On Sunday, November 5, 2006, Michael Kinsley wrote
a long essay in The Times Book Review called Election Day. Roughly
three and one-half pages in length, it was given pride of place;
it began on the first page. This apparently signifies that the editor
of the Book Review thought it important. The essay, as you would
guess from its title, is about American politics -- primarily, it
seems, about what is wrong with American politics. (Plenty is wrong
with them.) In the three and one-half pages Kinsley discusses, or
at least mentions, ten books on politics, including ones by a Senator,
professors, and various pundits. But, when all the sturm und drang
is done, what does Kinsley say is the biggest problem in American
politics today? Let me quote him (emphases added):
"In my view, the worst form of cheating in American
democracy today is intellectual dishonesty. The conversation in
our democracy is dominated by disingenuousness. Candidates and partisan
commentators strike poses of outrage that they don't really feel,
take positions that they would not take if the shoe was on the other
foot (e.g., criticizing Bush when you gave Clinton a pass, or vice
versa), feel no obligation toward logical consistency."
The great flaw in American democracy is not electoral
irregularities, purposeful or accidental. It's not money (which,
even under current law, cannot in the end actually buy votes). It's
not even the inexplicable failure of all other Americans to vote
my way or of politicians to enact my own agenda. It's not the broken
promises and the outright lying, although we're getting close. The
biggest flaw in our democracy is, as I say, the enormous tolerance
for intellectual dishonesty. Politicians are held to account for
outright lies, but there seems to be no sanction against saying
things you obviously don't believe. There is no reward for logical
consistency, and no punishment for changing your story depending
on the circumstances. Yet one minor exercise in disingenuousness
can easily have a greater impact on an election than any number
of crooked voting machines. And it seems to me, though I can't prove
it, that this problem is getting worse and worse.
Kinsley goes on to discuss what he calls "the
most corrupt" thing Bush did during the 2000 election crisis.
It involved "Intellectual dishonesty" and I have to admit
to not having heard of it before and to being thunderstruck by it:
A few days before the 2000 election, the Bush team
started assembling people to deal with a possible problem: what
if Bush won the popular vote but Gore carried the Electoral College.
They decided on, and were prepared to begin, a big campaign to convince
the citizenry that it would be wrong for Gore to take office under
those circumstances. And they intended to create a tidal wave of
pressure on Gore's electors to vote for Bush, which arguably the
electors, as free agents, have the authority to do. In the event,
of course, the result was precisely the opposite, and immediately
the Bushies launched into precisely the opposite argument: the Electoral
College is a vital part of our Constitution, electors are not free
agents, threatening the Electoral College result would be thumbing
your nose at the founding fathers, and so on. Gore, by the way,
never did challenge the Electoral College, although some advisers
urged him to do so.
Of all the things Bush did and said during the 2000
election crisis, this having-it-both-ways is the most corrupt. It
was reported before the election and is uncontested, but no one
seems to care, because so much of our politics is like that. And
no electoral reform can fix this problem. Intellectual dishonesty
can't be banned or regulated or "capped" like money. The
only way it can be brought under control is if people start voting
against it. If they did, the problem would go away. That's democracy.
Kinsley's view is most congenial to this author since,
for several years, I have been saying in blogs and books that dishonesty
in all its forms -- outright lies, spin, hypocrisy, failures of
disclosure, etc. -- is the single most important problem facing
this country. It is an even greater problem than the widespread
lack of competence -- which is itself a major problem -- because
it is very hard to act competently when one is acting on the basis
of false information. So it is nice to see, for the first time,
a leading member of the establishment media say that intellectual
dishonesty -- with its associated lack of concern for the truthfulness
or accuracy of one's statements -- is the major problem we face.
One hopes the rest of the mainstream media picks up the theme, and,
since it is Michael Kinsley who has now said it, perhaps this will
happen. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
One of the reasons for not holding one's breath, for skepticism,
is that the mainstream media, like politicians themselves, seems
to place relatively little value on truth. It is more concerned
to report the latest White House banalities, or to report imbecilic
statements in order to supposedly insure that both sides are presented,
than it is in the truth.
