Reason Magazine - Topics > History

Free the Fireworks!

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Outside of hardcore porn, is there any art form as static as a Fourth of July fireworks display? Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, yet year after year, like stoned zombies staring at screensavers, we tilt our heads to the sky and watch amateurs and professionals alike stage the pyrotechnical equivalents of gang bangs. If a dozen silver comets shooting across the heavens are spectacular, 100 are even better! And why not throw some crimson, gold, and turquoise into the mix too? Thus the spectrum expands, the explosions multiply, the choreography grows increasingly byzantine—but the basic plot remains unchanged.

So why are we so crazy about fireworks? In 1976, the year the United States celebrated its bicentennial, American patriots blew up 29 million pounds of fireworks. In 2006, the American Pyrotechnic Association reports, we exploded nearly 10 times that amount—in part, no doubt, because 10 times as many events have become fireworks appropriate. NFL games, casino openings, political conventions, weddings, and even a few funerals now get the sort of schlock-and-aww pageantry we once reserved for the Fourth.

Industry boosters typically attribute the growing popularity of fireworks to better safety standards and fewer regulations prohibiting their use. But the pyrotechnics still do injure people; 9,200 Americans required medical attention due to fireworks injuries in 2006, according to Consumer Product Safety Commission statistics. (In contrast, 220,500 people suffered toy-related injuries that year.) And in most states, regulation remains strong. While prosecution is mainly reserved for individuals caught selling products that exceed Washington’s safety guidelines for “consumer fireworks”—e.g.,
M-80s, quarter sticks, and professional display fireworks that require a federal permit—penalties for much lesser offenses can be comically severe. In New York, for example, you can get three months in the slammer for possessing $50 worth of sparklers.

Thus, while fireworks may splatter the sky with every neon hue Chinese chemists can summon from strontium and copper chloride, they exist in a legal and moral gray zone. They’re kind of safe and sort of permissible, but also sort of dangerous and kind of against the law. All of which, of course, makes them immensely appealing. They offer us a chance to engage in semi-illicit behavior without excessive risk of punishment or serious injury, at least until the NYPD makes zero sparkler tolerance its primary mandate.

If John Adams were alive today, he’d be issuing $500 fines for possessing sparklers too—but only because it would pain him to see us commemorating the Fourth in such timid fashion. In 1776 he exclaimed in a letter to his wife that the anniversary of America’s independence “ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”

In the decades that followed, Adams’ countrymen readily embraced this edict—or at least the “guns, bells, bonfires” part of it. By the end of the 19th century, however, the social fallout from chaotic Independence Day celebrations began to coalesce into an anti-fireworks movement. In a 1904 letter to The New York Times, a physician lamented the Fourth as “a sad story of amputated little fingers, arms, or legs.” In 1910 a Philadelphia rabbi called it “the annual day of slaughter of the innocents, the day of conflagrations, the day of compulsory self-exile, the day of agony for the sick and feeble.” Newspapers ran stories about drunken mobs firing guns in the streets, shooting Roman candles into crowds, and attacking police officers.

Progressive advocacy groups such as the Playground Association of America, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the American Medical Association began to actively campaign for a “safe and sane” Fourth of July. “In 1903 the AMA began keeping a tally of people who were killed and injured by fireworks,” says James R. Heintze, author of The Fourth of July Encyclopedia. “And out of that movement the legislation began to occur in a number of different cities.”

In her 1989 book Glorious Fourth: An American Holiday, an American History, the historian Diana K. Appelbaum writes that the AMA reported 4,543 fireworks-related deaths from 1903 to 1910. Cleveland, Chicago, and other major cities started banning the private use of fireworks and offering “safe and sane” celebrations that included parades, pageants, and the sort of large public fireworks displays that remain popular today, in the place of unregulated displays of spontaneously combusting patriotism. Individual citizens could no longer be trusted to celebrate the roles independence and liberty played in their lives.

But some Americans will give up their sparklers only when you peel them from their cold, dead, occasionally fingerless hands. Today, fireworks that meet a set of requirements established by the Consumer Product Safety Commission are legal at the federal level, but in states and municipalities where they’re regulated more stringently, the locals simply devise ways to get around the law. In Wisconsin individuals aren’t allowed to buy fireworks. Organizations can, but only after obtaining a permit issued by a local government official.

Some communities allow retailers to sell permits directly to their customers, however, as long as they promise to pass along the fees they collect. Because individuals aren’t allowed to purchase fireworks even with a permit, the retailers establish “user associations” that consist entirely of their customers. The customer buys his stockpile of fireworks, buys a permit, joins the association, and in one seamless transaction is transformed from a guy who’d like to set off some pinwheels in his backyard into an officially sanctioned community organization.

No doubt such ingenuity is as much a testament to the American spirit as the 16-shot “Untamed Retribution” aerial repeater, which comes in a package emblazoned with a bald eagle whose menacing, belligerent glare suggests little tolerance for namby-pamby expressions of patriotism like smoke pots and pie-eating contests.

But should the people of Wisconsin have to resort to such elaborate workarounds just to get their hands on some neutered, prettified sky bombs that even a pacifist floral arranger could love? In the eyes of John Adams, celebrating the nation’s birthday in noisy, incendiary fashion wasn’t just a right; it was a duty! To fulfill that duty in Wisconsin, alas, you have to behave like a Soviet Union bureaucrat trying to wangle himself a few extra vodka coupons.

In the first decade of the 20th century, when as many as 600 citizens were dying from fireworks injuries each year, such regulations may have been easier to tolerate. From 1988 to 2004, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. averaged approximately 6.4 fireworks-related deaths per year. According to the American Pyrotechnical Association, the number of injuries per 100,000 pounds of fireworks dropped 91 percent from 1976 to 2006. Meanwhile, with professional outfits like Fireworks by Grucci and Pyro Spectaculars by Souza producing massive fireworks blitzkriegs in honor of nothing more than halftime, it’s only natural, in the age of YouTube, Home Depot, and all the other manifestations of do-it-yourself culture, for individual Americans to believe they have the right to emulate such efforts, especially on the one day of the year when we’re ostensibly celebrating our status as citizens of the freest nation in the history of the world.

Thus, as with porn, the escalatory nature of fireworks isn’t just an aesthetic phenomenon but a political one. Just as we test the boundaries of our freedom by pushing from Playboy to Hustler to Little Red Rides the Hood #2, we do the same by pushing from firecrackers to cherry bombs to items with names like Mineshell Mayhem and Live Free or Die. Blowing up huge caches of fireworks doesn’t just celebrate our freedom; it certifies it—a patriotic act our Founding Fathers would have readily endorsed.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer in San Francisco.

Arming America

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:00:00 EDT

For the past 32 years, law-abiding residents of Washington, D.C. have been at the mercy of one of America's most unforgiving gun control laws: a total ban on the possession of handguns in the home, as well as strict trigger lock and disassembly requirements for rifles and shotguns. Taken together, these restrictions have left Washingtonians unable to mount any sort of meaningful defense of themselves, their families, and their homes from armed intruders.

But things changed on Thursday. In a landmark 5-4 decision in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court held that D.C.'s gun ban was unconstitutional under the Second Amendment since it deprived individuals of their right "to use arms for the core lawful purpose of self-defense." In a forceful, tightly argued opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia declared that the amendment protects an essential individual right, one that is "unconnected with service in a militia."

One major thing the decision didn't do, however, was directly address a crucial question going forward: whether the constitutional right to keep and bear arms is applicable against the states as well as the federal government (which administers Washington, D.C.). Under what's known as the incorporation doctrine, the Supreme Court has gradually ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment applies many of the protections contained in the Bill of Rights against infringement by state and local governments. The Second Amendment, however, has been glaringly absent from this process. Did Heller change that, too?

Technically no. But since the Court wasn't asked to settle that matter, the fact that it didn't do so is no cause for alarm. In fact, the decision offers cause for some real hope. Justice Scalia's extensive reliance on historical sources and scholarship sends a very promising signal to those who'd like to see the Second Amendment enforced against the states. If history matters, and Heller certainly says that it does, then strong evidence for incorporation is likely to carry real weight in future litigation.

So let's consider the origins of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states in part, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." As legal historian Michael Kent Curtis makes clear in his definitive book, No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights, the radical Republicans who drafted and then spearheaded the 1868 ratification of the amendment clearly intended and understood it to apply the entire Bill of Rights to the states.

In short, these legislators, most of whom had been active in the anti-slavery and abolitionist movements, wanted to secure the life, liberty, and property of the recently freed slaves and their white allies in the former Confederate states. This quite obviously and quite necessarily included the right to keep and bear arms for purposes of self-defense. Ohio Rep. John Bingham, for instance, the author of the Fourteenth Amendment's crucial first section, which was quoted above, declared that "the privileges and immunities" it refers to "are chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the Constitution." Similarly, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, who presented the amendment to the Senate, described its object as "to restrain the power of the States and compel them at all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees," including "the right to keep and to bear arms." For a state or federal judge following the methodology laid out in Heller, such information could prove very persuasive.

In modern-day Chicago, meanwhile, gun rights activists have already seized the initiative. Within hours of Heller's announcement, the Second Amendment Foundation and the Illinois State Rifle Association filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the city's draconian handgun ban, a law that has deprived Chicagoans of the right to self-defense for the past quarter of a century. Benna Solomon, deputy corporation council for the city, responded by telling the Chicago Tribune that "the 2nd Amendment does not apply to state and local government," adding: "We are prepared to aggressively litigate this issue and defend this ordinance."

