Radicalism and Republicanism in Kansas

My apologies for yet another long delay in blogging. April was busy--too busy--and May was hardly less so; it seemed that just as the semester ended and I got a break from all these new committee responsibilities I'm adjusting to, that a bunch of new stuff was thrown at me, via home and church. I really need to organize my time better. But then, I've been saying that for years, haven't I? Oh well; on with the summer. We're not going to be traveling until August this time around, so hopefully (there's always a "hopefully," right?) there won't be the sort of interruption in my blogging as has been common in summers past. But we'll see.

As usual, I start back up with a long post. About a month ago Sunflower Community Action, a citizens and neighborhood organizing group here in Wichita, asked me if I'd be interested in contributing to a workshop on Kansas culture and politics by lecturing a bit on Kansas's radical past. I was happy for the chance to put all that I'd been teaching and blogging and talking about for the past several months into lecture form, and I'm including the result below, pretty much in its entirety. Hopefully some of you will find it interesting, as well as relevant to the ongoing arguments about populism on the prairie--and elsewhere--today.


Radical and Republican Legacies in Kansas Politics

John Steuart Curry was a talented artist, born in Kansas in 1897 but educated in New York City and Paris, who was caught up by--but who also benefited from and strategically promoted--the rush of interest in "Regionalism" in the 1930s. Curry had perhaps the most ambiguous relationship with his home state of any of the "Regionalist Triumvirate": while Thomas Benton Hart and Grant Wood were pretty thoroughly and solidly products of and committed to Missouri and Iowa, respectively, Curry came back to Kansas only reluctantly, and his defining work of art involving Kansas--the mural "Tragic Prelude," painted on the east corridor of the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka--was by no means embraced by the Kansas public or its politicians. "Prelude," with its towering figure of John Brown, armed with a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other, bestriding a scene of violence, danger, and conflict, was reproduced in Life in 1939; it was a sensation, but also the last straw for some who disliked Curry's emphasis on Kansas's bloody and radical beginnings. Refusing to support Curry's request that some marble slabs be moved to accommodate his work on the uncompleted murals, Kansas lawmakers essentially shut down his larger vision for the Capitol; Curry then left his existing paintings unfinished and unsigned. He died in 1946, but the figure of John Brown--a wild-eyed Colossus--remains.

In some ways it is fitting that John Brown is still there, unfinished, looking down on Kansas lawmakers, because John Brown's legacy for Kansas is similarly unfinished and unclear. Brown is hardly a central, or even a particularly important, figure in the historical record of the state--yet his legacy is an enormously important factor in Kansas having become both at one time the most radical, but also for much of its history the most Republican, state in the union.

The history of Kansas of concern here is the one which began with the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The pressure was building for Congress to open up the remaining unorganized land from the Louisiana Purchase for settlement, but southern politicians did not want to open up any new land to potential statehood that would fall under the terms of the Missouri Compromise, which forbade slavery north of the 36th parallel. This was a difficult position for Democrats like Stephen Douglas of Illinois, who wanted to maintain the support of those who wished to open up and move into the western territories, but couldn't afford to antagonize voters and powerbrokers in the South. The solution, of course, was the gutting of the Missouri Compromise and the establishment of "popular sovereignty"--or "squatter sovereignty" as some preferred to call it--as the principle under which the territories of Kansas and Nebraska would decide if they would become slave or free states. This move, perhaps more than any other development in the 1850s, radicalized abolitionist opposition to slavery and forced moderate Democrats to choose sides, with Douglas himself becoming a general champion of the state-sovereignty approach to slavery and the South beginning its long-lasting role as crucial to Democratic electoral plans. (In 1852, the Democrats had won all but two of the northern states; in Congressional elections two years later though, they lost all but two, thus setting the stage for the subsequent identification of the Democrats with the South, agitation and rebellion.)

In May of 1854 there were fewer than 800 permanent white settlers living in the Kansas territory--indeed, besides those stationed at Ft. Leavenworth, those traveling the Santa Fe Trail to California, and various Methodist and Quaker missionaries, the population of Kansas was then almost wholly indigenous. But within nine months the number residents of European descent had increased by a factor of ten. Pro- and anti-slavery forces pored into Kansas, determined to put down roots and shape a state government either supportive of or opposed to slavery. For Missourians, the "Border Ruffians" and "Self-Defensives" who would cross over into Kansas, stake claims or briefly vote or harass other settlers, and then retreat back across the state line, it was a matter of protecting their "rights" as slave owners and their economic position: as mostly small farmers with few slaves, without the power of the plantation system that existed in the Deep South to back them up (and thus maintain social control), the existence of a free state next door was profoundly threatening. And they quickly, and rightly, deduced that this would not be any "ordinary" free state; the possibility of winning an electoral battle against the "Slave Power" on the ground was enormously appealing to many New England abolitionists, and the battle for Kansas became a huge fundraising and recruitment opportunity. Organizations like the New England Emigrant Aid Company helped move--and arm with rifles and other equipment--hundreds of settlers, setting the stage for numerous early conflicts that only escalated as time went by. Most early Kansas communities became quickly identified as havens for either pro- or anti-slavery settlers--Atchison being one of the former, Lawrence one of the latter--allowing for literal political lines to be drawn almost from the start.

It must be noted, however, that as the decade progressed the lure of land was at least as important as the struggle over slavery; fully a third of Kansas's white residents by 1860 had come from the Midwest, not New England or Missouri (or points further south). This is not to say that they had no interest in the partisan battles over slavery, only that their interest in it was not a direct moral or economic one. This was the decade when the Republican party emerged as a national alternative to the Whigs, and the Republican slogan of "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men" must be understood for what it truly was. The Republican opposition to the expansion of slavery was not grounded in a deeply abolitionist sentiment, though many Republican leaders did hate slavery; mostly, their opposition was grounded in the belief that slavery was a corrupting social system, which placed too much power in the hands of non-working slave owners and plantation masters, thus undermining the freedom of the white wage-earner or proprietor--an independent man with dignity and a family to support (such patriotic and patriarchal rhetoric was important)--to expand his property, advance economically, and control his own destiny politically. For early Kansas politicians like James Lane, opposition to slavery had nothing to do with sympathy for slaves and African-Americans; on the contrary, part of the reason why Lane opposed slavery in Kansas was because he wanted to keep Kansas entirely white. Such racial animosity clearly did not typify the Republican party as a whole, of course, but it captures a major part of the thinking of early Kansas settlers. The problem was not, for the most part, the degradations and discrimination suffered by people of African descent in a society which tolerated slavery; rather, it was the inequality and indecency embodied by a system which denied the fruits of liberty to ordinary independent freeholders (who theoretically could have been of any race, but who in the rhetoric and thought of most of America's voters were clearly white).

But then came John Brown--and not just Brown, but the revolution in partisan thinking about slavery he represented. Brown was born in Connecticut in 1800, and was a zealous Christian, deeply influenced by the language and power of the Old Testament and committed to the abolitionist cause. Unlike many abolitionists, however, he was also personally devoted to the cause of racial equality. He firmly denounced those who opposed slavery yet promoted racial separationism, and once was expelled from a church in Ohio for inviting an African-American family to attend with and sit in the pew beside his own. A wanderer without roots or much economic success in life, it was perhaps inevitable that he would be drawn to the struggle in "Bleeding Kansas." One of his sons came first, settling in Franklin County in early 1855, and was immediately caught up in the formation of antislavery militias, designed to defend free-state settlements and protect their representatives in the territorial government. (This protection was much needed; in the chaotic early months of Kansas's settlement, the rule of law was minimal at best, and fraud, intimidation, and mob action was common.) In a letter, Brown's son complained that the free-state settlers were sorely lacking in any kind of military organization, and this inspired Brown himself to relocate--leaving behind his wife, a new baby, and a host of debts and lawsuits--in the fall of that year. Within weeks, the Browns were in the thick of the conflict. In December of 1855, John Brown joined others in turning Lawrence into an armed camp, in preparation for an expected attack upon the free-state legislators living in the town by a group of intoxicated Missourians gathered along the banks of the Wakarusa River--the so-called "Wakarusa War." In this case, Marx's dictum was reversed, as the farce preceded the tragedy: while in December the territorial governor has been able to broker a deal to get the aimless yet angry mob to disperse, six months later Lawrence truly was attacked--by an organized force with artillery, no less--and the residents and legislators living there fled for their lives.

