I confess I've never read The Road to Serfdom, in part because of the impression I'd gotten of it from its fans. So this fascinating piece on Hayek was a revelation. Who knew that the father of right-wing libertarianism (though he wouldn't have considered himself so) believed that every government had a responsibility to ensure "a minimum standard of living"? Who knew that Keynes and Orwell found themselves wholly in agreement with Hayek's criticism of controlled economies? Clearly I'll have to finally read this.

I feel like this is a point I've been trying to make for a long time, but never so eloquently as this:

Yes, it is true that unions and chambers of commerce and gun enthusiasts and environmentalists and industrial sectors and doctors and lawyers and Indian casinos will band together and attempt to capture the machinery of government to further their own particular interests, often—usually—at the expense of rivals who are locked out of participation (and of the social and economic choices of individual citizens). Hayek’s solution is to deny the legitimacy of any movement to impose restraint on competition. The paradox is that forming spontaneous associations for the collective good of insiders seems to be a universal human activity. When individuals are free to make choices, this is invariably what they choose to do. Hayek’s principle might be sound, if applied universally, which it could never be. The practice would devastate civil society, and with it democracy.

Thanks to Tim for tipping me off to this: If you ever wondered whether all those secret, small expansions to the president's power really will ever have an effect on your life, check out this utterly terrifying article about the implications of a secret order issued by Ronald Reagan in the '80s -- it's apparently so secret that we don't even know when, though that could just be lack of access to "classified" information per usual -- regarding the line of presidential succession. (Ever notice that whenever this subject is brought up, no one can ever agree on who follows the Vice President?)

In the scenario I'm envisioning, Nancy Pelosi would assert her claim as acting president under existing statutes while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, or some other executive official, would simultaneously assert her competing authority under the executive order.

When confronting these competing claims, it would be the military that would call the shots. As the Washington Post reported three years ago, the Pentagon has "devised its first-ever war plans for guarding against and responding to terrorist attacks in the United States, envisioning 15 potential crisis scenarios and anticipating several simultaneous strikes around the country." In acting on these plans, would the Joint Chiefs choose to recognize the constitutional authority of Pelosi as commander in chief? Or would they respond to the commands of the executive official presiding over the "doomsday" crisis center at some "undisclosed location"? To ask the question is to answer it: The whole point of these "doomsday" exercises is to assure instant obedience to the will of the executive on the other side of the hot line. We are staring at a clear and present danger to the republic.

Even if the scenario never happens, the very notion that the President -- especially a revered and supposed champion of Constitutional rule like Reagan -- can secretly amend the Constitution for his own purposes is profoundly unnerving.

"Younger people are kind of excited about being in the wilderness," libertarian writer Megan McArdle told the New York Times the other day. She was referring, of course, to the very strong possibility that John McCain and the Republican Party will be crushed this November. It's by no means a given, but it's certainly a popular notion. Harpers ran a cover story about the possible demise of the GOP, and I can't count the number of headlines I've read running along the lines of "Is Conservatism Out of Ideas?"

To be honest, I don't think Republican leaders much want to win this one. Bush and the Right have left the government in such a dismal state that they've honestly got no idea how to run it anymore -- short of Bush's blatantly anti-Republican method of rule-by-executive-fiat governing -- and they'd rather leave the Democrats to clean up the mess.

This is just a theory, mind you. I'll throw any evidence I come across up here.

The notion that party leaders might deliberately throw away an election (or, to cast it in less ) isn't really that hard to believe. What keeps us in the dark is the belief that the point of a party is to win elections. As Walter Karp contended in Indispensable Enemies (the one and only indispensable book ever written about American politics), the point of a party is to retain power, and there are countless instances where it would clearly be more harmful to win an election than to lose it. If your candidate turns out to be a "dangerous" man -- i.e., one who might turn his back on the party leaders and govern like a populist -- then clearly it goes against the party's interest to let him win. If your candidate would be taking office under dangerous circumstances -- i.e., the middle of a war or an economic slump -- then clearly it's in the party's interest to let him lose.

According to Karp, Republican leaders "nominated the egregious Barry Goldwater with every intention of sending him to defeat" in 1964. That's an interesting spin on the usual story, that Goldwater lost because his radical populist right backers took away the party from the "helpless" party elite. Frankly, it's much more believable than the usual story (which reads like an apology for the Republicans). As for other examples, I wouldn't find it hard to believe that -- for example -- the Republicans threw away the election in '96, when Clinton was governing as a far more effective centrist-Republican than Dole ever would have.

