But likely you'll be moved to ask who the nut job is here, because it's truly amazing what venom, bile, and contempt this biographer of Barry Goldwater can work up for regular folks in a Western city who support the re-election of the President. The piece really has to be read to be believed.
For more Perlstein, see what Michael Kinsley has published from this "historian of the conservatives" in today's LA Times. Quotable: "For those who believe the Republican coalition does harm, it's time to make the Republican coalition impossible. "
And then there's the uncharitable reading: namely, that Wolfe is being deliberately sloppy, or intellectually dishonest, by mounting a sweeping guilt-by-association attack on conservatives who have no actual association with a "Nazi philosopher," while breezily forgiving the Left for having a deep, lasting, and revealing association with not just one � but many .. ". more Jonah Goldberg.
FOOTNOTE: Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom to "Socialists of All Parties". I've never come across any allusion to "lovers of liberty in all parties" in Hayek's work.
Major News. Somehow the NY Times managed to bury the lede:
And Google has embarked on an ambitious secret effort known as Project Ocean, according to a person involved with the operation. With the cooperation of Stanford University, the company now plans to digitize the entire collection of the vast Stanford Library published before 1923, which is no longer limited by copyright restrictions. The project could add millions of digitized books that would be available exclusively via Google.
cross posted at Liberty & Power.
For the Survival of Democracy : Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s by Alonzo Hamby is reviewed by Rick Perlstein in the NY Times. Quotable:
The generation that created his field [FDR studies], he writes .. ''established a tone that still dominates the study of American politics in the 1930's: a near-adulatory perspective, occasionally nagged by a sense that F.D.R. was too 'conservative' to lead us entirely into the promised land of equalitarian social democracy.'' He also notes the inconvenient fact that hobbles them: it's impossible to argue that the New Deal accomplished what it set out to do, namely, to produce a genuine economic recovery. But it is not in answering the question ''Did it work?'' that Hamby ventures his most aggressive contribution to this discussion. He's more interested in what there was to admire in Roosevelt's attempt. He concludes: not too much ..
Making sense of political writer Andrew Sullivan --an interview. Quotable:
[My road toward Conservatism] began living under socialism. Growing up in Britain in the 1970s, watching the country's terminal decline, seeing the damage unions could do, and how the entire ruling elite had lost hope - all that made me a Thatcherite. I also went to a publicly-funded magnet school that selected boys at the age of 11 on the basis of IQ tests and gave them a chance to succeed.My folks weren't rich. It was the only way I could have gotten an excellent education. I was so grateful. And then the Labour government took office and tried to abolish the school because it was deemed �elitist.� The school went private while I was there and lost its mission to educate under-privileged kids. (The school raised enough money to give me a scholarship to finish my time there). In all that, I saw that the Left was actually hostile to ordinary people, their aspirations, their achievements. The ideology of envy and equality of outcome trumped the ideas of freedom and equality of opportunity. And so I became a follower of the liberalizing right.
I wore a Reagan 80 button in high school; I read Solzhenitsyn and Orwell; I became fascinated by the horrors of Soviet tyranny; I read Hayek and Oakeshott and Friedman; I was so psyched when Thatcher won office that I stopped my calendar on the day - May 3, 1979 - and left it on the wall at that date. And at Oxford, I enraged my peers by celebrating the arrival of Pershing missiles with a champagne party.
But again, I was political in order to free people from being forced into politics. I wanted to ratchet back the state to let people breathe more freely, however they wanted to. I'm not interested in being ideological all the time. I love pop culture; I love gay culture; I love sex; I enjoy movies and Shakespeare and bodybuilding and my dog. I'm conservative in politics so that I can be radical in every other human activity. To me, that makes sense. But I'm aware I'm somewhat alone.
