History and partisanship.
Here's an interesting exchange (well, one-way exchange) between Philip Jenkins, author of Do Presidents Matter? and Eric Alterman. Jenkins argues that "our interpretation of American history is bedeviled by the excessive focus on the role of the president, his character and personality". He uses the obvious hypothetical cases of Jimmy Carter winning in 1980 and Al Gore winning in 2000 to suggest that things would not have been much been different in either case (Carter would have gone on to be the US' "national greatness" president, maybe with minor tweaks to the narrative; Gore would have militarily overreacted to 911). Alterman takes issue with Jenkins' commentary about Gore and Iraq:
[Jenkins writes that] “Conceivably, the vulnerability of a Democratic administration would have made a Gore presidency still more pro-active and militaristic than George W. Bush has been in practice.”...Note the use of the weasel word “conceivably” as in “Conceivably, my cheeseburger is actually made from the remains of little green Martian men.” To take the above seriously, one must simply ignore absolutely everything Gore has said and done with regard to Iraq, which in my view, rather weakens it.
Three points about this come to mind:
First, isn't this, to an extent, about the conflict between popular and academic history? I read not long ago (I forget where) a good definition of the difference between the two: academic history focuses mainly on prevailing trends in national life, of which democratically elected figures tend to emerge as rough reflections. (I'm not sure how this theory works in authoritian regimes, but maybe the party simply substitutes for the populace.) Popular history focuses, as Jenkins laments, on the personalities of society's Big Men and the forces they engender. So in a sense, Jenkins and Alterman are talking at cross purposes. In fact, Alterman undermines his point a bit when he bases his objection on what "Gore has said and done" since 2000. In fact, Jenkins' hypothetical has nothing much to do with what Gore is like; he's not expressing any particular cynicism toward him or toward politicians in general (to do so would undermine his academic-history position). He's talking about the forces that would have worked on the Gore Administration, forcing it to act in certain ways that are largely detached from presidential personality.
Second, the conflict between these opposing views of political history and development -- the electoral fatalism of the academic approach vs. the character-driven popular approach -- has interesting ramifications for progressive politics. If you read far-left, post-Communist writing, like the stuff at Counterpunch, say, you find a weird (and frankly exhausting) mix of the two approaches: absolute, fiercely personal derision toward politicians (of all stripes) mixed with a tendency toward Great-Forces fatalism, the view that we're all pawns in a cynical corporate-capitalist game over which we have no control. On the popular right, by contrast, you find large numbers of people fighting -- organizing, voting, demonstrating -- tooth and nail against these same forces of history. This depiction (and not his critique of the Democratic Party that caused such a stir) was the power of Thomas Franks' What's the Matter with Kansas (and also of this striking essay by failed Oklahoma Senate candidate Brad Carson) -- a world in which liberlism has replaced capitalism as the target of modern-day Luddites. Conservative foot soldiers (and their leaders) may be fatalistic, but not in a way that causes them to to withdraw from the battle with the Great Forces.
And what of mainstream liberals? Jenkins remarks derisively on "counter-factual scenarios, a technique that many historians find dubious". Actually, liberals seem to find it dubious. Frank writes in What's the Matter with Kansas about Jack Cahsill's book 2006: The Chautauqua Rising, about (what else?) America in the second term of a Gore presidency, in which as Frank puts it "the common people lie prostrate beneath the iron heel of liberalism" and must be rescued by a motley band of roughneck conservative populists led by a sportswriter. Off the top of my head, there's also Liberality for All, and conservative blogger Patrick Hynes' 2004 Gore-counterfactual novel (that doesn't seem to be available online right now; I hope that's not because he's planning on publishing it). It's fair to say, I think, that the equivalent simply does not exist on the left. (I have some theories about what a Gore presidency would have been like, but I'm mildly embarrassed about having them.) Mainstream liberals are not, as a rule, very indulgent of nostalgia or fantasy or the general Great Man theory of politics (I know, I know, there was the Kennedy thing, and Trudeaumania in Canada...but liberals have never systematically produced anything like the Reagan hagiography that threatened to explode and cover me in goo when I picked up a copy of Bruce Barlett's Imposter in Chapters tonight). I assume that this is part of what liberals are talking about when we speak of "the reality-based community".
