United States

20. Baker and Glassner, Man Who Ran Washington (13 October 2024)

by kurto

The career of Jim Baker, a corporate lawyer from an upper-crust Houston family, epitomizes a bygone era of Washington DC dealmaking, crowned by his successful tenure as Secretary of State during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Baker, who chafed at his campaign director and chief of staff roles, premised authority on power not wisdom as well as skill in sidestepping responsibility, with legal know-how acting as guarantor. The approach falters when the fundamental questions stretch the paradigm, in Baker’s case, the Baby Boom-era welfare state politics and Cold War arms control. Despite the authors’ frequent contention that dealmaking is out of fashion, Baker’s successor is Obama, the president himself the knife fighter.

A product of Princeton-as-finishing school, he turned to politics not because of his first wife’s death but from weariness with corporate law. His second marriage made for tempestuous family life. Still, over the 10 years from age 48 to 58 he soared from an outsider to Secretary of Treasury and then State, Nixon’s resignation having opened the way. Baker’s modus vivendi was to leak but not lie to the media; to keep a file of unethical requests; as negotiator, to allow the opposite side to show concerns had been expressed, without conceding the substance of his position. He used ‘double option’ positions to take credit or disavow the outcome. No permanent enemies, but equally no clear mechanism for driving consensus; there are compromises with Democrats but fewer examples of conciliating Republicans. Quayle, Rumsfeld, and Cheney are exemplars of conservatism. Buckley is said to be an eminence grise.

Baker preserved Social Security, and is credited with Canadian free trade by Mulroney. He was the first American leader to accept Chinese tyranny as concomitant with economic growth, and responsible for Willie Horton campaigning. His great rival was Henry Kissinger, the strategist being a very different prototype to the dealmaker. Nixon thought him prone to illustory international consensus. Thatcher thought his decision making average, e.g., allowing Germany to come together without any concern for proto-European Union (given Merkel, was she wrong?). He ended his days trading on influence, rallying to put the second Bush in the presidency.

Where is the line between duplicity and personal honor? He didn’t waste time on guilt over Machiavellian moves, according to his wife. The authors recur to the theme of Baker being out for himself, e.g., as Reagan’s chief, versus Bush’s consigliere; Nancy Reagan is said to have been pleased, Barbara Bush unhappy.

Well sourced, though from a historiographic perspective, the authors tend to describe characters as they would be remembered, rather than contemporaneously viewed (e.g., Oregon senator Bob Packwood). Reagan ‘stoked division’ by campaigning on welfare queens, apartheid was failing in 1992, left-liberal homogeneity pervades.