David Brooks does 300 words on Michael Oakeshott:
This is a good time of year to step back from daily events and commune with big thinkers, so I've been having a rather one-sided discussion about this whole Iraq business with Michael Oakeshott.One of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Oakeshott lived and died, in 1990, in England. As Andrew Sullivan, who did his dissertation on him, has pointed out, the easiest way to grasp Oakeshott is to know that he loved Montaigne and Shakespeare. He loved Montaigne for his skepticism and Shakespeare for his array of eccentric characters. Oakeshott seemed to measure a society by how well it nurtured idiosyncratic individuals, and he certainly qualified as one.
Oakeshott was epistemologically modest. The world is an intricate place, he believed, filled with dense patterns stretching back into time. We have to be aware of how little we know and how little we can know.
But the fog didn't make Oakeshott timid. He believed we should cope with the complex reality around us by adventuring out into the world, by playfully confronting the surprises and the unpredictability of it all. But we should always guard against the sin of intellectual pride, which leads to ideological thinking. Oakeshott's doctrine was that no doctrine could properly describe the world.
In his 1947 essay, "Rationalism and Politics," he distinguished between technical and practical knowledge. Technical knowledge is the sort that can be put into words and written down in books. If you pick up a cookbook, you can read about the ingredients and proportions and techniques for preparing a meal.
But an excellent cook brings some other body of knowledge to the task, which cannot be articulated. This knowledge comes from experience. It can't be taught but must be acquired through doing, by entering into the intrinsic pattern of the activity.
Oakeshott cites a tale by Chuang-tzu about a wheelwright who tells a scholar that the stuff in books is but "the lees and scum of bygone men." When making a wheel, the man says, a craftsman has to feel his way to know how much pressure to put on his tools. "The right pace, neither slow nor fast, cannot get into the hand unless it comes from the heart."
Oakeshott was living in the hubristic age of social science, when governments were building monstrous housing tracts they thought would improve the lives of the poor. Long before others, he understood the fallacy of social engineering. He believed instead that government should be prudent, limited and neutral, so that individuals would have the freedom to be daring and creative.
We can't know how Oakeshott would have judged the decision to go to war in Iraq, but it is impossible not to see the warnings entailed in his writings. Be aware of what you do not know. Do not go charging off to remake a society when you don't understand its moral traditions, when you do not even understand yourself. Do not imagine that if you conquer a nation and impose something you call democracy that the results will be in any way predictable. Do not try to administer a country from behind a security bunker.
I try to reply to these warnings. I concede that government should be limited, prudent and conservative, but only when there is something decent to conserve. Saddam sent Iraqi society spinning off so violently, prudence became imprudent. The Middle East could not continue down its former course.
I remind Oakeshott that he was ambivalent about the American Revolution, and dubious about a people who had made a sharp break with the past in the name of inalienable rights and other abstractions. But ours is the one revolution that worked, and it did precisely because our founders were epistemologically modest too, and didn't pretend to know what is the good life, only that people should be free to figure it out for themselves.
Because of that legacy, we stink at social engineering. Our government couldn't even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq � thank goodness, too, because any "plan" hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality.
I tell Oakeshott that the Americans and Iraqis are now involved in an Oakeshottian enterprise. They are muddling through, devising shambolic, ad hoc solutions to fit the concrete realities, and that we'll learn through bumbling experience. In the building of free societies, every day feels like a mess, but every year is a step forward.
Edmund Morris on Ronald Reagan and his malicious, nay, insensitive side. Quotable:
Behind the soft exterior, I repeat, was hard metal, and not all of him was nice. But more of him was nice than is normal in men that powerful. Even in ruminations like the above, and in the very funny stories he told (many of them politically incorrect), there was never any hint of malice. Well, maybe there was, when he leveled his wit against the one thing he really did hate: totalitarianism. Aides cringed at plenary sessions with Mr. Gorbachev as Mr. Reagan chucklingly told (again and again and again) jokes that ridiculed everything the Soviet leader stood for. It was insensitive, it was moral, and it was magnificent.
Do you have the character and temperament of a Founding Father? So which one are you? (via Right on the Left Beach)
Here's a book I'll be putting on my Christmas wish list. I've been wanting to read a book like this for years -- and now I can.