At the same time, a good case can be made that an over-popularization of politics has none-the-less worked against liberals over the last quarter century. Polling data suggest a very strong determinism in how we elect national leaders, with demographic composition and national attitudes changing very slowly over time -- forces that tend to back up Jenkins' exogenous-forces approach to political history. On the other hand, both of Jenkins' examples, Carter and Gore, went down because they suffered fragmentation of the liberal coalition (slightly different as it existed in 1980 and 2000). In Carter's case, the fragmentation was large, up to one-third of self-described liberals by some estimates; in Gore's case, the fragmentation was actually relatively slight and part of a longer-term consolodation that can be seen in the 1992-2004 trend among the Democratic base groups -- but it was enough to make the difference. In both cases, though, the fragmentation was largely personality-based; liberals felt "betrayed" etc. etc. and declined to vote for the coalition of interests represented by the ticket in favour of rejecting the guy heading it for being, basically, too conservative. These revolts might be statistical blips compared to the deterministic demographic and national-attitude trends, noise around the mean so to speak, but in a closely-divided two-party system, they can certainly be decisive, and are bound to become more so as American society becames more affluent and can afford to be more dilletantish about its politics.
Which brings me to my third point, in which I'm on Alterman's side: not only does the popular, personality-based view of history and politics drive elections, it also determines how Administrations are run, even if it's mostly like a different kind of bias introduced into the error term around the great-forces mean. Like the relatively small defection from the liberal coalition cost Gore the 2000 election, minor differences in the characterlogical makeup of an Administration -- and, more importantly, in the people it has to please to survive politically -- can make all the difference to how policy is created and enacted. For instance, Jenkins ignores the difficulty Gore's people would have had in convincing a dubious military hierarchy to commit to the Iraq occupation relative to Bush, Cheney, Powell and the Republican establishment with their rosy martial history and supposed cultural affinity. He ignores how completely manufactured much of the case for invading Iraq was in real time (and the crucial distinction of occupying the country with ground troops, something Gore, even as the Clinton Admin's head Iraq-hawk, had never endorsed), and how the use of those troops got put on the table in the first place.
In particular, Bush's initial election depended at least somewhat on the institutional support of the neocon establishment and its influence in Beltway opinion-making with all its filter-down effects. Gore would have owed The Weekly Standard nothing and wouldn't have expected their editorial support; on the other hand, he would have owed plenty to socioliberal and generally antiwar groups like the AFL-CIO, women's, environmental and civil-liberties groups, and would also have depended on the editorial support of more war-ambivolent entities like the New York Times editorial page.
Similarly, Jenkins writes that "It is difficult to imagine any president in 2001-2002 who would not have relaxed rules against robust interrogation, against kidnapping and rendition, and above all, who would have maintained legal restrictions on electronic surveillance". That's broadly true, but again, the differences would have been in degree, not in kind. For instance, mainstream opposition to the Patriot Act, the sort voiced by Russ Feingold and Al Gore, is not a blanket opposition to the expansion of government surveillance powers contained in the Act, but criticism of very specific provisions regarding warrants and electronic surveillance. It's also directly in line with the ACLU's major complaints. It's not hard to imagine a Gore Administraion going out of its way to make sure the ACLU kept its dissatisfaction to a low rumble; but there was no reason for Bush or Ashcroft to have cared what an inately hostile liberal civil liberties group thought of their actions. As for rendition, the Clinton Administration was, to my knowledge, involved in six really dodgy renditions, all of them to Egypt, a practice it eventually ended (according to Peter Beinart quoting a WaPo report) because of outcry over the brutal interrogation methods used there. The Bush Adminstration, with its weaker ties to organized human rights groups, has been involved in about 150 such renditions (data from the Wiki rendition page). Would Gore have been perfect on this score? Highly unlikely. Would he have been better than the Bushies? Almost certainly.
