08 December 2006
Review of Running Alone by James MacGregor Burns (Jon Meacham, Washington Post)
Splendid Isolation: How uncoupling presidents from their parties has given us less dynamic leaders (Jon Meacham, Washington Post)
In his impressive new Running Alone, Burns traces the origins of the collapse of broad party politics back to the rise of Camelot, which he sees as a court that was too focused on its king and not enough on the knights in Congress, in the states and in the neighborhoods who could help the monarch convince the realm of the wisdom of his program. The Kennedy drive -- JFK's appetites, curiosity, charisma and charm -- is the stuff of great biography, but in this book Burns is more concerned with the story of a nation than with the story of any one individual. And the stories of democratic nations, he argues, are determined by a leader's capacity to mobilize large numbers of people -- not only to elect the leader to office but to enable the work of government to begin when the work of electioneering leaves off.
Though this is not an especially original or startling point, Burns, who remains the preeminent historian of the years of Franklin D. Roosevelt, has written a colorful, intelligent and thoroughly engaging book about America as it has been and as, in his view, it should be. One need not agree with every point Burns makes to savor the stories he tells and to appreciate the passion he brings to the question of presidential effectiveness. He is an unabashed reformer: He wants, for instance, to remove what he sees as antiquated 18th-century constitutional checks on government (such as by abolishing the electoral college and requiring concurrent terms for presidents, senators and congressmen so that all would face the voters on the same day in the same year). On this point I respectfully dissent: One man's obstacle is another man's salvation, which is what the Framers intended.It is difficult, however, to argue with Burns's central thesis: "America needs better leaders . . . . Since Thomas Jefferson, great leadership has emerged from strong parties, from leaders who have run together with such parties and presented Americans with genuine alternatives." To Burns, the proliferation of presidential campaigns centered on the candidate, not on a larger party, has turned politicians into free agents more interested in their own survival on election day than they are on governing once they are in office. Burns is not naive; he knows better than most that politics is about ego and ambition. But he rightly recalls old campaigners such as FDR, who could credibly call on America's Democrats to rally round in a way JFK could not. And, to Burns, therein lies all the difference. The packaging of candidates to make them appear to be free of the demands of their party's base -- the insistence, for example, that candidates have a "Sister Souljah" moment in the way Bill Clinton did in 1992 -- is, to Burns, counterproductive when it comes to the business of government, for what works on the trail does not necessarily translate into effective leadership once in office, when a leader needs the base of that party.
Although people who typically don't know much about the evolution of the American political system (sadly, way too many people, as our public education system continues to fail in its duty to teach American civics in some detail) tend to lament "partisanship," the notion of "responsible party government" was once one of the big areas of study with the discipline of political science, and the study of parties is still a mainstay (in fact, the main area of study of Houston's oft-quoted political scientist Richard Murray). This sounds like an interesting (because contrarian!) contribution to the genre.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 12/08/06 17:59 | Books/Culture | Technorati |
Review of The Theocons by Damon Linker (Joshua Muravchik, Commentary)
God Squad (Joshua Muravchik, Commentary)
In short, the theocons and their allies, whether right or wrong in their beliefs, are far from having brought about a more sanctified America. If anything, they would seem to be fighting a rear-guard action against the relentless liberalization of norms.
So why this book? The answer would appear to be that whatever has happened to the United States, something has certainly happened to Damon Linker. Around the time he went to work for First Things in 2001—he was then also writing for other conservative journals, including Policy Review, National Review, and COMMENTARY—he penned a lengthy encomium to Pope John Paul II, whose many writings stood in Linker’s judgment as “a reminder of the greatness of which the human mind is capable when it sets itself to the task of understanding.” Five years later, the Pope appears in Linker’s book only as a stubborn reactionary.What happened, clearly, is that (for reasons unexplained) Damon Linker has turned Left, and this leftward turn has launched him on a crusade—the term is inevitable—to unmask and undo the insidious influence of the dogma to which he himself once succumbed. The sharpness of this turn is apparent not only in his attitudes but in his ferocious rhetoric. Thus, he refers to U.S. foreign policy as the work of “the world’s God-intoxicated hegemon.” He accuses Michael Novak of having once been a “rabid populist,” Neuhaus of “making moral judgments in a condition of self-imposed ignorance of the facts,” and theocons in general of viewing “the modern family [with] abomination.” Especially virulent is his treatment of Catholicism:
All the early modern liberals viewed the Catholic Church as the greatest obstacle to establish free government in the Western world. . . . Catholicism seemed to be the religious “faction” least likely to play by the rules of a pluralistic liberal order. These fears were confirmed in Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the Church became the most powerful reactionary force on the continent. . . . [Today] the Church remains (and under Pope Benedict XVI is likely to remain) a profoundly authoritarian institution.
One cannot help wondering how Linker would square these sweeping judgments, especially the last, with the fact that more than 90 percent of the world’s countries with majority Catholic populations—including those in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—practice democracy today. But one wonders in vain. Throughout, he spends much more time tracing the ascendancy of the supposed cabal and describing the peril it poses to American democracy than in debating the ideas of his subjects, which he takes to be self-evidently malign.
