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The current political campaign has always looked like a close contest that may remain undecided until the closing days and even hours of the race, but it’s also interesting as a window into the state of American politics. Possibly because I’m so old myself that this is the fourteenth such campaign I remember (when I was seven years old I watched my parents get over their loyalty to Adlai Stevenson to support Kennedy in 1960), I’m increasingly struck by the long term continuities in our politics — and unimpressed by panicky cries about how polarized we are.  Also, I’m struck by the way that the language we use to describe our politics often makes politics harder to understand.

The labels we mostly use in American politics have their limits. Words like “liberal” and “conservative” are so broad and poorly defined that they tell us more about tribal affiliation than about actual beliefs. What do Bill Kristol and Ron Paul have in common other than a hope that Barack Obama won’t be elected for a second term? What binds Hillary Clinton together with Code Pink? How did ‘liberal’ come to mean staunch defender of the status quo (Pelosi, Reid) and ‘conservative’ mean wild eyed, radical innovator and axe-swinger (Gingrich, Rand Paul)?

In Special Providence, I wrote about four schools of thought whose ideas, rivalries and interplay have shaped American foreign policy continuously from the 18^th century through the 21^st and named them after four American leaders who in various ways stood for the values of the schools: Alexander Hamilton, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. I hoped that a richer and more historically grounded typology would help me analyze American foreign policy debates more usefully than labels like realist, idealist, internationalist and isolationist.

What I did not do but very well could have done is written a book about how those four schools have also shaped American domestic politics and policy. The domestic story is more complicated and the issues are sometimes even more tangled, but our political quarrels about domestic issues have at least as much continuity as our national battles over foreign policy.

If I had written a Special Providence about domestic politics (and I just might do that some day), I’d have made at least one big change. The Wilsonian school of foreign policy believes that America’s destiny and interests compel it to spread democracy and other sound principles around the world. When Wilsonians turn their gaze toward the United States, they become what I think of as the Bostonian school in domestic politics. Like the New England Puritans to whom they owe so much, today’s Bostonians believe that a strong state led by the righteous should use its power to make America a more moral and ethical country.  This, I believe, is the tradition in American domestic politics that most profoundly shapes President Obama’s worldview; it inspired many of the abolitionists and prohibitionists who played such large roles in 19^th century reform politics, and it continues to influence the country wherever the spirit of Old New England survives. (Not all domestic Bostonians are international Wilsonians, by the way; some believe that America should lead by example rather than by imposing its views on others.)

Bostonians over the years have changed their ideas about morality; few today would agree with Increase Mather and John Winthrop that the state should punish any deviation from Biblical morality as understood by 17^th century puritan divines. But when it comes to punishing offenses against righteousness as defined by a congress of humanities professors, multiculturalist activists and foundation grants officers, the liberal morality police are ready to march — and to smite.  Today’s neo-puritans would certainly agree that once morality has been re-defined in a suitably feminist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-tobacco and anti-obesity way, it is the clear duty of the Civil Magistrate to enforce the moral law—and that our governing constitutions and laws must be interpreted—by the godly who alone ought to be seated on the judicial tribunals—to give said magistrates all the power they require for their immense and unending task of moral regulation and uplift.

Wilsonianism abroad is Bostonianism at home. In both cases, the heirs of the Puritans believe that a strong executive must act to enforce the moral law and that a strong and effective state is the moral agent of the community. They only worry about a strong state in ungodly hands: their idea of politics is to build a powerful government and make sure that only the righteous stand at the helm.  The foreign and domestic sides of this school merged most fully in Reconstruction, America’s first great failure in the art of nation building, The goals they sought were mostly noble, but their own flaws, rigidity and impracticality combined with the huge practical difficulties inherent in the nature of the problem to frustrate their intentions and force them to abandon their most vital goals.

I am tweaking the Bostonians here a bit as their self-righteous moralism is irresistibly provoking to my inner Mark Twain; in reality I feel about them the same way I do about all the schools in our domestic and foreign policy debates. They all bring important strengths and perspectives to the table; we would be worse off if any of them were to drop out of the contest for power—and we would be almost infinitely worse off if any one of them (perhaps especially the Bostonians) ever won a permanent victory and could govern indefinitely exactly as they wished.

While President Obama owes the most to the New England spirit, both 2012 presidential candidates have a bit of Boston in them. The Mormon apple didn’t fall all that far from the Congregationalist tree. Brigham Young’s Utah was the closest thing to an American theocracy after the puritans lost their hold on New England, and early Mormonism was born in and shaped by the cultural ferment of the New England diaspora in the chaotic aftermath of the Second Great Awakening.

Romney and Obama share a propensity to meddle in the lives of the poor in the effort to uplift them. President Obama would take away their bologna, their Twinkies and their gas guzzlers—not to mention their guns and their right to whop their kids as they see fit; Romney would force them to jump through hoops for their welfare checks and their food stamps. Neither man would have left Huck Finn’s father alone; both would try to figure out how the government could improve him. One might want to put him in the hoosegow for public drunkenness and the other for child neglect, but both would think that Mr. Finn needed his conduct more thoroughly supervised by the powers that be. Neither man would want him to have access to cheap tobacco in any form, and both would tax his alcohol in the hope of persuading him to take less of it. The state, led by the wise, must push the unworthy masses up the mountain toward higher ground.