One of the worst correlative aspects of the media's
failure to really care about the truth, while pretending the opposite
and using that pretense as an excuse for reporting horrendous political
claptrap under the guise of presenting both sides, is the media's
lack of concern with or knowledge about history and
for what history shows. (If an event is more than a few days old,
the media has little interest in it.) To know no history, of course,
and not to care about what it shows, is a method of enabling the
perpetration on the public of dishonest views that would be exploded
by (even slight) knowledge of historical facts. It is a method,
that is, of enabling pols to fool the public. There was a wonderful
example of this in a column by David Brooks of the Times last Thursday.
Three and a half years after we invaded Iraq, three and a half years
too late, Brooks said the following:
"Policy makers are again considering fundamental
changes in our Iraq policy, but as they do I hope they read Elie
Kedourie's essay. 'The Kingdom of Iraq: A Retrospect'."
Kedourie, a Baghdad-born Jew, published the essay
in 1970. It's a history of the regime the British helped establish
over 80 years ago, but it captures an idea that is truer now than
ever: Disorder is endemic to Iraq. Today's crisis is not three years
old. It's worse now, but the crisis is perpetual. This is a bomb
of a nation.
"Brief as it is, the record of the kingdom of
Iraq is full of bloodshed, treason and rapine," Kedourie wrote.
And his is a Gibbonesque tale of horror. There is
the endless Shiite-Sunni fighting. There is a massacre of the Assyrians,
which is celebrated rapturously in downtown Baghdad. Children are
gunned down from airplanes. Tribal wars flare and families are destroyed.
A Sunni writer insults the Shiites and the subsequent rioters murder
students and policemen. A former prime minister is found on the
street by a mob, killed, and his body is reduced to pulp as cars
run him over in joyous retribution.
Kedourie described "a country riven by obscure
and malevolent factions, unsettled by the war and its aftermath."
He observed, "The collapse of the old order had awakened vast
cupidities and revived venomous hatreds."
The British tried to encourage responsible Iraqi self-government,
to no avail. "The political ambitions of the Shia religious
headquarters have always lain in the direction of theocratic domination,"
a British official reported in 1923. They "have no motive for
refraining from sacrificing the interests of Iraq to those which
they conceive to be their own."
The Iraq of his youth, Kedourie concluded, "was
a make-believe kingdom built on false pretenses." He quoted
a British report from 1936, which noted that the Iraqi government
would never be a machine based on law that treated citizens impartially,
but would always be based on tribal favoritism and personal relationships.
Iraq, Kedourie said, faced two alternatives: "Either the country
would be plunged into chaos or its population should become universally
the clients and dependents of an omnipotent but capricious and unstable
government." There is, he wrote, no third option.
Now, I ask you, why did the press not concern itself
with Kedourie's essay back when it would have counted, in 2003 during
the run-up to war? The answer, I'm afraid, is what is often said
here. The press doesn't care about history. If it didn't happen
yesterday, it might as well not have happened. (Politicians in Congress,
I note, have access to extensive intellectual resources and research
capabilities, even if they themselves are not very knowledgeable
or smart. But, like the press, they have no interest in history
either.) By not caring about history, by ignoring Kedourie when
knowing what he had said might have done the rest of us some good,
the press enabled the liars in the White House to get us into a
war partially on the claim that we would create a model democracy
in Iraq. There were other reasons too why the Pretexter-In-Chief
was able to fool us, but the media's lack of concern with history,
it's ignoring of writers like Kedourie, was one of the relevant
reasons.
