Mondoweiss

'Walk Around Harvard. What Are the Names on the Buildings?'

A couple days ago I was talking to a well-connected woman who has met Steve Walt, the former Harvard dean and anatomist of the Israel lobby, and she offered this characterization: Walt is the brilliant nerd type, "the smartest kid in the high school. He loves ideas. He doesn't care who comes up with a good one." Then the woman said that Walt had been surprised by the response two years ago to his paper. "He is naive." 

I asked why she felt that way.

Abu Ghraib's a Moral Fig Leaf for the Disastrous Decision to Invade (and Other Wit n Wisdom of Linc Chafee)

I just watched the great Lincoln Chafee, formerly a Rhode Island senator, now the author of Against the Tide, on C-Span talking about the war and politics at the Watson Institute last month. He made a few great points.

The most salient was one I've expressed here: War contains atrocity, and the horror over Abu Ghraib is kind of a rear guard moral action by people who supported the war to somehow justify their disastrous choice by crying out, Look how they screwed it up! As if occupying an Arab society could have been done well, and it was Cheney and a bunch of degraded majors and sergeants and Lyndie England who botched things. Chafee said Look, Vietnam produced My Lai; war is a horrible thing. Charles Lindbergh, as I have pointed out here before, served in WW2, the great war, and in his (fabulous) war journals pointed out the terrible things that the Greatest Generation did to Japanese soldiers in the South Pacific--threw them out of airplanes alive, blocked their egress from caves and poured oil down inside and torched them, etc. I favor none of this stuff. But I've studied war enough to know that it brutalizes people and utterly strips the enemy of humanity and it is much easier to judge this behavior from an armchair having voted for the war than if you spend all day worrying about being maimed by IEDs. Palestinians murder innocent Israelis out of something of the same dehumanization, Israelis commit atrocities likewise; war is a cycle of violence.

Chafee reminded us that the real error was the decision to invade. "This is insanity," Chafee said to his Republican caucus back in 2002 and got blank looks back. He at least had "done the homework," looked at the evidence, had gone to the CIA and spoken to the analysts and seen what the case for war consisted in, understood it to be baseless. "There was no evidence," Chafee said. Saddam threatened the U.S.--nuts! He was coming down Main Street! Insanity, Chafee said again. This is why I and many thousands of others were in the streets protesting the war plans. Then it took us three days to capture Baghdad, Chafee went on; this was some great threat to us? Obama should be making this point: Hillary didn't do the homework.

Chafee also went after the neocons.

Hillary's Strategist Once Sought Full Accounting for Vietnam War Decision-Makers (Will Hillary Ever Apologize?)

A couple of readers have pointed out that I was unfair to Geoff Garin, Hillary's top strategist, in my suggestion that he was milking the Rev. Wright controversy on MSNBC Monday. They're right. Turns out Garin was actually saying it was time to move past the Wright business; it was Andrea Mitchell who was milking it. (I was making lunch, so the factchecking department was drinking wine...) Geoff Garin's a kind person and on the left; he's not the type to exacerbate racial divisions.

That said, I want to return to Garin's writings from college. Yesterday I wrote about his call for violent revolution. To be fair, a temporary mood on Garin's part, confined to 2 pieces at age 20. But a leftwing radical spirit characterized his work. That is the reason I as a young Jewish lefty looked up to him. He was clearthinking, he had figured out what he thought, he was never egotistical, and he had moral vision (at a time in my own life when I was immature and intellectually turbulent).

Garin often hit a theme I hit today: the need for accountability by our leaders and thinkers for a disastrous war policy--the Vietnam war in his case. And as I do he even blamed the meritocracy for producing the war:

Then there is the problem of meritocracy itself. Do we want, or does the rest of the world need, a Harvard that picks out an elite to do society's work when society's work means bombing Asian peasants... [emphasis mine]

Garin wanted war-crimes prosecutions. In 1975, at 22, he opposed the mood of let's-move-on. When Vance Hartke, an Indiana senator famous for opposing the war, said there must not be fingerpointing over who got us into the war, because it had been started by "desperate men caught up in a process that had a momentum of its own and which they neither understood nor could control"--which is sort of Hillary's line-- Garin wasn't buying. He wrote:

That way nobody gets hurt, at least not until the next time around... A conspiracy of silence will rob the United States of its Vietnam heritage: the moral, legal and political questions that American involvement raised but never quite settled.