I’ve been complaining about commercials a lot lately; the other day I saw one that made all the rest of them look classy. It was an advertisement for some gaudy 9/11 collector’s item: a clammy-looking oversized $20 bill printed in solid silver, with a picture of the NYC skyline — the twin towers included, of course — shimmering on one side. “The towers gleam in the morning light, much like they did on that fateful morning,” yammered the announcer, voice betraying not a hint that he knew what he was talking about. Who would buy something so grossly tacky? Who is the audience in mind? What would you even do with such a thing? Frame it? There was something mildly desperate and sad in the presentation, as if the product’s pushers knew it was a cursed item.

The other night Alyson and I watched "Gore Vidal's The American Presidency: Heroes or Villains?" (what an astoundingly klutzy title!), a video collecting Vidal's three-part series on the presidency, made for the BBC and the History Channel in 1999 but played here only once, in a highly bowdlerized version. As Alyson noted, no way could they ever get away with playing something like that here, without comment.

Thoughts:

1.) The style of the program is refreshingly far from the Ken Burns/History Channel technique, which pumps so much fake-drama into an essentially static form that it ends up like Digiorno frozen pizza; soggy, cardboard-base and still just as far as ever from the real thing. In one of my classes last year we watched a documentary on the anniversary of the Constitutional Convention. It consisted of three 15-minute interviews with experts on the Constitution. No camera tricks, no frills, no dramatic music. Far from being boring, it was actually riveting - kids my age are programmed to respond to EVERYTHING on television, and we're accustomed to everything important being thrust right at us, so when the camera holds on something, our first reaction is to think "Damn, that must be important!" and become glued to the screen.

2.) The program consists of Vidal sitting at a table and talking, with occasional clips flashing up now and then. At times, these clips are merely amusing (a clip of Nixon warming up for his farewell address, and clowning around like a frat boy); at times, astonishing (a sound clip of William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech - why the hell don't they give us this stuff in high school history?). It's an admirably simple and eminently watchable format.

3.) Vidal, as usual, waxes rhapsodic over the noble Founding Fathers. Even when he spouts the old Charles Beard economic interpretation of the Constitution (long discredited, but still a favorite of the lazy left), his heart never seems to be in it. Jefferson seems to be the only man he admires without much reservation.

4.) As much as I adore Vidal's essays, I find his novels a bit hard to slog through. For one thing, every single character talks like him, and being stuck in a big mansion full of Gore Vidals spouting expository dialogue ("My word, Secretary Seward! Does the president really mean to suspend habeas corpus? Such a thing was not done even when the British sacked Washington in 1813!") is a bit tiresome after a while. Yet he's a fantastic character to see holding forth on any subject. I find it tough to apply any critical standards to him at all. It's like listening to a retired Shakespeare character telling you all the things that old Will left out.

5.) Vidal's villains are familiar: Brooks Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, and the rest of the cabal who took us into the Spanish-American War and made of our republic an empire-in-the-cradle. He's unsentimental about FDR. Truman he regards as the worst of the worst: a "machine politician" posing as the guy next door. Disappointingly, he doesn't comment on Clinton.

6.) Vidal is ambivalent about our most fascinating president, Lincoln, whom he regards as simultaneously a ruthless tyrant and a great man. I personally have never accepted the "sic semper tyrannis" view of Lincoln, and think it might better be applied to Jefferson Davis (the Confederacy, with its ruthless one-party rule over a nation in which it was illegal to even discuss the abolition of slavery, was in many ways the first modern totalitarian state), but Vidal's reading of Lincoln's great "towering genius disdains a beaten path" speech is spine-chillingly powerful. It reminds you of the power locked in those words, a power that can be felt in most of Lincoln's writings, but which remains somewhat obscured by AL's cornball image.

7.) The program ends on a somber note, with Vidal sadly noting that all the presidents' wars, "as it were" (a Masterpiece Theatre-style rhetorical gesture that probably comes easier than breathing to Vidal), had brought them some degree of glory but that their major effect was to deprive the country of millions of its sons. A gloomy thought, but one that ought to give us something at least to be grateful for - had popular discontent not forced the U.S. government to give up the draft, imagine how many countless more lives might be wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So it's the end of the Harry Potter phenomenon, and I feel I should say something about it. What is there to say, for me? I'd have a hard time calling them great books, and yet I feel like the HP phenomenon is, far and away, easily, A Good Thing.