18. Roberts, Last King of America (10 September 2022)

by kurto

George III was a custodial not a tyrannical monarch, demonstrating a principled constitutionality and remaining above faction without undermining those in power. Initially unpopular and enduring a series of irresolute or unprepared prime ministers, during the French Revolutionary era he showed himself determined and muchly helpful to Pitt the Younger’s success. The recasting of the British monarchy as constitutional head of state commenced with him, not Victoria.
George’s education was superior to public schooling but reclusive. He learned to value the balanced constitution while developing lifelong hostility to Whig oligopoly. Self-denying for the sake of country, he was the first Hanover to see himself as primarily British. He was kindly and at ease among the populace; many less flattering characteristics aspects of his character are attributable to the salacious Horace Walpole, an entertaining but often misleading diarist.
Just prior to reaching his majority, Parliament entered the Seven Years War having sacked Pitt the Elder, its best strategist, in favor of the corrupt Henry Fox. (George II, though conscious of his rights, did so at the Duke of Cumberland’s urging; he merely agreed with the Old Whigs.) Bute’s tutelage of George was held against his ministry, and the king was at first seen as grasping both by contemporaries and historians, wrongly in Roberts’ view.
At the French war’s denouement, Bute ceded the sugar island Guadeloupe, after having instead considered Canada on grounds that French pressure would have kept the American colonies loyal to Britain. Once safe, economic matters were a pretext for the real issue of self-government. Bute and Blackstone’s Commentaries (1765) fashioned George’s opinion that American claims to self-government had no standing in English law. In addition to the strategic error of tethering the Americans to the Atlantic seaboard (the Proclamation of 1763), this conservative view propelled Britain toward losing the colonies.
George tended to appoint prime ministers and leave them to legislate and execute, notwithstanding the unwonted predominance of the Grenvilles (George and his brother Richard Temple) and the Pitts (the elder being married to Temple’s sister). The Stamp Act was Grenville’s responsibility, and having insisted on dismissing Stuart-Mackenzie as Lord Privy Seal of Scotland, forcing George to break a promise, Grenville alienated George to the family for making him subject to factional interests. Lasting but two months, Grenville was replaced by Rockingham, who had never sat in Commons nor anyone else’s cabinet. Contra Conor Cruise O’Brien, on his return Pitt the Elder (now Lord Chatham) was given more scope than Rockingham, one of several occasions on which Roberts disagrees with the Irish historian. Later the sons of Pitt and Grenville would become PMs, indicating George’s essential forbearance.
In the years following the Stamp Act’s repeal, George contended with keeping Grenville out as PM, Wilkes out of the Commons, Parliamentary review of royal finances and appointments, and France out of the West Indies. Historians who contend George tried to gather power ignore the politicians who wished to avoid responsibility – including Lord North, who had otherwise ended the merry go round. Relatedly, contemporary European governments often resorted to genuine tyranny (e.g., mass arrests, execution of civilians without trial) whereas there had been arrests at all following the Boston Tea Party. George behaved with constitutional propriety during the American unrest, going along with hawkish ministries (admittedly to his liking) rather than driving policy. Of the 28 charges laid against George in the Declaration of Independence, only 2, regarding taxation and parliamentary authority to legislate for the colonists, are logical.
In post facto war gaming, the UK wins the war 45 percent of the time. Even as the war deteriorated, George, stepping back from hopes of an outright win, was determined to hold Canada, Nova Scotia, and Florida. The stakes were more patriotic than economic: circa 1776, imports from the British Windies totaled £4.5 million, versus 1.5 million from India, while the Americans were far below.
1779 marked existential danger for Britain. A French fleet of 63 ships and 30,000 regulars gained control of the English Channel. George showed a decisiveness that North lacked, pressing for attack in the Windies, Gibraltar, and Minorca, recognizing that France and Spain’s joining the war converted the conflict from a domestic question of Parliament’s constitutional rights in the colonies to the UK’s survival as a great power. Colonial possessions had to be defended, even at the risk of the homeland’s invasion, because of the sugar islands’ revenue. However, he was less clear sighted about responsibilities for the American war’s military losses. (NB: ‘Hessians’ werer from several small principalities, representing one-third of the soldiery. Not mercenaries, they were paid by the German states. Though effective they made for poor propaganda, especially during the New Jersey winter of 1777-78.)
Though not ignoring the denouement, Roberts’ current thus turns toward domestic matters. Thinking George a moderate, he is generally unsympathetic to Burke, described as a ‘radical Whig’ (e.g., pp. 417, 445, 486, 490). Pitt on Burke: ‘much to admire, nothing to agree with’ (p. 526). Irish repeal of the Declaratory Act demonstrates Westminster had learned from America, rather panic in the Rockingham administration. Whig attempts to arrogate East India Company patronage to Parliament in 1778 seemed an oligarchical revival to George; parallels to the Whigs’ 1766’s repeal of the Stamp Act make them seem hypocritical.
1784’s dismissal of the Fox-North coalition stemmed from the East India Bill, and was quite constitutional of George. The subsequent election, a hotly contested affair which produced ‘Fox’s martyrs’, indicated that the Whig leader had overplayed his hand regarding East India, the loss of America, and near-republican critique of the monarch. Pitt’s rout result in George’s having a genuine ally for the first time, at time when the king could still have his choice of ministers. Had he died in 1783, he might have been lumped together with his Hanoverian predecessors; but instead he and Pitt saw off the French revolutionaries and Bonaparte. By 1792, Pitt as PM was no longer immediately responsible to the king, but to Parliament; he, Dundas, and Grenville were a united front in dealing with the monarch; Addington extended the trend. Pitt’s success was muchly due to George’s support.
As when recovering from illness, so with the initial period of the Revolutionary wars. Evident homeliness, piety, and commitment to national victory established his bona fides. Whereas during the American revolution George’s principled stance was unhelpful, in the French wars it was invaluable. Ironically, he traveled little, never visiting Scotland, Wales, or Ireland; nor Hanover; nor the American colonies or Windies. Indeed, did he travel north of Worcester or west of Plymouth. He never went to see the newly industrializing Manchester, Birmingham, or Leeds.
In Ireland, George supported toleration of the Catholic Church but not equality, for he was head of the Church of England (and of Ireland), and so was unhappy with the Earl of Fitzwilliam’s concessions. His successor, Earl of Camden, confiscated 50,000 muskets and 70,000 pikes – indicative of 1798. Neoclassical architecture, already underway, reached its apogee during his reign as he frequently paid interest in public projects.
(NB: amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.)
(NB: as an insult, a XXX husband, rather than not remarry, should as condign punishment marry the devil’s daughter. The riposte: the law prohibited marrying one’s deceased wife’s sister – p. 407)

