless appellation) do we see the shuttering of independent media, the mass emigration of political opponents and ethnic minorities, the murder or imprisonment of those who can’t get out, the mandatory mass rallies, the introduction—or continuation—of conscription. Public debate is ferocious, impolite, and open, a fact well reflected in the president’s historically low approval rating. The publication and mainstream media promotion of Wolf’s book, including a softball appearance on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, would suggest that her fevered vision of a “closing society,” a modern day Weimer-like collapse, is risible.

While it is unlikely, if not impossible, that America could mutate into a fascist state in the style of 1930s Germany or Italy, this country did have a fascist moment of its own. That’s the premise of Jonah Goldberg Liberal Fascism, a disquisition on the left-wing origins and progressive embrace of fascist ideas. In his introduction, Goldberg acknowledges that his motive for writing the book was not only to dispute the common linkage of conservatism and fascism, but to argue that fascism, in fact, crawled from the swamps of the left, abetted by liberal heroes such as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and birth control advocate Margret Sanger.

Goldberg is justified in quarreling with those who have argued that fascist economic theory is essentially an extreme form of capitalism. The economies of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, and the ideas touted by British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley and the neo-Nazi parties of post-war Europe, in fact stood in direct opposition to free market liberalism. The often overlooked Mosley, for instance, denounced “Jewish” chain stores, and also decreed that in fascist England “chain stores which are British owned will be permitted only under licence, and to an extent which does not interfere with the Fascist system of small shopkeeper and co-operative society.” It was an argument borrowed from National Socialism.

The stubbornly persistent myth that fascism was the logical end-point of capitalism was originally propagated by left-wing Italian and German opponents to Mussolini and Hitler. For example, in his book It Could Happen Here (originally subtitled Star-Spangled Fascism in Bush’s America), the liberal columnist Joe Conason argues that when Americans in the 1930s embraced the radical corporatism of the New Deal they were in fact rejecting the fascism of big business: “And in the time of crisis, when powerful figures in the corporate elite and the Republican Party looked toward fascism for salvation, the American people chose democracy and the New Deal instead.” Such arguments, Goldberg convincingly demonstrates, are an inversion of the truth. The New Deal was the nearest America ever came to economic fascism.

Goldberg’s chapters on the authoritarian temptations of Woodrow Wilson and FDR, and the socialism of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, draw heavily on the work of historians such as Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Götz Aly, A. James Gregor, and Stanley Payne—all of whom have underscored the socialist-fascist convergence—plus libertarian thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. It is a compelling argument, and Goldberg does a great service in bringing these issues to a non-academic audience.

The parallels between Mussolini’s economic policy and the New Deal were contemporaneously noted by American socialists such as Norman Thomas, who in 1933 said that while FDR was “no Mussolini” his economic program was “extraordinarily like the Italian program.” As Goldberg notes, the Nazi daily Völkischer Beobachter praised the “National Socialist strains of thought in [FDR’s] economic and social policies,” while New Deal officials like Hugh Johnson and Rex Tugwell praised the corporatist economy of fascist Italy. Goldberg then adds the requisite caveat—one repeated throughout the book—that “nowhere here do I suggest that New Dealism was akin to Hitlerism if we are to define Hitlerism solely in terms of the Holocaust.”

But what is he suggesting by the comparison? Goldberg wants us to take seriously the fascist strains in American economic thought and governance, not “the oppression, cruelty, and tyranny of classical fascism.” Yet if corporatism and government intervention in the economy is a prerequisite for the creation of a fascist state, how to explain Francisco Franco’s Catholic fascism in Spain? As the historian Robert Paxton writes in Anatomy of Fascism, “Franco’s state intervened little in the economy and made little effort to regulate the daily life of people as long as they were passive.” The Nazi state’s economic policy was heavily interventionist but, as Stanley Payne notes, it “explicitly rejected formal corporatism.”

Goldberg then goes much further, broadening the fascist impulse to include too many elements of mainstream modern liberalism, from John F. Kennedy to Hillary Clinton. In so doing, he, like Wolf, fails to provide the reader with a single, accurate definition, relying instead on the occasional doctrinal commonality between historical fascists and his modern ideological opponents.

Goldberg writes, for instance, that “a common principle” shared by the German and American New Deals is that “the state should be allowed to get away with anything, so long as it is for ‘good reasons.’ This is a common principle among fascism, Nazism, Progressivism, and what we today call liberalism.” If we accept this concept as true, doesn’t it also apply to communist collectivization and to contemporary conservative rationalization of torture and surveillance programs?

Goldberg is also stretching accuracy by claiming that right-wing fascism is “a myth.” It is true, as he repeatedly stresses, that the left-wing roots of fascism have been deliberately obscured, but, as Payne notes, most European fascist movements, including in Mussolini’s Italy, found that “their most common allies lay on the right, particularly the radical authoritarian right.”

