Reason Magazine - Staff > Michael C. Moynihan

Kill Joy

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Living under the bootheel of a dictatorship? An academic study suggests that taking a potshot at your oppressor might lead to greater democracy.

In “Hit or Miss?: The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War,” a working paper published last year by the National Bureau for Economic Research and several other institutions, economists Ben Olken of Harvard and Ben Jones of Northwestern look at 298 attempted and 59 successful assassinations of both autocratic and democratic leaders between 1875 and 2004. They find that “on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy.” Indeed, “transitions to democracy…are 13 percentage points more likely following the assassination of an autocrat than following a failed attempt on an autocrat.” Furthermore, the “effect [of political assassination] is sustained ten years later.” A failed attempt produced a statistically insignificant decrease of one percentage point in the possibility of a successful democratic shift.

Attempts on the lives of democratic leaders, Olken and Jones found, are associated with little political change. “Democratic institutions,” they conclude, “thus appear robust to the assassination of leaders, while autocratic regimes are not.”

The Center of Britain

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

To get a broad sense of what Britain once was, just what necessitated the rise of Margaret Thatcher, ignore the frequently referenced punk lyrics of the late 1970s, so full of manufactured rage at the ruling class (White riot! England’s dreaming! Guns before butter!). Instead, drop Yes, Minister, the classic early 1980’s television comedy of Whitehall perfidy and ministerial incompetence, into the Netflix queue. Or just find the episode “The Compassionate Society”—season two, episode one—in which the show’s protagonist, Minister Jim Hacker, attempts to halt a massive National Health Service (NHS) hospital project which bequeathed to London 500 full-time nurses and doctors but housed not a single patient. Arrayed in defense of the plan are the usual interests: the tub-thumping left-wing union leader (a send up of the militant socialist head of the mineworkers union, Arthur Scargill), Downing Street spinmeisters, and various members of Parliament shilling for self-interested constituents. An advisor defends the project, telling Hacker that one must “sort out the smooth running of the hospital. Having patients around would be no help at all.” It was, unsurprisingly, Prime Minister Thatcher’s favorite episode.

It isn’t hyperbolic to say that this was more or less the government the Iron Lady inherited—a bloated, free-spending state, full of make-work jobs jealously guarded by union toughs. It was a system that Thatcher would help delegitimize and then effectively destroy. The heavy lifting was done (thank you very much) by those heartless Tories, though by 1997 voters decided it was time to return government to the more compassionate hands of Labour.

And Tony Blair’s “New Labour” didn’t win the 1997 election so much as they pushed the Conservative Party to the edge of oblivion. The Tories retreated having lost a massive 178 seats, its biggest defeat in almost a century. For the Conservative Party leadership, it was an existential crisis.

Pop stars that, 10 years previous, excelled in writing songs about the forgotten British miner were now popping champagne corks at Number 10 Downing Street. These would be the years of “Cool Britannia”; Red Wedge was dead. But the honeymoon of pop and politics was mercifully—and predictably—short. Noel Gallagher, guitarist of the seminal 1990s Britpop band Oasis and early adherent of New Labour, soon grumbled that the prime minister was forgetting the working class and acting like an American president. This Tony talked god, was chummy with President Bush, and fancied himself a liberal internationalist. Indeed, the rebranding of Labour, according to Blair biographer Anthony Seldon, resulted in far more criticism from the traditional left than the Tory right. Blair would govern from the center.

Fast-forward to early 2008: Prime Minister Gordon Brown is wildly unpopular and local council elections resulted in Labour’s worst showing in 40 years. Barely a week after the catastrophic defeat, a YouGov poll put Conservative Party support at 49 percent and Labour at 23 percent, its lowest rating since polling records began in the 1930s. (Though it is tempting to blame an easy culprit like Iraq, Labour was 11 points ahead of the Tories just eight months ago, and this week’s Economist leader, which asks if “Gordon Brown is doomed,” doesn’t even reference the war.)

A certain amount of this Labour collapse is attributable to a palatable alternative: Conservative leader David Cameron, the Eton-and-Oxford party boss who professes a love of The Smiths and began a recent Times editorial with the cringe-inducing line “Radiohead are one of my favourite bands.”

But it’s not the pathetic hipster pose that has attracted so much positive attention from both voters and Fleet Street journos, but Cameron's bold (some say facile and opportunistic) attempt to rebrand conservatism in the style of New Labour: "I made changes to and with the Conservative Party over the last 18 months for a very clear purpose, to get us back into the centre ground, to get us into a position where people listen to what we were saying, where we are more in touch with Britain as it is today."

It’s getting crowded in the center of British politics.

Even after his stunning local election victory, Cameron continued to burnish his centrist credentials, writing this week in the lefty paper The Independent that "If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality, if you care about the environment—forget about the Labour Party…If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only we can achieve real change."

Cameron didn’t always consider himself a “true progressive.” When running for Parliament in 2000, he repeatedly dealt the social conservative card, grumbling about legislation that was "anti-family" and warning that it would force the "teaching of homosexuality" into British schools. When he took over the party leadership, Cameron jettisoned the tradition talk and spoke of welcoming gays and lesbians into the party fold, admonishing the Tory old guard for not supporting domestic partnership arrangements. The perpetually peeved Thatcherite Norman Tebbit grumbled that he didn't think "Tory supporters have gone soft, but I think the Tory leadership believes the electors are too soft to take the hard decisions which the country is now facing."

Others argue that the dash to the center—the “modernization”—is vindicated by recent electoral success and recent polling data. "The modernisers were right,” Times columnist and former Tory policy wonk Daniel Finkelstein trumpeted after the election. “Their critics were wrong."

It’s hard to argue with success.

The days following the Conservative rout saw nearly every political columnist on the island considering the future of Gordon Brown. The Spectator wondered what Brown “could learn from Hillary Clinton.” In the 1990s, when Labour was emerging from its punishing wilderness period, it took on countless Clinton operatives as consultants to micromanage its Clintonian rightward drift. But perhaps it’s time for American politicos—i.e. Republicans—to tear a page from the British political playbook.

The political landscape in America is hardly analogous to that of England. Despite Blair’s public piousness, fealty unto God isn’t a prerequisite for a presumptive prime minister. Nor do issues like abortion, the death penalty, or stem-cell research dominate the political culture. British conservatism is in many important ways distinct from its American cousin. But as many American conservatives have noted—David Frum in his book Comeback and his National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg—America too is becoming more socially tolerant and, if the Republican Party is interested in a successful future, a Cameron-like shift to the center on issues such as gay marriage and the drug war is advisable.

As political scientist Morris Fiorina points out in his book Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, both residents of red and blue states are “basically centrists”; American's aren't "red" or "blue" but various shades of purple. As conservative commenter David Brooks pointed out in 2001, "Although there are some real differences between Red and Blue America, there is no fundamental conflict."

Pat Buchanan's declaration at the 1992 Republican convention that there was a "religious war" raging in America, a "war for the soul" of the country, seems preposterous in retrospect. With a strong majority of Americans supporting Roe v. Wade, a clear majority supporting civil unions for gay couples, and the very real possibility of the country electing an African-American president, it's time for the Republican Party to borrow from the Tories if they want to recapture the center ground.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

Flight of the Neocons

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:00:00 EDT

They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, by Jacob Heilbrunn, New York: Doubleday, 336 pages, $26

In 1996 Norman Podhoretz, ex-friend of the left and high priest of neoconservatism, wrote an elegiac essay in Commentary about the movement he had helped to found. Neoconservatism was dead, he argued, but not of intellectual exhaustion or mass ideological defection. It was a victim of its own success. What had previously been a movement of political outsiders—former socialists ambling through “the middle of their journey,” in Lionel Trilling’s phrasing—was now well represented in the corridors of power: on Capitol Hill, in influential think tanks, on the Sunday chat show circuit. It was at last time to shed the neo, to announce the movement’s assimilation into the conservative mainstream. What once were ideological heresies had now become widely accepted banalities.

In They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at the conservative journal The National Interest, retraces the history of Podhoretz’s movement through its wilderness years to its open embrace of the Republican Party and, post-Iraq, its ignominious decline. Heilbrunn has roots in the movement himself—indeed, The National Interest was founded as a foreign policy–focused companion to the neocon journal The Public Interest. Heilbrunn’s breezy, crisply written history eschews the rancor of many recent discussions of neoconservatism in favor of a largely dispassionate account, tracing the movement’s development from its beginnings in the far-left milieu of 1930s and ’40s New York to its death, or grievous wounding, in the White House of George W. Bush.

Those introduced to the vagaries of neoconservative theory after 9/11—that is, most ordinary Americans and nearly every European editorial writer—often overlook the fact that Bush hadn’t paid much heed to the neocons prior to September 11, 2001, and that the movement’s prospects early in the new century had been quite grim. Indeed, it appeared to be in its death throes. As the 1980s drew to a close and the Soviet Union’s desiccated empire finally dissolved, neoconservatism lost its unifying enemy. But then the terror attacks on New York and Washington, as the cliché goes, changed everything.

Heilbrunn’s adumbration of neoconservatism’s left-wing provenance makes for compelling reading—and acts as a useful field guide to the current schisms on the right. It is an exaggeration to suggest, as many pundits have, that the neocon is merely a modified Trotskyist, but many of its intellectual architects did begin their careers on the radical left. Elliott Abrams, the Iran-contra veteran who served as special assistant to the president during George W. Bush’s first term, attended the radical Little Red Schoolhouse in New York City as a child and graduated to membership in the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL). The American Enterprise Institute’s Joshua Muravchik was YPSL’s chairman from 1968 to 1973 and later advised Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign on foreign policy issues. Onetime leftists such as Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and countless other “New York intellectuals,” disgusted by the cognoscenti’s ambivalence toward communism, migrated, at varying speeds and to varying degrees, rightward. But not every neocon emerged from the radical left, and not all of them landed in the GOP. Neoconservatism also enchanted disaffected liberals such as longtime New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who never abandoned the Democratic Party (although he did ultimately break with neoconservatism).