24. Kaiser, A Life in History (23 November 2023)

by kurto

Academic historians, having abandoned researching statesmanship and economic development for the Foucauldian sketching of marginalized groups, have torpedoed the discipline’s relevance to government and society. University professors can no longer synthesize or teach, but only present their abstruse pursuits. Although the trade holds too many important historical topics have been exhausted, one can inevitably discover new materials and so revised perspective (somewhat along the lines of Banner’s Ever-changing Past, albeit the latter seems more favorably inclined to sociocultural avenues). Through his own career, the author makes a persuasive case but routinely betrays conceit of unrecognized brilliance. A New Deal-Great Society liberal, he sees modern topics such as the Vietnam War in predictable terms.

Also of interest:
• The study of imperialism should entail the economic basis of hegemony, the administration of conquered territory, sources of resistance, military and naval factors, and the role of decision making process
• Camille Paglia (one of many with whom the author compares himself) first identified the cult of Foucault as reducing all events to relationships of power, indicated by language as interpreted by post facto critics.
• On his second appointment at Williams: ‘Political correctness was omnipresent, spread in a steady stream of emails to the whole campus from the dean’s office’ (p. 363) Also: ‘All
n— must die’ was revealed to him as a black student’s agit-prop by another student
• Training is how to do a task, education is how to think about the right tasks

21. Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville (12 November 2023)

by kurto

A scholarly but anachronistic biography dwelling on what the 19th-century pioneer ought to have written were he a 21st-century academic. Tocqueville was a brilliant mind ‘trammeled’ by Catholic, aristocratic background; Brogan is regularly unhappy he cannot be conscripted into the march of history, the telos of egalitarianism. Though the author seems to have read and re-read not only major works but surviving letters, it’s sometimes difficult to hear Tocqueville through the academic criticism. The Frenchman’s original identification of problems in democratic political philosophy is dismissed or denigrated.
Fundamentally a Norman aristocrat-cum-19th-century French nationalist, Tocqueville was born to lead as Brogan demonstrates in a thorough telling of his life. Upended by the French Revolution, schooling ‘failed’ to produce bourgeois manners, though his electoral politics in La Manche were painstaking. Primary intellectual influences included Montesquieu, Chateaubriand (source of the US sojourn), Guizot, Mill and to a less extent Pascal. He always opposed Bonaparte as representing tyranny.
By 1830, he had rejected his Catholic Norman heritage, eventually siding with the democratic age, but remained nostalgic for aristocracy. As a budding lawyer, he dealt with émigré / dispossession claims which provoked sympathy but also acknowledgement of the finality of French Revolution. The cataclysm had liberated man of tyranny of class, but exposed liberty to equality of ends. During his US tour he grasped the dynamics of entrepreneurialism and popular self-government, but missed the importance of cotton and didn’t address political parties. Subsequently, as a writer, his great themes became equality, liberty, and the Revolution.
As a politician, though seen by Bourbons (‘legitimists’) as a traitor and Orleanists as a time server (which exposure helped prompt his American sojourn), he most valued independence of party, and further advocated local self-government versus France’s traditional centralism. Liberty entailed the right to call power to account. Though he helped write the 1848 constitution, he opposed Louis Napoleon as tyrannical.
Tocqueville in Democracy in America emphasized the effects of equality, in The Old Regime and the French Revolution of liberty (or its loss). The secret to making men do good is appealing to high purposes. Society’s institutions reconcile liberty and equality. Democratic society (often) may prefer equality to liberty as a security. One of the French Revolution’s notorious legacies was dissolving freedom of association, in contrast with the American tendency of establishing voluntary associations. Having had little experience of politics, ancien French aristocrats had little knowledge of how to avoid catastrophe. ‘The general level of hearts and minds will never cease to decline while equality and despotism are partners’ (p. 567). It’s vital to understand the balance and the trend (tendency) – indicative of his contribution to what’s become sociology.
Brogan thinks Tocqueville a brilliant mind ‘trammeled’ by Catholic, aristocratic background, and considers his understanding of tyranny of the majority his ‘most serious mistake’. The Frenchman is criticized for consulting only American elites while ignoring the middle classes (notwithstanding his official mission of reviewing prisons and, separately, his rough-and-ready travels). He lived through a great epoch of arts but didn’t enjoy it.
He was a Romantic, drawn more to the old order (Old Regime) than the exemplar of the new (Democracy). Tocqueville ‘refused to admit’ the privileged, instrumental role of parties: power is the object of politics, each side pressing its case to have the better claim, not high purpose. His economic theory was antiquated and ‘obsessed’ by concern for property and the consequences of mob rule.
Tocqueville could not ‘admit’ that Algerian colonization would end badly, and ‘tritely’ predicted the US and Russia would predominate a future era. Repeatedly, the ‘game is given away’ when the subject’s conclusions don’t match the author’s. (Relatedly, Brogan dismisses Berlin’s theory of two liberties without explanation.)
In all, a frustrating read. See further Daniel Mahoney in Claremont Review of Books: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/a-noble-and-generous-soul/