Alan Gura, the attorney who successfully argued Heller before the Court, and who is now representing the plaintiffs in the Chicago case, is more than ready. As he told reason this week, "The next step is obviously 14th Amendment incorporation. I'm looking forward to leading that fight."

Damon W. Root is an associate editor of reason.

The Central Committee Is in Session

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is holding an open meeting today, giving students of public policy a chance to observe an especially egregious arm of the regulatory state. If you want to see what's wrong with Washington, the FCC is as good a place as any to start looking: Since its birth in 1934, it has manifested three fundamental problems.

The commission is corrupt. I don't just mean the sort of corruption where the chairman loosens his tie, puts his feet up on his desk, and doles out favors to the companies that scratched the right backs—though you'll find plenty of that in the commission's history. Even when the body is being relatively transparent and above-board, it is beholden to politically connected lobbies. The FCC controls an important economic resource. Naturally, important economic interests try their best to influence its decisions.

The most flagrant example of this might be the welcome the commission gave to FM radio. The technology was an enormous leap forward: It allowed stations to broadcast without static, and it allowed more signals to coexist on the spectrum. It also worried RCA, which was investing heavily in the development of television; the company fretted that consumers might not pay for both a new FM radio and a new TV set. RCA didn't control the patent on FM, so it pressured the FCC to favor the other technology. The regulators obliged, and a series of roadblocks appeared in FM's path. The most destructive decision came in 1944, when the commissioners suddenly reassigned the FM broadcasters' portion of the ether to television, instantly rendering every FM receiver obsolete.

Sometimes the benefits of FCC corruption were more narrowly focused. The most infamous illustration might be the case of Lady Bird Johnson, whose broadcasting empire relied on the Washington connections of her husband, future president Lyndon Johnson. The Johnsons got rich off their stations, with the FCC smoothing the way whenever they needed an application approved and throwing up regulatory hurdles when someone threatened their monopoly on Austin's TV market.

Does such winner-picking still go on today? Decide for yourself. The commission intends to auction off some wireless spectrum soon. FCC chief Kevin Martin wants to impose some restrictions on how that spectrum can be used—restrictions that happen to dovetail with the business model of one well-connected startup. The business in question, M2Z, wants to build an ad-supported national broadband network, with additional tiers where consumers can pay extra for speedier connections; last year it asked the commission to grant it the spectrum outright. The regulators refused, and the company promptly sued to overturn the decision. But if the auction goes forward as planned, the commission will have effectively bequeathed the spectrum to the corporation anyway.

You needn't be fond of the incumbent wireless industry—not exactly free-market heroes themselves—to appreciate how inappropriate it is for the government to weigh the scales in any single firm's favor. Those incumbents have protested the plan, leading Martin to take his proposal off the agenda for today's meeting. But that doesn't mean the idea is dead: Martin says he hopes to introduce it next month instead.

Despite this unpleasant history, the FCC believes it is qualified to serve as a moral guardian for the rest of us. Which leads us to problem number two.

The commission is sanctimonious. For seven decades, the nation's scolds and censors have used the FCC as a tool to shape the sounds and images allowed on the airwaves. In 1952, for example, then-commissioner Paul Walker announced with satisfaction that his agency had "surveyed the programming of some of the television stations in operation, and found that some of them had reported no time devoted to broadcasts of a religious nature. We felt in view of this fact that regular renewal of their licenses would not be in the public interest." The stations quickly revised their schedules, and the commission agreed to renew their licenses after all.

These days the FCC is less likely to shoehorn something onto a station's schedule, but it's more than willing to slice something off the program. This practice also has a long history. It was the FCC that enforced Spiro Agnew's crusade against "drug lyrics," an especially vague stricture at a time when some fretful listeners managed to detect traces of narcotics in "Puff the Magic Dragon" and "Hey Jude" (for the phrase "let her under your skin"). Agnew himself believed the Beatles song "With a Little Help from My Friends" was a coded message in which "the 'friends' were assorted drugs with such nicknames as 'Mary Jane,' 'Speed' and 'Benny.'" Rock stations suddenly faced much more uncertainty about what they were allowed to play, and worried program directors reined in their DJs, hastening the decline of freeform radio.

More recently, the FCC under Michael Powell and then Kevin Martin has waged war on "indecent" material, stepping up enforcement even before Janet Jackson's infamous nipple slip in 2004 and ramping its penalties still higher since then. Now Martin wants to tell a company that intends to offer a free national wireless network that it'll have to filter out the porn if it wants access to the ether.

The company? M2Z, of course—or, to be precise, whoever wins the auction tailored to M2Z's business model. Don't expect any objections: The smut-free proviso was already present in M2Z's plans. The execs there understand what Washington wants.

And then there's problem number three:

The commission is technocratic. The next time someone tells you central planning is dead, remind him that there is an arm of the federal government that decides in advance how different chunks of the electromagnetic spectrum will be used, and that it also reserves the right to determine which entities will be allowed to use it. It's true the commission has adopted several market "mechanisms" in the last few decades: FCC-approved broadcasters now have the right to sell their licenses to other FCC-approved broadcasters, and spectrum is usually distributed by auction rather than pure fiat. But even an auction can be bent to the planners' will.

For evidence, look—again!—at the M2Z situation. If the auction goes forward according to Martin's reported plans, the bidding won't be open to just any telecom company. Applicants will have to use that spectrum for a particular sort of service. They will even be pushed to adopt a particular business model. There are phrases to describe such an arrangement. "Free market" is not one of them.

But that is how the Federal Communications Commission works. In theory, its job is to manage the nation's spectrum in the public interest. In practice, inevitably, that means its job is to pick and choose among the definitions of "the public interest" offered by rival industry lobbies and moralistic pressure groups. Corruption, sanctimony, and the conceit of central planning: That's the FCC—and Martin's pet auction—in a nutshell.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker is the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press).

The Age of Nixon

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Unexplained Mysteries: Why Didn't the Indians Build Their Pyramids Upside-Down?

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:17:00 EDT

The new Indiana Jones flick prompts an anthropologist to debunk -- yet again! -- a resilient strain of crank theories:

Over the last 500 years Europeans and Americans have sought nearly any explanation for the complexity of native cultures in the Americas. Possible influences have been sought in a lost tribe from Israel, European wanderers, and even Atlantis. In the twentieth century extremely popular versions of this vein of thinking have included the idea that the Olmec civilization developed under the influence of priest-kings who came from ancient Egypt, and of course, Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods, in which ancient cultures around the world are given inspiration and innovation by aliens.

One of the pieces of evidence that is most commonly cited in this less than rigorous scholarship is the presence of pyramids all over the world. If a pyramid is broadly defined as a building that is wider at the bottom and tapers to the top, it is hardly a mystery as to why this structure would be common. Any small child with a block set will tell you that it is very difficult to make the top wider than the bottom. Ditto for sandcastles. More compelling than my ad hoc engineering arguments, however, is the steady accretion of knowledge from around the world of local, indigenous culture histories. Thousands of archaeologists, working on thousands of sites, analyzing millions of artifacts have allowed us to see that pyramid building in Egypt, for example, is a process, developed out of long-standing traditions related to tombs. In Mesopotamia, pyramids are temples, with their own long trajectory of development that can be traced in the archaeological record.

In the New World, there is clear evidence in Mesoamerica and South America (which is where Peru is by the way, Indy) of the indigenous development of pyramid building traditions. Similarly, in North America, the largest, pyramid-shaped earthen structures of the Mississippian period do not appear suddenly, with no precedent, rather they are part of a long tradition of earth mound building that stretches over thousands of years into the Archaic period in eastern North America. There is absolutely no reason to revert to theories of alien intervention unless you are predisposed to think of Native Americans as dull, lazy, conservative people who lack the initiative, creativity, cleverness, and cultural complexity to be responsible for the archaeological remains we can empirically document in their homelands.

[Via Infocult.]

Miscellaneous Friday Links

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 23 May 2008 11:33:00 EDT

* John Ford's lost Vietnam propaganda film.

* You want witch hunts? Here's a witch hunt.

* Is Alice Cooper a terrorist?

* Jimmy Carter's hands-on presidency.

Vote for the Socialist Labor Party!

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 13 May 2008 08:00:00 EDT

No, not really. Besides the ideological problems, there's the small fact that it hasn't bothered to nominate a presidential candidate since 1976. But I must admit I admire one plank in its program:

The Socialist Labor platform called for abolishing the presidency, and party electors were instructed to vote "no president" in the comet-striking-earth chance that the SLP carried a state.

That's from Bill Kauffman's thoughtful review of Daniel J. Flynn's A Conservative History of the American Left. There's more to the article than entertaining asides about the presidential platforms of semi-syndicalist sects; read the whole thing here.

The Cult of the Presidency

info@reason.com (Gene Healy) — Mon, 12 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

“I ain’t running for preacher,” Republican presidential candidate Phil Gramm snarled to religious right activists in 1995 when they urged him to run a campaign stressing moral themes. Several months later, despite Gramm’s fund raising prowess, the Texas conservative finished a desultory fifth place in the Iowa caucuses and quickly dropped out of the race. Since then, few candidates have made Gramm’s mistake. Serious contenders for the office recognize that the role and scope of the modern presidency cannot be so narrowly confined. Today’s candidates are running enthusiastically for national preacher—and much else besides.