Indeed, most early neocons had little interest in changing allegiances from the Democratic Party. “There was, and remains,” Heilbrunn writes, “a kind of aesthetic revulsion to the Republican Party amongst liberal hawks.” The neoconservative hatred of Richard Nixon—his policy of détente was, they argued, suicidal—provided ammunition for their (long since abandoned) contention that America’s best hope for a vigorous foreign policy was the Democrats. They did back Nixon against George McGovern in 1972, but afterward Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Walt Rostow, Daniel Bell, and other liberal hawks took out an ad in The New York Times urging the Democratic Party to return to “the [foreign policy] tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey.”

Heilbrunn quotes the late William F. Buckley, founder of National Review and doyen of the traditional conservatives, on the neocons’ fetishization of the Democratic senator and liberal hawk Henry “Scoop” Jackson. “The neos wanted a Democrat to enshrine,” Buckley said. “They found someone who was pretty much a welfarist but was anti-Soviet.” The latter position was pre-eminent, the former tolerable. Understanding the widely held misperception of the neocon as a sort of ultra-conservative Republican, Heilbrunn asks the reader to “remember that the neoconservatives did not oppose the idea of welfare itself.”

The neoconservative house organ of the 1970s, The Public Interest, was founded in part, Buckley later wrote, because Irving Kristol “had deemed National Review…too right-wing.” In 1976 Kristol denounced the antipoverty programs birthed by LBJ’s Great Society, but he suggested that the money not be taken out of government hands and instead be used to achieve “some form of national health insurance.” As late as 1993, Kristol would advocate a “conservative welfare state” that, for instance, would “leave Social Security alone—except for being a bit more generous, perhaps.” In the 1980s, like most other neocons, Kristol did embrace supply-side economics, then fashionable among Reaganites, although it is unclear how much of the Arthur Laffer gospel he actually believed.

(In the ’90s, he would express regret over his support for the theory that slashing taxes leads to greater revenues.)

All this leftover leftism made for an occasionally awkward integration into the right. The neocons had been focused primarily on the evils of the Soviet empire, having little time for the free market. As Podhoretz noted in his obituary for neoconservatism, “The neoconservatives did not love commerce, or anything else, more than they loathed Communism.” In other words, it was an ideology short on classical liberalism and limited government—both at least theoretically conservative principles—and long on “rollback” and exporting democracy.

A year after Podhoretz’s self-congratulatory trauermarsch, Bill Kristol, son of neocon founding father Irving Kristol and editor of The Weekly Standard, and David Brooks, also of The Weekly Standard, took to the pages of The Washington Post to inaugurate “National Greatness conservatism.” Critics grumbled that it was simply neoconservatism rebranded. Kristol and Brooks called for a muscular foreign policy and argued that the GOP message of limited government fell far short of a coherent governing philosophy; the Republicans, they wrote, must reconcile themselves to a certain amount of government intervention. The liberal columnist E.J. Dionne was ebullient, proclaiming that with the advent of National Greatness conservatism, “The era of bashing government is ending.” (Proving Podhoretz’s point about the mainstreaming of neoconservatism, both Kristol and Brooks have since matriculated to the New York Times opinion page.)

Libertarians and small-government conservatives were appropriately aghast. Former Reason editor Virginia Postrel wrote a scathing response with Washington Post economics columnist James Glassman, dismissing National Greatness as “wistful nationalism in search of a big project.” The duo opined that “the Cold War is over. So what’s a national-greatness government to do? It could go looking for the next war, hope for another Great Depression, or sponsor a trip to Neptune.” National Review’s Jonah Goldberg hissed in May 2001 that the younger Kristol’s project, by then four years old, was “an allegedly ‘conservative’ cause.” Goldberg was still irritated at the tenor of Kristol’s support of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the 2000 presidential primaries. “During the campaign,” he wrote, “Kristol suggested more than once that to be a Bush supporter was tantamount to being a hostage to evil corporations that put profit above patriotism.” (It was a point McCain would revisit during this campaign when he told Mitt Romney that he served in the Navy “out of patriotism, not for profit.”)

To Heilbrunn, the other important characteristic of neoconservatism is its Jewish roots. In a recent Washington Post op-ed piece debunking myths of neoconservatism, Heil-brunn pooh-poohed the commonly held idea that “neocons are Israeli lackeys” as pure “bunk,” noting that, if anything, they are often further to the right than the Likud Party. But in They Knew They Were Right, Heilbrunn says neoconservatism “is as much a reflection of Jewish immigrant social resentments and status anxiety as a legitimate movement of ideas.” This is a debatable point, but one that doesn’t necessarily contradict his dismissal of the oft-cited Likud-Commentary axis.

Many of neoconservatism’s heaviest hitters are, as is often pointed out, gentiles, and many Jewish intellectuals were, and are, repelled by neoconservatism. Nevertheless, Heilbrunn argues plausibly that the movement was really born “with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, the 1967 war, and the rise of black anti-Semitism in the United States.” The Six Day War, he writes, “gave the first real impetus to the birth of the modern neoconservative movement.” The idea that the world would sit idle as Jews were again attacked—recall that Washington’s unswerving support for Israel began only after that war—galvanized the neocons. Neither did it go unnoticed that the Soviet Union, one of the first countries to recognize Israel at the United Nations in 1949, was now actively assisting both Arab dictatorships and Palestinian terror groups.

The invocation of the Holocaust would be a frequent refrain—and a point of frequent criticism. Neoconservatives constantly cited the Shoah as a reductio ad Hitlerum debating tactic. In 1976 a neocon lobby, the Committee on the Present Danger, stated that the Soviet arms buildup was “reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s rearmament in the 1930s.” Evoking the mass murder of European Jewry, Norman Podhoretz warned in The New York Times against renewed complacency, “For if for the second time in this century, the world were to stand by while a major Jewish community was being destroyed, it would be hard to evade the suspicion that an irresistible will was at work to wipe every last Jew off the face of the earth, to make this planet entirely Judenrein.” Three decades later, in 2004, the Yale computer scientist David Gelernter hyperbolically announced in The Weekly Standard that “the world’s indifference to Saddam resembles its indifference to Hitler.” Heilbrunn could have also included a more recent reference: Podhoretz’s now-notorious essay arguing the “case for bombing Iran,” published last year in Commentary, which compared Israel’s current situation vis-à-vis Iran to Czechoslovakia’s forced immersion in Hitler’s Reich. In a brief debate with Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria on PBS after the piece was published, Podhoretz invoked Hitler four times.

Heilbrunn demonstrates that for the first generation of neoconservatives, the motive for embracing a hawkish foreign policy was this fear of resurgent Nazism. For the second generation, it was an Israel encircled by hostile neighbors, and a visceral dislike of the New Left, parts of which saw the Jewish state through the prism not of victimology but of colonialism. For the newest generation of neocons it was the mass murder of 9/11 and its attendant effects on the so-called Arab street.

In this latest iteration, Heilbrunn convincingly argues, neoconservatism would destroy itself. The Bush administration, which campaigned in 2000 on a policy of nonintervention abroad, had no intention of embracing the neoconservative outlook until the terror attacks of 2001. Condoleezza Rice, Heilbrunn writes, “hewed to her stated course of leaving nation building to the Democrats.” Some neocons shared this distaste for aggressively exporting democracy. In her famous 1979 essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which blasted President Carter’s “human rights”–centered foreign policy and argued for toleration of certain America-friendly, anti-communist authoritarian regimes, the neocon heroine Jeane Kirkpatrick argued that “the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances…is belied by an enormous body of evidence based on the experience of dozens of countries which have attempted with more or less (usually less) success to move from autocratic to democratic government.”

Kirkpatrick strongly supported the “rollback” policy Reagan adopted toward the Soviet Union, but she surely would have balked if, instead of merely stunting Soviet imperial advances, the United States attempted to build mini-Americas in every liberated land. “There is no inherent or historical ‘imperative,’ ” Kirkpatrick would write during the Iraq War, “for the U.S. government to seek to achieve any other goal—however great—except as mandated by the Constitution or adopted by the people through elected governments.” There is, after all, a significant difference between assisting in the abrogation of the Soviet empire and a quixotic policy of democratization.

It also worth noting, as Heilbrunn does, that the Reagan nostalgia of many neoconservatives requires a selectively deployed memory and a distorted reading of history. Reaganism held much promise for the neocon movement, though most neocons soon felt betrayed by the president’s nuanced handling of nuclear disarmament. Midge Decter declared herself “disgusted” with the administration’s willingness to sit down with the Soviet Union. Norman Podhortez called Reagan’s refusal to send ground troops into Nicaragua “appeasement” and was enraged by the administration’s “half-hearted” support of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the president’s apparent volte-face on arms control.

Heilbrunn recognizes that, from Nixon to Bush, the neocons actually have angered the right far more than the left. For many libertarians, paleoconservatives, and Reagan Republicans, this is certainly true. The American Conservative, a magazine that Heilbrunn misidentifies as beginning operations in the late 1990s (it was founded in 2002), is a case in point, launched in large part as a reaction against the neocon rebirth. It would have been helpful and interesting had Heilbrunn explored these internecine battles in greater detail.

To Heilbrunn, the legacy of neoconservatism is one of long-term disaster for the Republican Party, an ideological digression that “quite possibly not only destroyed conservatism as a political force for years to come but also created an Iraq syndrome that tarnishes the idea of intervention for several decades.” This sounds right. The surge has undeniably mitigated the violence in Iraq, but it seems likely that—barring a continued military presence in Iraq for “100 years,” as John McCain posited—the neocons’ nation-building project will be a millstone around the movement’s neck. The Iraq fiasco will also obscure the fact that many of their Cold War–era arguments with the left were prescient. They were right about the ineffectiveness of Great Society welfare programs and about the colossal evil of the communist bloc.

But the failures of the neoconservative approach to both foreign and domestic policy are recognized even by consummate neocon David Frum, partial author of the infamous “axis of evil” State of the Union speech. In his recently released book Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, Frum concedes Heilbrunn’s point that a conservative regeneration is needed after the Bush administration’s big spending and disastrous foreign policy. While Frum is upbeat about conservatism’s prospects, Heilbrunn ends They Knew They Were Right on an ominous note: “These reckless minds…aren’t going away. Quite the contrary.”