5. Ellis, His Excellency (2005)

by kurto

Washington was a physically dominating figure who was not well educated, but married into elite society. Possessing an outsized ego, he managed his image closely, particularly regarding early military failures. After a successful French and Indian War, he accumulated land and aspired to fulfill the promise of the west, but his debts to British cotton agents transformed him into a revolutionary. Ideology played no real role, although he did wrestle with the question of slavery. As a general in the Revolutionary War, he is proclivity was to attack but he realized survival was the victory, a la Fabius. He grew to recognize the ineffectiveness of the Articles of Confederation during this time, and subsequently agreed to lead the Constitutional Convention and become the first president. He disliked partisan politics, reluctantly agreed to a second term, and all but dismissed Jefferson as a schemer. Hamilton was responsible for much of the administration’s success. Ultimately, says Ellis, Washington never conquered his ego but recognized posterity is the final judge and had the confidence to submit — unlike Napoleon, Lenin, Mao, etc.

11. Ambrose, To America (2005)

by kurto

A readable but largely uninspiring survey of key events and figures in American history. Most interesting is the chapter of the Battle of New Orleans. Based on the success of his works, the author is apparently a fine storyteller but spends rather more time explicating his liberal politics than addressing his craft. Not as good as Hexter, Howard, or Beloff.

13. Lowenstein, Origins of the Crash (2005)

by kurto

Constructs a systemic explanation of the American financial market’s fin-de-siecle crash. Beginning with growing public faith in equities during the 1980s, Lowenstein portrays the rise of ‘shareholder value’ (i.e., stock prices) and excessive executive compensation as the most important paving stones. Both worked against ethical, long-term decision making. During the late 1990s, business standards also slipped in accounting, stock analysis, and law enforcement (as the government was overwhelmed and self-disarmed by the repeal of Glass-Stegall). Although dot-coms were everywhere evidencing bad deeds as well as misjudgment, the worst offenders were Enron, Worldcom, and Arthur Anderson. The author is marginally confident that Sarbanes-Oxley and other reforms will prevent recurrence: has the culture changed? (Probably not, human nature being persistent.) The indictment is compelling, but for the curious tenet that the market permissively allows ‘too many’ companies to compete in certain segments, such as air travel. Ultimately, he seems to lean toward centralism or worse.

5. Johnson, Modern Times (2006)

by kurto

A tour of the principal socioeconomic, intellectual, and political events and trends of the 20th century through the 1980s. Key observations: political violence is infectious and degenerative in nature; it is highly important for leaders to be seen as moral and ethical. In the last century, the left was responsible for the bulk of the disastrous experiments with social engineering in Russia, China, and various socialist outposts, but the right also participated as in Germany, Italy, and Spain. The author convincingly points to the enduring role of individual agency as well as the law of unintended effects. Because he is not a professional academic and is conservative, he is considered idiosyncratic but his conclusions have never been refuted.