In the revival tent atmosphere of Barack Obama’s campaign, the preferred hosanna of hope is “Yes we can!” We can, the Democratic front-runner promises, not only create “a new kind of politics” but “transform this country,” “change the world,” and even “create a Kingdom right here on earth.” With the presidency, all things are possible.

Even though Republican nominee John McCain tends to eschew rainbows and uplift in favor of the grim satisfaction that comes from serving a “cause greater than self-interest,” he too sees the presidency as a font of miracles and the wellspring of national redemption. A president who wants to achieve greatness, McCain suggests, should emulate Teddy Roosevelt, who “liberally interpreted the constitutional authority of the office” and “nourished the soul of a great nation.” President George W. Bush, when passing the GOP torch to his former rival in March, declared that the Arizona senator “will bring determination to defeat an enemy and a heart big enough to love those who hurt.” Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, suggests she is “ready on Day 1 to be commander in chief of our economy.”

The chief executive of the United States is no longer a mere constitutional officer charged with faithful execution of the laws. He is a soul nourisher, a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise. He—or she—is the one who answers the phone at 3 a.m. to keep our children safe from harm. The modern president is America’s shrink, a social worker, our very own national talk show host. He’s also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth.

This messianic campaign rhetoric merely reflects what the office has evolved into after decades of public clamoring. The vision of the president as national guardian and spiritual redeemer is so ubiquitous it goes virtually unnoticed. Americans, left, right, and other, think of the “commander in chief” as a superhero, responsible for swooping to the rescue when danger strikes. And with great responsibility comes great power.

It’s difficult for 21st-century Americans to imagine things any other way. The United States appears stuck with an imperial presidency, an office that concentrates enormous power in the hands of whichever professional politician manages to claw his way to the top. Americans appear deeply ambivalent about the results, alternately cursing the king and pining for Camelot. But executive power will continue to grow, and threats to civil liberties increase, until citizens reconsider the incentives we have given to a post that started out so humble.

Minimum Leader
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The modern vision of the presidency couldn’t be further from the Framers’ view of the chief executive’s role. In an age long before distrust of power was condemned as cynicism, the Founding Fathers designed a presidency of modest authority and limited responsibilities. The Constitution’s architects never conceived of the president as the man in charge of national destiny. They worked amid the living memory of monarchy, and for them the very notion of “national leadership” raised the possibility of authoritarian rule by a demagogue ready to create an atmosphere of crisis in order to enhance his power.

The constitutional office they designed gave the president an important role, but he’d have “no particle of spiritual jurisdiction,” the 69th essay of The Federalist Papers tells us. In Federalist No. 48, James Madison assured Americans that under the proposed Constitution the “executive magistracy is carefully limited, both in the extent and the duration of its powers.” Indeed, the very pseudonym the Federalist’s authors chose, “Publius,” says something about how hostile Founding-generation Americans were to the idea of one-man rule. Publius Valerius Poplicola, a hero of the Roman revolution in the 5th century B.C., was famous in part for passing a law providing that anyone suspected of seeking kingship could be summarily executed.

Never were constitutional limitations more essential than when it came to using military power. Early Americans were no strangers to national security threats; in 1787 the U.S. was a small frontier republic on the edge of a continent occupied by periodically hostile great powers and Indian marauders. Yet the Constitution limited emergency powers and sharply rejected the idea that the president was above the law. “In no part of the Constitution,” Madison wrote in 1793, “is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department.” In any other arrangement, “the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man.” That sentiment crossed party lines. As Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in 1801, “the whole powers of war being by the Constitution of the United States vested in Congress, the acts of that body can alone be resorted to as our guides.”

Today Americans expect their president to pound Teddy Roosevelt’s “bully pulpit,” whipping the electorate into a frenzy to harness power against perceived threats. But the Framers viewed that sort of behavior as fundamentally illegitimate. In fact, the president wasn’t even supposed to be a popular leader. As presidential scholar Jeffrey K. Tulis has pointed out, in the Federalist the term leader is nearly always used pejoratively; the essays by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay in defense of the Constitution begin and end with warnings about the perils of populist leadership. The first Federalist warns of “men who have overturned the liberties of republics” by “paying obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants,” and the last Federalist raises the specter of a “military despotism” orchestrated by “a victorious demagogue.”

Instead of stoking public demands for action, the chief magistrate was expected to resist “the transient impulses of the people” and use his veto to keep Congress within its constitutional bounds. That role didn’t require much speechifying. Early presidents rarely spoke directly to the public; from George Washington through Andrew Jackson, they averaged little more than three speeches per year, with those mostly confined to ceremonial addresses. In his first year in office, by comparison, President Clinton delivered 600.

In the early State of the Union addresses to Congress, presidents knew better than to adopt an imperious tone. After his third SOTU, Washington wrote that “motives of delicacy” had deterred him from “introducing any topic which relates to legislative matters, lest it should be suspected that [I] wished to influence the question” before Congress. Yet the deference shown by Washington and his successor John Adams didn’t go quite far enough for our third president, Thomas Jefferson, who thought their practice of speaking before the legislature in person smacked of the British king’s “Speech From the Throne.” Jefferson instead inaugurated a new tradition of delivering the annual message in writing. For 112 years, that Jeffersonian tradition held sway, until the power-hungry Woodrow Wilson delivered his first State of the Union in person.

The 19th century did see presidents occasionally taking independent action of enormous consequences: Jefferson purchased Louisiana without congressional approval, Madison seized West Florida in 1810, Andrew Jackson governed as an irritable populist, and Abraham Lincoln expanded presidential power dramatically throughout the course of the cataclysmic Civil War. Yet taken as a whole, the 19th-century presidency was a pale shadow of the plebiscitary office we know today.

In a 2002 study tracking word usage through two centuries of SOTUs and inaugural addresses, political scientist Elvin T. Lim noted that in the first decades under the Constitution presidents rarely mentioned poverty, and the word help did not even appear until 1859. Nor did early presidents subscribe to the modern notion that it’s all “about the children”; they rarely even mentioned the little buggers. But Lim found that “Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton made 260 of the 508 references to children in the entire speech database, invoking the government’s responsibility to and concern for children in practically every public policy area.”

George Washington did mention kids in his seventh annual message, lamenting “the frequent destruction of innocent women and children” by Indian raiders. But that was a far cry from Bill Clinton in 1997, who declared in the State of the Union that “we must also protect our children by standing firm in our determination to ban the advertising and marketing of cigarettes that endanger their lives.”

Wail to the Chief
A little-remembered vignette from the 1992 presidential race underscores how far we’ve traveled from the Framers’ unassuming “chief magistrate”—and how infantile our politics have become along the way. The scene was the campaign’s second televised debate, held in Richmond, Virginia; the format, a horrid Oprah-style arrangement in which a hand-picked audience of allegedly normal Americans got to lob questions at the candidates, who were perched on stools, trying to look warm and approachable. Up from the crowd popped a ponytailed social worker named Denton Walthall, who demanded to know what George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and H. Ross Perot were going to do for us.

“The focus of my work as a domestic mediator is meeting the needs of the children that I work with…and not the wants of their parents,” Walthall said. “And I ask the three of you, how can we, as symbolically the children of the future president, expect the three of you to meet our needs, the needs in housing and in crime and you name it.”

One wonders how some of the more irascible presidents of old would have reacted at the sight of a grown man burbling about childish necessities to the prospective national father. Yet under the hot lights of the 1992 campaign, Ross Perot said he’d cross his heart and take Walthall’s pledge to meet America’s infantile needs, whatever those were. Bill Clinton, being Bill Clinton, pandered. And Bush 41 spluttered through his answer thusly:

“I mean I—I think, in general, let’s talk about these—let’s talk about these issues; let’s talk about the programs, but in the presidency a lot goes into it. Caring is…that’s not particularly specific; strength goes into it, that’s not specific; standing up against aggression, that’s not specific in terms of a program. So I, in principle, I’ll take your point and think we ought to discuss child care—or whatever else it is.” That wasn’t just an example of the Bush family’s famous locution problems; it’s hard not to stammer when faced with the limitless and bewildering demands the public places on the presidency.

How did we go from a reticent constitutional officer to the modern commander in chief, a figure who continually shifts back and forth between gushing empathy and military bluster, often within the same speech? As Tony Soprano might have put it, whatever happened to Calvin Coolidge, the strong, silent type?

There is no single explanation for the presidency’s growth. New communication technologies such as radio and television played a role, as did growing material progress, which made Americans less willing to suffer inconveniences and more receptive to the belief that public problems could be solved with collective action. Yet in each key period of the presidency’s growth, we see a familiar pattern: expansionist ideology meeting practical opportunity in the form of successive national crises.

The 100-Year Emergency
Much of what’s wrong with American government today can be traced to the Progressive Era, that period of reformist backlash against the Industrial Revolution that dominated the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century. As the Progressives saw it, if the Constitution stood in the way of necessary reforms, then too bad for the Constitution. “We are the first Americans,” a young scholar named Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1885, “to hear our own countrymen ask whether the Constitution is still adapted to serve the purposes for which it was intended; the first to entertain any serious doubts about the superiority of our institutions as compared with the systems of Europe.”

The Progressives were “the nearest to presidential absolutists of any theorists and practitioners of the presidency,” wrote Raymond Tatalovich and Thomas S. Engeman in their 2003 book The Presidency and Political Science: Two Hundred Years of Intellectual Debate. For the new century’s reformers, power wielded for national greatness was benign, checks on such power perverse. The Progressives had no use for the restrained oratorical traditions of the 19th century; it was the president’s job to move the masses, unifying them behind calls for bold executive action.