The core differences between the two candidates here are about the relationship of state power and individual moral uplift. President Obama tends to think that the problems of the poor have less to do with their own fallenness than with the collective fallenness of man as embodied in our imperfect and unjust social institutions. Huck Finn’s father may be a worthless drunk, a racist, a woman beater and a child abuser, but he didn’t build his pickle by himself. Society helped build that, and the state can and should help fix it. Give poor, put upon Mr. Finn some health care, food stamps, subsidized housing, a welfare allowance (without being too tough on the work requirements) and some counseling from a properly trained and certified social worker, and he’ll start to do right. Ban hate speech on the internet and he will be less likely to embrace groups like the Klan. Give him access to vocational training and a community college and change will occur.  (And if it doesn’t, he’ll be caught breaking the law sooner or later and be confined in the secular hells we call prison where he will be knifed, raped and exploited by prison gangs until he understands just how benevolent society is and how counterproductive it is to challenge righteous authority.)  In the meantime, we need to get some trained, certified and tenured professional schoolmarms with some properly vetted textbooks in town to make sure the next generation of kids turns out a little better. Also, more public TV bringing inspiring messages of uplift; perhaps if Pap Finn had seen more of Big Bird when he was a kid, he’d be a less hopeless racist drunk now.

Governor Romney agrees with President Obama that people like Huck Finn’s Pap are living wrong and that a Christian country like the United States has a moral and social obligation to “do something” about his self-destructive behavior. And while he would also agree with President Obama that public institutions and practices are part of the problem, he has a different approach to how government can help the black sheep. Romney thinks that too much coddling of Mr. Finn will simply enable his lifestyle. If society supports him in his idleness it becomes entangled in a codependent and counterproductive relationship that won’t help Mr. Finn do what he must to find any hope: realize what road he is on, get right with his Higher Power, and take it from there. The Romney camp would agree that there are social failures that make Finn’s plight worse, but that might have more to do by allowing him unrestricted access to internet porn than to internet hate speech and in any case a Romney spokesman would also presumably say that no social reforms will help Mr. Finn much until he takes the First Step on his personal recovery plan. Making poverty too comfortable will tempt the weak-willed Finn to lounge in it. A dose of tough love might get him up on his feet.

Both men think that society should set up a system that will gradually compel Mr. Finn to straighten up and fly right. They differ about the architectural rules by which government should be used in the task of social reform, and President Obama is far more optimistic than Governor Romney about how much can be done, but both are political moralists. Talleyrand would have rolled his eyes at both of them, and unregenerate, anti-Bostonians like Mark Twain and H.L. Menken would have seen both men as pompous, bloviating windbags and delighted in cutting them down to size.

I am not saying that the Bostonians are all wrong; sometimes Nurse Ratchet is right. The blue nosed puritans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries might have gone too far with their long campaigns against masturbation (believed to be a leading cause of insanity and therefore to be vigilantly guarded against when it came to teen aged boys), liquor and low IQ people having children, but abolition was a good thing and so were women’s suffrage and the city manager form of government. I’m even glad about the anti-smoking campaigns and the whole seat belt thing. However, pity the people of a country where the Bostonians get the full weight of government and the Educated Class on their side; Bostonians need to be checked by countervailing power or they go much too far.

For the half hearted worldling like myself, who can never quite summon up all the moral fiber necessary for a grimly earnest New England crusade, all forms of Puritanism are suspect. But unlike the “Christianists under the bed” crowd over at the Daily Dish, I’m less worried about the puritanism of the right than the puritanism of the left these days. First, because American society is so firmly set against old fashioned right-wing prudishness, Romney’s “conservative” puritanism is probably a lesser threat to the freedoms of the people than the secular puritanism of the enlightened left. Public acceptance of homosexuality is likely to increase, for example, no matter who takes office next January; even after eight grim years of two Romney terms, you are still going to be able to see bare breasted women on “Boardwalk Empire” and “Game of Thrones.” Romney and the right are fighting the tide on many of these issues, so any efforts on their part to force more moral conformity on the population are unlikely to go all that far.

The other reason I worry less about the right’s tendency toward moralist dictatorship is federalism: the left likes its regulation at the national level and thinks the Federal government should set the tone for the whole country. The right on the other hand makes more room for the states. If we must be governed by meddling nanny state puritans, I would rather live in a country that had fifty petty moralistic dictatorships rather than one big one; I’d at least have a chance of finding a place where my favorite foods and amusements wouldn’t be banned by law. Surely there will be one state somewhere in this republic that will let me put some extra salt on my freedom fries.

In that sense, Obama is a better and more consistent Bostonian than Romney. Boston wants a strong federal government with Bostonians in charge. There is, after all, only one truth and one moral way, so there is no point in allowing a bunch of backward states to muck around in the dark.

President Obama is going to get the neo-Puritan vote this fall, and he deserves it. The half-Kenyan candidate from Hawaii is the heir of old New England for better and for worse.