John Brown was infuriated that he had been too late to fight in the "Siege of Lawrence," and dismissed Republican free-state leaders like Charles Robinson as a "perfect old woman" who was "more talk than cider." Brown's cider, by contrast, was fiery and pure. On May 24, Brown led for of his sons and three other men on a mission to the nearby proslavery settlement of Pottawatomie, where they dragged five men--none of whom owned slaves or had participated in the attack on Lawrence--from their homes and hacked them to death with broadswords. In later years, Brown would be coy about whether or not he had directly killed any man that night; in an early formulation of terrorist language which has become unfortunately familiar to us all, Brown rather insisted that he had done God's work that night, and that the deaths of those men--however it happened--did not displease him, the servant of the Almighty, in the least.

Brown stayed in Kansas only a little while longer; he was a wanted man, a guerrilla fighter, whose reputation--for violence and visionary leadership--increased with every week and month and year he was able to elude capture and outfight those sent after him. He and his loyal troops participated in what some historians consider to be the first organized military encounter of the Civil War in June of 1856. He fled the territory after troops were sent to destroy the free-state settlement of Osawatomie where he had been hiding, returned a couple of times after freeing slaves in Missouri and leading them through Kansas on their way north, but by 1859 was gone for good. His path took him, as everyone knows, to Harper's Ferry and death by hanging. But in Kansas, his legacy remained. Most importantly, the way he was celebrated and condemned throughout the nation for his implacable hatred of slavery and commitment to racial justice and the overthrowing of "Slave Power" was seared into the self-understanding of Kansans. As the years went by and the Civil War was fought, the battle between the north and south seemed in Kansas almost a continuation of the vicious, personal, neighbor-against-neighbor conflict that its residents had seen and had contributed to throughout the 1850s. (Which in many cases it actually was; the fighting between Missouri and Kansas during the Civil War years was particularly localized and bloody.) With the success of the free-state forces in Kansas, and then the success of the Union forces across the country, Kansans had reason to believe that they been more deeply committed to the struggle over slavery than any other state, and that belief had real political consequences.

For one thing, it made the Republican party absolutely dominant in the state. So many Union veterans settled in Kansas that it came for a time to be known as the "Soldier State," and these veterans almost to a man voted as they had shot--that is, they voted for the party of Lincoln, and against the traitorous Democrats. Waving the "bloody shirt," accusing the Democratic party of being in sympathy to slavery and treason, was commonplace throughout America in the 1870s and 1880s, but nowhere more than in Kansas. In the first fifty years of Kansas's statehood, there was only one Democratic governor, and that aberration was corrected after a single term in office. Moreover, the memory of the Bleeding Kansas era, and the impact of John Brown's revolutionary commitments, had made Kansas Republicans somewhat radical; in their proposed state constitutions in 1858 and 1859, they not only outlawed slavery (which made it into the final version), but also advanced a measure to protect the rights and votes of blacks and women (which did not, but not for lack of trying). Following the war, Kansas Republicans moved even more rapidly than those Radical Republicans in Congress did in their fervor to punish the South and fulfill what they took to be President Lincoln's dream; the state of Kansas held a referendum of providing African-Americans with the vote in 1867, before the 15th Amendment to the Constitution was even ratified.

But not only did Kansas Republicans' radicalism move more quickly than the national version did, it lasted longer. The energy and influence of the Radical Republicans in Washington DC was soon spent; by the late 1870s Reconstruction in the South came to an end, and the white power structure of the former Confederacy immediately began to re-assert itself, overwhelmingly through the Democratic party. With the "Solid South" completely lost to them, the Republican party needed to shore up its own majorities, and it increasingly found these in the rising corporate, trading, and banking interests of the cities of northeastern and upper midwestern states. In time the national Republican party, and state Republican party establishments throughout the country, shed much of the aspiration hopes of Lincoln, to say nothing of the crusading demands of Brown; the Republican party as the party of entrepreneurs and businessmen and the upper-class was born. Obviously, there were Republicans who were unhappy with this; hence the Mugwumps, who spurned the Republican party of the 1880s and embraced Grover Cleveland, a Democrat for president. Kansas Republicans were even more divided, as the apparent corruption and increasing complacency of what was once an intense and even revolutionary movement in American politics seemed a rebuke to all that they had identified themselves as over the previous 30 years. There were numerous split-off groups amongst the Kansas Republicans, with variously titled Liberal Republicans of Independent Republicans contesting items in the party's official platform throughout the 1870s and 1880s. The arrival of large numbers of African-Americans kept this struggle, the struggle to keep the Republican party faithful to the principles of conflict from which it had emerged, very much in the minds of Kansans. The "Exodusters," lured to Kansas by the promise of cheap land and the hope of settling in that state where the blessed John Brown had begun his war for equality, confronted and tested the good intentions of Kansas Republicans; the state's black population went from under 1000 in 1860, to over 15,000 in 1870, to three times that in 1880, and at least a dozen all-black communities were established throughout the state. As the years went by, as conditions for farmers worsened in the age of centralized monopolies and tight credit, as Jim Crow laws and a racial backlash in the form of the Ku Klux Klan strengthened their grip through the country, the Kansas Republican leadership had more cause and more opportunity to lead than was the case perhaps anywhere else in the nation.

Kansas Republicans did not wholly fail the test--but the did not wholly pass it either. In terms of racial politics, there were notable successes: for example, the Republican legislature for several years acquiesced to the request from the NAACP to ban the hideously racist film Birth of a Nation in Kansas, all while the movie was a sensation elsewhere. But in time, the radical element of Kansas Republicanism was superseded by something else: the appropriation by the Republican party of the new moderate, small-town, "middle-class" voice of America, so expertly embodied by William Allen White, a newspaper editor and eventual Republican mouthpiece for the nation from Emporia. By the turn of the century, the transformation of the U.S. from an mostly self-sufficient and localized, agrarian and rural society to a mostly specialized and national, industrial and urban society was nearly completion. The deep conceptual heart of the old call for "free soil, free labor, and free men" could have been source of resistance to the emergence of an interconnected and corporatized capitalist state, and a demand for real economic democracy, but instead it was adapted--as Lincoln himself had done some clever adapting of what America supposedly stood for in his Gettysburg Address--into a call for conserving small-town virtues and (white, Protestant) ways of life in the midst of a world where economic sovereignty and political power was being rapidly, and perhaps inevitably, concentrated in the hands of educated and cosmopolitan elites. Thus was the Kansas Republican party, like White himself, slowly transformed into a perfect vehicle for the "modern" and moderate--yet nostalgic and homey, always mindful of the bourgeois ways of the small prairie town--policies of the Progressive Republicans. Racially, Kansas had what it considered to be a mild and reasonable amount of segregation (Republican lawmakers in the 1950s would complain about how a court case which began in Topeka led to Brown v. Board of Education, saying that it was unfair that Kansas's sort of segregation should be associated with the presumably much different sort that existed in the Deep South); the need for more collective, affirmative actions to bring real social equality to blacks was something they never considered. Economically, the Kansas Republican party was flexible enough to respond to the Populist challenges of the 1890s and 1900s, returning from severe and surprising electoral defeats with proposals for change in the regulation of railroads and banks that got them returned to power in short order. (The fact that the Populists, through William Jennings Bryan, were from 1896 on closely associated with the Democrats made all the easier, of course, for Kansas Republicans to attack them as traitors in disguise.) White lambasted the Populists as wild-eyed fools and uneducated bumpkins, yet he fought the Klan with Brownesque fervor, and happily endorsed much of the Populist platform once it was moderated and modernized by Republicans like Robert LaFollette--to say nothing of Democrats like FDR. In these ways, White exemplifies the way John Brown's radical, egalitarian legacy long influenced the Republican party he helped make dominant in Kansas, but was also, in time, almost completely sublimated within it.