Their model and embodiment was Teddy Roosevelt, whom the Progressive journalist and New Republic founder Herbert Croly described as a “sledgehammer in the cause of national righteousness.” When T.R. took the stage at the 1912 Progressive Party convention, he foreshadowed Obama’s quasi-religious fervor and McCain’s bellicosity, barking, “To you who strive in a spirit of brotherhood for the betterment of our Nation, to you who gird yourselves for this great new fight in the never-ending warfare for the good of humankind, I say in closing.…We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!”

The most astute among the Progressives recognized that, given the American public’s congenital resistance to centralized rule, a sustained atmosphere of crisis would be necessary to sell the expansion of White House power. Two world wars and one Great Depression did the trick nicely. T.R.’s activist, celebrity presidency heralded the coming of a new sort of chief executive, one who would evermore be the center of national attention, the motive force behind American government. With his expanded power, Roosevelt busted trusts, carried a big stick throughout the Americas with a newly imperial U.S. Navy, and issued nearly as many executive orders as all of his predecessors combined. Woodrow Wilson then proved what Progressives had long hypothesized: that soaring rhetoric combined with the panicked atmosphere of war could concentrate massive social power in the hands of one person. Over the course of his presidency he helped create the Federal Reserve, nationalized railroads, and used the Espionage and Sedition Acts (along with more than 150,000 vigilantes) to carry out the most brutal campaign against dissent in U.S. history.

But it took FDR to eliminate the last remaining vestiges of the modest presidency. Roosevelt used Wilson’s Trading With the Enemy Act to shut down all U.S. banks in 1933, grabbed the power to approve or prescribe wages and prices for all trades and industries, and authorized the FBI to spy on suspected subversives. He changed the Supreme Court from a bulwark against presidential overreach to an enabler. By the end of his 12-year reign, FDR had firmly established the president as national protector and nurturer, one whose performance would be judged in terms of what political scientist Theodore Lowi has identified as the modern test of executive legitimacy: “service delivery.” In his 11th State of the Union address, FDR conjured up a second Bill of Rights, one whose guarantees would include “a useful and renumerative job” and the “right of every farmer to…a decent living.” Depression-era economic controls and war-driven centralization had turned the American system of government, in Lowi’s words, into “an inverted pyramid, with everything coming to rest on a presidential pinpoint.”

War was the health of the presidency during the long twilight struggle against the Soviet Union as well. “The worse matters get,” Harry Truman’s adviser Clark Clifford told him in 1948, “the more is there a sense of crisis. In times of crisis, the American citizen tends to back up his president.” During the Cold War, presidents used the all-purpose rationale of national security to justify spying on their political enemies. Richard Nixon might have been the most notorious abuser, with a series of dirty tricks and flagrant offenses that led to his downfall, but his predecessors also wielded the presidential bludgeon with gusto. When American steel companies raised prices in 1962, John F. Kennedy declared privately that “they fucked us, and now we’ve got to fuck them,” then (along with his attorney general, brother Bobby) ordered up wiretaps, Internal Revenue Service audits and early-morning raids on steel executives’ homes. During the 1964 presidential race, Lyndon Johnson used the CIA to obtain advance copies of Barry Goldwater’s campaign speeches, and the FBI to bug Goldwater’s plane.

In the pre-Watergate age of the heroic presidency, public trust in government was at its height, and mainstream scholars lauded the presidency as an earthly manifestation of the living God. As political scientist Herman Finer put it in 1960, the office was “the incarnation of the American people in a sacrament resembling that in which the wafer and the wine are seen to be the body and blood of Christ.” The president, Finer said, was “the offspring of a titan and Minerva husbanded by Mars.”

I Hate You; Don’t Leave Me
After Vietnam and Watergate, America’s intoxication with the imperial presidency ended with a crushing hangover. A newly aggressive press and assertive Congress produced serial revelations of the executive abuses that blind trust had enabled. In the bicentennial year of 1976, Idaho Sen. Frank Church’s Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities summed up the damage:

“For decades Congress and the courts as well as the press and the public have accepted the notion that the control of intelligence activities was the exclusive prerogative of the Chief Executive and his surrogates. The exercise of this power was not questioned or even inquired into by outsiders. Indeed, at times the power was seen as flowing not from the law, but as inherent, in the Presidency. Whatever the theory, the fact was that intelligence activities were essentially exempted from the normal system of checks and balances. Such executive power, not founded in law or checked by Congress or the courts, contained the seeds of abuse and its growth was to be expected.”

During the Eisenhower 1950s and the JFK/LBJ 1960s, the newly ascendant conservative movement coalescing around Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley’s National Review was the most potent source of criticism of the imperial presidency. “Others hail the display of presidential strength…simply because they approve of the result reached by the use of power,” Goldwater wrote in his 1964 campaign manifesto. “This is nothing less than the totalitarian philosophy that the end justifies the means.”

But enticed by the long-awaited prospect of an “emerging Republican majority” and turned off by the journalistic and congressional attacks on Nixon, conservatives learned to stop worrying and love the executive branch. During the post-Watergate reform era, two senior Gerald Ford White House aides named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld fought tooth and nail against what they felt were dangerous shackles on the executive branch, supported by a conservative commentariat that refocused its ire on the Democratic Congress and the left-leaning press. “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate,” National Review stalwart M. Stanton Evans once quipped.

Although Americans finally recovered their native skepticism toward power after Vietnam, Watergate, and the revelations of the Church committee, we never reduced our demands on the executive branch. The lesson we seemed to have learned from the legacy of abuses was to trust less, ask more. In 1998 the Pew Research Center noted that “public desire for government services and activism has remained nearly steady over the past 30 years.” Two years later, a report on a survey by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government put it pithily: “Americans distrust government, but want it to do more.” The spirit of Denton Walthall lived on in the years leading up to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Superman Returns
The Bush administration’s extraconstitutional innovations in response to those attacks are by now all too familiar. John Yoo, David Addington, and other members of the president’s legal team constructed an alternative version of the national charter, a “neoconstitution” in which the president has unlimited power to launch war, wiretap without judicial scrutiny, and even seize American citizens on American soil and hold them for the duration of the War on Terror—in other words, indefinitely—without ever having to answer to a judge.

Conventional accounts of the post-9/11 imperial presidency emphasize the role of dedicated ideologues within the administration, men and women who had long believed that post-Watergate America had swung the pendulum too far back, jeopardizing national security. There’s good reason for that emphasis, but the “cabal of neocons” narrative risks obscuring the role that public demands have played in driving the centralization of power.

In his 2007 book The Terror Presidency, Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the president’s Office of Legal Counsel, describes the prevailing atmosphere within the executive branch after 9/11, one where the president’s men were acutely aware that all eyes were on the commander in chief. What is he doing to keep us safe? What more is he prepared to do?

Goldsmith, a dissenter from the Bush administration’s absolutist theories of executive power, often clashed with Dick Cheney’s deputy David Addington, the hardest-driving supporter of those theories. But Goldsmith understood why Addington was so unrelenting: “He believed presidential power was coextensive with presidential responsibility. Since the president would be blamed for the next homeland attack, he must have the power under the Constitution to do what he deemed necessary to stop it, regardless of what Congress said.”

That dynamic can lead to enhanced presidential power even in areas far removed from the War on Terror, as was demonstrated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In business or in government, responsibility without authority is every executive’s worst nightmare. That was the political reality facing the Bush administration in late summer 2005, when New Orleans was under water and desperate for assistance. As Colby Cosh of Canada’s National Post put it at the time, “the 49 percent of Americans who have been complaining for five years about George W. Bush being a dictator are now vexed to the point of utter incoherence because for the last fortnight he has failed to do a sufficiently convincing impression of a dictator.”

To be sure, the administration deserved plenty of blame for bungling the disaster relief tasks it had the power to carry out. But it soon became clear that the public held the Bush team responsible for performing feats above and beyond its legal authority. One almost had to feel sorry for Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown(ie), the disgraced former Federal Emergency Management Agency head, when he was obliged on Capitol Hill a month after the hurricane to inform an irate Rep. Chris Shays (R-Conn.) that in our federalist system, the FEMA chief has no power to order mandatory evacuations, or to become “this superhero that is going to step in there and suddenly take everybody out of New Orleans.” “That is just talk,” Shays responded. “Were you in contact with the military?”

For a president beleaguered by public demands, seizing new powers can be an adaptive response. Small wonder, then, that the Bush administration promptly sought enhanced authority for domestic use of the military. Although few in the media noted the historical moment, the president received that authority. On October 17, 2006, the same day he signed the Military Commissions Act denying centuries-old habeas corpus rights to “enemy combatants,” the president also signed a defense authorization bill that contained gaping new exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, the federal law that restricts the president’s power to use the standing army to enforce order at home.

The new exceptions to the act gave the president power to use U.S. armed forces to “restore public order and enforce the laws” when confronted with “natural disasters,” “public health emergencies,” and “other…incidents”—a catchall phrase that radically expands the president’s ability to use troops against his own citizens. Under it, the president can, if he chooses, fight a federal War on Hurricanes, declaring himself supreme military commander in any state where he thinks conditions warrant it. That’s the kind of executive power grab that happens when the public demands that the president protect Americans from the hazards of cyclical bad weather.