 

Michael Massing

Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Steelworker Steve Jones in downtown Steubenville, Ohio to check his voter registration forms, September 20, 2012

President Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s simultaneous visits to Ohio on Wednesday show just how pivotal that battleground state has become. As they fired charges at one another over trade and China, each claimed to be the candidate who could best boost economic growth in the state.

On that score, Ohio is actually doing better than many other parts of the country. Since the start of 2011, it has added more than 122,000 new jobs, lowering its unemployment rate to 7.2 percent. This is particularly striking in view of the state’s long-term decline in manufacturing. When I visited Ohio four years ago, a few weeks before the 2008 election, I found many Ohioans filled with anger and frustration over their state’s seemingly irreversible economic troubles and newly open to bold action to address them.

With Ohio’s job numbers suggesting a turnaround, the question has emerged of who is more responsible for it—John Kasich, the Republican who became governor in January 2011, or President Obama, whose stimulus program and auto bailout have sought to help struggling Midwestern states like Ohio?

In a New York Times Magazine cover story earlier this month, “A Rust Belt Miracle,” Matt Bai suggested that whoever wins credit for Ohio’s comeback could help determine which way the state goes in November. The story was one of the most thoughtful and insightful articles of the entire presidential campaign. It did, however, have a gaping hole—one that is characteristic of campaign coverage in general.

During Bai’s stay in Ohio, Kasich let him fly around the state with him. The governor claimed that Ohio’s bounce-back is owed primarily to his own vigorous efforts to promote the state to companies. He pointed in particular to JobsOhio, a private entity financed by state money that he created to lead the courtship effort. In contrast, the Obama administration’s bailout of the auto industry, Kasich insisted, has had little effect. But Eric Burkland, the longtime head of the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association, told Bai that the bailout did in fact bring the auto industry back from the brink. Bai also found evidence that the funds Ohio received from the Obama stimulus package helped stabilize its economy during the depths of the downturn.

Despite its recent improvement, however, Ohio continues to struggle. Visiting Lorain, Ohio’s 10th largest city and one of its most distressed, Bai stopped by a local US Steel plant that has recently expanded, thanks to soaring demand for the tubes needed to extract shale oil. But the plant’s operations have become so automated that it now needs just 800 employees, compared to the 15,000 who worked for the company in the area in the 1970s. More generally, Bai found that the state’s much-touted manufacturing revival is creating many fewer jobs than expansions did two or three decades ago.

Columbus offers a more promising picture. The city has added more jobs than any other in Ohio, and the key, according to mayor Michael Coleman (a Democrat), was a successful ballot initiative (backed by the business community) to raise the local income tax by half a percentage point. The additional $100 million a year this generated allowed the city to restore public services, improve infrastructure, and fund a riverfront restoration project. (Coleman also credited the Obama stimulus with providing the city a “lifeline” when it needed it most.)

“As important as autos and factories and shale deposits are in creating a diverse stream of jobs and revenue,” Bai concluded, Ohio’s future economic health lay with the new economy that Columbus exemplifies, based in banking and insurance, state-of-the-art medical facilities, and high-tech manufacturing and research—industries that “thrive on the kinds of major investments in infrastructure and quality of life that only government can make, in schools and transportation and fiber optics and parkland.”

Its seems clear, then, that President Obama’s policies have helped create many more jobs in Ohio than Governor Kasich’s; as Bai points out, the growth in jobs began before Kasich took office. Yet, while this should be an attractive story for the president to tell, Bai writes, his advisers “seem flummoxed” about how to tell it. (Indeed, during his visit to Ohio this week, Obama chose to dwell on China rather than the stimulus.) According to his advisers, defending government spending remains “politically treacherous,” with public skepticism about such spending hardening—even in states like Ohio, which so clearly seem to have benefited from it.

For me, the key question is, Why? If the stimulus has in fact had such positive impact, why do Americans remain so skeptical about it and government spending in general? In a 7,000-word magazine story, I would have liked to hear more from ordinary Ohioans about how they see the stimulus, the bailout, and the overall role of government. Virtually none appears in Bai’s article, however. He spoke mainly with officials—governors, mayors, senators, even Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. In measuring the state of public opinion in Ohio, he relied heavily on polls. His story reminded me of correspondents who, traveling to war zones, spend most of their time in the company of generals and colonels. Such officers can be informative, but it’s only by speaking with civilians on the ground that journalists can get a full picture of the progress of a military campaign.

The same is true of presidential campaigns. In 2008, I went to Ohio out of frustration with the lack of voices of ordinary citizens in the news coverage. Speaking with factory workers in Toledo, teachers in Bowling Green, and small businessmen in Findlay, I was struck by the breakdown in traditional political allegiances that was taking place in light of the state’s ongoing economic woes and the potential for a political realignment if they could be addressed.

