The Democrats and the liberal base have responded to all this with a mixture of cynicism and their own partisanship. They rolled their eyes at Obama’s outreach to Republicans; they hated the inclusion of the other party in the cabinet and had to swallow hard not to complain about the post-partisan rhetoric. Their cynicism is well earned. But my bet is that Obama also understands that this is, in the end, the sweet spot for him. He has successfully branded himself by a series of conciliatory gestures as the man eager to reach out. If this is spurned, he can repeat the gesture until the public finds his opponents seriously off-key.
Ask yourself this question: Who, in the end, won the partisan warfare of the 1990s—Clinton or the Republicans? In 1993, the Republicans thought they had dispatched Clinton for good; he won reelection hands down three years later and left office, even after Monica Lewinsky, with high ratings. Obama may not believe that history repeats itself. But he’s surely aware that it often rhymes.
Mad, Maddening America, the Wisest of All
February 22, 2009 | THE SUNDAY TIMES
America can drive you up the wall. To Europeans and world-weary Brits, it can sometimes seem almost barmy in its backwardness. It is a country where one state, Arkansas, has just refused to repeal a statute barring atheists from holding public office but managed in the same session to pass a law allowing guns in churches. It incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than even Russia and aborts more babies per capita than secular Europe.
Darwin remains a controversial figure, but Sarah Palin was a serious candidate to be vice president. Last week the California legislature took five days to prevent the entire state from going bankrupt; and more than three months after the election, and five months since the financial system went kablooey, the Treasury secretary had not mustered the staff sufficient to craft the details of a rescue package for the banks.
There are times in the quarter of a century since I arrived in America that I have been tempted to throw my hands up in frustration. To give a brutal, personal example, I’ve lived in the United States since 1984. I’ve made a home and a life here. But I still cannot even begin the process of becoming a citizen because the United States makes it illegal for anyone with HIV to get a green card. The ban was passed in the 1980s in a moment of total, ignorant panic. It took two decades to repeal it last summer, and the government bureaucracy still hasn’t changed the regulation. Another small insanity: the residents of the city I live in, Washington, D.C., America’s capital, do not have any representation in Congress. Since the founding of the country, the district has never been formally a part of a state, and so cannot, according to the Constitution, have representatives in the House or the Senate. Imagine the residents of Westminster not having any MPs in the Commons. The residents of Baghdad, in fact, have more democracy than the residents of Washington, but no one in government cares enough about this to actually amend the Constitution to make that change.
And yet I stay and love it and defend it, even as it can push me to bang my head against the wall at times and may eventually throw me out altogether. Why? Because I’ve learned over the years that the constitutional system that seems designed to prevent change has more wisdom in it than some more centralized parliamentary systems, and because the very chaotic, decentralized and often-irrational mess of American state and federal politics also allows for real innovation and debate in ways that simply do not occur as vibrantly elsewhere. The frustration and innovation are part of the same system. You cannot remove one without also stymieing the other.
Take gay rights, a cause dear to my heart. Many Europeans feel quite smug about their enlightenment, and the transformation of the debate in Britain in the past decade has been as profound as it has been welcome. But few doubt that America pioneered the gay-rights movement, as the movie Milk, up for eight Oscars tonight, underlines. New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in the 1970s forged a liberation movement that changed gay lives throughout the world.
Yet even now, though I have a marriage license, something no gay couple in Britain has, my five-year relationship is not recognized by the federal government. In Massachusetts, a state where gay marriage is legal and where I married my partner Aaron in August 2007, the license is no different in any respect from that given to heterosexual couples. Civil partnership may provide rights at a national level, but it is still indelibly a separate and lesser institution than marriage itself, and offers a lesser measure of the social, psychological, and cultural acceptance that civil marriage provides.
In California, gays just suffered a horrible setback as a majority narrowly voted to take away marriage rights. But at least they had a chance to get them in the first place. And the debate was a real and raw one—which made victory more meaningful and defeat more profound.
In America, the bigotry you face is real, unvarnished, and in the open. In Britain, it can come masked or euphemized or deflected into humor. It hurts much more to punch a brick wall than to punch a deep velvet cushion. But if you punch hard enough, the wall will one day crumble, while the pillow will constantly absorb the blows.
There is plenty of religious bigotry and fundamentalist rigidity and crude sectarianism in America. But there is also a clear and invigorating religious energy that takes the question of God seriously and does not recoil from it in apathy or world-weariness. Give me a fundamentalist to argue with any day over someone who has lost the will to care that much at all.