The creation of fantasy, as a genre, was also its doom: Tolkien's progression from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings. When Tolkien wrote the former - an enormously inventive and wondrous adventure - he did what any other great storyteller would have done. He wrote his story in human terms, probably without even thinking about it. For years JRRT had been making up ancient legends along the lines of the old Norse myths he adored, even writing many of them down, but it was little more than a specialist's private game. When he wrote his great adventure, he naturally drew on all of it - as background. The characters had to have a world to dwell in, and because JRRT knew that world, knew it like the back of his hand, he made it uncannily convincing. Yet the center of The Hobbit is rather out of place in this world - as he should be. Bilbo Baggins is an unadventurous type who secretly longs for adventure - a wish so deeply buried that he spends the first half of the book loudly wishing he was back at home having tea. (Tolkien emphasizes, to an amusing degree, the physical uncomfortableness of having an adventure.) He's so clueless that he rather reminds me of Bertie Wooster. And yet, without breaking character throughout, he ultimately faces down every challenge and returns home a richer character (figuratively and literally). He does, in short, what you or I or Tolkien might well do if set down in his place.

When it came time to write the sequel, however, Tolkien found that he didn't have any more to say about Bilbo, whose character arc was finished. So he began writing, without any particular goal in mind, and sure enough stumbled right into the enormous and untapped universe that had been stirring in the back of his mind since the Great War. And here Tolkien made a dramatic transition. He quit writing a story and started writing history. The distinction is easily explained. The point of The Hobbit is not the hunting of a dragon and his stolen treasure, but that Bilbo Baggins went on an adventure and had his life changed. Whereas the point of Lord of the Rings is not that Frodo Baggins had his life changed, but that a Dark Lord was thwarted and peace restored to a troubled land. What is the difference? Well, the former is a story, but the latter is just made-up history - beautifully conceived and carried out, but essentially pointless.

It's that very (seeming) high seriousness that made LOTR so exciting to discover when I was 12; it seemed so much more purposeful and meaningful and exciting than anything I had ever read. Yet that seriousness is a mirage; it fades away when you try to examine it close-up. Most of it comes from a strange sense of mournfulness that hangs over the entire book - which is, after all, about the end of that imaginary world. LOTR is sort of a masterpiece (though not one I ever need to read again), but it created an awful genre by suggesting that you barely needed a story to write a book; all you had to do was invent things. Not much different from playing a game, really. Here literature ends and wish-fulfillment begins.

In Harry Potter, the "magical" trappings are just so much icing; wipe them off, and what you have is classic mystery: Harry is set with a riddle, puzzles his way through various complications, and ultimately finishes off a villain using his wits. And they are written in human terms. Voldemort does not matter because he is an evil dark lord who terrorized the wizard world; he matters because he is a terrible and intensely personal threat to our hero. The wizard world itself only matters to us because of the people in it. J.K. Rowling's great accomplishment was to return fantasy to its pre-LOTR state by writing a story, not fake-history.

Rowling is, on the word-by-word level, not an exceptionally good writer. She can't stop telling her characters how they should be saying something: "...said Ron heatedly," "...said Hermione anxiously," "...said Harry irritably." Her descriptions never take flight the way they should, never pull you all the way into a palpable physical world. And she's got a terrible sense of humor. The "funny" names and low slapstick might be gently amusing in a less ambitious series, but they don't gibe well with the increasing seriousness of the books. If we chuckle at them sometimes, it's not because they're funny but because they're endearingly stupid. Seeing them pop up again in every new book is like reminiscing about an old school friend.

Yet the books are utterly addictive. I think this is because Rowling has placed at the center of her series not one, but numerous stories. Harry, Ron, Hermione, Sirius, Snape, Voldemort, even Hagrid all have major character arcs that happen over the course of several books. And Rowling has a genuine gift for piling event upon event, complication upon complication, without losing the reader's interest. The later books are like Victorian serials in their giddy careering from one event to the next, one complication after another. You can trot through them at a leisurely pace and enjoy living in Harry's world - the real reason kids aren't put off by their length, I think. They feel as vast and airy and comfortable as the real world.

Reading Hannah Arendt's Crises of the Republic, I was struck by a long passage at the end in which she points to "an entirely new form of government" that arose, quite spontaneously, out of every revolution, only to be swallowed up by subsequent events and virtually written out of history. These councils occurred, Arendt writes, "in the French Revolution, with Jefferson in the American Revolution, in the Parisian commune, in the Russian revolutions, in the wake of the revolutions in Germany and Austria at the end of World War I, finally in the Hungarian Revolution. What is more, they never came into being as a result of a conscious revolutionary tradition or theory, but entirely spontaneously, each time as though there had never been anything of the sort before."