6. Will, Conservative Sensibility (15 April 2022)

by kurto

Contemporary American political debate comprises an argument between Madisonian conservativism and Wilsonian progressivism. To be conservative is to adhere to the Founders’ classical liberalism, to individualism borne of pre-government natural rights and the spontaneous social order which emerges. The core of its endeavor is promoting political and socioeconomic practices which promote virtuous living. More specifically, the political objective is to restore government based on natural rights, which imply limited government because these rights predate government, which exists to secure those rights. Conservatism faces three core problems: family disintegration, unfunded social benefits, and corrupt political culture, especially in Washington DC.

Since the Enlightenment, the West’s primary political problem has been the tension between self-assertion and self-control. In a plural society, government focuses on minimum moral essentials which can be described as empathy and self-control. Reasoning about the proper use of freedom is liberty in practice. By 1770, the colonials came to see individual rights not a originating in English common law but natural law: Madison wrote the Revolution was only a consequent of changed attitudes over 1760-75. The American project is exceptional in being free of feudal remnants, religion, or aristocracy, in stemming not from social theory but personal liberty – not what government should do, but what it must not do; this American sense of conservativism is incidentally opposed to the UK / continental traditions of duty and hierarchy. The Founding is one of history’s most extraordinary feats of political culture, made possible by general deference to excellence in public life, brought together in Philadelphia. Moreover, founding America on Madison interests was prudent; everyone has them, whereas virtues are difficult to acquire, agree, and sustain.

A society which values individualism expects unequal distribution of rewards. The more complex the society, the more government should defer to spontaneous order. Political economy was shortened to economy at the behest of social scientists touting rigor, yet the core remains allocation of scarce resources. Hayek asserted society advances by the functions it can perform without thinking (i.e., reflexively), contra JS Mill; government is an unequal and corruptible judge. Thus society’s economic regulator is pricing. Whereas JK Galbraith in the Affluent Society saw consumer desires as manufactured by corporate marketing, undermining respect for market equilibria. The effect is to reverse Burke’s view of government’s existing to deal with social wants; government can stimulate wants which it will be duly rewarded for providing. Inequality is not inherently injurious provided there is sufficiency (adequate resources).

Progressives attack individualism, reversing the view of rights preceding government. The democratic (majority) will is the manifestation of liberty; government’s antecedent job is shaping appetites, a European view which conflicts with the Lockean view of natural sociability. Progressivism holds human nature is plastic, is a product of shaping social forces, always becoming and therefore susceptible to steerage (which Will sometimes idiosyncratically calls historicism). Borne of Rousseau, this view is the more man is stripped of his own resources (i.e., of his nature), the greater the government’s possibilities – the very basis of 20th-century totalitarianism. It is Roman, government-made law with no limiting principle. Progressivism’s core text is Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, which aside from asserting the economically determined views of the contemporary politicians, disparages judicial review, and its worldview follows Thomas Dewey’s results-oriented pragmatism. The contrast is cooperative order versus top-down social engineering. Paradoxically, though Progressivism sees no individual human nature, groups (races) possess them. Also, Progressivism feel plural society should not be allowed to carry core cultural views from generation to generation, that is, it is intentionally historicist. The modern presidency is the agent of Progressivism, beginning with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (who held that checks and balances are absurd) and then to Lyndon Johnson.

Modern Americans talk like Jefferson (‘wise and frugal government’) and vote like Hamiltonians. In contemporary America, 35% of receive means-tested benefits including 50% of blacks and Hispanics; in 1960 the ratio of disabled to employed was 1 in 134, today it’s 1 in 16. Dependency should not be a political right. Conservativism seeks an equilibrium. Human nature makes political claims; government inevitably has a nurturing role, borne of the virtuous qualities, which Will sees as a popular government’s continuing task of education. (Statecraft as Soulcraft was not a prescription but an observation of what government inevitably does: whether to secure individual rights or shape collective outcomes? Will declares he was wrong upon 1983’s publication that the Founders paid too little attention to civic virtues: everyday capitalism promotes good habits such as honesty, politeness which are implicitly virtues.) Virtually the whole of contemporary government has become a corrupting force in a Tocquevillian vein, degrading without tormenting.