While clearly possessing a detailed understanding of fascist history, Goldberg’s difficulty comes in shoehorning his thesis into the narrative of 20th century American political history, using the blunt instrument of hyperbole. So John F. Kennedy, a president arguably more conservative than John McCain, is slammed for “advancing fascist themes and aesthetics in American politics.” And the short newsreel clip of a young Bill Clinton shaking hands with JFK is “Reifenstahlesque” [sic].

For Goldberg, fascism is omnipresent. He points to the The Da Vinci Code’s “ominous roots and parallels with Nazi thought,” and he claims that “hip-hop culture has incorporated a shocking number of fascist themes.” He is convinced that “Hitler would have given Dead Poets Society a standing ovation.” The film Gladiator, Goldberg writes, is a textbook example of Hollywood employing “fascistic imagery.”

At times, the contortions required to tie fascism with 21st century partisanship can bring Goldberg close to sounding like Wolf: “Fascists famously rules by terror. Political correctness isn’t literally terroristic, but it does govern through fear.” Well, yes, but being accused of racial insensitivity is rather different than seeing your family arrested on Kristallnacht.

While Hillary Clinton’s 1993 attempt at a government takeover of health care was disastrous and destined to failure, why view it as a failed bit of fascism rather than a failed attempt at generically Scandinavian socialism? And if the Clinton health care plan was socialist, does that mean that it was also fascist because, after all, both Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were economically left-wing? Is statism automatically fascism?

It is here that Goldberg’s book ultimately fails to convince. A jaunt through modern Sweden, for instance, would find an economy hobbled by state intervention and government agencies that talk endlessly about the health of the community—the folkhem, a term redolent of the Nazi concept of volksgemeinschaft. But if we then broaden the meaning of fascism to include social democratic Sweden, one wonders what country in Europe wouldn’t qualify. In his attempt to reappropriate the insult from the left, Goldberg has further diluted a term that was already almost unrecognizable.

That certain modern ideologies contain trace elements of fascism doesn’t mean that they are in any meaningful way fascist, or even pre-fascist (as the Wolfian left would have it). Not every flag-bedecked rally is Nuremberg, not every Guantanamo Bay is Auschwitz, and not every ill-conceived call for redistribution is a sign of corporatism.

It is important, in times of crisis, when an administration invokes the perennial threat of an external enemy, that a citizenry be vigilant in safeguarding civil liberties, in jealously guarding the constitutionality of invoked wartime powers. But when those self-appointed guardians collapse into “Weimar moment” paranoia, not only is the concept of fascism diluted to the point of meaninglessness, but other, more pressing liberty-related issues are subsumed by the hysteria. When both sides see creeping fascism lurking around every bit of political rhetoric and action they disagree with, then the term doesn’t need to be reappropriated or redefined, it needs to be buried.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

Hooray for Uribe

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:00:00 EDT

In December 1996, the Peruvian Marxist guerrilla group Tupac Amaru (MRTA) occupied the Japanese embassy in Lima, taking hostage a group assembled to celebrate the birthday of Emperor Akihito. Four months later, Peru’s strongman president, the now-imprisoned Alberto Fujimori, ordered a team of elite Peruvian soldiers to retake the building. The handful of rebels who managed to survive the initial assault, witnesses later reported, were bound, dragged into a courtyard, and executed by members of the Peruvian army. Not a single member of the MRTA made it out alive.

A rather different tactic was employed by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, whose special forces freed 15 hostages held by the Marxist terror group FARC on Wednesday. The hostages included three American contractors and former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt. Dressed like a group of slightly menacing Berkeley baristas, the army infiltrators disguised themselves in Che Guevara t-shirts (seriously) and camouflaged uniforms, easily convincing the FARC that they too were fist-clenching, Lenin-reading members of the jungle politburo. It was an elaborate, cleverly plotted ruse—one that was guaranteed to fool a platoon of knuckle-dragging, forest-dwelling communist revolutionaries.

And it was a stunning—and, to Latin America watchers, unexpected—success. While it is tempting to indulge in the reflexive optimism that follows such a victory, the war against the FARC isn’t over yet. Nevertheless, it is also difficult to disagree with The Economist’s immediate post-raid assessment. The operation, said the magazine, was “a disaster for the FARC and its sympathizers in Latin America who hoped to use the hostage issue to weaken Mr Uribe.” In other words, it was a disaster for not only the FARC, but also for Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, all of whom have expressed some degree of sympathy or ideological affinity for the group.

While outwardly congratulatory, many in Latin America and Europe could muster only lukewarm praise for the Uribe government, which is viewed by many as ideologically suspect and too friendly with the Bush administration. As one blogger at The Economist noticed, more than a few European newspapers were more interested in criticizing Uribe’s policies than they were in discussing the rescue of Betancourt. The French paper Libération championed Betancourt’s cause, The Economist noted, but “could barely bring itself to congratulate Mr Uribe and the Colombians this morning,” choosing instead to upbraid the government’s “implacable” war against the guerrillas.