Perhaps. But unless Iraq becomes an Arab version of Switzerland in the next decade, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of Reason.

The Killer Elite

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:15:00 EDT

At this point in the news cycle, it is perhaps unnecessary to reprint Sen. Barack Obama's continuously reprinted comments about those bitter, clingy, armed, pious, and disaffected voters of Pennsylvania. But in case your interest in this never-ending race waned upon the exit of Mike Gravel, here is, once again, the Illinois Democrat explaining why the rural poor are supposedly swayed by conservative—rather than liberal—populism: "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Now, let's ignore that last bit of hypocrisy—if anyone has fanned the flames of anti-trade sentiment, it's Obama—and say that it's not too difficult to agree with The Economist's characterization of these comments as a bit "snooty." The claim that religious zeal (the Christian fundamentalism is implied) or gun ownership correlates to the number of shuttered Pennsylvania factories is pretty thin gruel. Recognizing this, both Obama's current opponents, Sens. Clinton (D-N.Y.) and McCain (R-Ariz.), pounced, calling the comments "elitist" and accusing their fellow senator of being hopelessly "out of touch" with the real America.

For its part, many in the media—excepting the conservative-leaning Fox News, of course—jumped into the breach to defend their beloved frontrunner. Consider the reaction of the pundits on CNN's The Situation Room, hosted by Wolf Blitzer, to the charge that Obama displayed a hidden contempt for the armed and religious. First, CNN's house windbag Jack Cafferty denied that Obama was trading in elitism. Rather, explained Cafferty, Obama was simply acknowledging that Pennsylvania is the Saudi Arabia of America. "What happens to [unemployed] folks like that in the Middle East, you ask? Well, take a look. They go to places like al Qaeda training camps." Regardless of whether gun ownership and economic desperation are causative, Cafferty (who has his own problems with inflammatory comments) denounced previous American leaders—cough, Bill Clinton, cough—that "shipped the jobs overseas and signed phony trade deals like NAFTA."

U.S. News & World Report Contributing Editor Gloria Borger weighed in with wrist-slap for Obama's "inartful" terminology. "But," she continued, "I think he's expressing a sentiment of mad as hell voters not going to take it anymore that we've seen throughout this election." The McCain and Clinton campaigns, Borger said, were after the same thing, which is to "portray Obama as this sort of effete elitist who doesn't understand the real working class people or Independent voters."

And, finally, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin sputtered that the whole thing was taken out of context. It was, he proclaimed, a "fake issue. I think [Hillary Clinton] is completely distorting what Obama said. And I think it's just shocking, frankly... I think [Clinton's attack] ad is a disgrace." Toobin declared that by dint of his family background, Obama was incapable of elitism: "Well, I just think it's remarkable that Barack Obama, this guy who grew up in a single family household with no money, who lived in Indonesia, who, you know, was—came from very modest upbringings, somehow he's the elitist." (While certainly not rich, it's worth reminding that Obama, the son of two university-educated parents, attended an "exclusive and prestigious" private school in Hawaii, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School.)

So in The Situation Room, there was consensus. The story was silly season stuff; a prototypically Clintonian diversion from the substantive issues.

While CNN scoffed at the thought of Obama not understanding the rural, white working-class voter, a number of pro-Obama bloggers and pundits were turning on his accusers. At The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan linked to a column by New Criterion editor Roger Kimball, and directed readers to "check out the photo" of Kimball wearing a bowtie and sporting turtle-shell glasses. What does this elitist buffon know from elitism?

Writing in The New Republic, Jonathan Chait railed at the "hypocrisy" of certain elite media figures, saving special ire for "George F. Will [who] decided to leap to the defense of the proletariat. Yes, that George F. Will."

In case you didn't immediately understand the source of Chait's sarcasm, he clarified that Will is "the fabulously wealthy, bowtie-wearing, pretentious reference-mongering, Anglophilic fop who grew up in a university town as a professor's son, earned two advanced degrees, has a designated table at a French restaurant in Georgetown, and, had he dwelt for any extended time among the working class, would be lucky to escape without his underwear being yanked up over his ears." Oh dear. Rumor has it that, in his Georgetown estate, Will has a shelf devoted to the novels of Evelyn Waugh, that poncy, ascot-wearing Brit (boo!) who wrote florid novels about fox hunting and buggery, which Will reportedly reads while consuming expensive French food!

So here we have a class-war version of the "chickenhawk" charge. Don't advocate for war unless you have served, don't speak for the peasants if you wear a bowtie and recommend Chesterton novels to your (probably foreign) friends. Members of the right-leaning bourgeoisie are incapable of spotting and deploring such condescension directed at those who typically vote for right-leaning candidates.

Chait writes that populist, fist-shaking pundits such as Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly, who bully guests and interviewers with references to their "real America," blue-collar credentials, "are multimillionaires who retain only the most remote connection to blue-collar life." This is true enough. But Obama's defenders use the very same line of argumentation in explaining away his "bitter" comments. So when critics such as Toobin tell Wolf Blitzer that Obama "grew up in a single family household with no money," it is perhaps worth mentioning that it should also be tough for Obama to retain his working-class connections—if he ever had any—when he earned $4.2 million in 2007.

Though it likely had little or no effect on yesterday's loss in Pennsylvania—potentially insulted voters were leaning largely toward Hillary Clinton anyway—it is not outrageous to think that Obama's extemporaneous bit of pop sociology was indicative of a generally condescending attitude towards the Other (that was the basic point of Will's column, which found precedent for such feelings in Adlai Stevenson's failed presidential runs in 1952 and 1956). That attitude will surely be revisited in the general election.

The inclusion of guns in Obama's complaint is, I think, especially revealing. A convincing argument can be made that xenophobia is more appealing to the dispossessed and downtrodden—They're taking our jobs! They're invading our country!—and a convincing case can be made that Obama has employed similar, though not explicitly xenophobic, language when railing against NAFTA stealing American jobs. But what does any of this have to do with guns, other than to signify that these are bitter country rubes that, to paraphrase What's the Matter with Kansas author Thomas Frank, foolishly vote against their own interests?

Nevertheless, Jeffrey Toobin told CNN viewers, what Obama said "was factually accurate." But is it? As Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "It turns out [gun owners] have the same level of formal education as nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden group. Nor are they ‘bitter.' In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were ‘very happy,' while 9% were ‘not too happy.' Meanwhile, only 30% of people without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy."

So Obama's gun analysis was not only incoherent (how does one "explain their frustrations" by shooting skeet, anyway?), but based on lazy presumption and stereotype that's not that backed up by any data. And George Will might well be a fop, but his distillation of Obama's argument strikes me as reasonable: "Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program." In other words, Barack Obama thinks that, whether they know it or not, the gun-toting plebes of America are in desperate need of "change."

Michael Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

The Right to be a Hate-filled Imbecile

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

There are a number of points on which Ali Eteraz and I agree. Despite my general hostility to organized religion, I too have little patience for Robert Spencer-type arguments that Islam is possessed with a preternatural desire to force unbelievers into a state of "dhimmitude," nor am I terribly concerned that the minarets of "Eurabia" will soon encircle the Islamisized capitals of Western Europe. As I noted in my Reason column, I have little interest—and little academic qualification—in such conversations, and will leave the discussions of Koranic interpretation to theologians and historians. But thankfully, for the sake of Jewcy's readers, there is much on which we disagree. But let me start be reiterating that I too was unimpressed by Wilders film, and his views of Islam still strike me as reductive and, to put it mildly, incomplete.

Read the rest of this column at Jewcy.com

Same As It Ever Was

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

On March 28, the United Nations Human Rights Council elected, by unanimous vote, a special rapporteur on the "situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967." The nominee, Richard Falk, a veteran political activist and emeritus professor of law at Princeton University, was opposed by Israel for, among other statements, equating the situation in the Palestinian territories with the Nazi Holocaust. According to a spokesman for Israeli's foreign ministry, Falk will not be allowed through passport control in Tel Aviv.

"This is a very outrageous statement to us and a personal insult to every Israeli," said spokesman Arye Mekel. "How could he then come up with an objective conclusion about what Israel does or doesn't do in Gaza?"

To the Israelis, Falk's appointment is but another indication that the Human Rights Council (UN-HRC), which replaced the corrupt United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) in 2006, amounts to little more than a new acronym obscuring old anti-Israel bias. When the UNCHR was disbanded, The New York Times called the organization a "disgrace," conceding that, on this one point, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton was undeniably "right." In assembling the replacement body, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the new council would provide the "United Nations the chance—a much-needed chance—to make a new beginning in its work for human rights around the world." The UN-HRC, he claimed, "will breathe new life into all our work for human rights."

So has the UN-HRC purged itself of its political biases? Has it, at long last, expelled human rights violators from its ranks? Writing in the International Herald Tribune, Human Rights Watch's Peggy Hicks surveyed the recent record of the revamped council with dismay: "In its first year, the council shied away from taking action on most human rights crises, dropped its scrutiny of Iran and Uzbekistan, and managed to condemn Israel's human rights record without addressing violations by Hezbollah and Palestinian armed groups."

The nomination of Richard Falk is further evidence of UN backsliding in its commitment to fairly scrutinizing human rights. Not only has Falk served in a similar role in the past—he was on a 2001 special panel investigating Israeli human rights violations, suggesting that UN-HRC is recruiting from the old UNCHR pool—but his record is considerably worse than the recent news reports would suggest.

For instance, in 1979, not long after the inauguration of Iran's totalitarian and theocratic "revolution," Falk, then chairman of something called U.S. Citizens Concerned about Freedom in Iran, was granted space on The New York Times opinion page to shill for the incoming government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A month prior, Falk had flown to Paris with his comrade Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general and inveterate friend of dictators, to discuss "social justice" (Clark's phrase) with the then-exiled religious leader. Upon returning, Clark told The Washington Post that he was "deeply impressed by the nature and depth and purpose of the movement in Iran that has established the opportunity for a new freedom."

