The Empty Chamber (reprise)

I've always been a little ambivalent about the "broken branch" thesis. On the one hand, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein make a good case that things have gone downhill in both houses of Congress since the glory days of Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn. George Packer has made the same argument, specifically about the Senate, in The New Yorker. Actually, no one has issued the indictment more eloquently than former Senator John Glenn. Looking back on his long career, he writes:

In my twenty-two years in the Senate, I had watched the legislative process change. There was always partisanship--that was the nature of the system. Although it produced disagreement and debate, it ultimately forged budgets and laws on which reasonable people could differ but that worked for most. In general, lawmakers performed their duties in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

This was no longer the case. By the 1994 election, we had single-issue candidates, the demonization of government, the sneering dismissal of opposing points of view, a willingness to indulge the few at the expense of the many, and the smug rejection of the claims of entire segments of society to any portion of the government's resources. Respectful disagreement had vanished. Poisonous distrust, accusation, and attack had replaced it.

On the other hand, sometimes it seems to me that maybe the good old days weren't all they're cracked up to be--maybe, as a wag once suggested, they never were! Certainly, the vicious caning of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts by South Carolina's Preston Brooks in 1856 (pictured above) hardly qualifies as "respectful disagreement."

On the third hand, you can make the case that what's wrong with Congress is that its powers have been usurped by an all-consuming executive branch whose mandate comes from what James Madison referred to as "the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." Or you could argue that Congress has simply abdicated while the executive--and the judiciary--have been flexing their muscles. Either way, the explanation for Congressional irresponsibility starts to sound like the old saw about academic politics: it's vicious precisely because "the stakes are so low."

January 25, 2012 update: There's an interesting story in today's Politico on the GOP legislative agenda--interesting in part because it features Rep. Steve Stivers.

September 24, 2012 update: Two books about Congress, one of them Mann and Ornstein's It's Even Worse Than It Looks, are reviewed by Ezra Klein in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books. It's premium content, so here's hoping this link will work.

Spring 2012 Glenn Fellows with Dr. Gee

From left to right: Zach Prouty, Shannon Ryan, Erin Ryan, Alex Polivka, President Gee, Drew Calabro, Melanie Kaufman, Eric Nash, Evann Heidersbach, David Cameruca.

Spring 2012 Glenn Fellows at Air and Space Museum

Posing in front of Friendship 7, from left to right: Zach Prouty, Alex Polivka, Erin Ryan, Shannon Ryan, Dave Cameruca, Melanie Kaufman, Air and Space docent Larry McKinley, Drew Calabro, Evann Heidersbach, Eric Nash. Photo by Michael McCandlish.

This is an exciting time for staffers at the Udvar-Hazy branch of Air and Space, which takes possession this week of the space shuttle Discovery. There's a lead article about Discovery in today's Washington Post.

April 17, 2012 update: See photo below, taken on the Mall this morning, of Discovery on the back of a 747 and escorted by a jet fighter, en route to Dulles and Udvar-Hazy.

Why There Is No Socialism in America (Reprise)

In a lecture reprinted by The New York Review of Books, (now the late) Tony Judt of New York University tells us that this query—why is there no socialism in America?—was posed a century ago by a German sociologist, Werner Sombart. The question remains pertinent, for reasons that I try to explain below, despite the enactment of a great deal of “social democratic” legislation in the course of the twentieth century.

Judt’s lecture explores some of the many answers that have been formulated in response to Sombart’s question. I was surprised, however, that Judt never mentions Louis Hartz, a political philosopher with an original take on American political history that he published during the McCarthy Era as The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, 1955).

Somewhat surprisingly, Hartz’s answer boils down to this: there can be no genuine socialism in America because there was never any genuine conservatism here. And we have no conservatives because in the New World there was no Old Order to conserve. Early settlers came to the British colonies in North America in an effort to get away from vestiges of feudalism (primogeniture and the divine right of kings, for example) that retained their oppressive potency in Europe. We Americans are the descendants of religious dissenters and others who voted with their feet against the Old Order. The deal was sealed when our few remaining Tories, aristocrats, and monarchists escaped, or were chased, to Canada after the American Revolution.