UPDATE: Google found me Thomas Sowell's discussion of the book:
They say "truth will out" but sometimes it takes a long time. For more than half a century, it has been a "well-known fact" that President Franklin D. Roosevelt got us out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. That view was never pervasive among economists, and even J.M. Keynes -- a liberal icon -- criticized some of FDR's policies as hindering recovery from the depression.
Only now has a book been written in language that non-economists can understand which argues persuasively that the policies of the Roosevelt administration actually prolonged the depression and made it worse. That book is FDR's Folly by Jim Powell. It is very readable, factual and insightful -- and is endorsed by two Nobel Prizewinning economists.
If the word "folly" seems a little dismissive, read the book first. Someone described FDR's trust-busting Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold as being like one of the Marx brothers who went into government by mistake. That description would apply to many of the others around FDR, including his much-vaunted "brain-trust" of presumptuous and self-righteous people.
It is painfully obvious that President Roosevelt himself had no serious understanding of economics, any more than his Republican predecessor, Herbert Hoover, had. The difference was that Roosevelt had boundless self-confidence and essentially pushed some of the misconceptions of President Hoover to their logical extreme.
The grand myth for decades was that Hoover was unwilling to use the powers of government to come to the aid of the people during the Great Depression but that Roosevelt was more caring and did. In reality, both presidents represented a major break with the past by casting the federal government in the role of rescuer of the economy in its distress.
Scholarly studies of the history of these two administrations have in recent years come to see FDR's New Deal as Herbert Hoover's policies writ large and in bolder strokes.
Those who judge by intentions may say that this was a good thing. But those who judge by results point out that none of the previous depressions -- during which the federal government essentially did nothing -- lasted anywhere near as long as the depression in which the federal government decided that it had to "do something."
In "FDR's Folly," author Jim Powell spells out just what the Roosevelt administration did and what consequences followed. It tried to raise farm prices by destroying vast amounts of produce -- at a time when hunger was a serious problem in the United States. It imposed minimum wage rates that priced unskilled labor out of jobs, at a time of massive unemployment.
Behind both policies was the belief that what was needed was more purchasing power and that this could be achieved by government policies to raise the prices received by farmers and workers. But prices do not automatically translate into greater purchasing power, unless people buy as much at higher prices as they would at lower prices -- which they seldom do.
Then there were the monetary authorities contracting the money supply in the midst of the biggest depression in history -- when the economy was showing some signs of revival, until their monetary contraction touched off another big downturn.
With policy after policy and program after program, "FDR's Folly" traces the high hopes and disastrous consequences. It would be funny, like the Keystone cops running into one another and falling down, except that millions of people were in economic desperation while this farce was being played out in Washington.
Perhaps worse than any specific policy under FDR was the atmosphere of uncertainty generated by incessant new experiments. Billions of dollars of investment were needed to create millions of jobs for the unemployed. But investors were reluctant to risk their money while the rules of the game were constantly being changed in Washington, amid strident anti-business rhetoric.
Some of the people who most admired and almost worshipped FDR -- poor people and blacks, for example -- were hurt the most by amateurish tinkering with the economy by Roosevelt's New Deal administration. This book is an education in itself, both in history and in economics. It is also a warning of what can happen when leaders are chosen for their charm, charisma and rhetoric.
Anti-Capitalist Anti-Semites by Mark Struass. Quotable:
modern anti-Semitism made its debut with the emergence of global capitalism in the 19th century. When Jews left their urban ghettos and a small but visible number emerged as successful bankers, financiers, and entrepreneurs, they engendered resentment among those who envied their unfathomable success, especially given Jews� secondary status in society.Some left-wing economists, such as French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, depicted Jews as the driving force behind global capitalism. Other socialist thinkers saw their theories corrupted by the racism of the era. In 1887, German sociologist Ferdinand T�nnies published his classic work, Community and Society, wherein he blamed capitalism for undermining society�s communitarian impulses and creating a merchant class that was �unscrupulous, egoistic and self-willed, treating all human beings as his nearest friends as only means to his ends.� A few years later, German social scientist Werner Sombart took T�nnies�s theories to their next step and meticulously explained how Jews �influenced the outward form of modern capitalism� and �gave expression to its inward spirit.� Sombart�s book, The Jews and Economic Life, would influence an entire generation of German anti-Semitic authors ..