I say "almost completely sublimated," not entirely. For one doesn't have to look any further than to the innumerable analyses of "Red America" and rise of the "Christian Right" and so forth, all so well--if often profoundly inaccurately--realized by Thomas Frank in his bestselling screed What's the Matter with Kansas?, to realize that Kansas's almost unique mix of radical moralism and conservative populism is still present, lurking somewhere beneath the surface. Of course, the political surface itself has almost wholly changed; the issues which characterized the search for economic sovereignty and racial justice a century or more ago have been, in Kansas at least, almost definitively buried by the transforming effects of World War II and modern farming technology on the one hand, and numerous Supreme Court decisions and civil rights movements of the 50s and 60s on the other. And meanwhile, a host of moral and social issues--abortion most prominently--that never would have occurred to the free-staters and Exodusters and Populists of yore now define much of the political landscape.

So perhaps John Brown's legacy, the ideals and tensions which his radical, violent, visionary actions bequeathed to Kansas and the Republican party which embraced his memory (at first devotedly, in time reluctantly), is really and truly on its way out. Over the past decade, after all, the progressive and conservative factions of the Kansas Republican party have torn each other apart, so much so that Democrats nationally are looking at Kansas--and our rising star of a governor, Kathleen Sebelius--as a state of serious opportunity for them for the first time since...well, maybe for the first time ever. Craig Miner ends his wonderful history of the Sunflower State by claiming that Kansas has resisted homogenization as long and as successfully as any other state in the country (in no small part because its intense past became so entwined with its institutional memory), but that now becoming "like the nations" is unavoidable. Will ordinary, nonpopulist, nonprogressive, just straightforward Republican (and Democratic) politics therefore be our future?

For my part, I'll keep my eyes on that unfinished, unsigned mural of John Brown, watching with burning eyes the passing scene, and wait.

Ode to My--and Others'--Youth (also, Ralph Nader)

I told myself I wouldn't take such long breaks from blogging this year, and I meant it too. But here I am, three weeks away from the blog, and the usual number of half-finished posts piling up, perhaps never to see the sight of day. My main excuse, this time around at least, is the same as Tim Burke's--this April I've really been swamped, and a lot of it has been with stuff I've never seriously had to deal with before: advising, committee responsibilities, program evaluations, faculty searches, curriculum reforms, and all the rest of the business of being a full-time, tenure-track academic that eluded me while I had that "temporary" label attached to my title. I'm not complaining (well, not about most of it--though figuring out how to translate course outcomes for my education majors into all these matrixes and rubrics which the state certification boards have decided must be used is a real pain). Building up a major, shaping requirements, evaluating students: I like it all. But it does take up a lot of time. I know, I know, wah wah wah.

Aside from all this, I have managed to keep up an ongoing conversation over this past month with some other writers over matters discussed in this post of mine on William Jennings Bryan and populism, much of which has been informed by the reading I've done for my History of Kansas class, which in turn was shaped by a lot of fine recommendations I received last semester from you all. I have a couple of posts to finish regarding that conversation and issues which came up in that class, which wraps up next Tuesday; I'll try to get them up over the next couple of days. But for today, another end of the semester note, one that takes me back to my undergraduate years at Brigham Young University.

Some of you are no doubt aware that Vice President Dick Cheney will be speaking at my alma mater's graduation commencement ceremony tomorrow--not because I assume a great number of you care what happens at BYU, but because the fact that the invitation has actually given rise to protests at one of America's most politically conservative campuses, located in the heart of arguably America's most conservative county, has attracted all sorts of media coverage. To which I can only say: man, I'm jealous. See, I was a twentysomething BYU protester once: not a terribly responsible or ethical one, I can't deny (working for the university's official daily newspaper and simultaneously writing for and rabble-rousing along with its underground student-run weekly was hardly my finest moment, and my unceremonious firing from the former was pretty justified), nor an entirely unconflicted one (politics and religion are not easily separated at the ground level, especially at a church school like BYU, and so sometimes I got caught up by events and commitments that I couldn't in good conscience support), but one that got out and carried signs and collected signatures and was even arrested for civil disobedience in those fun years of 1991-1994 or thereabouts nonetheless. I've left that kind of political activism behind, for the most part, as most people do as they take on the responsibilities and complexities of adulthood and the professional world; nowadays, giving a speech at a local community organizing group is more my speed (in fact, I just gave one yesterday). I don't regret giving it up, but neither--except, admittedly, for a few really boneheaded moves on my part, such as the one mentioned above--do I regret my involvement in those causes, as much in vain as many of them were, and as much as some of my views have changed since then. (Some more reflections on my protest days here.) Direct, expressive, face-to-face political action--when it is done responsibly and respectfully, and not given over to self-righteousness and contempt--is a healthy thing, good for democratic society and good for the soul. Reading about the success that the BYU Democrats have had, and especially reading about the alternative commencement they and other malcontents have managed to organize, makes me feel happier--and older!--in regards to my undergraduate years than I have in quite a while.

Ah, yes...about that commencement. Ralph Nader, huh? Well, no, he wouldn't have been my first choice either. (Jimmy Carter, perhaps--but I doubt he's on the lecture circuit these days.) I have to admit that I think it's rather amazing (but in a good way!) that a plea for donations to Daily Kos would have been so successful, considering all the hate for Nader out there. No, I'm not going to attempt to refight the Nader wars; I said my bit and made my peace about supporting him for president in 1996 and 2000 long ago, and I've nothing to add now. Well, except for one thing.

I don't know, and doubt I'll ever know, Nader personally. Most of what is written and said about him and his interests and activities has always acknowledged streaks of arrogance and authoritarianism in his personality; for all I know, those streaks now complete dominate him, and perhaps those who say he's now just little more than an ambulance-chaser to boot are correct as well. I think he has been, more than once in his life, an important rallying point for those who seek to articulate a populist political response to the corporate and technocratic elites who dominate the democratic process and the marketplace; the fact that his response is not enough to make me wish to directly hand him executive power--especially given is lack of attention to building anything constructive in his wake--doesn't rob him of his ability to effectively harness the expressive desires of folks like myself who otherwise can't, as he put it, crash the party of what sometimes seems like an aristocracy that rules our country. Is harnessing such desires unwise when confronted by the real-world consequences--Cheney being one!--of pursuing such idealism (an idealism mixed with messianic complex, as the case may be)? In all likelihood, it often is. But I wouldn't want to live in a society without it, all the same.