By the time Falk published his impressions of the Paris pilgrimage, the Ayatollah's gang of fundamentalist squadristi—officially known as "secret revolutionary tribunals"—was already meting out executions with little concern for due process. Nevertheless, in his Times opinion piece, Falk upbraided President Jimmy Carter for "associating [Khomeini] with religious fanaticism," and declared that "the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude religious prejudices seems certainly and happily false." Indeed, "his entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals."

This was too much for the Times' preeminent liberal columnist, Anthony Lewis, who ripped Falk's column as "outstandingly silly." It was clear to those not blinded by ideology, Lewis wrote, that the "Ayatollah has set out, without equivocation or disguise, to turn the clock back and give Iran a theocratic regime." With hindsight, it is perhaps tempting to see Lewis's column as prescient, and Falk as merely a naïve, anti-Shah activist duped by the regime's unsophisticated propaganda apparatus. But as contemporaneous news accounts make clear, the theocratic and dictatorial character of the Khomeini clique was widely acknowledged by Middle East observers well before the hostage crisis.

Falk's conception of human rights—remember, this is what he is tasked to monitor for the UN—is also colored by his warm feelings toward Tehran. Ann Elizabeth Mayer, an associate professor of legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics, noted in 2000 that "The international law scholar Richard Falk, who sympathizes with the Islamic Republic and who opines that ‘Islam' is entitled to have its own 'civilizational approach' to human rights, embodies the tendency to imagine that Iranians need more Islamic culture, not the human rights protections valued by people in the West."

But this is small beer compared to Falk's latest intellectual pursuit. In 2004, Falk wrote the introduction to The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin, a book arguing that the American government was behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. Of the vast trove of 9/11 "truth" material available in print and online, it was Griffin, Falk wrote in his foreword, who "has had the patience, the fortitude, the courage, and the intelligence to put the pieces together in a single coherent account." For Griffin's latest book, Debunking the 9/11 Debunkers, Falk provided a dust jacket endorsement: "David Ray Griffin has established himself—alongside Seymour Hersh—as America's number one bearer of unpleasant, yet necessary, public truths."

As media coverage of Falk's nomination has metastasized, it has unfortunately obscured news of UN-HRC's nomination of the Swiss socialist Jean Ziegler to the UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee. A brief recapitulation of Ziegler's qualifications: In 1996, he defended Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy not only on free speech grounds—an admirable position, after all—but further celebrated his supposed scholarship. "All your work as a writer and philosopher," Ziegler wrote, "attests to the rigor of your analysis and the unwavering honesty of your intentions. It makes you one of the leading thinkers of our time." He lauded the Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe, a leader who "has history and morality with him." He offered his "total support for the Cuban revolution." He recently told a Lebanese newspaper the he "refuse[d] to describe Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. It is a national movement of resistance."

Then there's Ziegler's friendship with Libyan dictator Moammar Kaddafi. In 1989, according to a report in Neue Zurcher Zeitung (one that confirms research done by UN Watch), Ziegler helped establish the Kaddafi Prize for Human Rights. In 2002, Ziegler himself received the prize, which he shared with, among others, Roger Garaudy. Previous recipients include Fidel Castro, Louis Farrakhan, and Hugo Chavez.

Outside Turtle Bay, it is obvious that those who believe the 9/11 attacks were a government sponsored "false flag" operation and who believe in the moral probity of Kaddafi bequeathing cash prizes to serial human rights abusers have no business adjudicating human rights violations at the United Nations. In 2006, the current administration was widely criticized for opposing the establishment of the UN-HRC; the United States was the only industrialized country, besides Israel, to oppose its creation. In light of the appointment of Richard Falk and Jean Ziegler, it is similarly obvious that this was the correct decision.

While it is gratifying that the commission that long provided political cover for vile and undemocratic regimes such as Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Libya was publicly disgraced and dismantled, it is a disheartening, though utterly predictable, that its replacement is following in its footsteps.

Michael C. Moynihan is a reason associate editor.

Rant: Take Them Back to Dear Old Blighty

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EST

Last December, Ricky Hatton, a stout-chugging, ruddy-faced British boxer, was laid out on a Las Vegas canvas by the American welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather. The crowd of Union Jack–bedecked fans —“drunken dullards” and “boors,” according to The Daily Telegraph’s horrified sports correspondent—became so unruly that for the first time in its history, the MGM Grand casino shut down its archipelago of bars. Hatton’s troglodyte supporters achieved what was long considered impossible: They managed to class-down Vegas.

Drawn by a plummeting dollar, the British are arriving en masse on American shores. In the streets of Manhattan, pale-skinned men in Manchester United shirts marvel loudly at what all these iPods, “trainers,” and Nike track suits would cost them back home. While generously pumping much-needed money into the U.S. economy, the feral packs of lager louts are, one hopes, helping correct America’s long-held misperception that the English are a nation of Inspector Morse bit players—sophisticated, fastidious, snobby—especially when compared to us rubes.

We’re not quite free of our inferiority complex just yet. After a 2005 stint playing on London’s West End, former Top Gun actor Val Kilmer enthused that English audiences were “smarter” than their American counterparts because “they read books.” (This is true, though if the current British bestseller list is any indication, our bibliophilic cousins are feeding their heads with diet guides and biographies of topless models.) The American blogger Matt Janovic, enraged by his intellectual isolation in the Midwest, summed up the prevailing confusion nicely: “Face it: an English schoolgirl sounds more authoritative than the voice of most American politicians…we sound like the cavemen that many around the world (rightly) think we are.”

And the filmmaker Michael Moore, always eager to play suck-up abroad, told one English audience in 2003 that the “dumbest Brit here is smarter than the smartest American.” In other words, theirs is a nation of abeyant Evelyn Waughs.

Waugh himself bristled at such stereotypes—insisting, for instance, that in etiquette “Americans are immensely the superiors of the English.” When Esquire asked the curmudgeonly novelist to write of the “crudeness” of America’s literary milieu, Waugh demurred, arguing that the Yanks were far more “literate” than his London-based contemporaries.

It’s high time that self-hating, pusillanimous Americans everywhere revisit Waugh’s assessment. And there is no better educational tool than extended encounters with that breed of Britons known colloquially as the chav, a pejorative recently added to the Collins English Dictionary to describe “a young working class person who dresses in casual sports clothing.” (Also added, incidentally, was asbo, an acronym for youths racking up violations of the “anti-social behavior order,” a malady which midwifed the British reality show ASBO Teen to Beauty Queen.)

While Britain is fast catching up to America—and leading Europe—in illiteracy, obesity, and violent crime (despite ubiquitous surveillance cameras and an ineffective ban on handguns), the Wittgenstein references in Monty Python still shape our assumptions of British cultural supremacy. But as the English social critic Theodore Dalyrymple observed in 2004, to profess an interest in high culture in today’s Britain is to be met with accusations of homosexuality.

So before President Ron Paul restores the gold standard, it should be acknowledged that the sagging dollar is providing one useful service: a long-overdue corrective to our self-image as lesser Brits. Europeans, who ranked the English as the “world’s worst tourists” in a recent Expedia poll, have long ago disabused themselves of such stereotypes. Take a look around New York, Boston, or Los Angeles, and spot the omnipresent gaggle of chavs, waddling through the Adidas shop, shouting drunken insults in local Irish pubs, converting the currency on every product within reach. England is just America writ small.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of Reason.

Psychotic Reaction

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:13:00 EST

In the Soviet era, political persecution sometimes took a pseudoscientific turn: Doctors diagnosed dissidents with maladies such as “sluggish schizophrenia” and confined them to mental hospitals because they dared to criticize the state. A series of recent incidents suggests this practice might be making a comeback.

In the lead-up to Russia’s parliamentary elections in December, the government threw a handful of nettlesome political activists into psychiatric institutions. One of them was Artem Basyrov, a 20-year-old member of the opposition Other Russia coalition, who, according to London’s Independent newspaper, was detained by police in December and committed to a psychiatric institution just days before a planned anti-Putin protest in Moscow. After criticism from local and international human rights organizations, Basyrov was released from custody a month later without explanation.

It wasn’t the only recent incident of this kind. Six months earlier, authorities confined the journalist and activist Larisa Arap, a member of the opposition United Civil Front, in another psychiatric hospital. She had just published an article describing the widespread physical abuse of mental patients and had recently delivered an anti-Putin stump speech at an opposition rally. She claims to have been beaten and forcibly medicated during her 46-day imprisonment.

On December 6, 2006, Andrei Novikov, a journalist with Chechenpress and a former Soviet dissident, was sent to a mental institution because of his critical reporting, described as “publicly inciting constitutional change by means of force.” After two psychiatrists judged Novikov mentally fit, a “psychiatric commission” justified further confinement by ascribing acute “antisocial behavior” to the prisoner. The authorities finally released him a year later.

Shoot Down Over Cuba

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

In Defense of Geert Wilders

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

When discussing—and, in this case, defending—radical Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, it is de rigueur to begin with emphatic caveats and disclaimers. Mr. Wilders, a fulminating critic of Islam and advocate of closing Holland's borders to further immigration, is something of an extremist, a man with whom most will find difficulty attaining common ideological ground. The Koran, he says, is a Hitlerian text ("Ban that wretched book like Mein Kampf is banned!"). To those who contend that radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution, Wilders scoffs: "Moderate Islam does not exist." Mohammad, he says, was a "terrorist" and "war-criminal." And so on.

Now Wilders, whose Freedom Party holds just five seats in the Dutch Parliament, has boiled his hatred of Islam down into a ten minute film called Fitna—variously translated in the media as the Arabic word for "strife," "challenge," or "chaos." The film, which has not been released, will doubtless be a retread of Wilders' reductive reading of the Koran. Regardless of the substance of the film, and however much one disagrees with his interpretation, Wilders should be defended, without reservation, by free speech advocates both in Holland and abroad; a position made even more necessary considering the lukewarm defense proffered by Western governments and intellectuals.