On race, of course, this is especially true. No civilized country sustained slavery as recently as America or defended segregation as tenaciously as the American South until just a generation ago. In my lifetime, mixed-race couples were legally barred from marrying in many states. But equally in my lifetime, a miscegenated man who grew up in Hawaii won a majority of the votes in the old slave state of Virginia to become the first minority president of any advanced Western nation.
That is the paradox of America, and after a while you find it hard to appreciate anything more coherent. What keeps America behind is also what keeps pushing it relentlessly, fitfully forward.
That Canadian genius Leonard Cohen put it best, perhaps. In his anthem “Democracy” he called the United States “the cradle of the best and of the worst.”
You live with the worst because you yearn for the best, because the worst in its turn seems somehow to evoke the best. From the Civil War came Abraham Lincoln, from the Great Depression came Franklin D. Roosevelt, from segregation came Martin Luther King, and from George Bush came Barack Obama. America may indeed drive us up the wall, but it also retains a wondrous capacity to evoke the mountaintop and what lies beyond.
Obama’s Race Dream Is Swiftly Shackled
July 26, 2009 | THE SUNDAY TIMES
What do you call a black man with a PhD? The answer begins with an n. Yes, it’s an old and bitter joke about the resilience of racial bias in America, but it got a new twist last week. The black man with a PhD was Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the most distinguished scholars of African American history and culture at Harvard. His unexpected tormentor was a local policeman called James Crowley, a white, well-trained officer called to investigate a possible break-in.
The facts we know for sure are as follows. Ten days ago Gates got home from China in the afternoon to find his front door jammed. He forced it open with the help of his cabdriver, another black man. A white woman in the area called the police to report a possible burglary. Crowley showed up and saw a black man in the hallway of the house through the glass door. He asked Gates to step out onto the porch and talk to him. Gates refused.
The police report—written by Crowley—says he told Gates he was investigating a break-in in progress and Gates responded furiously: “Why? Because I’m a black man in America?” Gates tried to place a call to the local police chief, while telling Crowley he had no idea who he was “messing” with. The interaction quickly degenerated. After Gates had shown his Harvard identification, Crowley said he would leave. Gates then followed him to his front door, allegedly yel
ling that Crowley was racist. On his own porch, at his own property, Gates was arrested for “disorderly conduct,” handcuffed, and booked in at a local station.
The incident clearly struck a nerve. Boston has a fraught racial history. Gates, of course, is no underclass black man but among the country’s elite, friends with the president, chums with Oprah Winfrey, a man given a small fortune by Harvard to build one of the best departments of African American studies in the world.
The affair got another lease of tabloid life when President Barack Obama was asked for his reaction to the incident and said that while Gates was a friend and he did not know the full facts, the police acted “stupidly” by arresting someone when there was proof he was in his own home.
So was this an example of excessive racial grievance on the part of Gates or excessive racial insensitivity on the part of Crowley—or a little bit of both? Such moments are fully understood only by the individuals involved—and even then the truth is murky in such emotional circumstances. But it is indeed unusual to arrest someone for “disorderly conduct” when he is on his own property.
Massachusetts law defines the perpetrators of “disorderly conduct” thus: “common night walkers, common street walkers, both male and female, common railers and brawlers, persons who with offensive and disorderly acts or language accost or annoy persons of the opposite sex, lewd, wanton and lascivious persons in speech or behavior, idle and disorderly persons, disturbers of the peace, keepers of noisy and disorderly houses and persons guilty of indecent exposure.” Apparently, Gates’s loud accusations of racism on a street in Cambridge at one o’clock in the afternoon in front of at most seven passersby and neighbors was a qualification for the charge. It’s no big surprise that it was swiftly dropped.
Crowley gave an interview on Thursday after Obama’s remarks, refusing to apologize. When asked what he thought of the president’s comments, he smiled, paused, and said: “I didn’t vote for him.” The way he said it, the contempt in his voice and pride in his actions, helped to illuminate for me why Gates might have perceived racism. But the second police report—from an officer called Carlos Figueroa—testified that Gates initially refused to provide Crowley with any identification, yelling, “No, I will not!” and “This is what happens to black men in America!” and “You don’t know who you’re messing with.”
Gates is not a merchant of racial grievance. He is a scholar who has won wealth and fame and respect for his work and who tends to eschew the kind of bald racial accusations he made that day. Maybe he was exhausted after a long trip and irritated by being unable to get into his home; to be confronted by an officer of the law asking if he was a burglar may well have been the last straw. He lost his cool. A black man should never lose his cool with a white policeman in America. Obama explained in his autobiography the unwritten code for black men in such situations: no sudden moves.