Beautiful. Here's another inspired passage:

Hillary's Top Strategist Once Called for Violent Revolution

Yesterday I heard Geoffrey Garin, Hillary's new strategist, on MSNBC, using the Rev. Wright controversy to question whether Obama is out of touch. (The link's not up yet, or I'd quote him). He made similar comments in the Times re Pennsylvania voters.

I knew Garin in college more than 30 years ago when we worked at the Harvard Crimson newspaper. He was a special guy--softspoken, funny, brilliant. He was also a radical. In 1973, on an anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, Garin called for violent revolution in the United States:

To commemorate the symbolic significance of the Tea party without acknowledging the significance of the commitment to violence is to miss the point altogether. Boston did not win its "Cradle of Liberty" name because of a special intellectual quality of its leaders but because of a special leaders were willing to resort to violence under conditions they thought to be oppressive... Samuel Adams and the South End Mob were the first to understand Tom Paine's admonition, "Moderation in principle is always a vice."

...America and much of the world is living dangerously close to oppression. ... Whether Americans will soon become steadfast in their resistance to oppression depends on their coming to understand what resistance is all about. The way we celebrate the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party will gauge the depth of that understanding.... Freedom is on the wane in this country and repression is on the rise all over the world. We can no longer sit back and swap stories about the good old revolution. We have to start worrying about the present. On this anniversary we must recognize that the patriots of Boston acted wisely in overthrowing their oppressors and the time is come to express our confidence in what our forefathers did by doing it ourselves. [my emphasis]

Here, following Agnew's resignation in 1973, he says that the government will fall, and again spoke of revolution:

The government in Washington can not survive under these circumstances, and under these circumstances the government should not survive.... America will be governed in any case, but the question is by whom. If not by the people, then by a strong executive. These are revolutionary times, and we must decide now whom we want to win the revolution.

Yes, Geoff Garin was 20 years old when he wrote these pieces. (A mature 20, I must say). I'm sure he stopped calling for revolution after college, probably because he grew out of the ideas-- maybe too because you can't make a living as a leftist. But I knew Garin well enough to be sure that his political impulses, ones of fairness, respect for oppressed peoples, live on somewhere in his thinking to this day. Those impulses once made him call for violent revolution.

It is helpful to read his writings because they demonstrate: how much people grow, how common revolutionary statements have been in the left (even in the Jewish meritocracy, of which Garin and I are members). But mostly because they show that the continuum of left-center ideas, which are now coming back into American life, includes Wright, Garin, and Obama.

I will be "looping," to use Rev. Wright's words, more of Garin's firebrand writings later.

My Jewish Problem: We're Not Superior

I'm still caught up in Ambassador Gillerman's statement that Israel is a "far better" country than most others because it produces scientific and artistic talent. My friend Richard Witty acknowledges that this attitude is unfortunate when he hears it from guys in his shul, and he prefers people simply expressing pride in their accomplishments. True enough, but Witty is someone who actually possesses humility. This guy's an ambassador who is paid to be diplomatic and he makes these offensive comments. It causes me to reflect that I grew up with feelings of Jewish superiority, that we are better because we are smarter, and that it is an attitude whose time has passed.

The other night I was at a dinner party typical of the new establishment, half Jews, half non-Jews, and heard a gentile down the table talking excitedly about Slezkine's The Jewish Century, explaining how Jewish gifts for learning and the law had specially outfitted them for modernity. "But what is the Jewish century?" his Jewish dinner partner asked. He and I said in unison, "The last one."

We're All Clinton-Haters Now

During my parents' seder on Saturday outside Philly, there was a lot of political talk, and my 7-year-old niece came up to me with a big smile. She said: "Hillary lies."

Her comment was just the cherry on the top of a ton of anti-Hillary feeling I've registered in center-left Democratic circles. My father had been leaning toward Hillary till he decided that her behavior at the last debate was "mean"; now there's an Obama lawn sign outside the house. A friend who backed the Clintons to the hilt during Impeachment now fulminates about them, saying they are doing McCain's work for him and splitting the Democratic party. Another friend says Hillary has never believed in a thing, that Chelsea has a "no-show job at some hedge fund" and a boyfriend who is also the child of a corrupt politician. He wonders why the media aren't investigating Bill Clinton's big givers. "He's a high-priced lobbyist, that's all he is." He wants to get back into the White House.