David Frum: "Murray [challenges] his readers and listeners to name even one artistic or scientific achievement (he thinks science � pure science, that is, as opposed to technological or engineering progress - is declining for different reasons) of the past 50 years that will still matter to people in the year 2200."
PrestoPundit's 10 things from 1950 to 2000 that will still matter two hundred years hence:
1. Discovery of DNA.
2. Disney's Winnie the Pooh.
3. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.
5. Gerald Edelman's clonal selection theory of the immune system -- and later developments.
5. The Sound of Music.
6. Discovery of REM sleep and related sleep science developments.
7. The movies of Hitchcock.
8. Confirmation of the Big Bang theory.
9. American & British popular music, 1955-1975.
10. Discovery that impotence has a biological not psychological cause.
Put string theory near the top of the list, if the theory holds up in another 200 years.
Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences discussed in the NY Times.
Garrett Hardin, ecologist and author of "The Tragedy of the Commons", is dead at age 88. Hardin and Hayek corresponded a bit, and where interested in each others work.
The Guardian's 100 greatest novels of all time. Let's see. 3, 4, 16, 20, 21, 22, 24, 31, 38, 48, 49, 52, 53, 59, 63, 66, 73, all read cover to cover. That's 16 out of 100. Of course, I've read bits and pieces of many of the others, and may have even completed some of those -- but who can remember? My thought has always been that too much of this was read at way too young an age. A 16 year old shouldn't be spending his time reading Moby Dick -- he should be out living life, as Herman Melville was before he began writing his novels. Too few young men have the opportunity to do such a thing today. A shame and a tragedy, both for the young and for literature.
The list I would enjoy putting together is the list of the 100 greatest plays of all time. Somehow the play has always captured my imagination in a way the novel never has -- for example, I would much prefer to have written a great play than a great novel. I'm not sure why.
I don't read much fiction anymore (who has the time?) But I'd like to think that I'd be right to say that the Guardian list could do better by including more William Faulkner -- though perhaps the idea was simply to include only one title per author. I really do need at some point to go back and dip into some of the old stuff I've read ages ago, and take a look to see what I'm able to see now, with grown-up eyes and more education than you can shake a stick at. As a logic teacher I should no doubt begin with Alice's Adventures In Wonderland ...
The Godfather of Neo-Conservatives speaks: Quotable:
Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the "American grain." It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its 20th-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked. Of course, those worthies are in no way overlooked by a large, probably the largest, segment of the Republican party, with the result that most Republican politicians know nothing and could not care less about neoconservatism. Nevertheless, they cannot be blind to the fact that neoconservative policies, reaching out beyond the traditional political and financial base, have helped make the very idea of political conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters. Nor has it passed official notice that it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican ones, that result in popular Republican presidencies.
And I must do a bit of fisking. Irving Kristol has admitted that he had never read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. That's right, never read it. But Kristol has attacked both Hayek and his book for beliefs that Hayek does not hold and for ideas that are not contained in The Road to Serfdom. On the otherhand, Kristol has read Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty -- you won't know this because of any citations contained in Kristol's work, but you will know it if you've read both Hayek's Constitution of Liberty, and some of Kristol's best-know essays. Key themes from Hayek find there way into Kristol's work (example, the Britain vs. France theme). Anyway, Hayek always left room for the welfare state in his works, and never argued that a welfare safety-net was a necessary threat to liberty or a first step on the road to serfdom. If Kristol had ever bothered to read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, rather than to merely criticize it unread, he would know better. In fact, Hayek in such books as Law, Legislation and Liberty was all about studying "alternative ways of delivering [welfare state] services" -- even when (or especially when) these services are delivered by the state (and the same could be said of Milton Friedman's work on social services). So what follows from Kristol hits a deeply false note -- a false note which is the product of having failed the basic responsibility doing your research and knowing what you are talking about:
This leads to the issue of the role of the state. Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on "the road to serfdom." Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable .. People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government. Neocons feel at home in today's America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not.