Would this have happened to a white man? That requires some unpacking. A white man seen breaking through the front door into a house in an affluent section of Cambridge, Massachusetts, might not have prompted a police call. Any suspect break-in, though, could justify a call to the local police station.
More important, a white man seeing a policeman call him onto his porch for identification would probably not have exploded the way Gates allegedly did. Nor, one might add, would a poor black man arrested on the streets of the largely African American neighborhood of Roxbury in Boston raise such a ruckus about “racism.” Gates’s response was a classic example of how successful black men in America feel when treated by the police in a manner used in the ghetto. That was also perhaps the reason for Obama’s solidarity. What do you call a black man with a PhD again? Equally, I’d wager that if the policeman had seen an older white man wielding a cane through the glass door of a posh house, he would not have demanded that the man come out onto his porch and identify himself. He would have knocked, explained the reason for his visit, and instantly accepted a white man’s explanation. Is this racism? If it has never happened to you, no. If it has, yes.
On the web, the comments sections on various blogs and stories were the most honest. Here is one view: “Butt the hell out Obama. You don’t know the facts of the case, you weren’t there, you’re friends with the douchebag, you’re black. Taking Obama’s word is the same as judging a criminal by a jury of his fellow gangster peers.”
Here is another: “Professor Gates might not have been arrested if he’d been more submissive—let the cop win the masculinity contest. Every brotha has played that game as well: you don’t look the popo in the eye, you do say ‘sir’ a lot and maybe you won’t get locked up. Then you go home and stew in the stuff that gives African American men low life expectancy.” Yes, America has a black president. But some things haven’t changed that much, have they?
Leaving the Right
December 1, 2009 | THE DISH
It’s an odd formulation in some ways as “the right” is not really a single entity. But there has to come a point at which a movement or party so abandons core principles or degenerates into such a rhetorical septic system that you have to take a stand. It seems to me that now is a critical time for more people whose principles lie broadly on the center-right to do so—against the conservative degeneracy in front of us. Those who have taken such a stand—to one degree or other—demand respect. And this blog, while maintaining its resistance to cliquishness, has been glad to link to writers as varied as Bruce Bartlett or David Frum or David Brooks or Steve Chapman or Kathleen Parker or Conor Friedersdorf or Jim Manzi or Jeffrey Hart or Daniel Larison, who have broken ranks in some way or other.
I can’t claim the same courage as these folks because I’ve always been fickle in partisan terms. To have supported Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Dole and Bush and Kerry and Obama suggests I never had a party to quit. I think that may be because I wasn’t born here. I have no deep loyalty to either American party in my bones or family or background, and admire presidents from both parties. My partisanship remains solely British—I’m a loyal Tory. But my attachment to the Anglo-American conservative political tradition, as I understand it, is real and deep and the result of sincere reflection on the world as I see it. And I want that tradition to survive because I believe it is a vital complement to liberalism in sustaining the genius and wonder of the modern West.
For these reasons, I found it intolerable after 2003 to support the movement that goes by the name “conservative” in America. I still do, even though I am much more of a limited-government type than almost any Democrat and cannot bring myself to call myself a liberal (because I’m not). My reasons were not dissimilar to Charles Johnson, who, like me, was horrified by 9/11, loathes Jihadism, and wants to defeat it as effectively as possible. And his little manifesto prompts me to write my own (the full version is in The Conservative Soul). Here goes:
I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic- and foreign-policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law.
I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.
I cannot support a movement that so abandoned government’s minimal and vital role to police markets and address natural disasters that it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.
I cannot support a movement that holds torture as a core value.
I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.
I cannot support a movement that is deeply homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.
I cannot support a movement which has no real respect for the institutions of government and is prepared to use any tactic and any means to fight political warfare
rather than conduct a political conversation.
I cannot support a movement that sees permanent war as compatible with liberal democratic norms and limited government.
I cannot support a movement that criminalizes private behavior in the war on drugs.
I cannot support a movement that would back a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified and duplicitous because of identity politics and electoral cynicism.
I cannot support a movement that regards gay people as threats to their own families.
I cannot support a movement that does not accept evolution as a fact.
I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.
I cannot support a movement that refuses ever to raise taxes, while proposing no meaningful reductions in government spending.
I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.
I cannot support a movement that believes that the United States should be the sole global power, should sustain a permanent war machine to police the entire planet, and sees violence as the core tool for international relations.
Does this make me a “radical leftist,” as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not. But it sure disqualifies me from the current American right.
To paraphrase Reagan, I didn’t leave the conservative movement. It left me.
And increasingly, I’m not alone.
Obama, Trimmer
December 2, 2009 | THE DISH
Alex Massie flags this passage from E. D. Kain:
Out on a Limb Page 35