This time around, I feel similar frustration. Even when venturing into the field, most reporters stay inside the bubble. They follow the candidates, speak with their handlers, interview consultants, quote think-tank analysts, pore over polling data. Looking over a recent week of coverage in the Times (September 19-26), for instance, I found plenty of stories on PACs, campaign strategy, political operatives, Romney’s tax returns, and the polling data in Ohio and other battleground states. Only one—“Underemployed and Overlooked, Struggling Young Adults Are a Question Mark”—featured extensive interviews with ordinary Americans, and, while helpful, it provided little more than a snapshot. Bai himself, interestingly, seems to have missed the small but noticeable groundswell that, according to recent polls, has been building for Obama in Ohio. (For a diligent effort to speak with ordinary Ohioans—an exception in recent coverage—see Joel Aschenbach’s article in The Washington Post, “In Ohio County, Electorate Is Hardened and Fractured,” for which he interviewed dozens of residents in working-class Jefferson County.)

The ultimate embodiment of this approach is Politico, with its obsessive focus on the nuts-and-bolts of campaigns at the expense of in-depth reporting on the body politick. Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight blog at nytimes.com captures the poll-parsing fever that has so gripped national news organizations. In themselves, these sites are valuable additions, but they further push out old-fashioned on-the-ground reporting.

Truth be told, I’m not sure if such reporting was ever in fashion. Ever since Theodore White came out with The Making of the President about the 1960 race—a book that for the first time took readers behind the scenes of the political process and showed all the gambits and strategy involved—campaign reporting in America has become progressively an insiders’ game. We’ve had The Selling of the President by Joe McGinniss, What It Takes: The Way to the White House by Richard Ben Cramer, and Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, with its titillating tidbits about Obama and Clinton, McCain and Palin. Speaking with consultants and pollsters is a lot easier than buttonholing people in shopping malls or striking up conversations in a bar or restaurant. As a result of this tendency, however, journalists remain largely in the dark about the underlying political and social forces shaping the nation’s future.

According to Republican Rep. Jon Hubbard of Arkansas, African Americans were lucky to have endured slavery, which, he writes, was "a blessing in disguise," reports the Arkansas Times. In excerpts from Hubbard's self-published book, Letters to the Editor: Confessions of a Frustrated Conservative, Hubbard also declares that blacks are ignorant and better off in America than in Africa.

Slavery was good for black people:

"… the institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise. The blacks who could endure those conditions and circumstances would someday be rewarded with citizenship in the greatest nation ever established upon the face of the Earth." (Pages 183-89)

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When I was asked by the editors of the Financial Times to contribute to a series on the future of conservatism, I hesitated because it seemed to me that in both the US and Europe what was most needed was not a new form of conservatism but rather a reinvention of the left. For more than a generation we have been under the sway of conservative ideas, against which there has been little serious competition. In the wake of the financial crisis and the rise of massive inequality, there should be an upsurge of left-wing populism, and yet some of the most energized populists both in the US and Europe are on the right. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is surely that publics around the world have very little confidence that the left has any credible solutions to our current problems.

The rise of the French Socialists and Syriza in Greece does not belie this fact; both are throwbacks to an old and exhausted left that will sooner rather than later have to confront the dire fiscal situation of their societies. What we need is a left that can stem the loss of rich-world middle class jobs and incomes through forms of redistribution that do not undermine economic growth or long-term fiscal health.

But if you can’t solve the problem from the left, maybe you can do it from the right. The model for a future American conservatism has been out there for some time: a renewal of the tradition of Alexander Hamilton and Theodore Roosevelt that sees the necessity of a strong if limited state, and that uses state power for the purposes of national revival. The principles it would seek to promote are private property and a competitive market economy; fiscal responsibility; identity and foreign policy based on nation and national interest rather than some global cosmopolitan ideal. But it would see the state as a facilitator rather than an enemy of these objectives.

Distrust of state authority has of course been a key component of American exceptionalism, both on the right and the left. The contemporary right has taken this, however, to an absurd extreme, seeking to turn the clock back not just to the point before the New Deal, but before the progressive era at the turn of the 20th century. The Republican party has lost sight of the difference between limited government and weak government, reflected in its agenda of cutting money for enforcement capacity of regulators and the IRS, its aversion to taxes of any sort and its failure to see that threats to liberty can come from powerful actors besides the state.

A new kind of conservative might look at the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt for inspiration. Just as in the present, American capitalism in the late 19th century had generated powerful new interests, particularly the railroads and oil interests that provoked huge conflicts with farmers, shippers and their own workers. Roosevelt believed that no private interest should be more powerful than the American state, and set about to ensure that by going after Northern Securities and other trusts. One imagines that if he had been president during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, he would not have been satisfied with the regulatory hodgepodge that is Dodd-Frank, but would have sought to break Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase up into smaller pieces that could safely be allowed to go bankrupt if they took undue risks. If a new breed of conservatism could put Wall Street in its place, then it would have much more credibility taking on public sector unions and other interest groups on the left, just as Roosevelt did.

If contemporary conservatives could get over their ideological aversion to the state, they would recognise that American government is both necessary and in great need of reform rather than abolition. Private sector companies have undergone huge changes in recent decades, flattening managerial hierarchies, upgrading workforce skills and experimenting ceaselessly with new organizational forms.

American government, by contrast, seems trapped in a late 19th-century bureaucratic model of rules and hierarchy. It needs to be smaller but also stronger and more effective. And this will not happen unless people see public service as a calling, rather than a despised occupation for people unable to make it in the private sector. In this regard, conservatives have an advantage because they can call people to public duty on the basis of the American nation rather than abstract ideals.