And as for his speech and the alternative commencement tomorrow, well, I doubt anyone--probably including Nader himself--will think substantively about what it means for a bunch of protesters in the heart of Mormon Country to turn to the former Green Party candidate. If anyone thinks about it at all, they'll probably have their speculations short cut by observing that, in all likelihood, there weren't many others with that kind of name recognition available on that short of notice. But speculation should happen all the same--because the truth is, Nader's moral and social authoritarianism, if you want to call it that, is not a drag on his progressive commitments; on the contrary, they inform one another, and that sort of mutual informing, in which social solidarity combines with moral edicts and cultural presumptions, is the sort of thing which I think all Christian progressives, and Mormon ones in particular, really ought to be familiar with. To quote--with a few amendations and qualifications--an old post of mine defending the idea that leftism and an attendance to forms of cultural or even moral authority can go together:

What many progressives call "wingnuttery" is, I think at least in part, a concern for authority--including, most crucially, the authority of certain principles as embedded in cultural presumptions. You can't, in the minds of these and other leftists [like Nader], achieve progress solely through the legal establishment of a plurality of neutral spaces wherein one may (hopefully) achieve egalitarian improvement through the freedom of choice (though the prudential argument for the preservation of at least a little neutral space is strong). Such a focus is insufficient, as it never addresses who actually holds power over and in the midst of those spaces....What you need is an engagement with the whole culture, a popular demand for its conformity with justice as dictated by (you guessed it) absolutes, not merely the availability of free choice....This is part of the reason why Nader has never seen much importance in mobilizing people against traditional views on behalf of abortion rights or "gonadal politics." Is that "authoritarian"? Well, yes--insofar as one may speak of "working-class authoritarianism" as Christopher Lasch and others have. Or one could just call it "communitarian," in the sense of insisting that self-government rests primarily upon our attendance to communal values--which for many millions of working-class people [as Harry Brighouse and Bill Martin observed in the passages I quoted in this post] means a "culture of life"--and not simply the private space we afford citizens in the choosing of such.

The great majority of those who will attend the alternative commencement tomorrow will not be looking for working-class solidarity; they'll be going out of curiosity, out of a desire to be recognized as one of those who were less than satisfied with or indeed perhaps deeply opposed the university's decision to invite a man with Cheney's public record to speak at their graduation, maybe even out of desire to hear something important about what they did in response to Cheney's visit, and why more such direct action is the part of the way to create a healthier political culture, a culture in which the abuses of a vice president are not so easily kept from democratic exposure and accountability. I'm sure that at least they'll get the latter; whatever Nader's many faults, he clearly still knows how to sell youthful activists on a life of protest. Good of him, I say, and for them. And if maybe, just maybe, Nader or someone else says or does something to help all these twentysomething protesters like I once was see that their (and my) religious beliefs can be progressive, without unnecessarily compromising their acceptance of the culture and faith which made them....well, then they will have a truly great commencement. Certainly a much better one than Dick alone could have provided.

Harry Beyond?

Okay, so it's three and a half months or so until Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is released, everyone's counting down to the big day, pre-ordering their copies, grasping at every last bit of information...and now they've released the cover art for all the different editions of the book. They're out there for you to examine and argue about at great length (try here), and I can't pretend I haven't been. This old post of mine continues to get massive amounts of attention, so I figured a little update couldn't hurt.

(Incidentally, I have to wonder--has there every been a publishing phenomenon like Harry Potter before? Has the rise of the internet changed all the rules of how to build buzz...and what you can build buzz about? Are the Potter books sui generis, or will we--in a year or a decade or two--be treated to another ongoing story, published serially through several books, which blogs and the internet will enable similarly excited and ongoing discussions? I'm not talking about fanfic here; I'm talking about something that borders on a mass event, involving millions of people, all following the same rumors and watching the same dates. Sometimes the only thing it seems comparable to is the Star Wars phenomenon of my childhood, as the countdown to and arguments about The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi filled every playground and high school locker room. But those were movies...these are books. Maybe we have to all the way back to Dickens, and the enormous impact he had on the Victorian reading public, desperate to find out what happens to Little Nell.)

Unfortunately, I can't claim much that I feel comfortable in "updating" regarding those old predictions. Some of them I might want to refine now, as I've thought about things some more, but basically I stand by them, if only out of orneriness. I've said my piece about Snape and Harry and everyone else, so let the chips fall where they may. And as for covers and all the speculation surrounding them, two I can't come up with any kind of substantive take on at all with. The U.K. adult edition is a no-brainer: clearly that's the Slytherin locket, the real one, the one which R.A.B. stole, and which I believe Mundungus Fletcher unwittingly(?) lifted from Grimmauld Place, and sold/returned to Aberforth Dumbledore. As for the U.K. children's edition, I'm at a completely loss. Is that Dobby on Harry’s back? Why are Ron and Hermione wearing such fine robes (have they just come from Bill and Fleur's wedding)? I don’t even have a good sense of the direction of the action on the cover—are they falling, or moving forward, disappearing, appearing, or what? so that leaves the U.S edition...and even here, there's little I'm willing to wager.


Okay, what do we have here? Some people are immediately connecting the curtains with the drapes fluttering in the arch in the "Death Chamber" in the Department of Mysteries described in Order of the Phoenix. I don't think so; go back and look at the American cover for Sorcerer's Stone, and you'll find curtains there as well. There haven't been curtains on any other cover, thought. So this is the artist telling us that in Book One the story begins, and in Book Seven it ends.

But what is happening in that scene? Neither Harry nor Voldemort are wielding wands. Moreover, they don't even appear to be facing each other; both are either reaching out to/appealing to someone or something outside the picture, or else trying to ward that same person or thing away (this might explain Voldemort's hand positions, but not Harry's, suggesting that they are both having very different reactions to some development or actor off scene). Presumably, this is showing us the final showdown between Harry and Voldemort, or part of it. So...is that showdown not the duel/battle we all thought it would be? Perhaps not. There is something about this cover--the strange light in the sky, the ghostly figures around the edges of the amphitheater they are standing in, the broken wood or ruins at their feet--that makes me think that those who jumped to thinking it involves that arch, through which Sirius passed to his death, through which Harry and Luna alone could hear voices, are not wrong. I have predicted that the final battle is going to happen at Hogwarts, and I would really like to believe that what we’re seeing on the cover is the Quidditch field…but I doubt it. The size and shape are all wrong. No, I think we may very well be looking at what lays beyond that veiled arch, or else we are seeing what that same room in the Department of Mysteries appears to be to those who have gone through the veil. Harry, in short, has gone beyond this world, and perhaps stands--along with Voldemort--in a world somewhere between this one and the next one, a world of ghosts...of Sirius...of his mother and father, and maybe everyone else who have somehow not entirely disappeared from this story yet, whether through the power of Harry's own longing or through Voldemort's soul-splitting wand. And speaking of wands, their absence in the cover art makes sense under this explanation: wands would clearly be useless in a spirit world (or, dare I suggest, on "deathly hallowed ground").

Maybe I'm thinking about this stuff because I've recently run across, through the blogs Eating Words and Sword of Griffindor--the former a fine collection of thoughts, opinions, and reflections, and the latter a great resource for the Harry Potter-obsessed--a pretty darn comprehensive look at everything J.K. Rowling has gone on the record saying about her Christian faith (about which, the most succinct summary might be her own comment about attending church: "Well, I go more than to weddings and christenings"), and in that piece it is pointed out that on a several occasions Rowling has been reluctant to speculate too much about religion and the Harry Potter universe...not, she says, because she's worried about certain overzealous Catholics and evangelicals that want to ban her books (about which I've said my piece here), but because doing so would give things away. Here's a couple of crucial quotes from Rowling:

"Every time I’ve been asked if I believe in God, I’ve said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what’s coming in the books."

and:

"Magic in the sense in which it happens in my books, no, I don’t believe. I don’t believe in that....This [talking about religion] is so frustrating. Again, there is so much I would like to say, and come back when I've written book seven. But then maybe you won't need to even say it because you’ll have found it out anyway. You’ll have read it."

All this sets me to thinking...what if Rowling doesn’t want the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort to tell us much of anything about magic, but rather wants to tell us something about death, ghosts, our souls, and the afterlife? Most of my predictions presumed that Rowling's ultimate aim through the Harry Potter books--besides relating a great story--was to bring us to the point where we could see, through Harry's eyes, something about the relationship between persons in the real world. (You have constant subthemes throughout the books regarding racism, exclusion, separation, trust, and love.) But what if Rowling is actually stalking larger, more metaphysical, game? Or at least, what if she's designed a story that has to take us beyond this world in order to get to her point about those within it? (Shades of Tolkien, where the whole epic force of his story is characterized by its existence in a context haunted by an older, deeper, more "deathly" story.) Those figures on the cover--could they be the spirits of those slain by Voldemort? Are they watching the final battle as witnesses? As a court of appeal? Are they waiting desperately to see what happens next, or do they already know? Is there perhaps some reason why they haven’t been able to continue on to the next world, why a prior incantatem makes them potentially capable of being brought back? Might Harry himself also be part of the reason they’ve stayed on? This moves in the direction of thinking Harry himself or his scar is a Horcrux, a conclusions I still reject...and yet...