In response to the controversy surrounding Fitna, Wilders' website was knocked offline by his American host, Network Solutions; he has been repeatedly denounced by the government of Jan Peter Balkenende as a liability to Dutch "interests"; the country's shriveled monarch, Queen Beatrix, admonished that free speech doesn't allow one the right to offend; and last week 1000 "anti-racism" activists protested Fitna in Amsterdam's city center. As one demonstrator told Reuters, "There should be restrictions on what Wilders can say... it is a very bad example to people to let him say whatever he wants." Similar demonstrations on behalf of free speech and the freedom to mock, insult, and defame religion have yet to materialize.

Rather than assigning blame to the knuckle-dragging troglodytes who have threatened Wilders and Dutch commercial and diplomatic interests abroad, many have warned of an inevitable "blowback" from indignant Muslim masses. Addressing the European parliament, the Grand Mufti of Syria told his audience that "If there is unrest, bloodshed and violence after the broadcast of the Koran film, Wilders will be responsible." Prime Minister Balkenende sighed that in Holland such statements were indeed legal, "but there is the possibility, once the film is released, that there will be a court case." Dutch state radio produced a YouTube video chronicling the journey of a concerned Muslim who wonders why Wilders wasn't simply arrested and prosecuted. The Netherlands Islamic Federation has petitioned a court in The Hague to set up a censor board that could adjudicate on whether the film should be banned.

That Wilders possesses extremist views, that his interpretation of Islam is both reductive and puerile, is of no particular relevance in this case, unless one subscribes to the view that there exists an arbitrary boundary between right to free speech and freedom from offense. Once Fitna is broadcast—either via non-state television or the Internet—it is incumbent upon on those who value a society where freedom of expression is respected, and a society free of intimidation against those who question the probity of prophets, to engage the film on its intellectual merits.

But two great, and often unspoken, fears are governing the reaction to Wilders, ones that were similarly made plain during the so-called Danish cartoon crisis. First, it is important for members of both Europe's mainstream and radical left not to be seen as endorsing the views of a hard right politician, even if they make clear that they are merely defending the right to free expression. Second, despite Europe's deeply held secularism, Muslim immigrants are often, in both media and parliamentary debate, seperated from their religion, reclassified in a purely racial (or "other") context. In Sweden, when the controversial "Ecce Homo" photography exhibit premiered in 1998, which depicted Jesus as suffering from AIDS and featured leather-clad priests having sex inside a church, it came under sustained fire from Christian leaders. The country's editorial pages circled the wagons in defense of the artist's right to offend. Those very same pages, though, denounced Jyllands-Posten's Mohammad cartoons as gratuitous, distasteful, and offensive. None reprinted the drawings.

In Holland, the situation is similar. The reaction of the pathetic and spineless Balkenende government is typified by Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen. In an interview with Dutch state television, Verhagen bellowed that it would be "irresponsible to broadcast this film. That's because Dutch companies, Dutch soldiers and Dutch residents could and will be in danger." This is, as the Danish example suggests, doubtless true, though to do so is to blithely submit to the blackmail and gangsterism of Islamic militancy.

In focusing on Wilders' very real extremism, Western critics risk missing the larger point of the recent religious crises in Europe; from the scribbling of the Danish cartoonists to the alleged blasphemy of novelist Salman Rushdie. To suggest that it is simply Wilders' particular vision of Islam, the harshness of his language, with which his enemies disagree is foolish. To think that, for instance, a documentary version of Christopher Hitchens' best-selling and thoughtful anti-religion book God is Not Great, focusing only on the sections critical of Islam and broadcast on European state television, would not produce a similar backlash—or threatened backlash—is wishful thinking. Again, one only need think back to the vile fatwa that hamstrung the life of Mr. Rushdie to understand that it takes very little—a largely unread novel—to drive the ultra-pious into a murderous rage.

But it is also important that we not allow the chest-thumping histrionics of America's talk show circuit to reduce the Wilders affair to one of moderate critic versus those opposed to freedom of speech. On his Headline News television program, conservative radio host Glenn Beck, after first mischaracterizing Wilders (whom he referred to as "Gilt Whatshisface") as merely "critical of extremist Islam," sputtered about the "censorship" of Fitna's American web host, Network Solutions. It bears repeating that Network Solutions is a private company and is thus securely within its rights to suspend the accounts of any client with whom it isn't interested in doing business. Threats to free speech come not from private companies acting in their own self-interest, but from both governments and those who desire to silence heterodox—and yes, extreme—voices with implicit or explicit threats of violence.

Islamic extremists have been depressingly successful in frightening the Netherlands into assuming that a short film of little consequence will precipitate hideous amounts of "retaliatory" violence. And herein lies an important lesson for other religious crackpots, Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Wiccan. Full protection of "prophets" and deities can be attained by repeated, credible threats of violence. And to not support Wilders, alas, is to acquiesce to such bullying.

Michael Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

Diary of an Israel Junketeer, Part Three

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:13:00 EDT

(Editor's Note: reason Associate Editor Michael C. Moynihan recently traveled though Israel on a program sponsored by the American Israel Education Fund, a program for journalists sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. This is his third and final dispatch. The other two are online here and here.)

The West Bank—The settlements that sprouted up after the Six Day War, during which Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula, have retracted and expanded, a constant source of friction amongst Palestinians and Israelis alike. Indeed, a majority of Israelis support disengagement from most West Bank settlements. Herzl Makov, the former chief of staff to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, is not one of them. Standing atop the Kfar Adumim settlement, looking out on the breathtaking and empty vista that surrounds the West Bank community, says this is Jewish land. He employs an odd understanding of property law. "There was no one living here before the settlement began in 1979," he says, indicating that the area is therefore fair game.

As Jonathan Tepperman recently pointed out in The New York Times, the settlement issue has long "cut through the left-right divide in Israeli politics." The outposts floating in the post-1967 borders have been encouraged and supported by politicos from both Likud and Labor; there is near, but not total, unanimity of opinion on the efficacy and legality of some settlements, and bitter debate about others.

Not living in Israel, not being an expert on the issue, I best not wade too deeply into the murky waters of the debate. But for those who are interested, I would recommend this book by left-leaning historian Gershom Gorenberg. I can say this: If Makov bases his land claim on a messianic biblical literalism, and it appears he does, than it is impossible to debate the issue with him. The West Bank, he says, is Eretz Israel—land bequeathed to the Jews by God. It appears that he also believes Jordan to be part of Israel, though I could have misheard him. As he barrels forward, I am getting the sinking feeling that he believes most everything to be part of the great Jewish state, and wait impatiently for the land claims on Saskatoon and Waziristan.

In fairness, he makes one compelling point. If 20 percent of Israel is made up of Arabs who more or less live side-by-side, in peace with their neighbors (as with every issue in the Middle East, let me carefully provide a caveat to this claim by acknowledging that this clearly isn't a perfect arrangement, though Israeli Arabs are represented in the Knesset and on the Supreme Court, for instance), why not allow Jews to settle in a Palestinian state? It's a fair question. But when Makov is asked if the Kfar Adumim settlement was absorbed into a Palestinian state, would he and his family stay, his answer is swift. Not a bloody chance.

Speaking of which, after a gin-soaked evening, I find myself gently badgering two Israeli Muslims in the city of Tiberias about when, how, and why they are discriminated against, restricted in travel, forced to endure checkpoints, and the like. The two look amused, but unfazed. Things might happen here and there, they both agree, but not to them. The Americans and Europeans, one them sighs, are always looking for some morality tale, some bit of discrimination to take home with them as a souvenir. I slink away, far too drunk to be embarrassed, only later recalling the mention, somewhere in my babbling, that they are Druze, a group not considered by many Arabs to be "real" Muslims. A group, unlike Israeli Arabs, allowed to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, and a group that overwhelmingly self-identify as Israeli.

Later in the day, while visiting the graves of socialist founders of the kibbutz movement, an Israeli archeologist, who spent his twenties living on a kibbutz, relates the story of why he is no longer an enthusiastic backer of the kibbutzim. "My wife and I were socialists. But one day, a friend of ours decided he wanted to travel and work abroad for a few years. When he presented this to the kibbutz committee, they decided that he wasn't allowed to go; he was needed to perform some duty or another on the farm. He was completely fine with this decision. But my wife and I, on the other hand, pretty much decided that we were no longer socialists." These types of kibbutzim still exist, he says, but they are few. "An overwhelming majority found it necessary for their financial survival to privatize."

The rumor here, in the newspapers, amongst those in and around government, is that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, despite his repeated denials, has worked behind the scenes with Hamas to achieve a hudna—a cease fire—in Gaza. With an extremist group like Hamas, who have no intention of working towards any sort of peace deal, but rather desire the establishment of an Islamic state in the entire region, it can only be a brief lull in the jihad. Unlike diplomatic exchanges that result in "land for peace," cease fires are but respites in a long war. Avi Issacharoff of the left-leaning Haaretz (whom a group of us dined with earlier in the week) quotes "senior [Palestinian Authority] people in Ramallah" declaring that any long-term hudna leading to negotiation with Israel would be bad for the Hamas political brand. "It will no longer be a fighting 'resistance' organization, but rather a political movement that arrives at agreements with the ‘Zionist entity' in order to ensure the well-being of its leaders." Nearly all those asked to comment on the possibility of fruitful discussions with Hamas dismiss it as mere posturing. At dinner, even Issacharoff confessed that "Hamas won't ever make peace with the Jews." It is an opinion echoed by every politician, intelligence official, and expert we meet.

Luckily, the hudna was in effect when we arrived in Sderot, the Israeli town on the Gaza border that is the recipient of daily rocket attacks from both Hamas and the even more fanatical Islamic Jihad. The rockets trigger an "early" detection alarm, which helpfully allows the people a full 15 seconds to take cover. We speak with a woman who is an avowed pacifist who says her life in Sderot is "hell," yet still supports the disengagement and desires a dialogue with Hamas. She works with disabled children. She explains that trying to move them to cover is an almost impossible task, that driving home during a day of raining rockets can turn a five-minute drive into a 30-minute exercise in pulling to the side of the road and diving behind rocks.