It's always interesting to watch such young firebrand scribes (toss in David Brock as another example) go from scorching the earth on one side of a debate to scorching the earth on the other. You have to wonder about the stability of their belief system (and their inherent intellectual seriousness) in the first place, not to mention if there was some triggering event that drove them to turn their rage against their one-time intellectual allies.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 12/08/06 17:38 | Books/Culture | Technorati |
Review of Palestine by Jimmy Carter (Alan Dershowitz, NY Sun)
The World According to Carter (Alan Dershowitz, NY Sun)
Sometimes you really can tell a book by its cover. President Jimmy Carter's decision to title his new anti-Israel screed "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" (Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $27) tells it all. His use of the loaded word "apartheid," suggesting an analogy to the hated policies of South Africa, is especially outrageous, considering his acknowledgment buried near the end of his shallow and superficial book that what is going on in Israel today "is unlike that in South Africa—not racism, but the acquisition of land." Nor does he explain that Israel's motivation for holding on to land it captured in a defensive war is the prevention of terrorism. Israel has tried, on several occasions, to exchange land for peace, and what it got instead was terrorism, rockets, and kidnappings launched from the returned land.
In fact, Palestinian-Arab terrorism is virtually missing from Mr. Carter's entire historical account, which blames nearly everything on Israel and almost nothing on the Palestinians. Incredibly, he asserts that the initial violence in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict occurred when "Jewish militants" attacked Arabs in 1939. The long history of Palestinian terrorism against Jews — which began in 1929, when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem ordered the slaughter of more than 100 rabbis, students, and non-Zionist Sephardim whose families had lived in Hebron and other ancient Jewish cities for millennia — was motivated by religious bigotry. The Jews responded to this racist violence by establishing a defense force. There is no mention of the long history of Palestinian terrorism before the occupation, or of the Munich massacre and others inspired byYasser Arafat. There is not even a reference to the Karine A, the boatful of terrorist weapons ordered by Arafat in January 2002.Mr. Carter's book is so filled with simple mistakes of fact and deliberate omissions that were it a brief filed in a court of law, it would be struck and its author sanctioned for misleading the court. Mr. Carter too is guilty of misleading the court of public opinion. A mere listing of all of Mr. Carter's mistakes and omissions would fill a volume the size of his book.
That last is hardly surprising of work produced by Mr. Carter. In fact, it seems about as sporting to "Fisk" his work as it is to feed Bambi regularly in the leadup to the season that allows the shooting of Bambi with a high-powered rifle (sorry, any deer hunters who think I'm treating your sport unfairly), but Mr. Dershowitz does such a fine job that I just couldn't resist the link.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 12/08/06 17:24 | Books/Culture | Technorati |
Review of The Blind Side by Michael Lewis (George Will, NY Times)
The next big thing (George Will, NY Times)
Lewis’s subject is the salvation of Michael Oher, a black child virtually raised on the mean streets of Memphis. But Lewis also continues what he began with “Moneyball,” his 2003 best seller explaining new thinking about how to construct baseball teams. He is advancing a new genre of journalism that shows how market forces and economic reasoning shape the evolution of sports. Oher, who today plays left offensive tackle for the University of Mississippi, is a valuable commodity because of the lasting impact on football made by someone who played on the other side of the ball.
After the 1981 regular season, Lawrence Taylor, linebacker for the New York Giants, became the only rookie ever named the National Football League’s defensive player of the year. He was 6-foot-3, 240 pounds and quick as a cat, running 40 yards in 4.5 seconds. He was, Lewis says, “a new kind of athlete doing a new kind of thing.” This is how Taylor described his thing:“I’ll drive my helmet” into the quarterback, “or, if I can, I’ll bring my arm up over my head and try to ax the sonuvabitch in two. So long as the guy is holding the ball, I intend to hurt him. ... If I hit the guy right, I’ll hit a nerve and he’ll feel electrocuted, he’ll forget for a few seconds that he’s on a football field.”
Terrifying, disorienting and injuring quarterbacks is most of a linebacker’s job description. Taylor concentrated coaches’ minds on the problem of protecting quarterbacks. Most of them are right-handed, which means that when they are passing, threats from their left come thundering at them from their blind side. Hence the sudden interest in large and agile left offensive tackles.
Lewis goes on to tell the story of the evolution of that interest, and in a very compelling way by all accounts. I'm going to have to pick up this book.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 12/08/06 17:13 | Books/Culture | Technorati |
Review of God's Universe by Owen Gingerich (Margaret Wetheim, LA Times)
The creator's thumbprint is here for all to see (Margaret Wertheim, LA Times)
A lump of uranium seems an unpromising place to look for God. But in this lethal material Owen Gingerich, an emeritus professor of astronomy at Harvard University, detects a signature of divine action in the world. In his slim and elegant new book, "God's Universe," Gingerich finds that indeed everywhere he looks he can discern the hand of a benevolent Creator — all without compromising his adherence to a rigorous methodological scientific naturalism.
Take the uranium. Curiously, Gingerich writes, "in the cosmos as a whole gold is at least ten times more common than uranium, but here at the surface of the earth uranium is about five hundred times more abundant than gold." The reason is that uranium is radioactive and gives off heat in Earth's interior, generating slow convection currents that carry the element up to the surface. This convection has been crucial in the development of life on Earth, for "over hundreds of millions of years it helps build the continental zones [and] gives rise to continental drift."Remarkably, the half-life of uranium (a measure of its rate of decay) is 4.5 billion years, which is also the age of the Earth. Were its half-life much longer, Gingerich tells us, uranium would not produce nearly so much heat, hence our planet would be less geologically active; were it shorter, most of the Earth's uranium would be gone by now and the mantle would be correspondingly quiescent. In sum, the half-life of uranium seems curiously timed to create conditions that have made our planet hospitable to life.
In "God's Universe," Gingerich recounts many other examples of the ways in which the universe as a whole, and our planet in particular, seems suspiciously primed for life.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 12/08/06 17:05 | Books/Culture | Technorati |
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