Oh well--I'll find out in fifteen weeks or so. For all I know, Voldemort has gone legit, and he and Harry are having a parliamentary debate in front of the Wizengamot. Rowling has pulled fast ones on us before; this one, her last, may be a doozy.

Back to Bryan (Left Conservatism Returns)

A couple of months ago I had an e-mail exchange with Caleb Stegall, he of the late, great New Pantagruel, over William Jennings Bryan, and what his example does or does not teach us about how to preserve or construct a genuinely conservative/agrarian but also a populist/egalitarian social order. He was responding to this paper of mine, and I promised him that I'd blog some more about the issue soon. That paper was given at an Association of Political Theory meeting back in November, along with scholars like Patrick Deneen, and I promised them I'd follow up on my blog regarding some of what my paper said then too. And, even earlier, back when I wrote my post on "left conservatism," I said there was something more to say about the connection between the kind of perspective I was advocating and the American experience with populism and progressivism. So consider this post an attempt to fulfill all three promises.

I am, as readers of this blog know, a pretty big fan of William Jennings Bryan, though my appreciation of him is admittedly selective, admiring some aspects of his politics and his style and greatly disliking others. But the basic problem which Bryan poses to people like Caleb is not, for the most part, at least so far as I can tell, one that has to do with any of the specific positions he took throughout his career. The early Bryan of the 1890s and 1900s was an advocate of producerism, of the working man with a family to support and a small, mostly self-sustaining community to be a part of; bimetallism, his opposition to monopolies and trusts, his desire to regulate the railroads--all of that and more was grounded in his conviction that real autonomy and equality depended upon a socio-economic structure in which the power over loans, prices, wages and currency was to kept in public hands, rather than concentrated in private ones. And the moralistic thread which ran through all his arguments, becoming ever more explicit as times and society and demographics changed in the 1910s and 20s, was itself drawn clearly from a respect for and commitment to the localized Protestant Christian (and white) cultures and audiences that he campaigned successfully amongst and long preached to throughout the American South, Midwest, and Great Plains. No populist could seriously complain about any of that.

No, the problem posed by Bryan is not so much his principles, as what he believed his principles required in terms of political action. His moralistic egalitarianism became, over the years, a central component of the progressive liberalism of early the 20th-century Democrats (and to a lesser extent Republicans too), thus contributing to or at least not proposing any real alternative to the centralizing social and economic policies of Democrats Woodrow Wilson and later Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As Caleb put it to me, "I cannot accept [Bryan's] progressive liberalism, and in fact believe that this was Byran and the late-19th C. populists greatest failure/mistake."

Caleb's not alone; plenty of Kansas and Nebraska populists felt the same way. They were convinced that the "fusion" of 1896 with the Democrats was not just the end of their movement, but the first step towards the ultimate betrayal of its ideals. I'm no major fan of "progressive liberalism" myself, at least not in its final form. However, I think it is only fair to recognize the early Progressives and New Dealers as proposing solutions to real problems, and not just stealing rhetoric from the Populist Party for the sake of advancing their own agenda in the face of rapacious capitalism. Bryan was an imperfect vessel for making populism viable in cities, amongst non-Protestants, outside the Great Plains, but the attempt to make populist policies viable in such contexts had to made, regardless. The roots of the Great Plains populists' inability to come up with wholly sustainable and defendable alternative to the emerging corporate/capitalist order go deep into the basic structures of "opportunity" in the American order. This means, to me at least, that an achievable populism will have to be one that is sufficiently nationalized so as to be able to interact with that order.

Consider the absolute centrality of fears about the railroad trusts to the great majority of populist complaints. Why were the railroads, and the way they unfairly scaled freight charges, and pitted city against city throughout the Great Plains, such a motivating factor in the votes and concerns of so many farmers? Obviously, because a great many farmers were already in the process, by the 1890s, of choosing and/or being forced to adapt to a less self-sufficient, more cash-driven economy. They weren't an enemy of railroads; they wanted to make the railroads work for them. The same thing can be said about the huge role which paranoia over the money supply, and the demand for bimetallism, had in the Populist and People's parties: why was free silver such a vote getter? Because lots of farmers, rather than building their own farms and homes over the years from scratch through collective efforts, were themselves immigrants to the Great Plains, lured by opportunity, and consequently mortgaged up to their hilts. The very platforms that the Populist party adopted over the 1890s, and the producerist principles Bryan advocated, revealed the deep tension felt by farmers and other small-town folk who were actively trying to realize their personal economic and social vision in the midst of an already nationalizing environment.

Now, none of this is to say that the "progressive" fusion represented by Bryan was the only or best possible route to that preserving and constructing that vision. But I respect and accept progressive liberalism, and the New Deal which came later, as at least containing within itself the possibility of such a route, and it is Bryan for whom we have to thank for that.

But leaving aside such thanks...why, despite his best efforts, might Bryan nonetheless be a poor guide to any kind of serious thinking regarding populism today? What's the deep flaw that prevented his solutions, and the solutions of the party he shaped, from really doing what farmers hoped it would do? (That it did a lot to keep small farmers and small towns afloat is indisputable; that it also did a lot of damage all its own along the way is something that thoughtful agrarians have been aware of ever since I'll Take My Stand.) The way Caleb sees it, the real problem was--and is--methodological, or perhaps sociological (or both): "Byran’s populism is liberal because it is entirely procedural. This is the liberal flaw." That is, as I read his concerns, Bryan did not really respect the pre-existent world that he drew his ethics and religion from, however much he may have seemed to, because when it came time to fight on behalf of that world, he wanted to align larger, procedural forces on its behalf, as if it were something static just waiting for lift or an opportunity or a bestowal of new federal funding. This is, I think, a good point. Liberalism, at least in its later 2oth-century forms, has a real "best and the brightest" problem, a tendency to look almost anthropologically out upon the masses and try to figure out how to make them equal with those elites who have already survived and thrived within out socio-economic system. In other words, as Jeff Taylor (another fan of Bryan, though I think he places much too much of a libertarian spin on Bryan's policies) has argued, the liberalism of the post-Bryan Democratic party wasn't particularly Jeffersonian. The question is, to what degree did Bryan's moralistic progressive proposals create that result?

That the fusion liberalism of 1896, and the subsequent liberalism of the Progressives and New Dealers, was increasingly elitist and procedural (a fact that intellectuals like Richard Hofstadter gloried in, condemning the populist sentiments amongst early 20th-century reformers as an unfortunate ideological leftover), I understand and agree with. I also agree that, by the time proceduralism came to dominate liberal thinking, liberalism itself was all but unsalvageable, having committed itself wholly to "management" as conceived by already-well-positioned members of the "vital center." Such management is always, invariably, individualistic, conceived solely along lines connecting the specific, studied individual to those managers who take care of opposing economic and social forces of his or her behalf. Nothing populist there, I'll admit. But part of my point in the paper Caleb is commenting on was that Bryan's proceduralism (if you want to call it that) always presumed the existence of a non-individualistic, pre-existent historical/social/economic construct, the cultural substrate which grounds and subsumes all particular actions; this is the communal context which Rousseau--who plays a major role in my analysis of Bryan and Wendell Berry's respective approaches to democracy--refashioned for the modern world. (I say "refashioned" because there were, of course, plenty of thinkers, like Burke or de Maistre for example, who remained committed in different ways to some sort of conservative continuity into modernity, something that Rousseau assumed--rightly, I believe--was impossible.)