I must confess that the only one of these instances I've seriously studied in depth is the Russian Revolution. But doing my research, I was astonished at how little information most of the books contained on the Soviets (that is, the spontaneous councils that sprang up across the land), which seemed to me to be the primary spring of everything that happened in 1917. Hunger and opposition to the war and the decline of the tsar's authority provided the setting for the revolution, but they could not cause it; that there was a revolution was because of ordinary people's sudden discovery of what Arendt terms "political action." Discovering a "public life" where previously there had been only a vacuum, the disaffected soldiers and workers rushed to fill the available space.

Richard Pipes, a Reaganite scholar who has written the longest account of the Revolution and its aftermath available in the West, observed once that the tsar's absoluteness of power was precisely what made his rule so precarious; had he placed more of his power in the hands of lords and smaller rulers across the land (like putting money in a bank) he could have better safeguarded it from the people. Instead, Pipes wrote, the country's political system resembled a vast warehouse with a long line connecting the tsar and each person he ruled; when the line was snapped, the result was political chaos. This misses the point. The revolution was not merely "chaos," but the shifting of power away from the center to a vast and varied collection of groups who had seized it for themselves. Pipes, who believes in the oligarchic rule of the few over the dangerous many, condemned the (relatively few) radicals in the Duma for exacerbating the situation with their inflammatory words against the tsar. The Duma-radicals, however, comprised only one group battling for power as the tsar's authority waned.

It is truly astonishing how little has been written - at least in English - about the precarious existence of democracy between February and October 1917. Reduced to a chapter in most histories, as if the Bolshevik Coup were inevitable, the most crucial months in the history of Russia have been written out of its history.

Americans can see a similar omission in the numerous histories of our Civil War. The war began with a coup by the losing party in a presidential race; the Democratic Party, whose machines controlled most of the old South, chose to force a secession against the wishes of a majority of actual Southerners. A torrent of words has been wasted, by men as smart as Edmund Wilson and Gore Vidal, over whether the South had the "right" to leave the Union. The truth is that the South itself - that is, the people who made up its population - were barely consulted in the matter. Historians' refusal to acknowledge the power of political parties - who hold virtually all political power in this republic - has resulted in a war that makes no sense, for if the South was united in its wish to leave then the North's actions were obviously tyrannical. If, however, Southerners had remained loyal to the Union despite secession, the new government would have swiftly fallen apart. This explains the act that actually began the war: Jefferson Davis's government firing on Fort Sumter. Only a war could forge the unity possible to create a new nation independent of the old one, whose powerful hold on the people of the South could only be weakened by a war against the old government. Yet this conflict is all but absent in most histories of the Civil War, in which the Confederate nation itself barely exists.

If there's one thing outcast teenagers love, it's the Middle Ages. As far as I know, no one's ever tried to figure out just where this rampant "medievalism" came from, and why it exerts so tremendous a hold over the lives of - i hesitate to say millions of teenagers, so slight and barely-noticed/beneath-contempt is this curious non-movement, but i suspect it's right up there with any other weird subculture, numbers-wise. But where'd it come from? And more importantly, what does it mean?

This fascinating article - http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i44/44a00801.htm - reveals that many teenage-medievalists grow up to be medieval scholars - a more remarkable fact than it might seem, since teenage-medievalism has relatively little to do with the actual Middle Ages. (Witness the amusingly mistitled Renaissance Faires.) It draws more on relatively ahistorical inspirations - Tolkien, role-playing games, third-hand watered-down Arthurian legends, and even "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

Still, even ahistorical representations like this have deep resonance; why does the medieval world appeal so much to the social outcasts of our schools? I suspect the real answer has something to do with its remoteness from our own lives - its otherness. Now, I write about this stuff with the vaguely horrified sympathy of someone who was bordering on becoming this sort of person in 8th grade, and immediately abandoned it upon entering 9th grade (whereupon I instantly turned into the sort of (male) teenager who carries around a copy of "The Bell Jar" and aspires to someday turn into a Manic Street Preacher). As far as I can recall, I just liked the sense of dropping out of this world and moving into an older, richer, somehow (in an uncanny way) more familiar one. But there couldn't have been much of a deep connection, considering how quickly I dropped that interest. I'd studied medieval stuff back in 6th grade without being intrigued at all.

What resonance does that world have for people who remain in it well into their 20s - or, scarily, beyond? I suspect that the deeper, richer, more familiar "world" comes to eclipse the real one, which perpetually failed to live up to the standards of fantasy. In the world of teenage-medievalism, which plunders history and culture at random, one can - however briefly - escape the increasingly desolate, depressing real world altogether.

Or, hell, maybe there's a simpler explanation. Certainly the slightly stilted, ancient syntax of the medieval world appeals to many above-average-intelligence kids; certainly it did to me. More later...