Recovery of strong-state conservatism would have important foreign policy consequences. It would imply continuing investments in US military power and engagement in the world to maintain a balance of power favourable to American interests. This position is consistent, however, with a careful husbanding of national power: instead of undermining the American fiscal position through costly wars, it would see rebuilding of the economy as a precondition for a reassertion of military power over the long run.

Recovery of a Hamiltonian-Rooseveltian conservatism would require junking a lot of the ideas that have animated the right since the rise of Ronald Reagan, such as the willingness to tolerate deficits as long as this meant lower taxes. But while this older tradition is in certain respects similar to strands of European conservatism, it is also profoundly American.

Both Hamilton and Roosevelt believed strongly both in the exceptional character of the American regime and in the idea of progress. Hamilton foresaw that a centralised state would be necessary to create a national market, and an economy based on manufacturing. Roosevelt understood that the industrial economy had unleashed forces that needed to be tamed. They saw national power as a tool to achieve their ends, something to be nurtured and built rather than demonised as something to be drowned in a bathtub.

The chance, of course, that any version of this conservative vision will be adopted by the contemporary Republican Party is close to zero.  If Mitt Romney is defeated in November, we will not see an internal soul-searching over the basic agenda, but rather the argument that he lost because he wasn’t conservative enough.

Moreover, what ties many Republican legislators to their libertarian views has less to do with strong ideological conviction than where their bread is buttered.  When Jamie Dimon  was called to testify on JP Morgan Chase’s multi-billion dollar loss before the Senate Banking Committee, the Republican members put on an appalling performance, unctuously flattering him and asking him to confirm that we didn’t need more bank regulation.   My reaction was that they couldn’t possibly be such big idiots; they were simply following the money trail.  So if you want to change the nature of conservatism, you’ve also got to change the flow of resources and the way that they affect American politics.

[A version of this piece appeared in the Financial Times on July 20, 2012.]

The issue is not what separates Romney and Obama, but how much they agree. This hidden consensus has to be exposed

Wednesday night's debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney underscored a core truth about America's presidential election season: the vast majority of the most consequential policy questions are completely excluded from the process. This fact is squarely at odds with a primary claim made about the two parties – that they represent radically different political philosophies – and illustrates how narrow the range of acceptable mainstream political debate is in the country.

In part this is because presidential elections are now conducted almost entirely like a tawdry TV reality show. Personality quirks and trivialities about the candidates dominate coverage, and voter choices, leaving little room for substantive debates.

But in larger part, this exclusion is due to the fact that, despite frequent complaints that America is plagued by a lack of bipartisanship, the two major party candidates are in full-scale agreement on many of the nation's most pressing political issues. As a result these are virtually ignored, drowned out by a handful of disputes that the parties relentlessly exploit to galvanise their support base and heighten fear of the other side.

Most of what matters in American political life is nowhere to be found in its national election debates. Penal policies vividly illustrate this point. America imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation on earth by far, including countries with far greater populations. As the New York Times reported in April 2008: "The United States has less than 5% of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners."

Professor Glenn Loury of Brown University has observed that these policies have turned the US into "a nation of jailers" whose "prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history". The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik called this mass incarceration "perhaps the fundamental fact [of American society], as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850".

Even worse, these policies are applied, and arguably designed, with mass racial disparities. One in every four African-American men is likely to be imprisoned. Black and Latino drug users are arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned at far higher rates than whites, even though usage among all groups is relatively equal.

The human cost of this sprawling penal state is obviously horrific: families are broken up, communities are decimated, and those jailed are rendered all but unemployable upon release. But the financial costs are just as devastating. California now spends more on its prison system than it does on higher education, a warped trend repeated around the country.

Yet none of these issues will even be mentioned, let alone debated, by Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. That is because they have no discernible differences when it comes to any of the underlying policies, including America's relentless fixation on treating drug usage as a criminal, rather than health, problem. The oppressive system that now imprisons 1.8 million Americans, and that will imprison millions more over their lifetime, is therefore completely ignored during the only process when most Americans are politically engaged.

This same dynamic repeats itself in other crucial realms. President Obama's dramatically escalated drone attacks in numerous countries have generated massive anger in the Muslim world, continuously kill civilians, and are of dubious legality at best. His claimed right to target even American citizens for extrajudicial assassinations, without a whiff of transparency or oversight, is as radical a power as any seized by George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Yet Americans whose political perceptions are shaped by attentiveness to the presidential campaign would hardly know that such radical and consequential policies even exist. That is because here too there is absolute consensus between the two parties.

A long list of highly debatable and profoundly significant policies will be similarly excluded due to bipartisan agreement. The list includes a rapidly growing domestic surveillance state that now monitors and records even the most innocuous activities of all Americans; job-killing free trade agreements; climate change policies; and the Obama justice department's refusal to prosecute the Wall Street criminals who precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.

On still other vital issues, such as America's steadfastly loyal support for Israel and its belligerence towards Iran, the two candidates will do little other than compete over who is most aggressively embracing the same absolutist position. And this is all independent of the fact that even on the issues that are the subject of debate attention, such as healthcare policy and entitlement "reform", all but the most centrist positions are off limits.