Bryan surely had no real philosophical grasp on the necessity of a lived context for resisting the long-term consequences of the secular liberal order. But he did know that everything he valued kind of presumed a world of Protestant farmers. (White ones, it must be said; Bryan's unwillingness to challenge the racism of the Bourbon Democrats, and even worse his apparent embrace of it later in his life, was his true greatest sin and failure.) Now it is true that this localized, dynamic, and not-easily-reducible Christian agrarian world was one that he was never truly part of, and in fact chose never to be fully a part of, being instead fully committed to a party and a religious ideology that admittedly often were agents of reduction. But isn't it plausible that Bryan never stopped campaigning, never abandoned the reductive and proceduralist methodologies of travel and communication and policy-making of the emerging progressive and liberal elite, never permanently grounded himself in the local knowledge of Nebraska or Kansas or elsewhere, because he knew that wasn't a context he internalize, but rather one he could only serve and thus help conserve for others, and for the nation as a whole? If so, then perhaps what we ought to wonder if it isn't the case that Bryanism, while not sufficient for populism on its own, nonetheless has its place--that given the actually existing world of desire and movement and opportunity that gives this nation (and, increasingly, this world) power over the preferably localized and placed individual, we need actors and policies and provisions on the state and national and even international level to secure places wherein individuals can build the communities they desire. To allow for such is, of course, to walk a tightrope: allowing for this conceptual option makes it easy to sometimes sound like a mere liberal "fan" of culture and community, which brings in the same condescending sociological temptation that Christopher Lasch rightly diagnosed in both the work of the Progressives and their later proceduralist critics like Hofstadter. But to not attempt to walk that tightrope, to not allow for the possibility that populist concerns can, sometimes, be expressed in centralized and procedural terms, is ultimately, I think to become contemptuous of one's fellow man, to hate them for shopping at Wal-Mart, or for not wanting to go all the way back to the Anti-Federalists, in essence. And no good post-Lincolnian American democrat--which Bryan plainly was--should do that.

A little bit more about what Rousseau has to contribute to this argument. As my old "left conservatism" post made clear, I think Rousseau's philosophy is what helps us see the tightrope: the delicate and often tragic line which marks out the path that people, for whom the historical socio-economic condition of today has robbed of a natural basis for community and equality, must walk if they are going to find equality as well as embeddedness in the present world. To hold to embeddedness only is to, I fear, engage in fetishism. "Conservatism" must be willing to continually create something new out of the old in the midst of the modern market and state. That something is, I admit, precarious. I suppose one could argue that Rousseau, in (I think) correctly diagnosing the problem (or at least one of them) with modernity, tried too hard to repair it; he conceived of a way of alienating oneself to a community that, while in theory it would produce that kind of equality of recognition that true populist democracy requires, in practice produces something even worse than alienated individuals: a whole community held together solely by the (often dictatorially expressed) will of all. Further, I suppose one could argue that those "willed communities" are themselves often obsessive, static creations, thoroughly ideological and thus without much substance of their own. They thus become easy marks for monied classes that want to sell them connections and concessions.

Is this the only kind of populism/communitarianism which Bryan's progressivism politics conserves the possibility of: a Potemkin community, living off gnostic aspirations, dependent upon elites who themselves want nothing to do with them? (Why am I thinking about Thomas Frank's description of Republican politicians and their evangelical supporters in the megachurches here?) Perhaps that is the case. But I'm not willing to say so. "Proceduralism" may be a dead-end liberal ideology, but not all liberal procedures partake of that ideology. Some are, I think, genuine attempts to address the passing/weakening of conservative verities in the liberal order. If every single liberal procedure always carries these elitist ideological assumptions along with it like a virus, then Wendell Berry is a sell-out for supporting the Burley Tobacco Program, or for praising the insight of that William Allen White, a turn-of-the-century Kansas progressive and "Middle American" Republican who came to support the New Deal, because, though he attacked the populist People's Party (an attack he later regretted) as well as William Jennings Bryan in the 1890s, he accepted throughout his career and tried to see implemented widely their original agrarian insight: that the wealth that really matters is one that can be generated and held by the productive arts of a community of working people.

Those communities are mostly gone now. If the ideals behind them are to be realized again, it certain won't be the government or a new progressive program which will recreate them--that will happen family by family, community by community, away from the rush to modern media and markets. But families and communities are no longer, if they ever were in our theoretically classless and mobile society, locked in one place, able to allow their dynamism who work them deeper into the land they occupy. To provide some security for those few who do try to lock themselves down for the sake of the future and more permanent things, some assistance will be needed. Bryan's kind of assistance--the moralistic, Jeffersonian, and even "conservative" or populist assistance which he weaved into the fabric of the contemporary liberal Democratic party--probably wasn't the best possible kind of assistance. But it was a noble effort, one that I, for one, would love to see the likes of again.

The "Sovereignty Left"?

This post is, in some ways, a follow-up to my thoughts about my own and others' past support for the Iraq war, but mostly it's an elaboration of some themes I see being discussed throughout the long (and growing!) thread beneath Michael Bérubé's Crooked Timber post on the complicated arguments amongst liberals and leftists about their opposition to the war. In other words, it's my observations about the justifications and reasons employed by people who were, for the most part, smarter than me.

Bérubé's complaint is with those he refers to as the "Z/Counterpunch left," who continue to attack liberals like himself "and Michael Walzer and Todd Gitlin and Marc Cooper and David Corn (all of whom opposed war but favored UN inspections and/or no-fly zones and/or revised sanctions) as supporters of war in Iraq." Or if not outright supporters, than at least people who were supposedly squeamish enough in their taste for confrontational politics, or seduced enough by the universalist rhetoric of the liberal hawks, to not be willing to reject all American actions against Iraq. In the minds of folks like Alexander Cockburn, as Bérubé sees it, this animosity has deep roots, going back to the division between certain liberals and leftists over the appropriateness of NATO's intervention into the civil conflict in Kosovo, to say nothing of America's attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan. He sums up:

[I]f Alexander Cockburn is going to wonder whether I’ve had any dark nights in the past few years, I suppose I can wonder in return if he’s had any moments of regret for inveighing against people like me and Gitlin as insufficiently anti-imperialist and unacceptably willing to consider violations of Saddam’s sovereignty. Because although the Sovereignty Left has achieved a remarkable consistency in defending Milosevic and the Taliban from international interventions, they also did their part to make the antiwar movement in the US smaller and less effective than it might have been when it came to Iraq.

Bérubé's label for this group--the "Sovereignty Left"--is an interesting one. Many of the commenters that have shown up on the thread have denounced it as unfair; the primary concern of anti-intervention absolutists is repelling imperialism, they claim, not defending national borders. Still, it's a revealing enough label to prompt this thought from Timothy Burke:

[W]hen and how did one faction of the Western left come to regard sovereignty as the singular inviolate principle that left politics is called upon to defend, and by which people who are truly “left” may be separated from riff-raff moderates and popular frontists of various kinds? Seen against the long history of the left in the West, this strikes me as a very late and in many ways markedly odd development.

The question of "sovereignty" has weighed on Tim's mind for a long time. Years ago, he wrote a fine post on the topic that has stayed with me ever since:

When you defend sovereignty as the only moral principle in all the world, and say that all intrusions, forcible or otherwise, are wrong by their very nature, you ought at the same moment to deny yourself any and all judgments about the places and peoples you deem sovereign. If East is East and West is West, then the twain really must never meet, and humanity is sundered from itself, the globe inhabited by ten times ten thousand variants of the genus Homo. If you rise to sovereignty as the singular sacred principle, then human rights, civil liberties, democracy, and freedom are no more than local and parochial virtues.