After a visit to Israel's northern border with Lebanon, it was time to head back to D.C. Though organized by AIPAC, which advertises itself as "America's pro-Israel lobby," there was a wide variety of opinion represented, both among my fellow junketeers and the people we met. Our guide and custodian on the trip, Josh Block, is a former Democratic Party operative with experience in the Clinton and Gore campaigns, and worked for Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). Among the participants, there were conservatives, liberals, lefties, and moderates representing small (techpresident.com), medium (The Weekly Standard), and large (Slate, Politico) publications. The debates precipitated by our meetings were constant and vigorous, if not occasionally wildly impolite. The Israeli officials and journalists we encountered similarly represented a wide range of opinions. It was a trip of scrupulous political balance—Israeli Arabs, Palestinian Authority officials, a centrist Kadima Party official, a Sharon-hating Likud Party parliamentarian, a left-leaning journalist, a right-leaning intelligence official, even that pacifist from the besieged town of Sderot.

By the end of the trip, I am ready for home, ready for some degree of normalcy. It is, I realize, quite nice to have a coffee without being searched, to walk into The Gap without being profiled, to not read tea leaves in order to determine the likelihood of a third intifada.

Diary of an Israel Junketeer, Part Two

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

(Editor's Note: reason Associate Editor Michael C. Moynihan is traveling though Israel on a program sponsored by the American Israel Education Fund, a travel program for journalists sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He'll be filing observations throughout the week.)

Tel Aviv—"It's amazing," the owner of Jerusalem restaurant says, flicking his cigarette. "The police fined us for smoking out here. I mean, it's technically part of the building, but it's open air." The country banned smoking in bars and restaurants last year.

"Right over there, behind the security fence," he gestures wildly, "is the West Bank. And they are fucking with me for smoking. This restaurant used to be in the Old City and it was attacked four times. Guns, bombs, and hand grenades." But please refrain from lighting up.

In Tel Aviv, not a single bar or nightclub seems to obey the rules; all are thick with smoke. It is, roughly, a mix of 20 percent hash and 80 percent tobacco. According to a prominent investigative journalist here, it isn't just Israelis who indulge in drugging. The reporter, who works for a major Tel Aviv daily, is a fluent Arabic speaker who spends the majority of his time pounding the pavement in the Palestinian Territories.

He relates a bizarre story: Last year, while interviewing a house full of Hamas members, he entered into a rather ordinary conversation on the banalities of soldiering (the journalist, like most Israelis, is an Israel Defense Forces veteran). "So how do you pull these long shifts?" he wondered. "Well, we take pills smuggled in from Tel Aviv," said the Hamas apparatchik. "What pills?" He didn't know, but graciously placed a call to a Hamas comrade, who, apparently, doubles as his pharmacist. "He says they are called the EK-STAZY." The raver-jihadists explained that these mystery pills induce a mild euphoria, and allow them to shoot at members of the Israel Defense Forces for long, happy stretches.

The Hamas-embedded journalist relates another woe-is-me-story of life as a terrorist. "I'm the Oprah of the Palestinians. They are always telling me things about their private lives." One leader of Islamic Jihad recently confessed that his manifold sexual problems were driving him to depression. It is tough, he moaned, to find a good woman, a woman willing to spend time with you, when you marked for death by Israeli intelligence. Amongst the extremists, they even manage to blame not getting laid on Zionism.

According to a report in this morning's Jerusalem Post, Israelis are overwhelmingly opposed to further privatization of health services. It's initially surprising that such poll questions are even being asked, that such issues are deemed important, when Kassam rockets are being lobbed at Sderot everyday, when the very real possibility of a third intifada is discussed and debated with a mixture of exhaustion and terror. But life trudges forward. Visitors (and visiting journalists, especially) are the ones that steer conversation towards the maudlin. I have consistently asked Israelis, both politicians and ordinary citizens, their opinions on a variety of economic issues. There is, from this admittedly small sample, no real enthusiasm for such debates.

When I asked Likud parliamentarian Mickey Eitan to explain the difference in the economic policies of Kadima and his party, he was, as appears to be his nature, blunt. "None. We are both [classical] liberals. Our differences were almost only over the disengagement of Gaza."

Coming next: Hamas, Hezbollah, and the peace process that isn't...

Diary of an Israel Junketeer, Part One

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

(Editor's Note: reason Associate Editor Michael C. Moynihan is traveling though Israel on a program sponsored by the American Israel Education Fund, a travel program for journalists sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He'll be filing observations throughout the week.)

Jerusalem—Walking toward Jerusalem's Old City, a journalist colleague in my tour group relates, apropos of nothing, that Tucker Carlson's MSNBC show is being cancelled. A brief argument follows over who is the best cable talk show host on American television—I nominate the peerless Robin Byrd—only to be interrupted by two elderly and ornery American tourists: "We came here to get away from politics." The Yanks seem unaware that, in Israel—and we're within spitting distance of the Dome of the Rock—there is no escaping politics.

The constant political discussions in this city quickly annex most of your brain. It's a shopworn observation, but the simple act of entering a coffee shop requires a quick bit of profiling and a wave of the metal detector wand. No one, from what I can make out, seems irritated by this.

Politics and the icons of war are all around. Reading an essay in Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, trying to beat suffocating jetlag, I repeatedly misread a doped-up character named "Sharon" as Sha-rone.

Within the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, plus-sized American tourists are everywhere, waddling through the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with their panama hats and chunky white sneakers, oohing and ahhing at various reconstructed tombs and crucifixion crosses. Deeply holy, with a whiff of Six Flags.

Like everything else in the region, the church is subdivided into four quarters. The Eastern Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Roman Catholic, and Greek Orthodox have their own little Bantustans for which they are responsible. Take away these invisible boundaries and, I suppose, fistfights would break out.

Just outside the church, in the narrow alleyways of the Arab quarter, it is possible to buy all manner of junk: rugs, cheap knives, and, depending on your degree of bravery, either an IDF or Yasser Arafat t-shirt.

Over breakfast, an Israeli political analyst inspires little confidence that a peaceful resolution to this baffling, maddening, intractable conflict is at hand. The three pillars of Israeli politics, she says—the right, left, and center—have all collapsed, all producing similar results.

The latest: Kadima, the centrist party formed by Ariel Sharon in 2005 that took power the next year, presided over Hezbollah's 12,000-missile buildup and an inconclusive war. Sharon's total disengagement from Gaza has, almost everyone reminds you, resulted in a Hamas government and, as we have seen in recent weeks, a huge spike in the number of Qassam rockets fired at civilian population centers in Israeli border towns. As could be expected, recent opinion polling shows that the Likud party, which currently has just 12 seats in the 120-member Knesset (to Kadima's 29), would more than double that number if elections were held today.

Over lunch, an Israeli academic praises the innumerable benefits of the Israeli parliamentary system—no candidates, only party lists—and bemoans "the boring" American election. I wonder, though don't ask, if the parliamentary system in Italy, with its 50 governments in as many years, is an appropriate counter-example to the supposed brilliance of coalition governments and proportional representation. Israel, says the professor, was once a welfare state in the Scandinavian mold and, so I hear, was equally bungling and bureaucratic. But in recent years, he points out, the country "has privatized faster than Russia." It is difficult to determine if this is said with contempt or pride.

In the evening we drive into Arab East Jerusalem for a meeting with a senior Palestinian Authority official close to Mahmoud Abbas (all Israelis call him Abu Mazen). The consensus among our small group of journalists, regardless of their own political hang-ups, is that this guy, like many P.A. officials, eloquently delivers an hour of sophistry and evasion.

It's a pitiful performance. One questioner asks why, if the Palestinian Authority renounces terror, it recently celebrated the life and achievements of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist George Habash. The official becomes agitated and recommends that such issues must be left "in the past." Calling people "terrorists" or calling them "freedom fighters," he grumbles, is an impediment to peace.

For the remaining hour, it is clear that the Palestinian Authority wants to bury the past-except when it doesn't. The rest of the conversation is an argument about the past, with periodic nods to "the peace process." When I ask the official about the massive and well-documented thievery of Yasser Arafat, his eyes narrow. "Arafat never stole money," he hisses. "The people around him did, but not Arafat."

Besides, any corruption in the P.A. was "done with the full knowledge of Israel." If this guy pulls a muscle playing racquetball, he probably blames Israel. While the moderate Likud member of parliament Mickey Eitan told me that his former party boss Ariel Sharon "was the most corrupt man in the history of Israel," and that Sharon's extended family was like "something you would find in South America," the P.A. dare not speak ill of its former leader.

Coming Next: Raver-jihadists, privatizing health care, and the Oprah of the Palestinians.

End of Reyes

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

IN NOVEMBER 2006, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), the Marxist terror group that has waged a nearly half-century war against the Colombian state, circulated an open letter to the academic and Hollywood left, requesting that their "always generous solidarity" with Third World liberation movements again be marshaled to "pressure President Bush and his government to support a prisoner exchange in Colombia." The mediation request was addressed to Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, and, bizarrely, Denzel Washington. It was signed, with comradely greetings, by FARC "foreign minister" and second-in-command Raul Reyes.

Last Saturday the Colombian military briefly trespassed the border of neighboring Ecuador and, in a combined arms raid, disposed of Reyes. Acknowledging his military's one mile incursion into Ecuadorian territory, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe offered the country's chavista president, Rafael Correa, a perfunctory apology. Predictably, he refused to be assuaged. When Colombia claimed that the terrorists were killed during a "hot pursuit" operation that spilled across the border, Correa complained that Reyes, along with 23 other members of his execution and kidnap gang, had in fact been killed "in their pajamas."

Read the rest of this piece in The Weekly Standard.

McCarthy and His Friends

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 15:30:00 EST

Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, by M. Stanton Evans, New York: Crown Forum, 672 pages, $29.95

Here is a précis of what is now known, based on evidence revealed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, about what is broadly referred to as the McCarthy Era. State Department official Alger Hiss, whose espionage case actually predated the rise of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), was indeed a Soviet spy. Apostates from communism Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, who exposed significant breaches of national security to the FBI, were neither fantasists nor fabulists; both accurately recounted the names of government employees subsidized by the Soviet Union. Julius Rosenberg, one half of the ne plus ultra case of Cold War martyrdom, was indeed guilty of espionage. The American effort to develop an atomic bomb was thick with Russian spies, another of whom, a heretofore unknown American named George Koval, was revealed only last November when he was posthumously honored at a champagne reception by Russian President Vladimir Putin. America’s Communist Party, frequently defended as an indigenous political movement wholly independent of Moscow, took both direction and rubles from every Soviet leader dating back to Lenin.