2009 and Beyond
To understand is not to excuse: No president should have the powers President Bush has sought and seized during the last seven years. But after 9/11 and Katrina, what rationally self-interested chief executive would hesitate to centralize power in anticipation of crisis? That pressure would be hard to resist, even for a president devoted to the Constitution and respectful of the limited role the office was supposed to play in our system of government.

In the current presidential race, none of the major-party candidates comes close to fitting that description. Aside from the issue of torture, there’s very little daylight between John McCain and George W. Bush on matters of executive power. For her part, Hillary Clinton claims she played a key role in her husband’s undeclared war against Serbia in 1999. “I urged him to bomb,” she told Talk magazine that year. In 2003 she told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “I’m a strong believer in executive authority. I wish that, when my husband was president, people in Congress had been more willing to recognize presidential authority.”

Barack Obama has done more than any candidate in memory to boost expectations for the office, which were extraordinarily high to begin with. Obama’s stated positions on civil liberties may be preferable to McCain’s, but would it matter? If and when a car bomb goes off somewhere in America, would a President Obama be able to resist resorting to warrantless wiretapping, undeclared wars, and the Bush theory of unrestrained executive power? As a Democrat without military experience, publicly perceived as weak on national security, he’d have much more to prove.

As Jack Goldsmith put it in his 2007 book, “For generations the Terror Presidency will be characterized by an unremitting fear of attack, an obsession with preventing the attack, and a proclivity to act aggressively and preemptively to do so.…If anything, the next Democratic President—having digested a few threat matrices, and acutely aware that he or she alone will be wholly responsible when thousands of Americans are killed in the next attack—will be even more anxious than the current President to thwart the threat.”

Law professors Jack Balkin of Yale and Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas at Austin are both Democrats and civil libertarians, so they take no pleasure in their prediction that “the next Democratic President will likely retain significant aspects of what the Bush administration has done.” Indeed, they write in a 2006 Fordham Law Review article, future Democratic presidents “may find that they enjoy the discretion and lack of accountability created by Bush’s unilateral gambits.”

Throughout the 20th century more and more Americans looked to the central government to deal with highly visible public problems, from labor disputes to crime waves to natural disasters. And as responsibility flowed to the center, power accrued with it. If that trend continues, responses to matters of great public concern will be increasingly federal, increasingly executive, and increasingly military.

In the years to come, many Americans will find that the results of executive action are not to their liking. And if history is any guide, they’ll respond by vilifying the officeholder and looking for another man on horseback to set things right again.

In The Road to Serfdom, economist and political philosopher F.A. Hayek chastised the “socialists of all parties” for their belief that “it is not the system we need fear, but the danger it might be run by bad men.” Today’s “presidentialists of all parties”—a phrase that describes the overwhelming majority of American voters—suffer from a similar delusion. Our system, with its unhealthy, unconstitutional concentration of power, feeds on the atavistic tendency to see the chief magistrate as our national father or mother, responsible for our economic well-being, our physical safety, and even our sense of belonging. Relimiting the presidency depends on freeing ourselves from a mind-set one century in the making. One hopes that it won’t take another Watergate and Vietnam for us to break loose from the spellbinding cult of the presidency.

Gene Healy, a senior editor at the Cato Institute, is the author of The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power (Cato), from which this essay was adapted.

A Narrative of the Life of Barack Obama

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Mon, 05 May 2008 17:18:00 EDT

So far, Democratic frontrunner Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has been compared to Abraham Lincoln, Robert F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. Is he the second coming of abolitionist Frederick Douglass as well? In the spring issue of The American Scholar, Nick Bromell makes the interesting, if ultimately unconvincing case that Obama is the only Democrat still adhering to the faith- and feelings-based liberalism espoused by Douglass:

If Douglass were alive today, he would be dismayed by the reluctance of most liberals and progressives to connect programs with values, values with beliefs, beliefs with feelings. He would insist on their knowing what kind of temperament underlies and what spirit animates their politics. He would ask why they find particular values enduring and sacred—a question that would set them on a path leading back to how they feel about the world and themselves and other people, back to a recovery of words that breathe life and passion into an otherwise static list of clichés.

Aren't Americans today impatient for liberals to rediscover what they stand for? Aren't they eager for a liberalism that speaks out of its deepest wellsprings, a liberalism that speaks reason from the heart?

Of course, Frederick Douglass was a classical liberal, a lifelong champion of natural rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property. Too bad Obama seems so uninterested in following Douglass' lead on that third one.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily)

Obsolete Communism

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:30:00 EDT

City Journal has published a collection of reflections on the revolutionary month of May 1968. The views on display are more varied than you might expect, given the magazine's neoconservative slant. I particularly enjoyed Guy Sorman's memories of the uprising in France:

Slogans painted on walls and an onslaught of posters with surrealist messages captured widespread attention. The most memorable posters were those asserting that it was FORBIDDEN TO FORBID. Others offered more cryptic slogans like SOUS LES PAVÉS, LA PLAGE ("Under the paving stones, the beach") and COURS CAMARADE, LE VIEUX MONDE EST DERRIÈRE TOI! ("Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!"), an ironic paraphrase of Marxist ideology. Slogans were the only program, and they called for individual freedom, anarchy, nonviolence, and enjoyment of the here and now.

The longterm effect of '68, Sorman argues, was that "an individualistic society replaced the hierarchical one." The results could be seen everywhere from sexuality ("May '68 was the moment when sexual liberation coincided with the availability of the birth-control pill") to business ("Many '68 leaders became entrepreneurs and contributed to the new managerial style") to the left:

In the ideological world, Marxism was the most obvious victim. The May '68 leaders were anti-Communist. Those who claimed to be Maoist, as some did (without any understanding of Maoism's true nature), were, above all, anti-Stalinist. The revolts in Eastern Europe rendered Marxism comatose, both as an ideology and as a mode of governance. While another 20 years would pass before the Communist Party gave up power in Eastern Europe, the seeds of its demise were sown in '68. True, there were a few deviations: the Red Brigade in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, and the guerrillas in Latin America. But these were ideological last gasps.

That isn't, of course, the only political legacy of '68. Sol Stern's contribution to the forum describes Tom Hayden's naive support for the Viet Cong, and Christopher Hitchens' essay reveals the many ideological paths a soixante-huitard could take. But Sorman is right: A revolt against Communism was brewing, sometimes even among people who considered themselves Marxists. What looked like a month of triumph for the left wound up advancing something that is beyond left and right.

Footnote: How did free-market libertarians react to the rebellion in France? Many wrote it off as another spasm of collectivism, but not everyone. Here is Murray Rothbard's brief review of Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit's book about the uprising:

The story of the almost-victorious French revolution of May, 1968 by its heroic young anarchist leader. The case for an anarchist rather than a Bolshevik revolution.

By the way: This is also the anniversary of May 1958, another month of turmoil in France. Where are the cinquante-huitards?

Now Playing at Reason.tv: The Age of American Unreason; Q&A with Susan Jacoby

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:35:00 EDT

...

The Paranoid Style Is American Politics

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:30:00 EDT

On Tuesday the lesbian assassin of Vince Foster won Pennsylvania's presidential primary. In the larger contest for the Democratic nomination, though, she still lags behind a jihadist sleeper agent who is simultaneously a secret Muslim, a secret Communist, and a secret Republican. Whoever wins their race will go on to face a brainwashed puppet of the Viet Cong, and whoever wins that race will then get on with the modern president's central task: serving the interests of Mexico. It must be true, I read it in my email.

There's a persistant political myth that paranoia is only a feature of the fringe, something common among alienated radicals and reactionaries but rare in the great American center. In fact, paranoia has been ubiquitous across the political spectrum. You can find it in nearly every faction and movement at every point in American history, not least among those establishment figures who think they're immune to conspiracy theories. (The most lurid and destructive tales of Waco were not told by militiamen after the raid was over. They were told by the media and the government while the siege was underway.)

In The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the historian Bernard Bailyn showed that the worldview of the patriots who would soon revolt against England included a strong belief, in the words of one colonist, that "a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty." At the same time, Bailyn notes, British administrators "were as convinced as were the leaders of the Revolutionary movement that they were themselves the victims of conspriatorial designs." Colonial governors such as Thomas Hutchinson—a man John Adams accused of "junto conspiracy"—believed, in Bailyn's words, that "the root of all the trouble in the colonies was the maneuvering of a secret, power-hungry cabal that professed loyalty to England while assiduously working to destroy the bonds of authority."

After independence was won, the victorious patriots quickly found plots in their own ranks. If you didn't think the Jeffersonians were Jacobin pawns of the Illuminati, you probably fretted that the Federalists were conspiring to establish a monarchy. Nor did the hunt for subversive cabals end with the death of the revolutionary generation. The historian David Brion Davis has pointed out that the lead-up to the Civil War can be viewed as a clash between two conspiracy theories, one featuring a fearsome network of abolitionists and the other a hungry Slave Power.

And no, these passions haven't limited themselves to periods as violent as the war for American independence and the war between the states. It's telling that the 1990s, a time of relative peace and prosperity, were also a golden age of both frankly fictional and purportedly true tales of conspiracy. There are many reasons for this, including the not-unsubstantial fact that even at its most peaceful, America is still riven with conflicts. But there is also the possibility that peace breeds nightmares just as surely as strife does. The anthropologist David Graeber has argued that "it's the most peaceful societies which are also the most haunted, in their imaginative constructions of the cosmos, by constant specters of perennial war." The Piaroa Indians of Venezuala, for example, "are famous for their peaceableness," but "they inhabit a cosmos of endless invisible war, in which wizards are engaged in fending off the attacks of insane, predatory gods and all deaths are caused by spiritual murder and have to be avenged by the magical massacre of whole (distant, unknown) communities." Many bloggers with comfortable lives spend their spare time in a similar subterranean world.