Congress must reassert itself via less delegation to administrative bodies, and the judiciary led by the Supreme Court should insist on separation of powers. In the latter 20th century, government services were increasingly less connected with elected officials and more to semi-permanent bureaucrats. In 2016, Congress passed 3,000 pages of legislation, against 97,000 pages of administrative law enrolled in the Federal register, an example of legislative delegation to executive agencies such as the Consumer Protection Bureau – which dangerously funds itself. Congressional atrophy is executive branch hypertrophy. (An aside: stripping the states’ rights to appoint senators (in 1913’s 17th amendment) served to make states administrative extensions of Congress and senators more responsive to Washington.)

Only the courts can preserve constitutional order against the general will. Originalism is meant to defend a fundamental understanding; judicial restraint does not equal securing rights but only deference to majoritarianism. The US constitution specifies not democracy but federated republic. Its fixed purpose is to protect natural rights in changing circumstances. Contra Oliver Holmes, there is no right of majority to embody opinions in laws. Lochner wrongly sought to establish government’s right to prescribe contracts (Bork is majoritarian?); the due process clause should prohibit arbitrary government actions which restrict individual rights.

America’s problem is not wealth determining political power but the opposite. The Depression accelerated America’s dependence on government; the postwar era (including educational subsidies) renewed social confidence; the civil rights movement reinvigorated federal centrality. The New Deal’s break with Liberalism was abandoning the idea that society produces most elements of happiness: instead, government has a duty to provide. Providing for nebulous insecurity added emotional needs and established a permanent tension in the dynamics of free, capitalist society.

Americans are less likely to believe in the destiny of bleak social forces because they embrace individualism. Most Americans are not only patriots who love their country but also nationalists who feel their system is better. Progressives, notably Barack Obama!, disagree.

Pessimism is a check on scientific fatalism, a realistic opposition to prescribed outcomes, a revolt against passive role in predetermined events, a clarifying of what we can and cannot do. Freedom is not universally defined all countries, let alone universally understood relative to other political goods (equality, social cohesion). Totalitarianism rises from claims to certain understandings of history and the necessity of untrammeled action. Hannah Arendt forecast ideology plus bureaucratic social control would produce new, irresistible tyranny, but she admitted the 1956 Hungarian rebellion showed human nature was unchanging in its thirst for liberty.
Religion is helpful to but not necessary for American Conservatism. Christians should be wary of government which goes beyond defending individual rights, because Christianity is concerned with dignity of the individual. Locke said most need religion as a shortcut to wisdom; Christianity was certainly central to the Founders who observed the imperfectability of human nature, that original sin does not vitiate individual dignity, and there are universal moral truths. But the author’s overstates agnosticism as if to demonstrate realism.

Who will want to attend the postmodern university if everything is open to reinterpretation? Why devote scarce resources to obsessing race, sex, class?
Will is at his best identifying the contrasts of Conservativism and Progressivism, and the addition of Hayekian views of spontaneous socioeconomic order are helpful; yet his somewhat idiosyncratic in his views of religion, historicism. While immensely learned, the book should have condensed (or several books): too often it’s a clip job.

10. Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity (25 July 2006)

by kurto

The true nature of the Enlightenment is best demonstrated by 18th-century Britain, where such concepts as nature, liberty, reason, rights and truth were most fully adumbrated in the concern for the ‘moral sense’. The thesis is revisionist, for the French philosophes have been considered to embody the paradigm, and only the Scottish (but not Burke!) have been understood as members of the canon. But British writers from Shaftesbury through Smith and on to the great Anglo-Irishman, along with the practical example of John Wesley’s Methodists, demonstrate the fundamental predilection to see dignity in all men. Not so the philosophes, preoccupied with the ‘ideology of reason’, as were the British Dissenters, or the Americans, focused on the politics of liberty. So Britain’s ‘sociology of virtue’ makes the strongest claim to the Enlightenment’s essence; however, each country’s subsequently development bears something of the others. A bibliography worth exploring, and worth revisiting for its brilliance and clarity.