These revelations have led some historians and cultural commentators to wonder if perhaps Joseph McCarthy, the red-baiting Republican senator from Wisconsin who was both architect and demolisher of his eponymous era, was more right than wrong. In 1996 the liberal journalist Nicholas von Hoffman, writing in The Washington Post, asked if, after years of hand wringing over his malign influence, McCarthy was in the end “right about the left.” Based on disclosures from Soviet and American archives, von Hoffman concluded that “enough new information has come to light about the communists in the U.S. government that we may now say that point by point Joe McCarthy got it all wrong and yet was still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him.” In a foreword to the 1996 edition of his 1954 book McCarthy and His Enemies, the ur-text of McCarthy’s defenders, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote with evident triumphalism that “a gradual and painful process of historical rectification” was under way, one that would in many respects vindicate the senator’s crusade.

Twelve years later, the veteran conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans has selectively aggregated these revelations in an attempt at providing that vindication. In Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, Evans, a columnist for Human Events and former director of the National Journalism Center, attempts to fulfill the mandate of his father, John Birch Society member Medford Evans, author of one of the first book-length McCarthy apologias, The Assassination of Joe McCarthy. “The restoration of McCarthy,” the elder Evans wrote, “is a necessary part of the restoration of America.” Since his father’s restoration efforts were unsuccessful, it has fallen to Evans fils to enshrine the late senator in the pantheon of great Americans, arguing that McCarthy was wrongly maligned by the liberal establishment and largely right in his reading of the communist threat. He contends, quite rightly, that most of those who refer to the period “know little of McCarthy, and would be hard-pressed to back their view[s] with plausible specifics, or indeed with anything whatever.” But it is unlikely that Evans’ full-throated, frequently overzealous attempt to contextualize McCarthy’s charges will convince anyone but Birch Society dead-enders.

Evans’ stated purpose is to rescue McCarthy from the historians, to resurrect the “warrior” who has “vanished into the mists of fable and recycled error.” While McCarthy’s “straight-ahead, take-no-prisoners views and methods did lead him to make mistakes of facts and judgment,” what matters, writes Evans, is whether the senator was “right or wrong about the cases.” And as has been previously demonstrated by other revisionist historians, McCarthy was broadly correct; most of those accused were members of the Communist Party. But what does this add up to? Was the assemblage of New Deal liberals, fellow travelers, and communist agents that McCarthy tossed together “the product of a great conspiracy,” as he famously bellowed on the Senate floor, “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man”? McCarthy’s scattershot approach to the facts greatly damaged the cause of anti-communism and greatly emboldened, even legitimized, communism’s apologists. It also raised serious civil liberties questions: Should you lose a government job merely for your political opinions? How far left could you drift and remain employed?

Evans’ recapitulation of events begins plausibly enough, with an outline of what readers probably already know: The Soviet Union operated a sophisticated network of agents in the United States, many of whom—including Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, Justice Department employee Judith Coplon, and White House economist Lauchlin Currie—passed secrets to Moscow. But what of those specifically accused by McCarthy of being either security risks or agents of the Kremlin? Here Evans is on shakier ground.

Take his treatment of one of the better-known McCarthy cases. In 1950, the senator denounced the China scholar Owen Lattimore as Russia’s “top spy” in the State Department, an influential “China hand” who deliberately “lost” that country to Mao’s communists by seeking to undermine Washington’s support for Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. McCarthy’s initial accusations, such as his risible claim that Lattimore acted as Alger Hiss’ “boss,” were demonstrably false, something McCarthy himself quickly realized, beating a hasty retreat from his wilder charges. It was a damaging concession, red meat to the growing ranks of McCarthy haters, but one which receives just a single sentence in Evans’ narrative.

Evans does demonstrate that Lattimore was an “indefatigable shill for Moscow.” There is little new here, though it is still a much needed corrective to the widely held view, successfully advanced by Lattimore himself, that he was in fact a generic New Deal liberal and an anti-communist. McCarthy grilled Lattimore on his previous writings, such as his view that Soviet forced collectivization “represent[ed] a kind of ownership more valuable to them than the old private ownership under which they were unable to own or even hire machines.”

But was he a spy? To Evans, the existence of speculative FBI documents (his “FBI file contains numerous allegations that Lattimore was both a Communist…and an espionage agent”), none of which offers proof that he was engaged in spying for the Soviets, is enough to vindicate McCarthy’s charges.

As careless as the charges against him were, it was at least conceivable that Owen Lattimore was involved in espionage. When McCarthy unleashed a furious 60,000-word philippic against Gen. George Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff during World War II and President Truman’s secretary of defense, he ensured his own downfall, handing his opponents the material for his censure on a silver platter. In a rare concession, Evans judges the attack on Marshall a mistake, but even this judgment is milquetoasty and loaded with qualifiers. Evans provides almost no representative selections from McCarthy’s speech about Marshall, thus insulating the reader from the true biliousness and absurdity of the senator’s attack. If Evans had so chosen, readers would have seen a hero of World War II besmirched with contemptible claims of treason and with the bizarre suggestion that the Marshall Plan for the economic revitalization of Europe was inspired by U.S. Communist Party boss Earl Browder. To McCarthy, Marshall was responsible for every foreign policy blunder since Pearl Harbor; he was a man who made “common cause with Stalin on the strategy of the war in Europe and marched side by side with him thereafter.”

Evans also partially concedes that McCarthy’s bizarre attacks on New York Post Editor James Wechsler, a communist turned liberal anti-communist, were ill-conceived. In 1934, as a student at Columbia University, Wechsler joined the Young Communists League and left the party three years later, after an eye-opening trip to the Soviet Union. When Wechsler testified before McCarthy’s Senate committee, the senator’s deep paranoia was on prominent display. He suggested that Wechsler’s well-documented hostility to Stalin was an elaborate ruse. As his quarry shifted in his chair, McCarthy speculated that Post editorials critical of his committee were planted by the Manchurian editor: “Perhaps the most effective way of [propagandizing for communism] would be to claim that we deserted the party and, if we got in control of the paper, use that paper to attack and smear anybody who actually was fighting Communism.” Evans omits these fantasies from his account, again providing an imprecise picture of the often bizarre proceedings.

It is baffling that Evans’ series of mini-concessions doesn’t convince him that McCarthy deserves his reputation as a liability to anti-communism, especially taken together with other unflattering details found in the senator’s vita. McCarthy lied about his time in the Marines, telling daring tales of action as a tail gunner even though his actual combat experience was minimal. Evans dismisses this prevarication in a sentence, arguing that McCarthy should be applauded for serving his country voluntarily since, as a Wisconsin judge, he was exempt from conscription. Early in his political career, McCarthy courted controversy when he stood up for members of the SS who were on trial for war crimes, accused of executing American soldiers at the French town of Malmédy; McCarthy argued that the accused had been mistreated by their American captors and that evidence was obtained by coercion. The charges, levied by SS men awaiting the hangman’s noose, with no corroborating witnesses, were dubious. The deep conscientiousness that McCarthy displayed regarding the rights of fascists—he once wrote to a friend that the Nazi leaders on trial at Nuremberg were “so-called war criminals” whose “only crime was attempting to win the war”—was hard to discern in his dealings with American leftists accused of espionage. None of this troubles Evans, who cites the Malmédy case to demonstrate McCarthy’s intellectual depth and compares him to those who blew the whistle on abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

But the most frustrating habit of Blacklisted by History is the subtle conflation of New Deal liberals, radical fellow travelers, and actual spies, a move that recalls McCarthy’s own signature tactic. It is difficult to sympathize with most of those willingly duped by Soviet communism, all of whom were aware of the country’s nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, its purge trials in the 1930s, and its forced starvation of millions of Ukrainians. But there is a more interesting moral question that Evans might have considered, if only briefly. If the percentage of fellow travelers in and around government was much larger than the percentage in the general population (as it clearly was), what was the civil libertarian to do? How many front organizations, joined either with forethought or in ignorance, must one be affiliated with before qualifying as a security risk? And as in the case of James Wechsler, what is the statute of limitations on youthful flirtations with Marxism?

It’s easy to dismiss the more partisan attacks on McCarthy by critics who contend, for example, that no one called before his committee was a party member. It is more difficult to ignore the objections of Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.), the Cold War hawk who, in 1953, resigned from McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and ridiculed the senator during his showdown with the Army the following year. Or Gen. Matthew Ridgeway, who in the 1970s said McCarthy’s attack on George Marshall consisted of “scurrilous and indefensible remarks whose evil effects persist to this day.”

And then there is the opinion of the former Soviet spy, accuser of Alger Hiss, and stalwart anti-communist Whittaker Chambers. Evans frequently refers to Chambers’ testimony but is mum on his ultimate judgment of McCarthy. While Chambers prepped the senator in the early days of his anti-red campaign, he was soon disabused of his enthusiasm. When asked to provide a jacket blurb for Buckley’s apologia for McCarthy, Chambers declined, responding that McCarthy’s “inaccuracies and distortions, his tendency to sacrifice the greater objectivity for the momentary effect, will lead him and [the anti-communist cause] into trouble.”

In the book’s last chapter, Evans concedes that “McCarthy made his share of errors, some contributing to his downfall.” The book is peppered with small caveats like this one, but Evans never seriously considers the significant and convincing body of evidence assembled by McCarthy’s critics.

A book can be radically wrong in its conclusions and devilishly selective in its presentation of evidence yet still be useful. Blacklisted by History sketches the fellow-traveling milieu of postwar Washington, populated by eggheads who, for reasons both idealistic and sinister, were attracted to the Sovietophilic fringes of the left. But since it does not set this scene in a broader context, present McCarthy in his own words, carefully distinguish between those sympathetic to left-wing causes and those paid to do Stalin’s bidding, or consider the effect of McCarthy’s very un-American assault on civil liberties, it is not a book to be read in isolation.