The harm from this process is not merely the loss of what could be a valuable opportunity to engage in a real national debate. Worse, it is propagandistic: by emphasising the few issues on which there is real disagreement between the parties, the election process ends up sustaining the appearance that there is far more difference between the two parties, and far more choice for citizens, than is really offered by America's political system.

One way to solve this problem would be to allow credible third-party candidates into the presidential debates and to give them more media coverage. Doing so would highlight just how similar Democrats and Republicans have become, and what little choice American voters actually have on many of the most consequential policies. That is exactly why the two major parties work so feverishly to ensure the exclusion of those candidates: it is precisely the deceitful perception of real choice that they are most eager to maintain.

• This is an op-ed I wrote to appear in the Guardian newspaper

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Glenn Greenwald
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I want to make one correction to an assertion I made in my last blog post.  In it, I said that delivery of services like education and health care is something that “states accomplish, and not the institutions that check them.”

This is a big overstatement.  The checking institutions actually play a big role in improving the delivery of services and controlling corruption.  Courts are often used to force executive branches to carry out mandated tasks, and of course to prosecute corrupt officials.  Democratic accountability, free media, and open information are  critical in disciplining corruption and keeping on pressure to improve performance.  Much of the international donor community has been promoting mechanisms to increase transparency and accountability in governments as the primary route towards good governance.  The Open Government Initiative developed by my colleague Jeremy Weinstein is another worthy effort in this direction.  Clearly, the more information that’s out there about corruption and bad governance, the more people are likely to mobilize around pressuring executives to fix things.

I was trying to make a different and more complex point.  There is no question that greater transparency and accountability, as well as strict application of the law, are critical to improving the performance of governments.  However, without basic capacity, no amount of transparency and accountability will produce good services.  If you look around the world at all of the great bureaucratic traditions—Germany, Sweden, Japan, Singapore, etc.—not one of them became great because of democratic accountability.  In fact, many great bureaucracies were created by authoritarian regimes that needed efficient services, primarily for the sake of national survival.  This was true of American state-building as well in the Progressive Era–something that I will have to address in a later post.

Moreover, democratic accountability is a double-edged sword.  We of course want bureaucracies to be broadly responsive to public needs, rather than serving their own interests, or those of the elites that appoint them.  On the other hand, there is a permanent tension between accountability and bureaucratic autonomy based on expertise and merit.  Democratic accountability produces its own forms of corruption, as when politicians mobilize voters clientelistically.  In clientelistic systems politicians don’t just set policy and appoint heads of agencies, they choose personnel throughout the bureaucracy.  Politicians representing, in theory, the public will, often make populistic choices at odds with long-term public interest.  This is why executive branches have to be shielded from day-to-day legislative oversight.  The need for bureaucratic autonomy is why we don’t turn monetary policy or military strategy over to our elected representatives for management.  Most Americans seem to recognize (at least implicitly) the importance of expertise and autonomy; surveys like General Social Survey tend to show that the most respected parts of the US government are actually the least democratic:  the Supreme Court, the military, the Centers for Disease Control, etc. By contrast, the part of the government most immediately accountable to public opinion, the House of Representatives, is the least respected of all.

So the checking institutions (law and accountability) have to do their job to force executives to serve the public will.  But checks by themselves do not produce the expertise and enforcement power needed to govern effectively.  I argued last year in the Financial Times that the American system has too many checks, when compared to other democratic systems, and has been steadily accumulating more as time goes on.  Vetocracies can stop bad things from happening, but they also don’t provide for much by way of effective collective action.

When I picked up a copy of George H. Nash's indispensable history of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 at the local used book store, I got more than I bargained for.
Sure, I got a pretty good deal on the book itself:  I paid $9.99 for a near-perfect hardback copy of the 1996 edition.  The pages are tight and clean, there is almost no shelf-wear, and the dust jacket is just ever so slightly bumped at the corners.  It's a really nice copy.  This is because I haven't started reading it yet.  I am a tough, tactile reader of the books I own:  I double-dog-ear pages, and I write rapid-fire marginalia like nobody's business.  By the time I am done with George Nash, this book will look like cannon fodder -- or, I suppose, canon fodder, as I bring Nash's text into conversation with the other books on my reading list. 
What I didn't bargain for when I bought Nash's text was the window that this particular copy of the book would give me into a different kind of conversation taking place within and across distinct communities of discourse -- to borrow and use David Hollinger's apt and helpful mode of analysis.  I need to understand the relationship between the ideas Nash discusses and the way that Nash discusses them in the context of these overlapping discourse communities.  Thankfully, Dr. Nash himself was available to offer some insight via email, which I am glad to share with our readers. Tucked inside the front cover of the copy that I purchased is what appears to be a hand-written note, along with a business card from Brent Tantillo, (erstwhile) Program Director for The Collegiate Network of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (founded, as our readers know, by William F. Buckley, about whom I have written here).  The ISI published the 1996 edition of Nash's text.*