I have a love-hate relationship with Salon.com; I’ve been reading it regularly since I was about 16, and I still check it at least twice a week. But Jesus, is it ever hit-and-miss. I avoid the “personal” pieces (“I’m worried I’m not raising my kid right! The little bastard got kicked out of nursery school for biting everyone! Oh, maybe I shouldn’t let him watch TV. I’m a bad parent. No, wait, I’m a great parent. But part of being a great parent is accepting your imperfection…”) like the plague, and I have an allergic reaction to what I call the Salon tone. it's mildly tart, a tad solicitous, a bit flaky (in a meant-to-be-endearing way) and oh so very pleased with itself.

That said, their advice columnist, Cary Tennis, wrote a beautiful response to a workplace thug who wrote in complaining about a fellow employee (a woman, of course) who wore a shirt saying “Kitty Not Happy” to work. “Personally, if I were her husband and she went out of the house wearing this, or even wore it at home, come to think of it, I would want to give her a good slapping. Am I a bad person?”

Tennis’s eloquent and scathing response to this sexist-Gestapo horror jolted me into a terrible realization: Though we live in a democracy, we spend the majority of our lives living under authoritarianism. When you go to work, you invariably end up working for a boss. Even a nice boss is still a boss; the workplace is not a democracy. Small wonder that most of us, frustrated and humiliated in a thousand small ways at work, have no strength left to take part in the life of the republic.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2007/06/14/kitty_not_happy/

It's been insufferable to sit through countless condemnations of Jimmy Carter - who, a few days ago, said simply what everyone else in the country already believes - which all take the exact same shape: "Jimmy Carter, look in the mirror." "Is this a case of the pot calling the kettle black?" "Carter belongs in peanut gallery."

In fact, Carter was a fine president, inasmuch as that means anything. That he is not considered one speaks volumes about what we consider "great" in our presidents.

Look at the usual reasons for consigning Carter to the dustbin.

"He was only elected to one term." So what? Grant was elected to two terms, and no one considers him a great president. And Lincoln, our greatest president, only served a month over four years. This means nothing.

"What about the economic situation?" FDR governed during a far worse economic crisis that lasted at least until his third term. In addition, the crisis began during Nixon's administration and continued through Reagan's first term.

"He didn't get anything accomplished." Carter, a Washington outsider, was deeply unpopular with his own party. Despite the fact that the Democrats controlled Congress, they refused to work with Carter and constantly belittled him to the press. It's telling that everyone remembers Carter's embarrassing "fight" with a rabbit, but no one remembers Reagan joking that he had outlawed Russia "forever," and "we begin bombing in five minutes." Despite these obstacles, he retained a relatively modest foreign policy and managed to secure a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt.

"He allowed the overthrow of the Shah." This convenient untruth allows us to blame Carter for the current Iran "crisis." The truth is, the Shah was a tyrant who was overwhelmingly unpopular in Iran. One doesn't have to approve of the Ayatollah Khomeini to believe that the U.S. had no more right to prevent his taking power than Iran would have the right to overthrow President Bush.

"What about the hostage crisis?" Well, what about it? What was he supposed to do, declare war on Iran? In fact, Carter handled the kidnapping with dignity, considering he was under assault from all sides for not starting a war.

Alas, this crisis probably sealed Carter's historical fate. Giuliani, in the first Republican debate this year, told a flat-out lie: “[Iranian President Ahmadinjad] has to look at an American President and he has to see Ronald Reagan. Remember, they looked in Ronald Reagan’s eyes, and in two minutes, they released the hostages.”

In fact, Carter had secured the release of the hostages by working nonstop on his last night in office. Unfortunately, their release coincided with Reagan's inauguration, leading many to believe, falsely, that the Iranians had been alarmed by the election of an old movie star whose biggest coup during the campaign had been to chuckle a harmless-old-codger laugh at Carter and quip, "There you go again!"

In fact, speaking of Ronald Reagan, who expanded the power of the president back to pre-Watergate days, hacked brutally at the welfare state and cast countless Americans into poverty and darkness, cracked down on civil liberties and popular government in a manner that even Nixon never dared, unnecessarily revived the receding Cold War and did his best to stave off its end (the myth that Reagan and Gorbachev share credit for the fall of the Soviet Union is just that - a myth; as one Gorbachev aide has said, the U.S.'s flailing show of fake-aggressiveness only gave ammunition to the hard-liners in the Kremlin), and finally sold weapons to Iran so he could illegally finance a private war in Nicaragua - compared to that, Carter was a bad president?