As in the case of Hiss and the Rosenbergs, consensus is often wrong. But no matter how hard M. Stanton Evans might try, Joe McCarthy will never be rehabilitated as an American hero. And despite the ominous warnings of Evans’ father, America is a better place for it.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of Reason.

Spycatchers

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:00:00 EST

The largest newswire in the Netherlands knew something suspicious was going on when a government official lodged a complaint about an interview that hadn’t been published yet.

According to reports in the Dutch news media, members of the government’s Social Affairs Ministry were recently caught accessing the computers of the newswire GPD and obtaining stories before they went to press. Marcel van Lingen, GPD’s director and editor-in-chief, told Dutch state radio the break-ins were conducted with an eye toward “influencing our reporting.” The unauthorized access was discovered when GPD employees noted the frequent use of computers with Social Affairs Ministry IP addresses to access internal data and, according to a report in Der Spiegel, when a government official inquired about that yet-to-be-published interview.

The Social Affairs Ministry isn’t the only branch of government spying on journalists. According to the Dutch daily de Volkskrant, the General Intelligence and Security Service put journalist Frénk van der Linden under surveillance in the late 1990s, with agents noting that, after a trip to the Middle East in the 1980s, he had returned with newly “radicalized views.” Other journalists are uncovering more government scrutiny, conducted under the aegis of the state security service. Noting that much of this spying predated the 9/11 attacks, Dutch blogger Michael van der Galiën has cautioned against employing the “national defense” defense, noting that spying on the Fourth Estate is “not fighting terrorism; that’s Big Brother.”

In 2003 the Netherlands ranked first—along with Finland, Iceland, and Norway—in the Reporters Without Borders annual report on press freedom. By 2007 the country had tumbled to 12th place. Reporters Without Borders cited a court’s decision to keep two journalists from the daily newspaper De Telegraaf “in custody for two days for refusing to reveal their sources to the judicial authorities.” It also pointed to the death of journalist and filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who had been murdered by a radical Muslim offended by van Gogh’s feminist, anti-Islamist film Submission.

Expect the Netherlands to drop a few spots again this year.

Graft Paper

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:30:00 EST

In his nondescript office on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, nestled in a far-off corner of Harvard Square, Ben Olken ruminates on the economic consequences of tyrannicide, the damaging effects of television on social cohesion, and the byzantine system of bribery in Indonesia. Olken, a 32-year-old with an undergraduate degree from Yale (in mathematics and “ethics, politics, and economics”) and an economics doctorate from Harvard, is a rising star in the field of developmental economics. Olken is currently a member of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, a prestigious institution within the institution, where the best young scholars pursue what interests them. Among economists alone, former Junior Fellows include Paul Samuelson, Carl Kaysen, Jeffrey Sachs, Steven Levitt, and James Tobin.

Olken is “one of the most exciting young scholars in economics,” his Harvard adviser, Lawrence F. Katz, former chief economist to the U.S. Labor Department, told The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is.

Read the entire article at The American.

Still Stuck on Castro

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

In a country where major news developments rarely precipitate anything but deeper misery, Cuba awoke Tuesday to the news that el jefe maximo, Fidel Castro, had formally ceded power to his younger brother Raul. Cuba has grown accustomed to a seemingly endless and ageless set of images of the revolutionary father delivering a stultifying oration on Yanqui this-or-that, reposing in a monogrammed track suit, mumbling incoherently about his days in the Sierra Maestra. But to Cuba watchers and exiles, his official ceding of power was unexpected.

The 81-year-old Castro tendered his resignation in column form, carried in Cuba's national newspaper (there is, excluding a flimsy "youth publication," just one). Lifting language from Lyndon Johnson (one of the many presidents that, the deeply serious pundit is required to mention, he has "outlived"), Fidel declared, "I will neither aspire to nor accept—I repeat, I will neither aspire to nor accept—the positions of President of the State Council and Commander in Chief." Delusional until the end, Castro presumes that his indentured subjects demand eternal revolution, forcing him to repeat that, no, it will be little Raul, 76, who will guide the Cuban people towards a classless and cashless utopia. MSNBC's Chris Matthews apparently believes this too, asking Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), co-sponsor of the monumentally stupid, embargo-expanding Helms-Burton Act, why "Cubans on the island still support the Castro brothers."

The preceding days have demonstrated that information peddled by Castro's legion of academic and celebrity apologists has deeply penetrated the mainstream media consciousness, with credulous reporting sundry revolutionary "successes" of the regime: not so good on free speech, but oh-so-enviable on health care and education.

In an email to staffers, with the nudging subject line "Castro guidance," CNN producer Allison Flexner advised reporters to be fair and not to focus solely on the regime's repressiveness. "Please note Fidel did bring social reforms to Cuba," writes Flexner, "namely free education and universal health care, and racial integration in addition to being criticized for oppressing human rights and freedom of speech."

Well, wrong on all three counts, but more on that later. That evening, CNN's ubiquitous foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour appeared on a panel to hail the end of Castro's rule while managing to mention that he was "a leader in many things such as education, health care." Message received, Atlanta!

In Europe, The Guardian's Latin American correspondent Rory Carroll admonished Cuba for its human rights violations while praising "the government's success in offering all its citizens free access to education and healthcare, resulting in western levels of literacy and life expectancy." That's at best a dubious achievement, considering that Cuba is situated in the West. "Compared with other Latin American countries," Carroll gushed, "Cuba is notable for its absence of beggars, violent crime and extreme inequality," because everyone is equally poor. The average monthly salary in Cuba is 330 pesos—about $13.75.

Thirteen measly bucks and there aren't any beggars in Cuba? Well, not really. As one Miami Herald reporter observed in December 2006, "Anyone strolling through Cuba's tourist spots like Old Havana is likely to encounter a number of panhandlers, from the disabled like Avila and the elderly like Cecilia in the Plaza de Armas, to those struggling with mental illness such as Irma Castillo at the Parque Central." The British left-wing magazine The New Internationalist reported, "On the streets of Havana there are two relatively common sights that wouldn't have been seen 20 years ago: cellphones and beggars." (Cell phone use is, naturally, heavily regulated by the government, ensuring that Cuba ranks second to last in a recent United Nations table of cell phones per person. For those scoring at home, only Papua New Guinea ranks lower.)

The British news agency Reuters tells us that Castro came to power by overthrowing "U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista." And Batista was a dictator—one alternately supported, tolerated, and disliked by Washington. As historian Hugh Thomas, author the magisterial book Cuba or the Pursuit of Freedom, wrote, "American assistance to Batista was never explicitly forthcoming." By 1958, a year before Castro's seizure of power, the U.S. had instituted an arms embargo against Batista, and elements within the CIA and State Department were actively agitating for a Castro victory. Indeed, it was the British government that agreed to sell Batista military hardware—15 fighter planes—when the Eisenhower administration refused.

And how does Reuters describe Castro? After 50 years of brutal one-party rule, to apply the appellation "dictator" seems a rather contentious issue: "Vilified by opponents as a totalitarian dictator, Castro is admired in many Third World nations for standing up to the United States and providing free education and health care." And again, we return to education and health care.

The AP, retracing the history of modern Cuba, explains that Castro's "revolutionaries opened 10,000 new schools, erased illiteracy, and built a universal health care system." And what kind of schools, what kind of education system, did they inaugurate? As Georgetown University professor Eusebio Mujal-Leon has observed, "The [rewritten Cuban] Constitution made the furtherance of Marxism-Leninism the purpose of education, and through its Article 38 made the latter a function of the state." What good is universal literacy if one can be arrested for possession of an Orwell book? What good is "free" education if honest academic inquiry is forbidden?

In fairness to fourth-estaters, it wasn't just journalists that cribbed from the party script. The ridiculous Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.) was the only American politician to debase himself by issuing a Granma-worthy press release actually praising Castro. This week's events prove, Serrano wrote, "that Castro sees clearly the long-term interests of the Cuban people," including the selfless decision to hand power to his brother, thus saving the Cuban people from the indignity of electoral choice. "I would like to congratulate both Fidel Castro and the Cuban people for this smooth transition of power," continued, "Few leaders, having been on the front lines of history so long, would be able to voluntarily step aside in favor of a new, younger generation." The absurdities of that sentence are too many to catalog, though note that the "younger generation" is represented by Fidel's septuagenarian brother Raul.

Writing in The New Statesman, British parliamentarian John McDonnell, the Right Honorable Gentleman from 1968, offers high praise for Cuban communism and demonstrates a level of credulity not seen since John Reed vacationed in Moscow. But don't mention Moscow, because, as McDonnell bizarrely writes, "unlike Stalin's Russia there have never been any Cuban gulags." What's not to like, he asks, about a country that provides "free prescriptions, free care for the elderly, free university education."

So again, the health and education canard returns. What all of these pols and pundits lazily presume is that if the state of Cuban health care and education have markedly improved on Castro's watch, surely the situation was dire during the final years of the Batista dictatorship.

Well, not exactly. In 1959 Cuba had 128.6 doctors and dentists per 100,000 inhabitants, placing it 22nd globally—that is, ahead of France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland. In infant mortality tables, Cuba ranked one of the best in the world, with 5.8 deaths per 100,000 babies, compared to 9.5 per 100,000 in the United States. In 1958 Cuba's adult literacy rate was 80 percent, higher than that of its colonial grandfather in Spain, and the country possessed one of the most highly-regarded university systems in the Western hemisphere.

Cuba improved, as have most countries, on some of these indices in the years since the revolution. As reason Contributing Editor Glenn Garvin points out, "countries like Costa Rica, Panama, and Brazil have posted equal gains in literacy during the same time period without resorting to totalitarian governments." (For more reason coverage over the years on Cuba and Castro, go here.)

This is precisely the point: Punctual trains and spiffy highway networks hardly mitigate the horror of dictatorship. Such "advances," like the illusory gains of the Cuban Revolution, are best achieved through policies that promote economic and political freedom. You would think, almost 20 yeas after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that journalists would understand that.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.