The note is written on 3.5" x 4.5" pre-printed cardstock.  At the top of the card is the ISI logo and name.  At the bottom is a pre-printed generic message -- "This might interest you" -- over Tantillo's name.  The card, it seems, was designed to be inserted in complimentary copies of books.  Sure enough, in the blank space between the ISI logo and the pre-printed signature, Tantillo wrote, "Here is a book that I thought you would enjoy. Merry Christmas! Brent."
The fact that there's no addressee on the card leads me to believe that the diligent Mr. Tantillo probably hand wrote stacks of these cards to be inserted into ISI publications sent out as Christmas gifts.  But how many stacks of cards?  Which publications, besides this one? Which Christmas?  I don't know, and I haven't yet tried to find out.  I do know that Brent Tantillo is no longer with the ISI -- per this profile page, he left that institution to co-found The Democracy Project, to which Wilfred M. McClay is also a contributor.  A simple email to Mr. Tantillo might answer many of my questions, and I may yet send such a message.  So far, everyone to whom I have written regarding my research has been more than happy to assist me, and I doubt Tantillo would react any differently.
However, what I really wanted to know was what George Nash might think about the relationship between his scholarship and the ISI's mission.
So I asked him.
My colleague Andrew Hartman was kind enough to introduce me to Nash via email, and Dr. Nash very graciously agreed to answer my questions.
Here's what I asked:

I'm working on a piece for the USIH blog about how books -- the real, physical objects -- occupy a unique place in the study of intellectual history, because they simultaneously testify to the history of ideas, the social/cultural history of intellectuals, the material conditions of intellectual discourse, and the shifting boundaries of various discourse communities.

The occasion for my post is a felicitous find I made at the local Half Price Books store:  a hardback copy of The Conservative Intellectual Movement (1996 reprint by ISI).  Inside the book was a business card and a hand-written note from an ISI staffer indicating that this particular copy of the book had been sent out as a Christmas gift.  

So I'm interested in thinking about the material history of your crucially important and influential text (which of course is on my exam reading list for US intellectual and cultural history), and the ways that this publishing/circulation history is part of the intellectual history of the very movement whose developments you trace.  

Specifically, here are some things I'm wondering about:  

-your choice to reissue the book with ISI rather than with an academic press.  This is an unconventional move, it seems, and I'd like to understand what kinds of factors you weighed in making that decision.  In what ways was this decision aimed at finding a wider audience, and in what ways was it aimed at finding a different audience?  Did the choice of this press as opposed to a university press or academic publisher come under criticism from the academy?  Should it have?

-the fact that your book was distributed by ISI not just as a significant work of history but (presumably) as a text that would further the mission/goals of ISI.  I am guessing that your decision to publish with them was taken in large part out of agreement with the basic aims of the organization.  In this sense your scholarship is formally and explicitly a part of the story that your scholarship tells.  This strikes me as an interesting dynamic, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

-your thoughts more generally on critically engaged history.  If you happen to follow the conversations on the USIH blog, you may have seen much recent discussion about the place of irony in history, the moral commitment of historians, etc.  Is publishing with ISI sufficiently indicative of your larger "moral commitment," and do you see that as promising or problematic or really irrelevant to the larger project of your scholarship? 

Here is George Nash's very helpful and informative reply, which he has granted me permission to share with our readers:

Regarding the publishing history of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945: as you know, Basic Books published it in hard cover in 1976 and in paperback in 1979. Basic Books kept the volume in print until 1988 or so, when I was informed that the book was no longer selling enough to justify its continuance in print.  I think the publisher and I thought that twelve years was a pretty respectable run.  In any case, in 1988 Basic Books let the book go out of print, and publishing rights (except for Spanish translation) reverted to me. 

In the next few years I gave some thought to reissuing the book with a new publisher, but I was quite busy with my multivolume biography of Herbert Hoover and did not pursue the matter too actively.

Then, in 1994 (as I remember), I was approached by a representative  of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).  He explained that ISI was establishing a book publishing division and would be honored to reprint my book as its first (or one of its first) offerings. I was already familiar with ISI, of course, since I had written about it in my book and had lectured a few times to academically oriented audiences under its auspices. 

The more I thought about this proposed publishing arrangement, the more fitting it seemed. First, ISI (founded in the 1950s) was an organization of long standing whose tone and clientele were broadly academic. As a prospective book publisher, it resembled my first publisher, Basic Books, in seeking to disseminate serious books aimed not only at a tiny coterie of specialists but at what my first editor at Basic Books called "the intellectually oriented general reader." (In ISI's case, these would mostly be college students.) Second, by the mid-1990s ISI had an expanding national network of thousands of affiliated professors, graduate students, and undergraduates.  It seemed to me that these were precisely the sort of people most likely, in the first instance, to read a new and updated edition of the book, nearly twenty years after its initial publication.  That is, the principal new readership of the book would probably be a rising generation of politically aware and intellectually curious college and graduate students of the kind ISI reached out to in its programs every year.  I suspected that ISI would produce a volume accessible to this emerging demographic (unlike many university presses that might be content to print just a small number of copies at a price well beyond the reach of most undergraduates or college course adoption.) 