But perhaps it's true. Carter wasn't a great president. He is something much more important: He is a great citizen.

When Carter bid farewell to the Oval Office on January 14, 1981, he said this:

"In a few days, I will lay down my official responsibilities in this office -- to take up once more the only title in our democracy superior to that of president, the title of citizen."

In the years since 1981, Carter has been one of the most outspoken and honorable people to hold that honorable title. May he serve as an example for many years to come.

Just because you've mastered the art of "foreign policy" talk doesn't mean you know what you're talking about. One thing I've noticed about over-reaching discussions of foreign affairs - and I mean serious journals as much as blogs - is that vague air of unreality that hangs about them. It's as if the writers aren't talking about real places where real people live, but about abstract entities - "Iran" as a concept, not "Iran" the complicated real-world place where inconvenient facts pile up to interfere with your theory-making.

Nothing proves this more than the persistent myth that American foreign policy is forever torn between two philosophies: "idealism" and "realism." Nothing in American history supports the view that these are our only two options, or even that they are particularly different options. Yet year after year, scholars and pundits and politicians alike continue to pontificate on the epic struggle between the starry-eyed idealists and cold, reasoning realists who dictate which countries we are to bomb this year, and which countries we are to merely enact punishing embargoes against.

Just look at this review, in the New York Times, of a new biography of George Kennan, the State Department hack whose notorious 8,000 word 1946 telegram gave the Washington oligarchs ammunition to start the Cold War. The reviewer, James Traub, bends over backwards to praise Kennan. He is possessed of an "extraordinarily fine-grained and exacting sensibility," "a penetrating and lucid intellect," with "the great Protestant virtues" deeply ingrained in him, and yet full of "humility." He also writes "magisterial prose" on the level of Hemingway. The review closes by praising his "courage" and "the greatness of his character." When the biographer, an even bigger fan, claims that Kennan is "a better writer and a better thinker" than Henry Adams, Traub allows only that it "may be true."

So it comes as something of a shock, near the end, to learn this:

Kennan made no secret of his low regard for the wisdom of the common man, and thus for the practice of a so-called democratic, as opposed to a professional, foreign policy. But Lukacs also notes that in the late ’30s — as Hitler’s Germany rose to power — Kennan began writing a book proposing that America adopt a more authoritarian model of government in which both immigration and suffrage would be curtailed. Kennan could not bring himself to despise Germany before, during or after the war. . . . The predicament of ordinary people seems not to have moved him much.

It can't be much of a coincidence that the universally admired "architect of the Cold War," who ushered in an era that saw free politics smashed and honest citizens deprived of their jobs for daring to disagree with the oligarchs' foreign policy, that saw anti-communism elevated to the level of a state religion, that paved the road for Senator McCarthy's demagogy, "could not bring himself to despise" Nazi Germany. Like the Washington insiders of the 1930s who clamored for a "Mussolini" to step in and take charge, he thought we could even have learned a thing or two from them. Such is the stuff of "realism"!

As Traub has it, it was disagreement with the "realist" policy represented by Kennan - and, later, Henry Kissinger, that has led so many to support President Bush's "policy of democracy promotion." This leads Traub to a truly stunning conclusion, though he presents it as if it were a well-known fact:

Many of the president’s harshest detractors accept the legitimacy of this mission . . . even if they doubt the methods. Wilsonian idealism, as Kissinger himself once recognized, is America’s default foreign policy. Kennan’s “realism” — the policy of prudence and self-restraint — is the path usually not taken.

The fact is that Americans knew nothing of "Wilsonian idealism" until Wilson himself forced it on them. Americans had been cheerfully minding their own business since the birth of the republic. But as Walter Karp ruefully observed: "Nothing in America's political experience as a nation had prepared Americans for Woodrow Wilson." It was no coincidence, either, that Wilson's triumph over his fellow Americans expressed itself not just in dragging them off to Europe to fight in a war they had no stake in save "making the world safe for democracy," but also in destroying democracy at home. Anyone overheard criticizing the war, or even the president, was liable to wind up in prison. By the time Wilson went off to Europe to help his fellow conquerors carve up the defeated nations, democracy had been crushed in America. All that was left to America's silenced, bullied, embittered citizens was to kick Wilson's successor out of office by one of the largest landslides in history.

Thus two great moments in American foreign policy, one led by "idealists," the other by "realists." Consider that when President Bush decided to declare war on Iraq, he was praised for being both a realist and an idealist, wisely acting on behalf of America's "interests" and nobly setting out to save an oppressed people from a dictator. It was a foreign policy pundit's dream come true.