In other words, one hardly needs to be mawkish about Gore (athough both Alterman and I and great swathes of the partisan liberal blogosphere are) to believe that his administration would have done things differently. Elections matter; individuals matter; and coalitions really matter. If overemphasis on the peculiarities of national leaders is intellectually and practically problematic, so is underestimating the importance of coalitions and the way their reprsentatives filter history's trends. To be pat about it, fatalism really does us nowhere.
[Jenkins writes that] “Conceivably, the vulnerability of a Democratic administration would have made a Gore presidency still more pro-active and militaristic than George W. Bush has been in practice.”...Note the use of the weasel word “conceivably” as in “Conceivably, my cheeseburger is actually made from the remains of little green Martian men.” To take the above seriously, one must simply ignore absolutely everything Gore has said and done with regard to Iraq, which in my view, rather weakens it.
Three points about this come to mind:
First, isn't this, to an extent, about the conflict between popular and academic history? I read not long ago (I forget where) a good definition of the difference between the two: academic history focuses mainly on prevailing trends in national life, of which democratically elected figures tend to emerge as rough reflections. (I'm not sure how this theory works in authoritian regimes, but maybe the party simply substitutes for the populace.) Popular history focuses, as Jenkins laments, on the personalities of society's Big Men and the forces they engender. So in a sense, Jenkins and Alterman are talking at cross purposes. In fact, Alterman undermines his point a bit when he bases his objection on what "Gore has said and done" since 2000. In fact, Jenkins' hypothetical has nothing much to do with what Gore is like; he's not expressing any particular cynicism toward him or toward politicians in general (to do so would undermine his academic-history position). He's talking about the forces that would have worked on the Gore Administration, forcing it to act in certain ways that are largely detached from presidential personality.
Second, the conflict between these opposing views of political history and development -- the electoral fatalism of the academic approach vs. the character-driven popular approach -- has interesting ramifications for progressive politics. If you read far-left, post-Communist writing, like the stuff at Counterpunch, say, you find a weird (and frankly exhausting) mix of the two approaches: absolute, fiercely personal derision toward politicians (of all stripes) mixed with a tendency toward Great-Forces fatalism, the view that we're all pawns in a cynical corporate-capitalist game over which we have no control. On the popular right, by contrast, you find large numbers of people fighting -- organizing, voting, demonstrating -- tooth and nail against these same forces of history. This depiction (and not his critique of the Democratic Party that caused such a stir) was the power of Thomas Franks' What's the Matter with Kansas (and also of this striking essay by failed Oklahoma Senate candidate Brad Carson) -- a world in which liberlism has replaced capitalism as the target of modern-day Luddites. Conservative foot soldiers (and their leaders) may be fatalistic, but not in a way that causes them to to withdraw from the battle with the Great Forces.
And what of mainstream liberals? Jenkins remarks derisively on "counter-factual scenarios, a technique that many historians find dubious". Actually, liberals seem to find it dubious. Frank writes in What's the Matter with Kansas about Jack Cahsill's book 2006: The Chautauqua Rising, about (what else?) America in the second term of a Gore presidency, in which as Frank puts it "the common people lie prostrate beneath the iron heel of liberalism" and must be rescued by a motley band of roughneck conservative populists led by a sportswriter. Off the top of my head, there's also Liberality for All, and conservative blogger Patrick Hynes' 2004 Gore-counterfactual novel (that doesn't seem to be available online right now; I hope that's not because he's planning on publishing it). It's fair to say, I think, that the equivalent simply does not exist on the left. (I have some theories about what a Gore presidency would have been like, but I'm mildly embarrassed about having them.) Mainstream liberals are not, as a rule, very indulgent of nostalgia or fantasy or the general Great Man theory of politics (I know, I know, there was the Kennedy thing, and Trudeaumania in Canada...but liberals have never systematically produced anything like the Reagan hagiography that threatened to explode and cover me in goo when I picked up a copy of Bruce Barlett's Imposter in Chapters tonight). I assume that this is part of what liberals are talking about when we speak of "the reality-based community".