I think my judgment proved to be correct.  In 1996 ISI Books published an attractive, reasonably priced, hardcover, new edition with updated material that I wrote for it.  In 1998 the paperback edition appeared.  In 2006 ISI Books published an updated "30th anniversary edition" in paperback.  During these years a growing number of politically minded students (and not just those who self-identified as conservative) discovered the book and found it pertinent to their interests. The book found its way onto reading lists for graduate and undergraduate study in the areas of American political and intellectual history and the rapidly developing field of "conservative studies."  Major political phenomena of recent times ( the "Reagan Revolution," the Tea Party, etc.) obviously have had much to do with the book's continuing relevance and circulation. During this period the book has also appealed to a number of people (Left and Right) in the journalistic/commentary community, as E. J. Dionne, among others, has publicly attested.  I am not aware of any criticism in the academy of my decision to permit ISI to republish the book. 

ISI, as you probably know, has now been existence for sixty years.  Its motto is "To Educate for Liberty," and it conceives its mission as educational and intellectual in nature.  In addition to conducting an energetic program of academic and "public intellectual"--type book publishing (in association, I believe, with the University of Chicago Press), it publishes intellectually focused periodicals (notably Modern Age  and the Intercollegiate Review), awards fellowships to graduate students, facilitates undergraduate study clubs and summer institutes focused on the Great Books and themes of western civilization (among other subjects), and sponsors numerous public lectures a year by its affiliated scholars. It has been called an "alternative university," bringing to campuses ideas and perspectives that it finds too often underrepresented in American academic discourse.  I believe that approximately 60,000 to 80,000 faculty and students are in its network at present.

My own association with ISI consists of my being on its mailing list, writing occasionally for its journals, serving on the editorial advisory board for Modern Age, lecturing from time to time under ISI's auspices (most recently to an undergraduate political philosophy study group at the University of Wisconsin), and publishing two volumes with ISI Books.  My name also appears in the new online ISI Speakers Bureau, which was announced a week or so ago. Here are two links to this:

http://faculty.isi.org/speakers   

and 

http://faculty.isi.org/speakers/index/browse/theme_id/2

As you will see, ISI's affiliated academic lecturers include, besides myself, a number of persons probably familiar to the USIH blog, such as the historians Wilfred McClay and Brian Domitrovic.

Since it might be of interest to you, I also enclose a link to an interview I did for an ISI website a couple of years ago: 

http://faculty.isi.org/blog/post/view/id/303%20http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=1803&loc=r

As you can infer from the above, I think well of ISI and have been pleased to contribute, when invited, to its educational programs (time permitting).  This has bought me into acquaintance with a number of studious and impressive undergraduates and graduate students throughout the United States--mostly (but not exclusively) conservatives eager to explore their intellectual roots and civilizational heritage in a rigorous way.  As an independent scholar or (as I sometimes put it) an academic without portfolio, I have always been free to say what I want at ISI forums. I am not an ISI employee and in fact lecture widely at non-ISI gatherings as well (such as academic conferences).  I do not know where all this may rank in the scale of "moral commitment," but as a historian of American conservatism (and other subjects) I have always aspired to write works that can be read with profit by people across the ideological spectrum, regardless of their opinion of the subject. In academia I am known as a conservative intellectual, and I willingly accept the designation. But this has not precluded my striving for fairness, balance, and objectivity in my professional work, both written and oral.  This has been part of my moral commitment as a historian. 

I am grateful for this thoughtful and thorough reply, and glad to share it with our readers.  The reply highlights some intersections and interconnections between distinct but overlapping communities of discourse -- critical scholarly inquiry and conservative cultural advocacy -- to which I will do well to pay attention as an American intellectual and cultural historian.  Further, it gives me a most welcome insight into the ethos of a particular, and particularly important, historian of this era in American intellectual history.  Finally, it serves to confirm my sense of the basic generosity and collegiality of the historical profession and of the academy more generally.

Without exception, all those to whom I have written in connection with my work, from the most junior scholars to the most eminent historians in the field, have been unfailingly gracious and generous in answering my questions and providing suggestions for further research.  In this sense, George Nash's specific response to my particular inquiry is broadly, hearteningly typical.  His answer not only says a great deal about his own sense of his subject matter and his own ethos as a historian; it also exemplifies the ethos of the academy as a hospitable home to scholars from distinct yet overlapping communities of discourse.  As communities of discourse go, the field of U.S. intellectual history suits me just fine; I like where I have landed.  And the intellectual generosity of scholars like George Nash in answering the pointed questions of this inquisitive grad student serves as yet another reminder of why I  think I am in such good company.

And just think:  all this insight has come my way before I have so much as turned to the first page of Nash's crucially important book.  There's no telling where that text itself will take me -- but I'll no doubt be able to retrace my steps, one margin-note and double-dog-eared page at a time.

______________ *In a follow-up email, Dr. Nash offered this helpful advice: "The 2006 edition, which I mentioned in my response, contains several new features: a new Preface, a new Conclusion, and a new Bibliographical Postscript.  Also, for the first time in the history of this book, its footnotes are placed at the bottom of the page--a feature I heartily approve. So you may want to take a look at the later edition at some point."  Sold! The footnotes alone would be enough to convince me.