Roundup: Media's Take
Follow Roundup: Media's Take on RSS and TwitterThis is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
SOURCE: Washington Monthly (5-11-12)
Ed Kilgore is a contributing writer to the Washington Monthly. He is is managing editor for The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a Special Correspondent for The New Republic.
One of the truly interesting things about the reaction to the president’s announcement of support for same-sex marriage (sorry if it annoys anyone that I’m writing about this yet again, but it is the dominant story of this week, affecting nearly every other political “story”), particularly among those who were pleased with it, is the constant alteration between narratives emphasizing its highly tactical and perhaps even accidental nature, and narratives placing it as extraordinarily important—even magnificent—from the perspective of history. This is particularly noticeable among LGBT writers, who often seem to pause in the midst of analyzing the event dispassionately or even cynically, to marvel at how it has affected them....
I’d observe that this isn’t the first, or second, time that a complicated progressive politician took a historic step in a calculated way from what might be at least partially interpreted as mixed motives. The Emancipation Proclamation, after all, contradicted years of prior statements by Lincoln that he never intended, even after the beginning of war, to tamper with slavery in its southern homeland. He got to his ultimate position in no small part, moreover, because he was convinced it would help win the war. But he also knew he was making history, and did.
SOURCE: The New Republic (5-11-12)
Jonathan Rauch is a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America.
...Obama’s gay-marriage conversion smacks of conviction, not convenience. Waiting until after the election would have been politically safer, but if Obama loses in November, as he knows he might, a historic opportunity to speak out for justice could have slipped away. President Clinton has said he regrets having signed the Defense of Marriage Act. Obama seems to have decided not to repeat the error.
“We shall overcome,” LBJ said in March of 1965, shortly after his reelection. When he said those words, he knew he was writing himself into the history books. But he also knew he would probably be writing off the South. There’s no doubt that Obama is a more cautious politician than Johnson: If he thought helping gays would have cost him the election, he wouldn’t have done it—and gays wouldn’t have wanted him to. And the political risk he is taking is not of the same magnitude as LBJ’s. The country has come far enough on marriage equality to make a stand on principle affordable. African-American equality was unique in its moral importance and political voltage, so Johnson’s gesture continues to stand as unique, and, we must hope, always will.
Still, Obama has claimed for himself a place in gay history not unlike LBJ’s place in black history. He is the first U.S. president to put the federal government unequivocally on the side of full equality for gay Americans, and he will almost surely be the last Democratic president to have opposed full equality. For his party, for its liberal base, and possibly for the country, there is no going back. He has crossed the bridge from Selma.
SOURCE: American Spectator (5-10-12)
Peter B. Doran is senior policy analyst at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and P. Bracy Bersnak is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Economics at Christendom College.
These are rough days for the European Union (EU). What began as a sovereign debt crisis has now metastasized into a political debacle for the leaders left holding the bag. Nicolas Sarkozy's electoral defeat in France, the ouster of an austerity-minded government in Greece; and last month's collapse of the governing coalition in the Netherlands are all symptoms of a deeper problem for Europe: bloated governments are hard to tame, even when there is no money left to pay for them.
This is bad news for Europe. But the political tumult on the continent is also a stunning vindication of the post-War thinkers who anticipated this outcome. These individuals, men like Friedrich von Hayek and Wilhelm Röpke, would become founding intellectual fathers behind the modern conservative movement in Europe and the United States. Even today, their foresight provides a defining roadmap for navigating away from Europe's current crisis and offers a chilling warning to the United States about repeating the same mistakes.
Much like the debt crisis of our own time, the dimensions of Europe's post-War reconstruction were staggering. Only instead of ruined factories and decimated cities, today's contemporary European leaders must contend with bombed out credit ratings and the herculean task of reordering the continent's dysfunctional economies. Then, as now, the basic policy debate centered on the state's role as guarantor of public prosperity and welfare; and perhaps more importantly, how to finance it.
SOURCE: PunditWire (5-7-12)
Dan Whitman teaches Foreign Policy at the Washington Semester Program, American University. As Public Diplomacy officer in USIA and the Department of State for more than 25 years, he drafted and edited speeches for U.S. ambassadors in Denmark, Spain, South Africa, Cameroon, Haiti, and Guinea-Conakry. A senior Foreign Service Officer, he retired in 2009 from the Bureau of African Affairs, U.S. Department of State.
Ten of us had Vernon Walters to ourselves, in a location in Scandinavia. Even he never predicted exactly what would happen later that year, but in 1989 he brought us fresh news of subtle changes affecting East-West relations. He’d been sent as President Reagan’s ambassador to something called the Federal Republic of Germany, which no longer exists.