At the same time, a good case can be made that an over-popularization of politics has none-the-less worked against liberals over the last quarter century. Polling data suggest a very strong determinism in how we elect national leaders, with demographic composition and national attitudes changing very slowly over time -- forces that tend to back up Jenkins' exogenous-forces approach to political history. On the other hand, both of Jenkins' examples, Carter and Gore, went down because they suffered fragmentation of the liberal coalition (slightly different as it existed in 1980 and 2000). In Carter's case, the fragmentation was large, up to one-third of self-described liberals by some estimates; in Gore's case, the fragmentation was actually relatively slight and part of a longer-term consolodation that can be seen in the 1992-2004 trend among the Democratic base groups -- but it was enough to make the difference. In both cases, though, the fragmentation was largely personality-based; liberals felt "betrayed" etc. etc. and declined to vote for the coalition of interests represented by the ticket in favour of rejecting the guy heading it for being, basically, too conservative. These revolts might be statistical blips compared to the deterministic demographic and national-attitude trends, noise around the mean so to speak, but in a closely-divided two-party system, they can certainly be decisive, and are bound to become more so as American society becames more affluent and can afford to be more dilletantish about its politics.
Which brings me to my third point, in which I'm on Alterman's side: not only does the popular, personality-based view of history and politics drive elections, it also determines how Administrations are run, even if it's mostly like a different kind of bias introduced into the error term around the great-forces mean. Like the relatively small defection from the liberal coalition cost Gore the 2000 election, minor differences in the characterlogical makeup of an Administration -- and, more importantly, in the people it has to please to survive politically -- can make all the difference to how policy is created and enacted. For instance, Jenkins ignores the difficulty Gore's people would have had in convincing a dubious military hierarchy to commit to the Iraq occupation relative to Bush, Cheney, Powell and the Republican establishment with their rosy martial history and supposed cultural affinity. He ignores how completely manufactured much of the case for invading Iraq was in real time (and the crucial distinction of occupying the country with ground troops, something Gore, even as the Clinton Admin's head Iraq-hawk, had never endorsed), and how the use of those troops got put on the table in the first place.
In particular, Bush's initial election depended at least somewhat on the institutional support of the neocon establishment and its influence in Beltway opinion-making with all its filter-down effects. Gore would have owed The Weekly Standard nothing and wouldn't have expected their editorial support; on the other hand, he would have owed plenty to socioliberal and generally antiwar groups like the AFL-CIO, women's, environmental and civil-liberties groups, and would also have depended on the editorial support of more war-ambivolent entities like the New York Times editorial page.
Similarly, Jenkins writes that "It is difficult to imagine any president in 2001-2002 who would not have relaxed rules against robust interrogation, against kidnapping and rendition, and above all, who would have maintained legal restrictions on electronic surveillance". That's broadly true, but again, the differences would have been in degree, not in kind. For instance, mainstream opposition to the Patriot Act, the sort voiced by Russ Feingold and Al Gore, is not a blanket opposition to the expansion of government surveillance powers contained in the Act, but criticism of very specific provisions regarding warrants and electronic surveillance. It's also directly in line with the ACLU's major complaints. It's not hard to imagine a Gore Administraion going out of its way to make sure the ACLU kept its dissatisfaction to a low rumble; but there was no reason for Bush or Ashcroft to have cared what an inately hostile liberal civil liberties group thought of their actions. As for rendition, the Clinton Administration was, to my knowledge, involved in six really dodgy renditions, all of them to Egypt, a practice it eventually ended (according to Peter Beinart quoting a WaPo report) because of outcry over the brutal interrogation methods used there. The Bush Adminstration, with its weaker ties to organized human rights groups, has been involved in about 150 such renditions (data from the Wiki rendition page). Would Gore have been perfect on this score? Highly unlikely. Would he have been better than the Bushies? Almost certainly.
In other words, one hardly needs to be mawkish about Gore (athough both Alterman and I and great swathes of the partisan liberal blogosphere are) to believe that his administration would have done things differently. Elections matter; individuals matter; and coalitions really matter. If overemphasis on the peculiarities of national leaders is intellectually and practically problematic, so is underestimating the importance of coalitions and the way their reprsentatives filter history's trends. To be pat about it, fatalism really does us nowhere.
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