Now that the war has turned into an ignoble occupation, pundits and politicians call for a healthy dose of "realism" to save us from Bush's reckless idealism. Good old Henry Kissinger never would've gotten us into this mess! It's hard to imagine a more bankrupt, pathetic pretense.

I stumbled on this great article exploring the link between Tony Blair and Britpop; both ascendant in 1997, and now, a decade later, both buried in history's dustbin. The only real complain I have about the article is its description of "Live Forever" and "Wonderwall" as songs of "infinite cheer." Disappointment and failure were what Oasis were born to; their vainglorious refusal to accept that as their lot in life, that determined arrogance and swagger that was so bemusing to Americans, made perfect sense at home.

As the article notes: "The proudly working-class [Noel] Gallagher was the kind of apathetic young person that 18 years of Conservative rule had created." Labour's triumph, briefly, made many feel that something different was possible. With Blair about to plod out of office in more-or-less disgrace, it's poignant to read something like this:

In February 1996, Blair attended the Brit Awards. When Oasis sauntered onstage to accept an award, a blissful Gallagher exclaimed, "There are seven people in this room tonight who are giving a little bit of hope." He named all five members of the band, the president of their label, and Blair. "If you got anything about you, you go up and shake Tony Blair's hand. Power to the people!"

Maybe Blair was just hitching a ride on a star, as Harold Wilson had done with The Beatles. But the whole country was along for the ride.

I usually manage to find a way to avoid candidates' debates, despite that familiar tugging feeling that I really should watch them. But when my girlfriend and I stumbled across the second Republican debate while flipping channels at about 12:30 a.m. tonight, we were sucked in immediately. From moment to moment, as the questions rolled on and the camera flashed from candidate to candidate, we grew more and more appalled and disheartened.

It wasn't so much the opinions on display; it was, all things considered, a more diverse mix than you'd expect. There was just something ugly going on. A question about a possible terrorist scenario unleashed some genuinely creepy responses. I braced myself for the inevitable, unbearable "24" reference, and I didn't have to wait long. John McCain, to his credit, stood firmly against torture. But his plea for the importance of decency to your enemies didn't make much of a dent; the others took it as an opportunity to bleat about presidential responsibility. Mitt Romney's sneering machismo left a particularly bad taste in my mouth.

Then one of the moderators turned to Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, who hadn't said much during the evening. "Congressman Paul, I believe you are the only man on the stage who opposes the war in Iraq," he noted. "Are you out of step with your party? Is your party out of step with the rest of the world? If either of those is the case, why are you seeking its nomination?"

Paul responded with an astonishing defense of the Republican Party's ancient tradition of "a noninterventionist foreign policy." When the moderator asked if Sept. 11 hadn't made that ancient tradition irrelevant, he continued: "There's a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican party. It is the constitutional position. It is the advice of the Founders to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy, stay out of entangling alliances, be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them.

"Just think of the tremendous improvement - relationships with Vietnam. We lost 60,000 men. We came home in defeat. Now we go over there and invest in Vietnam. So there's a lot of merit to the advice of the Founders and following the Constitution."

Paul even brought up the sacred name of the party saint, Ronald Reagan, recalling his warning against meddling in "the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics," which had inevitably stirred up the venomous sentiments that gave ammunition to bin Laden's vicious henchmen. After all, he asked, what would we think "if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us."

It was a truly startling moment. Paul couldn't have wrecked the mood more if he'd simply heaved a bomb into the hall. His crime, of course, was to take the supposed precepts of the Republican Party - a modest-sized federal government, a foreign policy without imperial ambitions and adherence to the beliefs of the Founders - seriously. He was speaking a different language than any of the other candidates, and you could feel the entire room slow to a halt, trying to absorb what had just been said.

"Holy shit," I muttered to Alyson, barely able to believe what I'd just heard.

Then Rudy Giuliani ("Mayor Giuliani," the moderator kept calling him, reminding me of the judge who kept calling William Jennings Bryan "Colonel" in Inherit the Wind) stepped in to rescue the moment. He'd been hanging back so far in the debate, keeping a straight face and choosing his words carefully. But his liberal social policies weren't doing so well with this South Carolina audience, so he leaped on Paul's words like a starving man going after a freshly grilled steak.

"That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.” Giuliani blurted out the first words of his rebuttal; by the end, as the applause swelled about him, he seemed as imperious as Mussolini. All you had to do was mention That Day, and the great man felt himself to be a Great Man again; sweep all that complicated business away and revel in the presence of the savior of a city. If only you would let him be the savior of a nation!