He was bewilderingly smart. He’d never been to college. He spoke perfect French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, and passable German. Everyone who ever met him had a Walters story. He was “General,” or “Ambassador,” depending on where he was at the time.
Talking as always without notes, he gave us updates and also reminded us of things we already half knew. Too smart for optimism, he proceeded willfully and sketched a working plan for straightening out the edges and angles of a fizzling conflict. He never said it would be settled soon. He was of the Ramrod School, figuring how to face the Soviet Union down at its own game.
Sometimes during a 90-minute brief, the listener wants to consider response, question, reflection, assimilation. None of that was called for with Walters: even the political counselor in the room settled back with a primary school receptivity. Dispute and refinement were pointless....
SOURCE: The American Prospect (5-10-12)
Garrett Epps is the legal affairs editor of The American Prospect. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and a professor of law at the University of Baltimore. His most recent book is Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America.
Is anybody else as depressed as I am about the next four years?
No matter who wins, we face the prospect of bitterly divided government, savage partisanship in Congress, and increasing executive desperation....
The Framers did not foresee the rise of a two-party system. As a result, the Constitution (unlike most twentieth-century constitutions) makes no provisions for party participation in government, or party accountability in policy. But their vision of disinterested, dispassionate demigods soberly debating the public good barely survived the Washington administration; the Founding generation itself descended into partisan warfare that compares in vitriol with what we face today. No amount of wishing will make party polarization go away—as Senator Richard Lugar learned this week. And amending the Constitution to tie parties more closely to responsibility would be a chancy and dangerous process....
SOURCE: WaPo (5-8-12)
Richard Cohen writes a weekly political column that appears on Tuesdays .
Barack Obama has read and been influenced by Robert A. Caro’s classic biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker.” From the evidence, it is far from clear, though, that the president has read Caro’s other books, the latest being the fourth installment of his massive Lyndon B. Johnson biography — “The Passage of Power.” He should immediately read it. It will teach him how to be president.
Maybe I should have written that it will teach him how to be a better president. Where Johnson was strong and unparalleled — personal relationships with much of Washington — Obama is frighteningly weak. Last week I asked a member of the Senate if he knows of anyone who really knows Obama. He said he does not.
Washington is thick with stories about Obama’s insularity and distance. We hear how he does not listen to criticism — he sometimes just walks out of the room — and how he sticks to a tight circle of friends. His usual weekly golf game is mostly limited to the same people — and when he played a round with House Speaker John Boehner(R-Ohio), it was treated as an exceptional event. When, for whatever reason, Politico analyzedObama’s golf outings (June 6, 2011), it found that Obama’s “golf circle has actually gotten much tighter over the past 21/ 2years” — none of them politicians or, heaven forbid, journalists.
Lyndon Johnson, in contrast, would not think of wasting a golf game on the game itself…
SOURCE: American Spectator (5-7-12)
Rishawn Biddle the editor of Dropout Nation, is co-author of A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era.
SOURCE: National Review (5-7-12)
Matthew Shaffer lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
When President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner initiated the nationalization and expropriation of the Argentine assets of YPF, an oil company owned mostly by Spanish interests, it came as no surprise to anyone who has visited the country recently or watched it closely. The theft, a consistent manifestation of the Kirchner personality and the mercurial character of the Argentine political class, was more a return to business as usual for the country than a shock — and goes a long way toward explaining why Argentina is poor.
In January 1912, an impartial observer of Argentina and the United States would have had trouble guessing which had a more promising future. Both enjoyed the low-hanging fruit of abundant, underpopulated land. The Argentine pampas were as fecund, tillable, and flat as the American Midwest. Argentina had a long coastline ideal for exporting the agricultural products that were grown inland. Immigrants from all over the world were rushing in. Argentina had one major advantage over the States: It had never relied so heavily on slavery for agriculture. So it had never experienced such a wrenching civil war, nor was it destined for the racial strife and inequality that would be the major blot on America’s future. By 1912, Argentina had even started to enjoy some soft power: The tango — which had originated in Buenos Aires’ slums — had just hit Paris and would soon be the rage in New York and Finland. The capital was marketing itself as a fully European city transplanted directly into the Americas.
In January 2012, I caught a flight to Buenos Aires with a cheap Air Canada ticket, a psychological desperation for more sunlight than Boston would enjoy until April, and a vague curiosity about why Argentina, which had once so resembled the United States, was now so different. What had happened in the intervening 100 years?...