As someone with a deep interest in history, I read
all the history and biography I can get to, and believe deeply in
Harry Truman's aphorism that there is nothing new under the sun
except the history that you don't know. It seems pretty plain that
history presents recurrent patterns -- which is the basis of Steven
Kinzner's marvelous book entitled Overthrow: America's Century Of
Regime Change From Hawaii To Iraq. Sometimes, one finds historical
analogs where one did not previously know they exist. For example,
by the time one is even a quarter done with the recent biography
of Julius Caesar entitled Caesar: Life Of A Colossus, by Adrian
Goldsworthy, one is well aware of similarities between the Roman
politics of Caesar's day and the politics of our own. Roman leaders
were pretty much a hereditary group (the equivalent of Bushes, Kennedys,
Gores, etc.) They spent a bundle on political campaigns (just like
today) and often went into debt to finance them (like today). They
made fortunes off politics and empire (as current pols and contractors
do). Bribery and extortion were big. (Today we call them campaign
contributions.) While the Roman pols and the other aristos were
rich, the poor were very numerous and were crammed into very crowded
slums (as in our big cites). When the Roman pols felt like it, they
violated the law or changed it to suit their purposes (like George
Bush). The only thing I can think of offhand that was different
is that many of the most important Roman leaders were military men
who had risked their lives in battle (Lyndon Johnson was not, Richard
Nixon was not, George Bush and Dick Cheney are not), and it was
fairly common to simply kill your enemies and even to have their
heads paraded around on a pole. We're not there yet, although leaders'
enemies are simply killed in lots of other countries.
Another work of history that presents some interesting
parallels right from the get go is The Barbary Wars, by Frank Lambert.
It turns out that to buy favor -- in this case to enable their oceanic
commerce to ply the seas without being hijacked by Barbary pirates
-- the great powers of Europe, and for awhile the US too, simply
bribed the Barbary states. England, France, Spain, many others too
-- they would all pay large sums to the Barbary States (to the Barbarians),
would give lavish presents to the Barbary leaders, and would give
the Barbarians warships and cannons, i.e., would give them implements
of war which sometimes were turned back on the givers. At first
the US did the same. To me, all this doesn't sound so different
from what the US has now been doing for many decades in the 20th
and 21st centuries. To buy allies we give huge sums of money to
middle eastern and far eastern nations that to a large extent despise
us (we call it foreign aid sometimes), and we give them or sell
them vast amounts of military equipment which sometimes gets turned
back against us or our allies. I wonder whether -- I don't know,
but wonder whether -- there is a lesson in the fact that we eventually
had to fight the Barbarians.
Well, even if it doesn't precisely repeat itself,
history does occur in patterns. It is thus a disaster that politicians
and the press care nothing about it and that our kids are taught
less and less of it. This writer learned decades ago that, when
there is something so systemically wrong as the wide-ranging lack
of concern for history, there is little or nothing that an individual
can do about it on a wide-ranging basis. Rather, the most one can
do is to tend one's own backyard, one's own garden, in a way that
makes a tiny, even an infinitesimal, dent in the problem. To that
end the Massachusetts School of Law has requested the state's permission
to begin an undergraduate program in history and law, a program
in which students would concentrate in and could get a degree in
only a single major, history and law. As part of the program, students
would learn American history from A to Z, would learn about the
relationship between American and world history, would learn the
history of scientific ideas, mathematical ideas, economic ideas,
etc. There would also be courses in the crucial subject of the lessons
of history. This topic is often neglected today because historians,
it would appear, unlike Kinzner, seem to be experts in and to think
in terms of given historical periods rather than in terms of recurrent
patterns that continually make themselves felt and are making themselves
felt today. (Although there can, of course, be argument over what
the patterns are, I think extensive agreement -- consensus -- might
well develop if the matter were extensively studied and that consensus
may even, in fact, exist already.) And, to address a major problem
of modern higher education, students would have to write and write
and write, on the twin theories that one learns how to write by
writing and that clear writing makes for clear thinking. As well,
making use of MSL's extensive experience and consequent know-how
in making rigorous education available inexpensively (the law school's
tuition is only 40 to 45 percent of the average in New England),
the tuition for what will be a very rigorous undergraduate program
would be only about $6,000 per year.
We hope the state will permit this program to be undertaken.
It is a beginning to a much needed effort to cure the historical
ignorance that afflicts, and adversely affects, this country. It
may be a beginning only in our own little backyard, our own garden,
but it would be a beginning that lots of people could replicate
elsewhere.
The National Affairs column appears in BC
every couple of weeks.
Lawrence R. Velvel, JD, is the Dean of Massachusetts
School of Law. Click
here to contact Dean Velvel. |