Why all the paranoia? In part, of course, it's because there really are conspiracies out there. Power does attract the power-hungry. No, Hillary Clinton did not murder Ron Brown—but her explanations for her good fortune trading cattle futures do not bear close scrutiny. John McCain is not a deep-cover Manchurian Candidate, but he was a charter member of the Keating Five. Barack Obama is not a closet Islamist, but there are legitimate questions about his ties to the corrupt developer Tony Rezko. If politics is the art of compromise, then politicians will inevitably be compromised.

It also is often in a movement's interest to paint the opposition in the darkest possible colors, even when the stakes are small and even when the allegations involved are not completely true or relevant. More importantly, it is natural for the members of a movement to find such suspicions believable and to conjure up such theories themselves. It's always easy to think the worst about people outside your group, especially if they're already consciously working against your goals. This tendency becomes even stronger when a hierarchy is involved. The lower orders are inevitably suspicious of the elite, and the elite are always worried about the proles.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that one poll showed 15 percent of voters believing that Barack Obama is a Muslim. It shouldn't be a surprise that the stories anti-McCain conservatives used to whisper, that perhaps he collaborated with his captors in Vietnam, are now surfacing on the left as well. If Hillary Clinton somehow manages to take the Democratic nomination—an outcome that would probably require a conspiracy itself—you shouldn't be surprised when all the stories you heard about her in the '90s come roaring back, be they plausible or nuts.

Above all, you shouldn't be surprised when you hear these tales not just from that creepy-looking fellow manning the LaRouche booth near the bus stop but from ordinary, middle-class relatives and neighbors with ordinary, middle-class views. Welcome to America. Paranoia is a part of the political process.

Not the Strongest Possible Argument

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:03:00 EDT

[Via Roderick Long.]

The Singing Revolution in Washington, D.C., April 18-24

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:13:00 EDT

An excellent documentary about the Estonian revolt against Soviet domination, The Singing Revolution, is coming to Washington, D.C. The movie, lauded by The New York Times and others will be playing at the Landmark's E Street Cinema starting this Friday.

For more background on The Singing Revolution (including clips, a Q&A presided over by reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch, and a great presentation by libertarian former Prime Minister Mart Laar from the conference Reason in Amsterdam), check out reason.tv's interview and more with co-director Jim Tusty. Click on the image below to view.

The New Franklin Roosevelts

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

FDR lives!

Last night Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the speaker of the House of Representatives and the majority leader of the Senate, received the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Distinguished Public Service Award at a dinner dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the New Deal. The organizers praised the politicians for "the parallels to be drawn between their present leadership and the New Deal period, when so much important and progressive legislation was pioneered with the cooperation of Congress."

It might sound odd coming from a libertarian, but I wish the Pelosi-Reid Democrats had more in common with Franklin Roosevelt. Not the Franklin Roosevelt who occupied the White House from 1933 to 1945, but the Franklin Roosevelt who aspired to the White House in the election of 1932. The Democratic platform of that year is a remarkable document, considering the way the party's candidate went on to govern. It isn't a libertarian manifesto—it endorses several subsidies and regulations—but it hardly embraces the enormous expansion in federal power that FDR would achieve. The very first plank calls for "an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating extravagance to accomplish a saving of not less than twenty-five per cent in the cost of the Federal Government." (It also asks "the states to make a zealous effort to achieve a proportionate result.") Subsequent planks demand a balanced budget, a low tariff, the repeal of Prohibition, "a sound currency to be preserved at all hazards," "no interference in the internal affairs of other nations," and "the removal of government from all fields of private enterprise except where necessary to develop public works and natural resources in the common interest." The document concludes with a quote from Andrew Jackson: "equal rights to all; special privilege to none." It sounds more like Ron Paul than Pelosi.

FDR's campaign reflected that platform. He accused Herbert Hoover of "reckless and extravagant spending," and he further denounced the Republican incumbent for believing "we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible." Even when he called for interventions in the economy, he generally couched his words in the old liberals' language of equal treatment rather than the new liberals' vision of enlightened central planning. In his famous Forgotten Man speech of April 1932—itself a sustained allusion to an essay by the pro-market sociologist William Graham Sumner—the Democratic candidate pointed to the wave of foreclosures sweeping the nation. Noting that Hoover had created a "two billion dollar fund...put at the disposal of the big banks, the railroads and the corporations of the Nation," FDR averred that the government should "provide at least as much assistance to the little fellow as it is now giving to the large banks and corporations."

Once in office, the new administration did indeed repeal Prohibition, and it eventually lowered some trade barriers as well. The rest of Roosevelt's anti-statist rhetoric resembles his actual policies about as closely as the last seven years reflect George W. Bush's promises to give us a smaller federal government and a "humble foreign policy." In 1932, a classical liberal could easily conclude that Roosevelt was closer to his views than Hoover, an old progressive who had displayed a lifelong love of central planning and government-enforced cartels, a man who bragged during the campaign that he had responded to the Depression with "the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic." Among other things, President Hoover had jacked up spending, installed agricultural price-support programs, pressured businesses to follow Washington's wage dictates, and created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But by the time a cerebral hemorrhage cut short FDR's fourth term, the federal bureaucracy's power had grown so enormously that Hoover was widely remembered as the last apostle of laissez faire.

Seventy-six years after Roosevelt's first presidential victory, we're again faced with the task of weighing a candidate's campaign promises and wondering what, if anything, they tell us about how the politician would actually govern. This isn't simply a matter of avoiding ill-informed projection, though both Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) have a talent for attracting supporters whose views are diametrically opposed to the stated opinions of their candidate. Nor is it just a matter of sussing out dishonesty, though that's obviously a part of the equation as well: Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) has lied brazenly about everything from NAFTA to Tuzla, and it's hard to believe she's being upfront about her views on Iraq.

The truth is, would-be presidents don't always care about the issues that turn out to be most important. How did Bush flip his foreign policy views so easily? By not having strong convictions on global affairs in the first place, allowing neoconservative advisers to fill the void after the 9/11 attacks. It's easy to imagine, say, John McCain doing something similar during an economic crisis, given that he has already radically reinvented his economic philosophy twice in the last decade, shifting leftwards in 2000 and back to the right in 2008.

Come 2012, President Obama might be explaining why he is sending more troops to Tehran; or President McCain could be preparing emergency legislation to nationalize the banks. If so, our leader's former self will join Bush the humble non-interventionist and Roosevelt the budget hawk on the fringes of the nation's memory. A candidate's campaign persona: There's the true Forgotten Man.

Jesse Walker is the managing editor of reason and the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America.

You Wait Right Here, I'll Go Get Warren

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:40:00 EDT

Ilya Somin joins the ranks of Harding revisionists:

In Sunday's New York Times, Yale historian Beverly Gage has an interesting article suggesting that Harding may have been the first "black" president in the sense that it is possible that he had a remote black ancestor. Unfortunately, Gage's article about Harding and race relations completely ignores the fact that Harding made a well-known speech advocating full legal equality for southern blacks in 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama. As W.E.B. DuBois pointed out at the time, Harding went farther in advocating equal rights for blacks than any other post-Reconstruction Republican president (the Democrats, at that time the party of southern whites, were even worse). Indeed, no president went as far as Harding in advocating equal rights for southern blacks for several decades thereafter. Harding also lobbied hard for a federal anti-lynching bill to curb the rampant lynching of blacks by whites in the South - again, the first post-Reconstruction president to do so (the bill passed the House, but died in the Senate due to the threat of Democratic filibusters). As DuBois pointed out in the linked article, Harding was not wholly free of the racism common among whites at the time. But he was a lot better than the vast majority of his contemporaries.

Nor were these Harding's only positive aspects. As Gene Healy discusses in his interesting recent book, The Cult of the Presidency, Harding is also notable for reversing the severe violations of civil and economic liberties that had proliferated under his predecessor Woodrow Wilson. It's easy to belittle Harding's campaign slogan - "Return to Normalcy." But Harding's notion of "normalcy" included an end to the imprisonment of political dissenters (such as Wilson's notorious "Palmer Raids"), abolition of wage and price controls, and the reversal of Wilson's numerous illegal seizures of private property.

I think the most palatable presidents of the 20th century were Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, and I believe Wilson was the worst chief executive in U.S. history. So I'll nod in general agreement, though I think Somin understates Du Bois' criticisms of Harding.

An aside: Harding's alleged black ancestry is a plot point in one of my favorite novels, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo.

Another aside: In the comment thread beneath Somin's post, some readers are talking up the merits of James K. Polk. Me, I don't believe that history can be reduced to simple "turning points," but if I did, I'd say the day everything went to hell came when that landgrabbing bastard beat Van Buren at the 1844 Democratic convention.

Jesse Don't Like It

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Early last year when his presidential bid was gearing up, one of Barack Obama's classmates from Harvard Law handed the New York Times a photo of the young superstar from a 1990 election-watching party. Obama is wearing jeans and a blue shirt opened down to the last button, as if he's en route to a phone booth and a battle with Lex Luthor. The buttons are undone so that Obama can reveal a T-shirt: "Harvey Gantt for U.S. Senate."

Why Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte who was running for a Senate seat in North Carolina? Why not, say, John Kerry, who was winning his second term that night in Massachusetts? It wasn't just that Harvey Gantt was black. It was that he was running against Jesse Helms.