The economic and historical significance of boredom -- and those brave souls who embrace it
Roger Kimball on Malcolm Muggeridge. Quotable:
Muggeridge was weaned on well-scrubbed attempts to set up an earthly paradise. It was a main plank of the Fabian creed: to dispense with the burdensome scaffolding of the past, its selfish institutions, its superstitions, its allegiance to outmoded vices like competition and greed. Love, harmony, brotherhood�an end to the depredations of inherited wealth, inherited � anything. Onwards, upwards, unfettered progress forever and ever. Not only was Muggeridge raised in that creed, he also married into it. Kitty Dobbs was the beautiful, freethinking niece of Sidney and Beatrice Webb; in marrying her, he noted many years later, he was marrying into �a sort of aristocracy of the Left.�Muggeridge�s great gift as a political commentator was a nose for spurious idealism. Like nearly every right-thinking (which meant left-leaning) person, the young Muggeridge regarded the Soviet Union as the first chapter of the new utopia. When he went there as Moscow correspondent for The Manchester Guardian in the early 1930s, disabusement was almost immediate. As a leader writer, Muggeridge had tapped out �Many an uplifting sentence � expressing the hope that moderate men of all shades of opinion would draw together, and that wiser counsels might yet prevail.� In Moscow, he discovered that �moderate men of all shades of opinion had a way of disappearing into Lubinka Prison, never to be seen again.� Muggeridge saw the future, and�unlike Lincoln Steffens a decade earlier�he saw that it was hell on earth. Russia, he understood, was in the process of becoming �a huge and centrally organised slave state.� It wasn�t long before he was writing to his aunt-by-marriage Beatrice about his:
overwhelming conviction that the [Soviet] Government and all it stands for, its crude philosophy (religion if you like) is evil and a denial of everything I care for in life� . Why should uncle Sidney say � �I indignantly repudiate the slander that there is forced labour in the Soviet Union� when every single person in Russia knows there is forced labour � ?
A glimpse of Stalin�s Russia spurred Muggeridge�s political awakening. It is to his everlasting credit that he had the wit to see through his Fabian �ideals� and the courage to broadcast the horrors going on around him. In the beginning, at least, he was almost alone. Western intellectuals flocked to the workers� paradise that Stalin had created and �they were one and all utterly delighted and excited by what they saw there.� Clergymen walked serenely and happily through the anti-god museums, politicians claimed that no system of society could possibly be more equitable and just, lawyers admired Soviet justice, and economists praised the Soviet economy.
As for the Webbs and their starry-eyed ideal of universal brotherhood, Muggeridge summed it up in a dismissive BBC broadcast after their deaths. Comparing Beatrice to Don Quixote, he wrote that �she finished up enmeshed in her own self-deception, adulating a regime [the USSR] which bore as little relation to the Fabian Good Life as Dulcinea del Toboso to the Mistress of Don Quixote�s dreams.�
On the other hand .. David Horowitz is now defending Ann Coulter:
In today's LA Times, James Pinkerton takes Coulter to task for saying that Whittaker Chambers is invisible today. This too is wide of the mark. Coulter is absolutely right about this, despite the appearance of Sam Tannenhaus's worthy biography which appeared six years ago. I had lunch shortly after that with two seniors at the University of California Santa Cruz. They were both on the dean's list and I asked them if they knew who Alger Hiss was. They did. He was someone who was a victim of McCarthyism. I asked them if they knew who Chambers was. Their faces went blank. This is the large truth in Ann Coulter's book. Modern "liberalism" is really leftism and is not only soft on communism itself but has attempted to indotrinate a generation of Americans in its leftist faith.