Canada, in fact, proves Hartz’s point. Even today there are a few honest-to-God Tories, and roughly the same number of authentic socialists in Canada, and neither feels obliged to offer apologies for itself. The result, to take just one example, is that the Canadians were able to create something akin to socialized medicine; it couldn’t be rejected, as it has been in the U.S., as part of a wholly alien tradition.

In the United States, by contrast, liberalism (think John Locke, for whom society is “atomistic,” i.e., the sum of its individual parts) is the only tradition we have. Some American liberals may be inclined to promote equality, even at the expense of personal liberty; Hartz calls them “liberal democrats.” Others may favor liberty over equality; Hartz calls them “liberal whigs.” We have neither a Far Right reminiscing about an organic, corporate order dominated by a benign and paternalistic gentry, nor a Far Left intent on overthrowing bourgeois capitalism and replacing it with a collectivist Social Welfare state (i.e., a Workers’ Paradise). The good news is that there is nothing in our tradition for fascism to feed on. Never mind all the dire warnings over the years about indigenous fascism that have been issued by the Far Left; the closest we’ve ever come was Father Coughlin in the 1930s, and that wasn’t very close. BTW, that's Ben Shahn's image of Father Coughlin and his Hitlerian fist pump up top.

The result, according to Hartz, is that American politics oscillates between the two “extremes” of liberal democracy and liberal whiggery, which aren’t extreme at all, but variations on the same theme. Thus, it is very much in the Hartzian tradition for Judt to pose the following musical question about American politics: “Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?” It’s because our liberal tradition is so capacious it makes everything else seem beyond the pale.

In the United States, the liberal democrats (i.e., people like Judt) have traditionally had the stronger hand. This is because they (unlike, say, the author of Federalist No. 10) have no real reservations about majority rule, and they know how to appeal to majoritarian instincts, some of which are not very honorable (e.g., the abolition of debts). Liberal whigs (e.g., today’s Republicans) have a harder time of it, because if they articulate their principles clearly they run the risk of offending the many who stand to profit from “majority tyranny.” Still, the liberal whigs are able to compete by planting seeds of fear and doubt in the American democrat. Conjuring up the “rags to riches” fantasy (e.g., Andrew Carnegie’s “gospel of wealth”) allows the American right, such as it is, to enjoy what Hartz called the Great Law of Whig Compensation, by which he meant that for the death of Hamilton (and genuine Toryism) they are rewarded with the perpetual triumph of McKinley (an Ohioan, of course). You take what you can get. Come to think of it, Hartz himself was born in Youngstown, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants.

Still with me? Hang on, there’s just a bit more. Implicit in Hartz’s description of a consensual and monotonous liberal order is the idea that the parameters of American political discourse are unusually narrow. Tony Judt is on exactly the same page when he says, apologizing for the academic jargon, that the great shortcoming of American politics is discursive. One of the effects of that is that the stakes of American politics are fairly low, though politicians do everything they can to try to make them seem much higher.

Some will note that the U.S. has had its collectivist moments: the Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century; the New Deal during the Great Depression; Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. And that is true, though each was more of an improvisation than part of a Grand Design, which explains why American institutions differ so markedly from their European counterparts. During our spasms of Social Democracy (to use Judt’s term) in the 1900s, the ‘30s, and the ‘60s, we were trying to solve practical problems. We were “muddling through”; we harbored no wish to create a Brave New World. From the days of Benjamin Franklin at least Americans have been practical-minded empiricists (the Branch method, rather than the Root), not theoreticians.