That year Helms had attacked Gantt for benefiting from racial preferences, for supporting racial quotas, and for being close to Jesse Jackson. Gantt fought back with millions of dollars in campaign funds, raised on swings to California and New York from liberals much like Obama. The result was the same as every time Helms faced a challenge from the left. Helms won.

Read the rest of this piece at The American Spectator.

Links! We Got Links!

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 08:00:00 EDT

Stuff I've been meaning to blog:

* a leftist critique of the New Deal,

* an online chat with Al Qaeda,

* a psychiatric strange loop,

* and from 1986, the first important piece of Reagan revisionism.

Bonus politics-free, prog-free music link: Candi Staton sings Merle Haggard.

Food Fight History Lesson

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 12:12:00 EDT

Ever wondered what "an abridged history of American-centric warfare, from WWII to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict" would look like? Well, it would look like this:

The result is surprisingly violent. It's rather grisly with watch a burger (read: Americans) be blow to bits in a sushi air raid.

Watch out for the IED at the 4:45 mark.

Get the cheat sheet to decode the players here. Get the list of wars/battles included here.

Via Crispy on the Outside

Cross-posted at reason.tv

Faith of our Fathers

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Were the Founding Fathers religious? Deist? Apatheists?

In Sunday's New York Post (founded by Alexander Hamilton!), reason's Nick Gillespie takes a look at a fascinating new book about the origins of religious freedom in America, answers thoose questions, gives a shout-out to Moloch, and tips a tricorn hat to James Madison. All in less time than it takes to go to a drive-through Mennonite service.

Read all about it here.

Oprah, Marilyn, Break Through Public-School Industrial Complex

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:09:00 EDT

This escaped my attention at the time, but through the L.A. Times' Tim Cavanaugh-tastic Opinion L.A. blog I see that USA Today recently asked high schoolers across these 50 United States to name the "most famous" non-president Americans since the time of the original illegal immigrant, and here's what they came up with:

1. Martin Luther King
2. Rosa Parks
3. Harriet Tubman
4. Susan B. Anthony
5. Benjamin Franklin
6. Amelia Earhardt
7. Oprah Winfrey
8. Marilyn Monroe
9. Thomas Edison
10. Albert Einstein

Sounds like the exact list I would have made in 5th grade, if you subbed out Parks/Oprah/Marilyn with maybe Pete Rose, Farrah Fawcett and Peter Frampton. Harriet Tubman in particular was someone I idolized at age 9 (due to Runaway Slave being both required reading and totally awesome ... what 9-year-old wouldn't dig an Underground Railroad?), and then never heard about again in the three decades since. Ditto for Susan B. Anthony, minus actually knowing anything about her in the first place.

Though the list probably says far more about the public school system than anything else, it was largely spun as what survey-leader Sam Wineburg of Stanford called "a revolution in the people who we come to think about to represent the American story." My favorite part of the USA Today explainer:

"There's a kind of shift going on, from the narrative of the founders, which is the national mythic narrative, to the narrative of expanding rights," he says.
Yes, but how does he explain No. 7: Oprah Winfrey?
She has "a kind of symbolic status similar to Benjamin Franklin," Wineburg says.

Who would you have included at 17?

I'm Free on Thursday

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:33:00 EDT

Some fun recovered history from Bill Kauffman: the saga of the State of Jefferson, a handful of counties along the California-Oregon border who attempted to secede from Sacramento and Salem. Here is the zone's proclamation of temporary autonomy:

You are now entering Jefferson, the 49th State of the Union.

Jefferson is now in patriotic rebellion against the States of California and Oregon.

This State has seceded from California and Oregon this Thursday, November 27, 1941.

Patriotic Jeffersonians intend to secede each Thursday until further notice.

For the next hundred miles as you drive along Highway 99, you are travelling parallel to the greatest copper belt in the Far West, seventy-five miles west of here.

The United States government needs this vital mineral. But gross neglect by California and Oregon deprives us of necessary roads to bring out the copper ore.

If you don't believe this, drive down the Klamath River highway and see for yourself. Take your chains, shovel and dynamite.

Until California and Oregon build a road into the copper country, Jefferson, as a defense-minded State, will be forced to rebel each Thursday and act as a separate State.

(Please carry this proclamation with you and pass them out on your way.)

STATE OF JEFFERSON CITIZENS COMMITTEE
TEMPORARY STATE CAPITOL, YREKA

"Inauguration Day," Kauffman writes, "featured a torchlight parade through Yreka led by brother bears named Itchy and Scratchy. Marchers carried signs reading OUR ROADS ARE NOT YET PASSABLE, HARDLY JACKASSABLE; IF OUR ROADS YOU WOULD TRAVEL, BRING YOUR OWN GRAVEL; and THE PROMISED LAND--OUR ROADS ARE PAVED WITH PROMISES. Well, look--Mayor Gable had been a flack for the phone company, so don't expect poetry on the order of 'Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.'"

With His Ballot in His Hand

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EST

Like no other Democratic candidate in this presidential campaign, Barack Obama has had an affinity for fan-launched viral videos, from a cutting spoof of Apple's famous 1984 ad to a star-studded singalong to a stump speech. But the most interesting Obama clip circulating online right now might be "Viva Obama!," a musical tribute cooked up by the Chicago-based marketing company Nueva Vista Media and performed by a California mariachi band. Aimed at Latino voters in Tuesday's Texas primary, the video features a Spanish-language testimonial to the junior senator from Illinois.

Translated into English, the song begins:

To the candidate who is Barack Obama
I sing this corrido with all my soul
He was born humble without pretension
He began in the streets of Chicago
Working to achieve a vision
To protect the working people
And bring us all together in this great nation
Viva Obama! Viva Obama!

The anthropologist Margaret Dorsey has listened to lots of lyrics like these—though this is the first time she's heard someone combine a corrido, a specific kind of ballad frequently used in South Texas political campaigns, with Mexican mariachi music. "This is insane," she laughs as she hears the song over the phone. "I can't wait to listen to it at home. It sounds like a wonderful example of cultural hybridity and innovation."

Dorsey has spent a lifetime surrounded by borderlands politics and borderlands music. The daughter of a now-retired Texas judge, she attended her first rally when she was five. More recently, she spent several years researching and writing Pachangas (2006), an intriguing study of the intersection between music, marketing, and politics along the Texas-Mexico border. It focuses on the pachanga, a local institution whose forms range from family barbeques with musical entertainment to choreographed commercial spectacles sponsored by Budweiser, Ace Hardware, and other multinational firms. She did her fieldwork in and near Hidalgo County, a rapidly growing border county that contains over 700,000 people.

Dorsey, 34, is now a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. I interviewed her in late February, just a few days before the Texas presidential primary. We began by exploring the deep roots of Obama's campaign corrido.

reason: When did the corrido originate as a form?

Margaret Dorsey: The corrido of the Texas-Mexico borderland area comes out of a context of intercultural contact and conflict, specifically between Anglo and Mexicano populations. Américo Paredes [author of With His Pistol in His Hand, the classic study of the subject] points to the time period around 1900 to 1920, when you see the real emergence and innovation of this form in the region.

reason: What is the literal translation of "corrido"?

Dorsey: Literally, correr means "to run"; it's about a flow. But the best translation in English is really "ballad," or "border ballad."

The quintessential corrido, the ur-text, is "El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez." Paredes found many, many iterations of this song. It's never exactly the same: People change the places a little, and they play with it. But it follows the corrido form in terms of its rhyme scheme. There is a corrido melody, and it follows that. And the text tells the story of an upright man fighting for the right cause against a system that is not upright.

This is important, too: A corrido is based in reality. It's a legend, but it's based on historical fact. It's extrapolated from this wonderful story of what happened to this fellow.

reason: And what did happen to him?

Dorsey: In a nutshell, it's the story of an upright Mexicano fighting the unjust rinches, or Texas Rangers. It's a very long story, but the short version is they come on his property and try to arrest his brother, a shooting match breaks out, people are killed, and then he flees and Rangers chase him all over the state. Once they meet up, Cortez is put in jail. He is tried in several counties in rural Texas, and finally President Lincoln's daughter intercedes to have him freed.

reason: So it's a classic outlaw ballad, then.

Dorsey: It is. You can talk about this in relation to European balladry traditions. You can talk about this in relation to the Robin Hood story. It's connected to both Mexican and U.S. folk forms. In terms of Spanish balladry traditions, Paredes argues that it builds upon the romance form.

reason: It's interesting that this form that's identified with celebrating the righteous outlaw would evolve into something celebrating the outsider politician.

Dorsey: It makes a lot of sense, right? In my book I talk about [Judge Edward] Aparicio [subject of a popular campaign corrido, "The Song of the Judge"]. He was the politician from Washington state running for office in Hidalgo County in South Texas. And who was he running against? The political machinery. So you can see how those valences work.

You can see it with Obama, too. Bill Clinton was just stumping for Hillary Clinton in Corpus. There was not a strong turnout. There weren't many people there. And -- this fits perfectly with the corrido -- who was standing on stage with Bill Clinton? All of the political establishment, all of these elected officials. Then Hillary Clinton spoke at University of Texas-Brownsville, and from what I could see, she did not have a huge turnout.

Obama had a rally around the same time at University of Texas-Pan American, in Edinburg. At that rally, people arrived six hours ahead of time so that they could be close to Obama.

reason: But is a university typical? A campus would probably be stronger territory for Obama.