If you want a one-word answer to the question “Why isn’t Argentina rich?” your best bet is coups. Between 1930 (when, only a year after Black Thursday, Argentina’s future may have looked even brighter than America’s) and 1976, Argentina endured at least six. Until 1930, its per capita GDP had closely tracked that of countries like New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. But constant political instability in the decades that followed threw Argentina off track. The reasons are basic: When a country is unstable, it is risky to make the long-term investments required for growth. When dictators and oligarchs use the economy to reward their friends and punish their enemies, markets can’t guide the structural evolution and modernization of the economy. Political revolutions leave a country economically retrograde. By 2000, Argentina’s per capita GDP was about a quarter of that of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. It had largely missed the boat of the 20th century’s spectacular growth....
SOURCE: American Spectator (5-3-12)
Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and the Senior Fellow in International Religious Persecution at the Institute on Religion and Public Policy. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics (Crossway).
North Korea is, to put it mildly, a "problem." The so-called Democratic People's Republic of Korea devotes much of its time to threatening other nations. Pyongyang spends money that it doesn't have on nuclear weapons, missiles, and bizarrely choreographed and synchronized propaganda ceremonies. It has pioneered a system of monarchical communism, passing power from one idiot son to another.
Worse, at least for the North Korean People, the DPRK has created a genuine gulag state, with a smaller but still murderous "gulag archipelago," as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously called Joseph Stalin's creation. The most important political challenge facing Washington remains the North's nuclear program. But the ultimate objective is to relax Pyongyang's grip over the suffering population.
That the DPRK is repressive is hardly news. However, it is difficult for anyone in the West to imagine the full extent of repression in the North....
The DPRK was a Cold War creation, established after Japan's surrender in World War II left the Korean peninsula divided between hostile U.S. and Soviet client states. Moscow tapped Kim Il-sung to run the Soviet zone, which became formally independent in 1948. Kim learned well from Stalin, out-maneuvering internal opponents to win supreme power and creating a system of pervasive social control to terrorize the population. Kim's horrifying twist to Stalin's style was to punish three generations of a family for the "crimes" of any member. Children, parents, and grandparents routinely ended up in the North Korean gulag....
SOURCE: American Spectator (5-3-12)
Most characteristic of this preaching [of the Great Leap Forward] was its utopianism, the promise of a bright future just in the offing, "three years of suffering leading to a thousand years of happiness." -- Franz Schurmann writing in Ideology and Organization in Communist China
Forward!
Comrades, you can't make it up. Can you say "campaign blunder"? Or is it a blunder? Is it deliberate? The socialist mind at work in campaign mode?
The Obama campaign has picked a portion of one of the most infamous socialist slogans of 20th century history to use as its own new campaign slogan.
"Forward" is the new Obama slogan, Team Obama borrowing boldly from none other than the late Communist Party of China leader Chairman Mao.
Mao's slogan? "The Great Leap Forward."...
SOURCE: NYT (5-5-12)
Since the discovery of his richly furnished tomb in 1922, Tutankhamen has ascended to an afterlife no pharaoh in ancient Egypt’s 3,000-year civilization could have imagined. His reign was brief, circa 1336-1327 B.C. Historians had previously known so little about him that they were not sure if he had died young or come to the throne as an old man. But the sight of his golden death mask provoked a media frenzy, and the wild conjecture has continued down to our time of high-tech studies of the Tut mummy.
Today, Tut the boy king — about 18 at death — is the superstar of museum and touring exhibitions, one of antiquity’s celebrities, sharing a firmament with the likes of Nefertiti and the ever lusty Cleopatra. Indeed, he is so much a celebrity that Joyce Tyldesley, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester who wrote a biography of Cleopatra four years ago, says that for some aloof colleagues, confessing an interest in Tutankhamen is “the equivalent to confessing a preference for television soaps over Shakespeare.” Nonetheless, she evidently believes the moment right for a book rethinking the Tutankhamen craze and assessing new biological and archaeological evidence for perspective on his place in Egyptian history. In “Tutankhamen: The Search for an Egyptian King,” Tyldesley has written a crisp, well-researched account of emerging insights into both the life and times of the young king and the modern response, nonsense and all, to his resurrection, as it were, in the modern world.
One part is an archaeologist’s sympathetic review of the luck, hard work and frustration associated with the tomb discovery by Howard Carter, the British excavator bankrolled by a lord, the Earl of Carnarvon. On one “last gamble” in the Valley of the Kings, workers clearing rubble near a known tomb uncovered steps down to another and, as Carter wrote, “made a discovery that far exceeded our wildest dreams.” Tyldesley retells the familiar story with spirit, and with closer attention than usual to each revealing step, including the mistakes, setbacks and dealings with the press....
SOURCE: The Fiscal Times (5-4-12)
Bruce Bartlett is a columnist and blogger for The Fiscal Times.