In the fever swamps of the far left, the reaction was predictably full of non sequiturs about Uribe’s dubious past associations and rumor-mongering about the fortuitous timing of the operation. The left-wing radio station Pacifica devoted a significant chunk of its coverage following the raid to questioning both the “timing” of the operation (more on this in a moment) and the institutional corruption of the Uribe administration—but nothing on the FARC’s unspeakably brutal crimes against the Colombian peasantry.

A Huffington Post writer dismissed as fake the evidence gleaned from laptops captured in the raid that killed FARC commander Raul Reyes in March. The material, which was verified by Interpol and suggested connections between FARC and officials in Venezuela and Ecuador, was most likely ginned up by the “death squad President Alvaro Uribe.” (The same author recently praised Evo Morales for “turn[ing] over the tortilla of our consciousness about Indians, race and power.”)

There is an understandable desire to bludgeon Uribe’s credibility by citing, for instance, his shady family and political connections. And there is quite a bit to unpack here. While it’s unfair to compare President Uribe to the buffoonish President Chavez, his critics are indeed justified in expressing skepticism of the timing of the raid, which they claim is designed to distract the public from a very Chavista-like scandal. Uribe’s second term election victory was secured after Congress lifted a ban on the serving of consecutive terms—a victory secured through good old-fashioned bribery, say his critics. The court recently ruled against the president on this very issue, forcing Uribe to issue a furious denial.

And his accusers are also correct to criticize the positively Bolivarian attempt to hold on to power for a third term, with party activists collecting signatures to force a referendum on the issue. While not directly involved in the campaign to extend his rule, Uribe has thus far refused to eliminate the possibility of yet another presidential mandate.

And then there is “Plan Colombia”—the wasteful, destructive, and counterproductive drug war operation inaugurated by former U.S. President Bill Clinton (and expanded by President George W. Bush) and former Colombian President Andres Pastrana. Drugs and the FARC are deeply intertwined, but it is optimistic to think that an end to the Colombian drug war would precipitate the end of the guerrilla war.

So yes, the Uribe government is far from perfect—it is Latin America after all, so we must judge on a steep curve—but as even the left-leaning Guardian acknowledged this week, Uribe is indeed a "skilled politician" who "has been able to bring a degree of order, security and prosperity to the country that was scarcely believed possible when he took office in 2002."

So what to do now? With FARC against the ropes and Uribe’s popularity at all time highs, former KGB “agent of influence” Richard Gott, author of a hagiographic biography of Hugo Chavez and a pro-Castro history of Cuba, advised that a “new Democratic government in the United States in January should put pressure on Uribe to engage in negotiation.” The New York Times said much the same: “President Álvaro Uribe should now capitalize on that disarray and offer the rebels, who long ago traded the business of political liberation for drug trafficking, a political settlement.”

During his press conference with the freed hostages, Uribe himself made a vague offer to FARC, one quickly endorsed by Betancourt: “This is an invitation to the FARC to make peace, to start releasing the hostages they still hold captive.” It is rather important to note that this was not the first in a new round of negations, but a stern demand for peace, offering no reciprocal action by the government.

So let’s bring this back around to where we started. Looking at the Peruvian example of fighting a war against left-wing guerrillas, we see a protracted, bloody war that the government ultimately won, crushing both the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru, two Maoist terror organizations who demanded nothing less than the restructuring of civilization according to the Chairman’s book of insane aphorisms. And there could, of course, be little political negotiations when there was almost nothing to negotiate. That was a situation understood by the rebels, and one that prompted them to enter into the business of kidnap and assassination.

There is an important distinction that must be made between the Fujimori tactics noted above—which routinely involved extrajudicial executions and the torture and disappearance of detainees—and those of Uribe, who claims to have insisted that the FARC hostage takers not be harmed during the raid. And while his critics rail against waging war against the FARC, it is only now, with the organization in full retreat, that the government can start making demands and "negotiate." This is, in other words, fast becoming the type of "negotiation" we saw aboard the battleship USS Missouri in 1945.

All of this is good news for Colombia, President Uribe, the families of the released, and the country’s economy (the Colombian peso surged the following day). But last word must go to Betancourt, who after years in captivity wisely warned both the Latin American left and her captors to let Colombia choose its own destiny: "I think (Chavez and Correa) are important allies in this process—but on the condition of respect for Colombian democracy. Colombians elected Alvaro Uribe. Colombians did not elect the FARC.”

And with President Uribe's approval rating hovering around 80 percent, don't expect Colombians to elect the FARC anytime soon.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor at reason.