Dorsey: Well, I was watching the news, and they were interviewing some young people who had come from Rio Grande City, which is an hour away. Obama's bringing in lots of young people, and when you talk to political scientists who study Latinos in the U.S., you can see it's clearly falling along the lines of young, educated, cosmopolitan Mexicanos overwhelmingly supporting Obama. For Hillary Clinton, it's middle-aged Mexicanos.

reason: There's also the idea that someone like Alonzo Cantu, who was reported to be bundling contributions for Hillary, also has the sort of turnout machine that can bus people in to vote for her -- people who might not be as politically engaged on the national scene but know who their patrons are. Do you buy that argument?

Dorsey: I think people who make that argument are discounting the ability of individuals to make their own choices.

reason: The most recent poll numbers I've seen have Obama ahead statewide but with Clinton holding the lead in the border country.

Dorsey: That's pretty much what I've been seeing, too. I haven't seen any surveys that have Obama ahead in the region. What people have told me is that in places like the Austin area his backing is much stronger, but when you get into South Texas there's a much more even split. Even families are split.

We're just going to have to see. I don't think anyone knows. I'm not a predictor.

reason: You mentioned Hillary Clinton's rally in Brownsville. I thought it was interesting that the Brownsville Herald headline called it a "presidential pachanga." Later in the article, the reporter said the rally had "the feel of a political pachanga."

First of all, how would you define a political pachanga?

Dorsey: There are different types of pachangas. You have corporate pachangas, you have family pachangas, and you have political pachangas.

When you look at the political pachangas, specifically in Hidalgo County, you see various iterations of it. You see old-style pachangas, which are still in practice, which are all men, typically out in the country on a little ranch. There's live music, the men cook the food, they're talking politics, and they're organizing people to run for office.

Another kind arose with women taking an explicit role in politics: the dance-hall style pachanga. You find that in small towns and cities. It'll be in a dance hall, usually a family-owned dance hall. It'll have food—traditional Mexican-style entrees, but also served with white bread and things like that. It involves usually a conjunto band. Conjunto bands play various genres of music, including corridos and including dance music. They always have an accordion and a bajo sexto, which is a kind of guitar, and a vocalist.

These rallies involve a pretty set format. You usually have some prayers, the showing of the colors of the flag, patriotic gestures, introduction of the candidate, then the candidate's speech. And then everyone leaves. It almost feels like going to mass, it's almost that regimented. People dance beforehand and afterwards.

The third kind is a novel combination. It's moving more toward a spectacle format, so it has a much more visual orientation, easier to broadcast on TV.

reason: What's the relationship between a political pachanga and the sort of rally Hillary had in Brownsville?

Dorsey: I can't comment on it, because I wasn't there and I didn't talk to anyone who went to her event. The images I have just aren't clear enough.

reason: I found another report about the Clintons going to pachangas back in the '90s. Those were actual pachangas that do fit the term?

Dorsey: They do. Bill Clinton is and was a strong presence in this area. You go into restaurants, and you see signs with the owner shaking Bill Clinton's hand, saying this was Bill Clinton's favorite restaurant. I remember a couple of years ago Hillary Clinton was down in the Valley raising money. So they have maintained their presence in that area for a long time. I never heard about Barack Obama going down to the Rio Grande Valley and drawing in the big money people and raising money the way Hillary has.

reason: I want to read a couple of quotes from your book. First: "Scholars have tracked the work of people, particularly upper-class conservatives in power, who use terms like 'boss,' 'patrón,' and 'machine' in conjunction with politics to describe all that is bad in U.S. politics. Usually such discourse functions to disenfranchise poor citizens (who tend to be darker and immigrant), keeping them as far removed from the political system as possible." The other one is earlier in the book: "With the final fall of bosses like [James B.] Wells, who saw Mexicanos as political capital, and with the rise of reformist candidates, politics reverted to strict racial segregation and a systematic disenfranchisement of Mexicano voters. The texture of politics in South Texas shifted from one of pistol whipping and brow beating—coercing Mexicanos to vote a certain way—to excluding them from the process altogether."

At the surface, grassroots democratic reform seems to be opposed to that kind of machine politics. On the other hand, there's this history of people using "reform" as a way of cutting out the lower rungs.

Dorsey: Usually that's been how people are disenfranchised. When I was doing my fieldwork down there, you still heard Republicans using that rhetoric. The Republicans would use this talk of transparency. And Barack Obama also talks about transparency in his speeches, though that doesn't necessarily mean that the valences are the same.

This is why the story of Aparicio is so important. Block-walking [visiting voters door to door] and grassroots politics are very important to this area. It's very important for people to get to know the candidates, for people to have personal contact with the candidates. The corrido, the music, can often work to facilitate that.

So you do have this very complicated relationship between personal contact and people looking at voters, especially people of color, as a "herd" to be marshaled to vote one way.

reason: How does Obama's rhetoric fit into that? The period of disenfranchisement that you're talking about was the Progressive Era, which is associated with liberal reform.

Dorsey: Right. Martha Menchaca, who's at UT-Austin, is writing a book about this period in Texas politics. And she agrees that these analyses of "machine," "boss" politics where you have people voting in herds is highly problematic. She's an anthropologist writing a historical study that's going to add a lot of complexity to our understanding of that.

With Obama, it's just hard to tell. I realize that's not really a fair answer, but I think we'll be better positioned to answer that question in the general election. Because the general election will be Republicans vs. Democrats, and that's when you tend to see that rhetoric used more clearly, because it tends to be Republicans using that kind of talk against people of color, who tend to vote Democratic. Republicans are already talking about Obama the same way: He's part of "the machine from Chicago."

reason: A lot of people wouldn't talk to you on the record about political pachangas. Do you feel that reticence was justified?

Dorsey: If one feels afraid or threatened to speak about it, certainly it's justified. It's not my place to tell them they should feel safe or unsafe. Politics is still physical in Hidalgo County. The day Barack Obama spoke in Edinburg, the local TV station reported the sheriff going out to a site where people were campaigning for a state rep race -- the campaign workers were having clashes. People were afraid it was going to turn into a fistfight.

Politics in South Texas is still very personal. It's still very family-based for a lot of people. You still hear stories about there being brawls at the polls. That's not everywhere at all times, but it still happens.

At the pachangas themselves, I write about the politiqueras, the ward-heelers, and some people affiliate their role with a type of coercion in getting people out to vote.

reason: Your book talks about the corporate pachangas converging with the political pachangas. When did that start to happen?

Dorsey: I didn't put a date on that. But companies like Budweiser putting on these huge pachangas has been around now for at least a decade. One important fact that I highlight in my book is that right at the time when you expect the candidates to be busy at their own pachangas, Budweiser hosts this huge event and all of the political players are there.

Those events aren't just people from the lower Rio Grande Valley. They bring in people from all over South Texas.

reason: You had a quote in the book about the changing meaning of the term "crossover." A marketer you interviewed, Robert Peña, flipped the word on its head—instead of talking about Tejano stars and the like crossing over to the mass market, he said that advertisers need "to cross over into the Hispanic marketplace." So instead of the outsiders crossing over to the mainstream, the people who are seeking the consumers cross over to the consumers' niche.

You seem ambivalent about that process, but I think it demonstrates a really interesting mutual influence between the local population and the transnational companies.

Dorsey: And we're seeing this today in these political campaigns. You see that in that webpage you sent me: "Viva Obama!" Hillary Clinton is doing it, too. I think Robert Peña was showing some foresight.

We have this wonderful Obama corrido, this hybrid kind of mixture. At the same time, both Obama and Clinton voted in favor of the fence—what people along the border call the wall. And that is highly unpopular in these places.

reason: How do they address that issue when they're in South Texas? It's not just immigrants who are upset—property owners are having their land taken.

Dorsey: Hillary Clinton said at the debate that when she spoke at the University of Texas-Brownsville the previous night, she learned that the president's plan would go right through the campus of the University of Texas. She said there was a "smart way" and a "dumb way" to protect the border and that this was clearly "absurd." And she said it had to be "reviewed" and that she would "listen to the people who live along the border." But then, after she says that, she talks about "smart fencing" and using technology.

So while they're stumping, people from inside the Beltway are finally hearing what people on the border have been saying forever. It doesn't matter if you're Republican or Democrat, if your skin is light or dark, if your first language is English or Spanish—almost everyone is against the wall. So people like Hillary are saying that we're going to build it in spots, but first we have to listen to the people. She's trying to do both.

Obama's not that much different. He even said, in this debate, that they "almost entirely agree." Obama has three talking points on immigration, and he does a good job in sticking to those three points. But one thing he's added—and Hillary Clinton has mentioned this too—is that we need to work with Mexico and the governments of Central America to fix their economies so that we don't have as many people coming in. Then he shifts attention to—this is his number—the "12 million undocumented workers" in the U.S.

reason: How did you get drawn into this world? Was this around you already, or did you decide as an academic that you wanted to take a closer look?

Dorsey: I was raised in Texas politics. When I went to grad school I was interested in studying the relationship between music and politics, but I didn't know where they came together. I was constantly going back and forth between studying music and studying politics, and the convergence just wasn't there. Then, in 1998, I was reading the Corpus Christi paper, and I saw this photo of Bush stumping with [Tejano star] Emilio Navaira. And he just swept the largely Mexicano counties, the first time a Republican had done that since Reconstruction. That's what brought it all together.

Jesse Walker is managing editor of reason.