David is one of my hero's because he believes in taking back the language -- and he acts on it. So do I (see to your right in my links column).
Over 50 papers have been collected from the 2002 Popper Centenary Conference by Rafe Champion. Take a look. I particularly recommend "Popper and Hayek: Who Influenced Whom?" by Bruce Caldwell.
Andrew Sullivan has Ronald Radosh's heated reaction to the Ann Coulter's latest "historical revisionism" on Joe McCarthy:
"I am furious and upset about her book," me told me last week. "I am reading it - she uses my stuff, Harvey Klehr and John Haynes, Allen Weinstein etc. to distort what we actually say and to make ludicrous and historically incorrect arguments. You might recall my lengthy and negative review in The New Republic a few years ago of Herman's book on McCarthy; well, she is ten times worse than Herman. At least he tried to use bona fide historical methods of research and argument." Now Radosh has endured ostracism and abuse for insisting that many of McCarthy's victims were indeed Communist spies or agents. But he draws the line at Coulter's crude and inflammatory defense of McCarthy. "I think it is important that those who are considered critics of left/liberalism don't stop using our critical faculties when self-proclaimed conservatives start producing crap."
Putting a fork in Michael Lind. Stephen Schwartz does a fisking:
Unless Lind is incapable of reading as well as thinking, he knows Wald is a defender of the Trotskyists, not of the neocons. This line alone should exclude Lind from any consideration as a serious intellectual himself, and brands him, not Wald, as an exemplar of pseudo-intellectual dishonesty.
When Lind writes about things I know a great deal about -- like the ideas of Hayek -- it's always worth a good laugh. Or a good shake of the head. Who is Lind trying to fool? Oh, those guys ... too easy.
All publicity is good publicity, right? Still more publicity for the half-baked "intellectual" behind the half-baked essay "The Weird Men Behind George Bush" -- i.e. Trotsky, Bush and all that nonsense. And the discussion turns to Joshua Muravchik. Yes, somehow, Muravchik.
More on Eric Hoffer from Thomas Sowell. This is don't miss stuff.
Historian Paul Johnson on the history of empire and America's new destiny as The Empire of Liberty.
Neoconservatism -- Jonah Goldberg explains it all for you. Money quote:
The only remotely useful definition of neoconservatism today is "Whatever Bill Kristol thinks." [On the other hand] Bill Kristol is a brilliant man, but one could go crazy trying to extract a coherent ideology from his tactical movements within the Republican party.
Tyndale: ''Thys ys my commaundement, that ye love togedder as I have loved you. Gretter love then this hath no man, then that a man bestowe his lyfe for his frendes.'' King James: ''This is my Commaundement, that ye loue one another, as I haue loued you. / Greater loue hath no man then this, that a man lay downe his life for his friends.'' From Hitchens review of God's Secretaries: Blessed Are the Phrasemakers.
Elaine Pagels has a new book, this one a close study of the Gospel of Thomas and 50 other early Christian works. This is from a review in the Christian Science Monitor:
Pagels .. points out that the Gospel of John is the only one in the New Testament that actually promotes the idea of Jesus as God in human form, and she argues .. that it was written explicitly to counter the Gospel of Thomas, which said otherwise. Thomas's gospel, she writes, teaches "that God's light shines not only in Jesus but, potentially at least, in everyone ... and encourages the hearer ... to seek to know God through one's own divinely given capacity .. "
If you like this kind of stuff, Pagels is a great read, and what she has to say can be, er, revelatory. I found The Five Gospels marvelously interesting -- guess I'll have to order up Pagels when I've finished off the two history of religion books I have awaiting in the nightstand.
King James -- "Now Elizabeth's full time came that she should be delivered, and she brought forth a son". New English -- "Now the time came for Elizabeth's child to be born, and she gave birth to a son". A new book is out on the making of the King James Bible. Read a review here.