I try not to grin. I became a Clinton hater in the late 90s, in fact Clinton hatred eased my way out of the Mainstream Media. The New York Times Magazine sent me to Arkansas in '96 to find out why people hated the Clintons, and I saw that the haters were on to something. The Clintons would stop at nothing to get and hold power. Ambitious young Bill Clinton had signed on to a one-party machine in an impoverished state to get ahead, and that machine had corrupted him. The famous "body count" of people who died in proximity to Clinton--a list that Monica dropped on to Linda Tripp's chair one day as a hint not to talk to the feds (I never understood why more wasn't made of this threat) was a reflection of the Arkansas machine's ties to drug deals and degraded methods. Soon enought, the Clinton women were getting threatened.

Politics was at the heart of every Clinton scandal. Deputy counsel Vincent Foster died right around the time the Troopers were readying to come forward with their salacious stories, in summer 1993. His White House office was rifled the night he died by aides who were surely acting at Hillary's direction. There were reports then that Foster had created a divorce file for Hillary in 1988 or so, and that the Clintons were afraid that file would get out...

A great mystery. The establishment press avoided it, because it loved the Clintons. Loved prosperity, loved what he was doing for my people.

If Hillary ends up running in the general, I hope some of this stuff comes out. Heck I hope it comes out in the next couple months. Remember when Bill Clinton bombed Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan in 1998--the same days that the House was releasing impeachment evidence, or voted to impeach? Back then everyone denied that he had political motivation, to bury the story. I wonder what they'd say now...

Jews, Including Noah Feldman, Need to Emulate the WASPs' Discourse of Privilege

Last week two Harvard Law School professors had a fascinating debate over the Iraq war and American power.

One professor was Duncan Kennedy, a pioneer in critical legal studies--i.e., a leftwinger. The other was a prof barely half his age, Noah Feldman, a rising star at Harvard who is famous for two things: serving the U.S. coalition in Iraq back in 2003 by helping to draft a constitution for the Iraqis and writing a piece for the New York Times in which he said that his marriage to a Christian Asian woman had caused him to be airbrushed out of his Orthodox high school's photographs. The piece was explosive, though I wasn't that impressed: its arena of introspection seemed to me too narrow. Intermarriage violates Jewish law; we all know that already. So does driving a car on Saturday.  And everyone's doing it. What about Jewish law/custom that is much more important/controversial: colonization of "Judea and Samaria" for religious purposes.

The debate at Harvard is interesting to me chiefly for Jewish socio-cultural reasons, secondly for political reasons. But let me offer some of reporter Chris Szabla's superb account:

[M]ilitary and economic factors [such as the rise of China], Kennedy said, would result in the United States losing control of its traditional spheres of influence.... [H]e wondered whether this wholesale abandonment of "empire" was not a good thing. U.S. power, he pointed out, had resulted in the propping up of a number of unsavory regimes and the commitment of a number of atrocities, dislodging the notion that there was a moral necessity to continuous American power projection.

...Feldman took the opportunity to paint Kennedy into an ideological corner.

He noted that his adversary's musings on the United States' possible agrarian future were akin to the political position taken up by anti-imperialist agrarian populists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Comparing Kennedy to William Jennings Bryan, he said that "small-r republicanism" might be as attractive today as it had been to Jefferson, or, for that matter, republican Rome. Still, he noted, it didn't "enable [a state] to add value" economically.

Feldman then moved into the arena of global power politics, asking "who will win" if the United States were to abandon its role as a guarantor of global order. On this, he took a Hobbesian position - chaos was likely to ensue. He suggested that Kennedy's hopes for withdrawal were akin to a "fantasy of redemption" driven by the selective application of a historical model - the end of communism, but only as it had happened in Poland, and not, say, Yugoslavia.

Iraq, Feldman observed, was an example of what happened when disorder was actively promoted. [Kennedy] hit back by noting that attempts to prop up world order had sometimes resulted in further destabilization. The clash of perspectives continued in a different direction with the example of German reunification: Feldman argued that it had only been possible with the United States maintaining a presence, guaranteeing other states did not become fearful of, and gang up on, Germany. Kennedy said that it had been possible not as a result of U.S. power in that given moment, but as a consequence of many years of political and ideological development.

Ultimately, the two professors appeared to disagree most strongly about what American power actually meant for the world. Feldman retained a belief that the exercise of U.S. power could promote moral values, whereas Kennedy saw less to admire. "I want to overcome my WASP ruling class identification with the U.S. as a proxy" for personal power, he said, as the debate came to a head. In response, Feldman deadpanned, "I don't have the luxury of thinking of my country that way". He said that he "did not see the right to rule as something [conferred] to me by birth" but was glad to be a member of a participatory state.