And not even that. Because once sovereignty becomes an impermeable barrier to intervention, we have to ask, "Are nations the proper unit of sovereignty?" The answer is clearly no: peoples or “cultures”, in the ethnographic sense of the world, are what assert the most meaningful claims of sovereignty, of an inalienable right to difference. Meaning that from such a perspective imposing Roe vs. Wade as the law of the land on a town of Southern Baptists in Georgia is morally little different than invading Iraq with tanks: the difference is only in scale and method of imposition. The Constitution itself is then an imposition, as is any law which intrudes a larger political power onto the scene of some bounded, well-defined practice of everyday life in the name of enforcing a larger system of rights and obligations which the smaller community refuses....

A journey through that hall of mirrors always brings us back to interventionism. We are all interventionists now. We should be able to spare a gentle thought or three for late 19th and early 20th Century British imperialists as a result. The question of the 21st Century is not whether interventions should happen, but how they should happen. It is a question of method and result, not of yes or no....

If we are bringing democracy to the world, then let us bring democracy, and follow the best traditions and instincts of the United States. Intervention is a double-edged sword. If we act against sovereignties in the name of human rights, then we must be open to being acted against. If humanity as a whole rejects capital punishment as a fundamental violation of human rights, for example, then the United States has no business pursuing it--not if we want the right to intervene on behalf of human rights ourselves.

That is the crystalline moment where interventionism become immoral imperialism: when the pursuit of human emancipation is not a reciprocal obligation that binds the actor as well as the acted upon, when the honest pursuit of freedom everywhere curdles into cynical oppression.

When I first read that essay, the phrase "we are all interventionists now" rang forth as a terribly true description of the post-9/11 global reality. But I wonder how much I may have misunderstood Tim: he was clearly talking about the failure of both national actors (like the U.S.) and existing international actors (like the U.N.) to fail to appreciate the reciprocity which an ethical interventionary liberalism ought to demand, but nonetheless I read his essay as forwarding a prescription for interventionary liberalism as an unavoidable burden--seeing his comments through Michael Ignatieff lenses, as it were. I suppose that if I got him wrong, then that is all the Sovereignty Left requires: positive proof that failing to be an absolutist on matters of sovereignty results in blank-check writing to supporters of war, even fairly doubtful one's like myself. Tim, of course, shouldn't be blamed for my misreading of him, or rather for my ideological appropriation of his ideas. But nonetheless, I think, thanks to a few years of pondering over what liberalism and universalism and their opposites mean, I can give a slightly more charitable reading of what Bérubé's and Burke's opponents saw in statements like this, and what might yet be learned from such claims, however much they failed to grasp our real situation both in 2003 and today.

Cockburn and Co. obvious consider themselves leftists. Clearly, any position that is even remotely leftist is going to be unwilling to credit the historical construction of power and elites within state borders with normative authority; the willingness to dispute the claimed “naturalness” or “rightness” of capitalist/colonial hierarchies is pretty much fundamental of leftist critiques. And so, in that sense, to attribute to them an obsession with state sovereignty is either to accuse them of deep confusion, serious hypocrisy, or to have misunderstood their position. Surely leftists, from Marx's call to working men of all countries onward, have been internationalists, supporters of international agreements and movements that would limit the crimes that can be covered in the name of sovereign privacy.

However, state power doesn’t necessarily exhaust all the possible meanings of "sovereignty"; one might also be talking about populist/culturalist notions of power, in which case the defense of sovereignty is a way of defending the self-determination and democratic development of peoples. That is, one might argue that progress/the revolution/liberation has to happen solely through the organic efforts of the oppressed, and if that’s going to happen then some sort of space that is truly their own and not subject to intervention needs to be in principle defended. This is a way of thinking on the left that, far from being recent, has been with us for a while; it is a mix of Gramsci and realpolitik, and as subsequent comments Tim makes in the CT thread reveal, it has deep roots in the anticolonial leftism of the 80s and 90s and perhaps earlier.

How does this map on to the supposed internationalism of the left? That internationalism obviously underwent a crisis over the past decade, as leftists of numerous persuasions came to recognize that hegemonic power was no longer being exercised by states and governments but rather by corporations and media empires, both of which benefited enormously from--indeed, were the largest supporters of--free trade and open borders and liberated populations. In this new world, international law served the upwardly mobile (and thus incipiently liberal and Westernized) classes; international institutions, far from being a tool of the oppressed, became components of an interventionary world system.The resistance to globalism thus became paired with a kind of defensive, anticapitalist organicism, and sovereignty, all of sudden, made more than just anti-imperial sense: it because the very heart of certain quite narrow, quite pure, leftism.

Now frankly, I think this is a terribly flawed position. Admittedly, it is "conservative" in all sorts of ways I find interesting, but it also fails to provide any sort of grounding for what it aims to "conserve"--in this case, a localized space for "authentic" liberation--besides that which the status quo provides. In short, it fails the Rousseau test; it does not allow for, or even properly acknowledge, the tragic reality and history of interventions of all sorts in any sort of spatial or social or public construction; it takes what is there (Kosovo in the midst of war, Afghanistan under the Taliban, Iraq under Saddam, Zimbabwe under Mugabe) and calls it a will worth respecting. Which, of course, it often isn't...and just not from some elite universalist position (though obviously it is often that also, of course), but from the position of the people themselves. But I will give this to the “sovereignty left”: there’s a conceptual clarity to their anti-universalism, one which allows them (in the end wrongly, but not without some insight all the same) to see at least part of where liberal nationalists and communitarian social democrats from Christopher Hitchens to Michael Walzer and everyone in between got their thinking somewhat confused (though obviously some of the above were far more confused than others, myself included!). There’s a reason, I suppose, why Cockburn et al, get so inflamed at certain leftists: because they expect them, demand of them really, a willingness to denounce any kind of interventionary liberalism—that is, universalism—both root and branch. Their antiliberal leftism is both silly and self-defeating given the actual world we live in. Even a communitarian and anticosmopolitan like myself can and should recognize that there are good, prudent reasons to be liberal, and that means--at the very least!--recognizing the occasional justice of intervening on behalf of the liberation and security of individuals in the face of whatever remains of the Westphalian system. Still, that alone--that observation about sovereignty that I turned into a support for my own theoretical take on the Iraq War--is hardly sufficient to justify a pre-emptive war; and I have to say that I find it bracing, and even a little bit salutary, to have radical leftists-cum-paleoconservative anticapitalist cranks like Cockburn remind weak thinkers like myself of that fact, when necessary.

March 2003 and Me

About a week and a half ago, via Crooked Timber, I heard about the challenge: "If you are a blogger who was active in March 2003, link to that month’s archive and write an entry called 'What I was wrong about in March 2003.'" I was planning an anniversary post this weekend anyway, as today is the fourth anniversary of my entry into the blogosphere. And given that the overwhelming majority of my posts when I started blogging were about Iraq, and that tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the war...well, it made sense to respond.

Here are my posts from March 2003; I wrote 17 posts in 12 days, a rate that I'm certain I've never matched since. I wish I could say those posts were filled with informed and prescient commentary about Sunnis and Shi'ites and Baathists and so forth...but they weren't. The best I can say is that I knew my posts supportive of the war weren't constructed out of the latest empirical and predictive scholarship; my thinking about the Iraq war was admittedly driven by theory, as I put it in my very first post:

My assessment of the arguments both for and against an invasion [of Iraq have] never depended, at least not too much, on a solid understanding of the "facts": whether Saddam actually had WMDs, and if so which ones and how many, and what he intend[ed] to do with them or whether that could actually be known, and whether regardless of Saddam's intentions we could be certain that he could be prevented from ever making them available to terrorist organizations, and what his actual relationship with such organizations really is anyway, and for that matter what Bush's relationship with Saddam really is and what his intentions are, etc., etc., etc. I've never attempted to develop anything like any real expertise in these areas; while I'll read with interest reports on U.N. resolutions, the Iraqi opposition, neoconservative ideologues at the Pentagon, al-Qaeda, Bush the First's deals with Saudi Arabia and so forth, I lack confidence in my ability to work out all the contrasting military, strategic, political and conspiratorial claims.