The most talked-about article in Washington this week is the one by political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein blaming political polarization and gridlock on the Republican Party. They say that its breech of longstanding norms of political competition, especially routine use of the filibuster in the Senate, has gone over the line. Mann and Ornstein blame the extreme rightward tilt of the GOP for its destructive behavior.
The political scientist Jonathan Bernstein agrees that the Republicans have moved well to the right and have become more radical in pursuit of their agenda. But he argues that these are two different phenomena that are not necessarily related. Bernstein thinks the GOP has simply become dysfunctional. He points to the purging of conservatives such as Senators Robert Bennett of Utah and Richard Lugar of Indiana merely for being insufficiently aggressive in attacking Democrats.
The roots of political polarization go back to before the Civil War. The slaveholding society of the old South necessarily imposed upon it a very conservative view of the world, which impacts public policy to the present day.
One way in which this conservatism exhibited itself and still does is that Southerners tend to be very religious in an evangelical Christian way. The reason for this is that when slavery came under attack by Northern abolitionists, Southerners found comfort in the Bible. In it there are many passages that defend slavery and treat it as a normal part of life (e.g., Exodus 20: 20-21; Ephesians 6:5; Colossians 3: 22)....
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (5-3-12)
William Shawcross's most recent book is Allies: the United States, Britain, Europe and the War in Iraq.
SOURCE: National Review (5-3-12)
Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
SOURCE: TIME (5-2-12)
Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME, where he has covered international conflicts in the Middle East, Asia, and the Balkans since 1997.
In a recent New York Times article Susanne Güsten described the difficulties that Syriac Christians faced throughout the history of Republican Turkey. This story reflects the traumatic consequences of the nation-building process that modern Turkey has experienced since the 1920s and 1930s. The Turkish official national identity was based on the ideology of Kemalism, which idealized a homogenous society defined by secularism and nationalism. This ideal, which has been alien to diversity, made life very difficult for ethnic and religious minorities.
Turkish secularism, in contrast to the American experience of secularism that separated religion and the state, excluded religion from the public sphere and aimed to keep it under state control. In an aim to distance itself from the Ottoman Muslim past, the state took a hostile position against religion. It banned organizing around religion. Even today, all religious associations, including Muslim ones, do not exist legally. Related to this, the state does not allow religious education outside of the state domain. The state itself took the responsibility to teach a Hanefi/Sunni interpretation of Islam. The motive of the “secular” state was to institute an “official Islam.” Only a limited number of non-Muslims, excluding Syriacs, were given the right to open religious schools.
Turkish nationalism perceived ethnic and religious minorities, including Christians, as a threat to the ideal of a homogeneous Turkish nation. In the early years of the Republic, Turkey and Greece had large-scale population exchanges in an effort to homogenize their respective societies. Turkish Muslims in Western Thrace moved to Turkey while Greek Christians in Istanbul moved to Greece. In later years when nationalism peaked, the status of minorities including Christians worsened. For example, in the late 1960s, when Turkey had international problems with Greece over the Cyprus conflict, the state expropriated land and properties owned by Christian community foundations by using simple legal technicalities. Again when Turkey had problems with Greece, Turkey closed down the historical Theological School of Halki, which was opened to train Greek Orthodox clergy under Ottoman rule in 1844. Additionally, due mostly to the nationalist security perceptions of the state, religious minorities faced restrictions in opening up spaces for religious practice.
Only after Turkish secularism and nationalism started to weaken in recent years, the Turkish government implemented new reforms enhancing the religious freedoms of Christian minorities in Turkey. Although many significant problems still exist, the Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party has passed several laws to enhance religious liberties for minorities over the last decade. The state passed new laws to return all expropriated properties to non-Muslim community foundations or to compensate the community foundations for properties transferred to third parties. The new laws made it easy to open houses of worship even though some local authorities still keep creating bureaucratic hurdles for non-Muslim minorities.
However, the recent reforms are far from satisfactory. They have not yet offered a solution to many problems that Christian minorities face. Religious communities still do not exist legally and they cannot establish religion-based associations and organizations. Similarly, religious groups cannot open educational institutions to teach religion. The Theological School of Halki, for example, is still closed.
The only comprehensive solution to these problems is to redefine Turkish secularism to make it more inclusive. Secularism in its current form is used as an ideological tool to guarantee state control of religion. For religious freedoms to thrive, Turkish secularism should be transformed into a constitutional principle that guarantees religious freedoms while keeping religion out of the control of the state. This change will prevent the state from intervening in the internal affairs of religious communities including Christian minorities. A change that allows an autonomous sphere to religious minorities would also bring them legal guarantees. While it is true that the current government in Turkey is more tolerant of Christian minorities than its predecessors, Turkey still needs a legal framework that protects the freedoms of Christian minorities. Only a transformation of Turkish secularism could make such a legal framework possible.
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