On the politics here, I am in Kennedy's corner (and not far off is Jeremiah Wright!). I believe America is the greatest country on earth, but I don't see great moral virtue in American foreign interventions. Some good, some bad. Feldman's beliefs seem to me somewhat starry-eyed and reminiscent of neocon theory, say Charles Krauthammer's unipolar Wilsonian idealist interventionism. Feldman attacks Kennedy as a populist isolationist. But always we must ask, Who will fight these beautiful wars for world order? Your children or someone else's? That is the soul of populist isolationism, and it's not always a bad guide for policymakers. Cf, Iraq, which Feldman (who speaks Arabic, says Wikipedia) seems to regard as a potentially-noble intervention. In my view, and I imagine Kennedy's, it has been arrogance from start to finish.

But let me get to the sociological ground. Kennedy makes me love him when he talks about his ruling class background. This is typical of WASPs I know. Yes a lot of them are ruling class tools, maybe most of them, but a bunch of them are running environmental organizations and new-age spiritual retreats, i.e., they have had a rich discourse of interrogating their privilege since Vietnam showed their fathers to be war criminals. And it was in the Vietnam years that E. Digby Baltzell published the classic, The Protestant Establishment, which said that WASPs had become a calcified "caste" and they must let the Jews in.

They did. Again I must say this is the Largest Sociological Fact of my life and my Jewish generation's  lives: how we came into the Establishment in the last 30 years. And I am irritated by Feldman's response to Kennedy, when he says, "I don't have the luxury of thinking of my country that way." This strikes me as self-deceptive and self-flattering. A great deal about Feldman's life must be thought a luxury: the Orthodox Jewish background that gave him, at Maimonides High School, the bookish legal training that has served him so well; his inclusion in one elite organization after another as a sterling member of the meritocracy. Lately rumor has it he has bought a fancy house near Harvard. Good for him.

I wonder if Feldman's triumphalist feeling about American power doesn't come out of the triumphal rise of the meritocracy. No I don't have enough information to make such a personal judgment of Feldman; but I've seen that complacence all around me in the new establishment, and so I wonder. Certainly there is a lack of self-awareness in that comment about luxury. Jews make much more than WASPs, per the latest Pew Research. We serve in the military at rates lower than other religious groups, even Buddhists, as I have reported (and no, I've never served). We've stuck in our thumb and pulled out a plum and thought, what a good boy am I!  Noblesse oblige; I want Jews to have a discourse of privilege: an understanding of ourselves as privileged in this society and along with that, some self-interrogation about how to make our society a fairer one.

Who Joins the Army? A: They Can't Afford College

My friend Michael Massing has a wonderful piece of reporting in the latest New York Review of Books on who is the volunteer army. It is not a statistical hodgepodge, no, he went to Fort Drum in Watertown, N.Y., to talk to people. The essential lesson he came back with is that people are going into the army because they cannot afford college, and the army will provide them with the job security/education that they would get from college.

In Canada and much of Europe, higher education is heavily subsidized by the state, and the tuition at most institutions is nominal if not free. As a result, practically anyone who wants to attend college and is able to meet the admissions standards and pay for room and board can do so. In America, we've elected to put our money elsewhere...

In the struggle of many young men and women to pay for a college education, however, the military sees an opportunity. As a recent Defense Department report observed:

The most dramatic social force affecting military enlistment is the interest in college attendance. Youth are focused on education and work, with the Military as an afterthought. The percentage of minorities completing high school is increasing, and college is becoming a reality for a greater proportion of the minority population. This increase in college aspirations and college attendance should be expected to continue. Already, the military, under the Montgomery GI Bill, offers soldiers up to $73,836 in tuition credits; it will also repay up to $65,000 in college loans.

Egad. So the military exploits ambitious kids who cannot get in to college or afford it. More reason to bring back the draft!

 

Oy, My People Have Too Much Money (Ct'ed)

Values:

--Eliot Spitzer grew up on Park Avenue, I gather, the son of a real estate guy. Maybe we're in a recession, but he could drop $5000 on regular assignations, allegedly.

--William Kristol's column yesterday included the statement, "the bad housing and job market reports at the end of last week were politically chilling."

Politically chilling? What about plain old chilling? Kristol's comment is revealing. The truth is that the recession is chiefly concerning to him as a political development. And that makes sense. He's rich. Allan Bloom once said that his relationship with Bill Kristol's father Irving got “easier” once Bloom, like Kristol, had wealth (as Jacob Heilbrunn reported in They Knew They Were Right).