What Judt has to say at the very end of his lecture is extremely interesting. He is clearly disgusted with the American left for not recognizing that it “has something to conserve,” i.e., the collectivist, social democratic heritage of the twentieth century. He notes that the left often seems intent on apologizing for its own legacy. Judt also criticizes the left for not recognizing that the right (thanks largely to George W. Bush, though he doesn’t say that in so many words) has put itself in the awkward position of advocating utopian ideas such as not worrying about budget deficits (“Deficits don’t matter,” according to Dick Cheney) and “making the world safe for democracy.” The right, according to Judt, “has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project.” They ought to feel more uncomfortable in that position than they seem to be.

This, in my view, is astounding, especially when one considers that (quoting Judt again, but now with a bow in the direction of Charles Lindblom) “If we learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences.” (Consider, for example, Hitler’s answer to “the Jewish question,” or Stalin’s answer to the challenge posed by the kulaks--that is, prosperous peasants--whose very existence as a class was an affront to Marxist ideology.) Yes, what we have here is another argument for muddling through.

Spring 2012 Glenn Fellows at the Newseum

From left to right: Erin Ryan, Drew Calabro, Melanie Kaufman, Dave Cameruca, Zach Prouty, Shannon Ryan, Eric Nash. MIA: Evann Heidersbach, Alex Polivka.

Mr. Justice Scalia and the Moritz School of Law (Reprise)

In one of my first posts on this blog I observed that easterners are inclined to dismiss midwesterners as rubes and that Glenn Fellows, who tend to be professionally ambitious and have every reason to be, forget or ignore this at their peril.

There could be no more dramatic example than that provided a few years ago by Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. As Adam Liptak reported in May, 2009, in The New York Times, Justice Scalia, speaking at American University in Washington, D.C., explained to an audience of law students that their chances of landing a clerkship with a Supreme Court justice were slim or none because those plums are reserved for students from America’s most prestigious law schools. According to Liptak, the “hard truth” is that “Over the last six years, the justices have hired about 220 law clerks. Almost half went to Harvard or Yale. Chicago, Stanford, Virginia and Columbia collectively accounted for 50 others.” Liptak reports that “Justice Scalia said he could think of one sort-of exception to this rule favoring the elite schools.” To wit:

"One of my former clerks whom I am the most proud of now sits on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals” in Cincinnati, the justice said, referring to Jeffrey S. Sutton. But Justice Scalia explained that Mr. Sutton had been hired by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. after his retirement and then helped out in Justice Scalia’s chambers. “I wouldn’t have hired Jeff Sutton,” Justice Scalia said. “For God’s sake, he went to Ohio State! And he’s one of the very best clerks I ever had.”

As one can readily imagine, Justice Scalia’s remarks inspired a kerfuffle in Buckeyeland. The Columbus Dispatch reported that Scalia was “not a big fan of OSU law graduates,” and the Ohio State Bar Association objected to the “insult” and issued a sharp rejoinder, arguing that “Intellect, skill and fundamental integrity are not measured by the school someone attends. Birthright, money, LSAT scores and magazine rankings of law schools are not the standards by which this profession judges itself.” My reading of this story is that Justice Scalia was conveying brute facts that are not really in dispute, and that his enthusiastic endorsement of Judge Sutton indicates that he understands that the prejudice in favor of elite law schools ultimately is not entirely rational. True, he would seem disinclined to buck the system from which he has profited, yet I think it’s pretty clear that his “For God’s sake” remark was intended as irony. They learn that sort of thing at the elite law schools, such as Harvard, where Scalia earned his law degree.

September 14, 2009, update: Further evidence that Harvard law graduates tend to be lovers of irony comes from an AP story that Lawrence Hurley cites in his Supreme Court blog, Washington Briefs. Elitist joke alert: Asked if too many of the justices came from elite law schools, Chief Justice John Roberts says no—some went to Yale (AP).

Spring 2012 Glenn Fellows at Library of Congress

From left to right: Dave Cameruca, Eric Nash, Drew Calabro, Shannon Ryan, Evann Heidersbach, Erin Ryan, Melanie Kaufman, Alex Polivka, Zach Prouty, K. Kolson. Photo by M. McCandlish.