John McCain's Concesssion

    As with William F. Buckley, I’ve never agreed much with the politics of Sen. John McCain of Arizona.  Indeed, I believe he placed the conservative movement and the Republican Party on a slippery slope when he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate in 1968.  But I nonetheless respect him as a person and (unlike Donald Trump) I admire the manner in which he handled his capture and imprisonment during the Viet Nam War.

    While McCain can from time to time be as uncooperative and obstructionist as the next Senate Republican, as Evan Thomas pointed out in the New York Times (10/23/16), “as a defeated presidential candidate in 2008 he showed grace and respect for democracy.”  Late on election night that year, McCain made this statement:

    “This campaign was and will remain the great honor of my life, and my heart is filled with nothing but gratitude for the experience and to the American people for giving me a fair hearing before deciding that Senator Obama and my old friend Joe Biden should have the honor of leading us for the next four years.”

    Think we’re likely to hear anything remotely resembling those sentiments on the evening of November 8, 2016?

      

William F. Buckley, Jr.

    Remember Bill Buckley — the conservative inquisitor par excellence?  Remember how he sparred with liberals on Firing Line, his TV program for 33 years (over 1,400 episodes).  But remember also how he did so firmly and cogently, but always respectfully, rarely if ever insulting or trashing his guests.

    Richard Brookhiser, a later editor of National Review, the conservative bi-monthly founded by Buckley, said that Firing Line “was the grandfather of today’s cage fight media—but its descendants are illegitimate.  Buckley hosted and roasted guests fo the left (and right) to find out what they thought.”

    Indeed.  In a recent book on Buckley, Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on The Firing Line, Heather Hendershot writes:

        "In short, Buckley came to realize that one could have very interesting conversations, and even become very good friends with, people whose belief systems were very different from one’s own.  This kind of personal realization was not strictly necessary for a political pundit, a conservative movement organizer, an editor of a journal of opinion, or a nationally syndicated right-wing columnist.  You could, theoretically, perform all of these rolls from within an isolated bubble filled only with your own ideological compatriots.  But a willingness to engage generously with political opponents would make you a better host of a public affairs TV show.  Of course, Buckley did not need to be friends with all of his liberal and left-wing TV guests, but it would have been boring if he had simply attacked and disdained them.  He succeeded on his program Firing Line for more than thirty years  because he was open to guests, open to their differences, open to debate."

    Not too many Buckleys around today, are there?  Personally, I’m a liberal and rarely agreed with Buckley politically.  But my sense of nostalgia is great.  I wish he were still with us.

There's More To Do

Two days after the nomination of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate for president, the Traverse City Record-Eagle printed an editorial published in The Detroit News lauding that accomplishment and the advances of women generally in politics and business.  Clinton’s victory “shattered the glass ceiling” of male domination of candidates for president, said the editorial, and constituted “an accomplishment American women in the 20th century could only dream of.”  So far, so good.

But then the editors turned to the subject of women in lower levels of politics, specifically women elected to seats in state legislatures.  That number “has skyrocketed since the 1980s,” they said, “growing from just a couple of hundred nationwide to 1,812 in 2016.”  That in itself is true, but before we suffer a shoulder separation patting ourselves on the back, we should note the fact that this year there are 7,383 seats in state legislatures around the country and that the 1,812 filled by women amount to only 24.6% of the total.  Moreover, women occupy only 20.9% of the seats in the Michigan legislature (31 of 148), the state thus ranking a puny 34th among the 50 states.

As far as I know, women comprise somewhere around 50% of the total population of both the United States and the State of Michigan.  There’s more to do.

The Somme, A Hundred Years Later

July 1 of this year marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme in World War I, one of the most horrific military engagements in the history of man.  The occasion caused me to retrieve from my bookshelf Peter Hart’s definitive history, The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front (2008).  In the preface, Hart makes this statement:

    The political imperatives of defending the bloated empire, the endemic racism and all-embracing casual assumption of moral superiority of the age, the overwhelming reliance on blunt threats ro achieve what might have been achieved by subtle diplomacy—these were all part of the British heritage in 1914.

Ring any bells?  That was Britain a hundred years ago.  Think United States today. 

Sound Familiar?

    Sam Tanenhaus is an American historian, biographer, and journalist who writes often for The New York Times and the New York Review of Books.  His biographies include those on Louis Armstrong, Whittaker Chambers, and William F. Buckley, Jr., which he’s currently working on.  He has received both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for his work.

    In a recent essay in the Book Review section of the Times, Tanenhaus asks “if there is a useful precedent for this most unpredictable of election seasons.”  He rejects references to 1978 when the Republicans had to settle their differences at a divided convention, and to the riotous, violent Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968.  Instead, he turns to 1936, the year Franklin Delano Roosevelt was lining up to run for his second term, a year when populist demagogues were also in evidence in American politics.

    In 1936, Tanenbaum writes, “the country was lifting itself out of the Great Depression, helped by the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, but the climb back to prosperity was long and slow, and a mood of populist unrest began to steal across the land.”  He then cites to the description of the period offered by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.:

        The followers of the demagogues mostly came from the old lower-middle classes, now in an unprecedented state of frustration and fear, menaced by humiliation, dispossession, and poverty.  They came from provincial and traditionally nonpolitical groups in the population, jolted from apathy into near-hysteria by the shock of economic collapse.  They came, in the main, from the ranks of the self-employed, who, as farmers or shopkeepers or artisans, felt threatened by organized economic power, whether from above, as in banks and large corporations, or from below, as in trade unions.  To a considerable degree, they came form the evangelical denominations; years of Bible reading and fundamentalist revivalism had accustomed them to millennial solutions.  They were mostly men and women of native-born old-immigrant (Anglo-Saxon and German) stock; if [Father Charles] Coughlin’s [right-wing] Irish Catholic supporters seemed an exception, the exception was more apparent than real, for the Irish were beginning to see themselves as part of the old immigration rather than the new.  In sum, they seemed to represent Old America in resentful revolt against both contemporary politics and contemporary economics.

Sound familiar?


References:

Sam Tanenhaus, “What  Do This Season’s Political Books Tell Us About the Election?”, New York Times, Book Review Section (June 16, 2016).

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval 69 (Houghton-Mifflin 1960).

We Have Been Warned

     Anne Applebaum  is a well-regarded journalist and author.  She studied at Oxford and the London School of Economics, married a former Foreign Minister of Poland, and is an expert on Eastern Europe and Russia.  She wrote about her view that Britain’s decision to leave the European Union is a warning to America in her bi-weekly foreign affairs column in The Washington Post three days after the British referendum.  Here, in part, is what she said.  Pay attention.

        I do realize that it’s facile to talk about the impact on a U.S. election that is still many months away, that it’s too simple to say ”first Brexist, then Donald Trump.”  But there is a way in which this election has to be seen, at the very least, as a possible harbinger of the future.  This [British] referendum campaign, as I wrote a few days ago, was not fought on the issues that are normally central to British elections.  Identity politics trumped economics; arguments about “independence” and “sovereignty” defeated arguments about British influence and importance.  The advice of one-trusted institutions was ignored.  Elected leaders were swept aside.  If that kind of transformation can take place in the U.K., then it can happen in the United States, too.  We have been warned.

Applebaum’s right.  We have been warned.