So why have an opinion at all? Because, in the end, the language of the pro-war argument fits well with an intellectual and moral paradigm I find persuasive. It's a theory--usually called "liberal nationalism" by political theorists--which holds that the international order depends upon expressions of national conviction and power. If you're not a fan of the existing "international order" (and I am one, though with some big reservations), you could just as well replace that phrase with "human rights" or "the spread of democracy": either way, the idea is that the accomplishment of certain humane, liberal conditions depends upon national action....Translated to questions of international politics, this attitude suggests that the use of national power to accomplish liberal ends is not necessarily corrupting of those ends; on the contrary, it is possible that without real, specific, national engagements with the liberal project, those ends will never emerge.

In other words, to talk about the United States acting forcefully on behalf of liberal goals, even if such action takes place outside the procedures of the presently-existing international community, even if such action is pre-emptive and not premised upon any sort of immediate threat as has been traditionally recognized, shouldn't be dismissed as incoherent outright. The foundation of liberalism--for the oppressed people of Iraq, or anyone for that matter, anywhere--is the work of liberal nations, not an ungrounded ideology which exists to constrain such nations. Does this mean that asymmetrical--even hegemonic--relations between national actors is not, in itself, an obstacle to liberal ideals: that you could have a "liberal empire"? The answer, as best as I can see it, is "maybe so."

Yes, I was a "liberal hawk," though I disliked calling myself one. Nonetheless, my posts for the remainder of the month were filled with proof of my attitude: I talked about Tony Blair and the "Anglosphere" and Michael Ignatieff and neo-Wilsonianism and "liberal interventionism" and "democratic imperialism" and Islamic fundamentalism and all the rest. The need to create a "decent left" seemed obvious to me; I would have signed the Euston Manifesto in an instant.

What was I wrong about? To the extent that I developed specific predictions about the war (and I didn't develop many), they were almost wholly wrong. As for the war plan itself, it took me a while, but I finally was able to put into words how screwed up my acceptance of Bush's claiming of my preferred theoretical mantle had been here. That leaves the theory itself. Has Iraq disproved to my mind the very possibility of an interventionary (inter)national liberalism?

I always insisted that there was an important difference between the liberal nationalist/internationalist position and the neoconservative one, and despite the depressing track record of many liberal hawks, I still believe that to be the case. The latter group had a tendency to insert "liberalism" and "democracy" into all their supposed conservative calculations in the place of "culture," and thus arrived at descriptions and prescriptions for the development of nations and civilizations that were explicitly ideological. (And they continue to do so, waxing lyrical about the easy intersection of partisan politics and cosmic struggles over the centuries, as this Slate article makes clear.) Whereas the liberal hawks simply wanted to do the right, "liberal," thing, issues of sovereignty be damned--or at least, be trumped by human rights and so forth. By so arguing, the liberal hawks were ironically far more respectful of the cultural--and thus the "conservative"--roots of their subjects than the neoconservatives were: they at least did not delude themselves into thinking that their ideological preferences captured the movement of history through culture, but instead acknowledged that, if they were going to remake the Middle East, they were going to have to muscle their way into doing so. This was the tough, "realistic" aspect of liberal hawk thought that some of us found so appealing...perhaps especially those pseudo-conservative leftists like myself who are really more communitarian than liberal, and who were thus, as I wrote a while ago, delighted to discern in the liberal hawks' worldview a theory of international relations which allowed America, and the liberal nations of Western world, to be acknowledged--in direct contrast to the preferences of Islamic terrorists--as representing "a culture and a way of life...that wasn't a function of, or susceptible to, the abstract forces of globalization...not just a site of media and market exchanges [but] a community worth loving." The prospect of a nation intervening and fighting on behalf of liberal principles gave both "national" and "liberal" a meaning and a force that I desperately wanted them, and still want them, to have.

However, at the time, I couldn't really tell you where my theory ended and where ranting about the imperative of responding militarily to the Islamic fascist challenge to universal human rights began; my biggest intellectual error, complete aside from whatever might be conceptually wrong about all of the above, was that I didn't even really try. Because if I had tried--if I'd really done the work to flesh out my theoretical paradigm, to relate it to what was going on in Washington DC and in Iraq--then I might have realized that it was genuinely stupid to allow myself to believe that just because I could explain the value of seeing certain actions in a certain light, that therefore any such actions thus undertaken would conform to that light, as if my value set (even assuming anyone else held it, and in retrospect it's clear that even fewer people did than I thought) was the only one out there. No, the banal and obvious truth is that there were a million things--things revealed by all those "facts" I failed to pay adequate attention to--which were being valued or pursued or elided in and through the Iraq war, and even if it is the case that one ought not allow the inability account for every possible intention to prevent one from acting on theory and hope when the need is great enough, a better effort could have and should have been made by me and many others who supported this war to least account for some of what was or wasn't being prepared for. Forget prudence--amongst the theory-driven supporters of the war like myself, basic intellectual responsibility was what was needed here.

People like Michael Walzer, who did try to work things out in the light of a worldview very similar to the liberal hawks' and to my own, refused to support the war; they knew, as Peter Beinart has learned, that just because events may arise that allow one to describe the United States differently than the superficialities of our current world system usually allow, that doesn't mean the U.S. is, in fact, a "different country." Not that my blogging four years ago made any kind of difference, but still: I wish I'd learned it sooner too.

Bloggers That Make You Think

Peter Levine was kind enough to tag me as a "thinking blogger," which coming from him is really equal to or better than all the other compliments as I've received in the four years since I've started blogging. (Hey, that's right...my anniversary is coming up.) I wish I could repay the compliment by tagging him, as there are very few--if any--bloggers that consistently produce the kind of thoughtful, engaging, opinionated yet open-minded material that Peter does, and has for a long time. Unfortunately, Richard at Philosophy, et cetera, had already tagged him. So let me see if I can come up with five more....

1. Jacob T. Levy. He was probably my earliest blogging inspiration. I followed him to the Volokh Conspiracy, I waited through his hiatus, and now that he's back to his own digs I couldn't be happier. Everyone knows this, but let's say it again for the record: Jacob is smart, sharp, surprising, and always worth reading. He doesn't produce as much original material as the country (or Canada, for that matter) needs, but what he does produce is first rate.

2. Lee at A Thinking Reed. I've enjoyed Lee's contrarian-if-mostly-conservative-in-some-sense perspective for a long time now. He recently rebaptized his blog, formally Verbum Ipsum, into something that will focus somewhat less on politics and more on the Bible, Christianity, social justice, philosophy, and ethics. The level of high thinking hasn't changed a bit.

3. Joel at Far Outliers. Joel rarely writes extensively about his own perspectives and opinions; what visitors to his blog instead find are excerpts from fascinating and provocative and often little-noticed or long-forgotten books and articles and internet finds. Mostly it'll have something to do with Asian history or politics or society, or the historical experience of expats and immigrants with such; however, sometimes it'll be American politics or film reviews or just about anything else. I link him in my mind with Eomann Fitzgerald's Rainy Day or Geitner Simmons's gone-but-not-to-be-forgotten Regions of Mind--a couple of great old blogs that, like Joel's, show what happens when a curious and insatiable intellect meets a high-speed internet connection.

4. TNR's Open University. It hasn't lived up to its promise yet as another Crooked Timber, but with Michael Kazin, John McWhorter, Linda Hirshman, Sanford Levinson, David Greenberg, and Alan Wolfe all regularly posting, it's succeeding much better at providing scholarly blog-thoughts than some other academic-heavy blogs ever did.

5. Finally, two graduate students, whose respective political positions are probably about as distant from each other as any graph could record, and who both produce a lot of tremendously thoughtful, often provocative and just as often persuasive posts: Rob Jubb, and Daniel Larison. Read them both every day.