Then he stuck the knife in: "I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that." A bully's taunt, and an especially vicious one coming from the party frontrunner and aimed at a virtual unknown.

But Paul didn't back down: “I believe the CIA is correct when it warns us about blowback. We overthrew the Iranian government in 1953 and their taking the hostages was the reaction. This dynamic persists, and we ignore it at our risk. They’re not attacking us because we’re rich and free, they’re attacking us because we’re over there.”

Giuliani sputtered. But the moderator quickly changed the subject, sensing that a truly vicious storm was about to be unleashed, sweeping the carefully arranged debate off its tracks and plunging it into total chaos. For party debates were not designed to argue over the very purpose of the party itself. To question the president is one thing; to suggest that the party itself has gone astray - that is truly unforgivable.

As the debate ended and Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes presided over the postdebate debate, the official line was that Rudy Giuliani had stolen the show with his dazzling retort to the contemptuous Ron Paul. His response was "from the heart," Giuliani burbled to the grinning twosome. Giuliani's response was "excellent," said John McCain, on next - after all, America was at war with an "evil force," he added. Another commentator popped on, citing results he'd garnered from talking to people in the crowd, whom he couldn't name, of course; the consensus, he said, was that Paul had disgraced himself by suggesting that "America" was responsible for 9/11.

At the bottom of the screen, a number invited the viewer to text-message their vote for the winner of the debate. Shortly after 11 p.m., the first results of the text-message poll came in. In the lead, with 30 percent, was none other than Ron Paul.

The American Republic is not a phrase you hear thrown around much these days.

One nation, under God. Remember that? We recited that every morning, without much thinking about it, putting our hands on our hearts. I remember a few guys in second grade liked to salute, but I always preferred the hand-on-heart gesture. I remember being weirded out by the "under God" part, since no one in school ever mentioned God, and yet no one seemed to notice that he was right there smack in the middle of something every kid had to say every day! It was an early lesson in not-thinking-about-what-you're-saying, a technique that's gotten me through more group presentations than I can count.

A few years ago, when some showoff atheist tried to get the offending phrase banned, several people expressed their disgust with the fellow. When I pointed out how weird it was that we even make our kids pledge allegiance to the country every morning, they shrugged: That's the way it's always been. You can't change it.

So it is with the American Nation. Its emblems - the flag, the pledge, the eagle, the trappings of militarism and jingoism - are meant to look everlasting and omnipresent. They've always been here, they seem to declare. They'll always be here. You can't change it; you might as well try to pull down a mountain.

And yet. The nation is not the whole story. The pledge mentions not just a "nation," but the republic, for which [the flag] stands. The Republic is what stands behind the shrieking avian chorus of presidents and senators and pundits and talk-show hosts; the Republic is what politicians praise in one breath and betray in the next; the Republic is what America is. Founded on a slew of propositions - "conceived in liberty," "all men are created equal," "of the people, by the people, for the people" - that represented the best impulses of the Enlightenment, brought down to earth in a commonwealth of small republics that had set out to create the freest country in the world.

The Republic is founded on the notion of constant change. If you don't like your mayor, kick him out and vote yourself a new one. If you don't like a law, petition to get it changed. In theory, at least, each citizen has the power to effect change, and this dangerous fact lies behind much of our politics. The struggle between the "friends of liberty," in Madison's phrase, and those who seek to safeguard the Nation's power to look invincible and forever out of reach, may not be the only story worth telling in our Republic, but it is the most interesting story.

This blog is a lone citizen's attempt to revive the kind of talk you heard in the old days, the kind of language that reveals the degraded political discourse of our day as nonstop apologies for corrupt power and gutless pandering, the kind of writing that makes you want to go out and do something. At least, that's what I hope it will be. The political writers I like - Jefferson, Madison, Gibbon, Machiavelli, Tocqueville - did that for me; hopefully I can do it for someone else.

You won't find many of the things here you might expect to find in a political blog. I'm not interested in why some people think Barack Obama "isn't really black" because he grew up in Hawaii. Nor will you find diligent explanations of how "the free market" cures all ills. Nor will you hear all our problems consigned to a drawer and dismissed as the inevitable legacy of "imperialism," "entrenched racism," "institutionalized capitalism," or whatever other empty phrases people like to use as an excuse for not thinking about politics, for the most important thing anyone needs to know about politics is that people, not "institutions," govern our lives. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise has succumbed to the first pretext of cynicism, that what people do doesn't really matter. And if you don't think widespread cynicism serves the interests of our leaders far better than "political naivete" or "idealism" ever could, you haven't been paying attention.

Of course, I'll probably talk about other things, too. That's the way I am.