On a journalistic note, it would be helpful if one or two columnists at the Times regarded the recession as personally concerning. It would give the Times rapport with a large body of the public at a time when the gap between rich and poor is yawning.

And on a socioreligious note, yes, I am nostalgic for Sholom Aleichem, I.B. Singer, and Michael Gold, a time when my people's actual living values were closer to the American average.

Chelsea Clinton's Lack of Accomplishment (and Mom's Lack of Success) Signals the End of the Elite That Gave Us Iraq

I read the New York magazine profile of Chelsea Clinton hungering for any evidence of something idealistic she believes in. No, she seems insipid, a pale copy of her parents, with a New York lifestyle. She's on the board of a ballet company, but tThere isn't a shred of what her mother expressed when she graduated from Wellesley 40 years ago, during Vietnam:

our prevailing acquisitive and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living.

People are for Obama because they want a larger sense of meaning to their American lives. And in that sense the Clinton era is over. Hillary talked about it some times, but the Clintons never offered us a "politics of meaning." Bill's one great accomplishment was economic growth in the 90s. Chelsea's life seems to have drained into those materialist values. She works for a hedgefund.

Of course I look at it from a Jewish perspective. My people came inside with the Clintons. The most philosemitic administration in history (per Frum, from the next philosemitic administration). The two Supreme Court appointees were Jewish. The big donors to Hillary's campaign are Jewish and Chelsea's boyfriend is Jewish (and works at Goldman Sachs), as was her father's most famous lover. The establishment has been by my estimate half-Jewish. The Camp David negotiating team was almost all Jewish. When John O'Keeffe writes to me that now is the time for Israel to cut a deal he's right. It seems like this era is already passing, that the Jewish arrival-into-power generation didn't stand for enough--besides wealth and the Iraq war--and so now it's going into the dustbin of history. The Vietnam debacle ended a blueblood establishment that went out in the domestic convulsions of the 70s, and the great minds that gave us Iraq will give way, even if he loses, to an Obama-fostered rising class of assimilating intermarrying leftleaning ethnics who don't play identity politics and want to reinspire our democracy. I can't wait.

I always use the word meritocracy to describe my generation but it's not precise. What is the meritocracy? It was a ruling class that melded the burgeoning communications industries with Wall Street and global entrepreneurialism, i.e., hedge funds and the internet. When they were young the meritocrats made the first cut via standardized tests, and these tests gave them the sense that they were the best, chosen democratically; and the meritocracy was pervaded by elitist prestige thinking. Few of them had kids in the Iraq war, and they felt no personal connection with Bush's war, which their representative almost universally suported. And yes, my people did especially well in the meritocracy. As I reported yesterday, Pew shows that 55 percent of Reform Jewish households make over $100,000 a year, three times the national percent. We brought our entrepreneurialism to the American economy and brought our worldview to the ruling class. When 9/11 happened, the powerful press never said that Osama bin Laden was motivated by anger about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.

My father has said to me that when America turns against Jews, it will happen "without fireworks." He's right. This Jewish-flavored establishment will pass without fireworks. Though I believe Walt and Mearsheimer have played a large subterranean role in this presidential campaign--Newsweek cites them but can't even mention their work by name in a piece on whether Obama is good for the Jews. Their ideas won't stay subterranean. All the murmuring from Clinton's pro-Israel braintrust and the neocons about Obama's true agenda is going to break out in open accusation, that Obama wants an evenhanded policy in the Middle East. Again, I can't wait. And as Obama himself has said, all the bleeding of Jews into the Republican party is over Israel. Jews now make up the conservative bulwark of the Democratic Party. We're like Rockefeller Republicans, in their day, just as status quo oriented. Why change anything, Malcolm Hoenlein said to Haaretz, when he attacked Obama, it's just inviting mischief...

Why change anything? My own disappointment with the meritocracy stemmed from my awareness that it was as smug and entitled as the ruling class it replaced. When PBS's Paul Solman interviewed the Indian Vandana Shiva about her anti-globalist crusade--to stop agriculture companies from patenting ancient indigenous cures-- he expressed irritation that she was anti-progress, anti-urban, anti-growth. Is there any soul in his values? When the New York Times offered a piece yesterday on the latest trend in Holocaust education for children, there was scarcely a word about the importance of the Holocaust in identity politics, to the preservation of the state of Israel and Jto the Jewish campaign against intermarriage (at a time when everyone wants to marry us, as they wanted to marry rich gentiles back when). And no mention of the ways that human suffering is unfolding before us now, including in the Occupied Territories. Some day soon these attitudes will seem quaint and ancient.