Jim Webb, Tulsi Gabbard and the Future of the Democratic Party

Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb speaks at an event at the public library in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Thursday, April 9, 2015. Jim Webb and Martin O'Malley are both in Iowa, trying to establish themselves as the alternative to Hillary Rodham Clinton. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

There has been for a long time a problem for identity in the Democratic Party since the days that George McGovern, the liberalism that he promote was found repulsive but a lot of people in Middle America. Jimmy Carter southern populism was consider weak on foreign policy. Bill Clinton won on a neoliberal platform of corporativism and hawkish foreign policy. The Bush years made some liberals consider an alliance with libertarians against neoconservative republicans in that years the name of Brian Schweitzer sound strongly as an antiwar, anti-tax, pro-gun rights ans pro-privacy kind of candidate but when the 2008 primaries come both Mike Gravel and Bill Richardson who were somehow close to that ideal do very badly in the elections. Civil libertarians like Russ Feingold and Mark Udall had lost their seats and the Democratic Party has embraced identity politics as their main credo. The party hasn’t completely rejected neoliberalism or liberal interventionism but their main issues are cultural not economical.

Jim Webb has supposed to change that. Having been a Vietnam War veteran and Secretary of the Navy under Reagan. He became the antiwar hero of 2006 becoming a Democratic senator from Virginia. He’s by no standard a pacifist, even some neocon publications respect his positions on foreign policy. But he is still the most thoughtful democrat when it comes to international relations. He wants American foreign policy to focus more on China than the Middle East but at the same time he understands the that the current conflicts are product of the implicit alliance between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists. On economics he is a populist who wants more government intervention but I don’t think to the level of the dreams of Bernie Sanders. On gun rights he is closer to the position of Bernie Sanders that is shared both by people in rural areas and military families. He has issues with affirmative action and while is not for open borders with the time has been more supportive of immigration reform. He’s not a environmentalist and supports coal.

The reactions to his performance at the debate had been mixed from some praising to some criticism. I don’t think really that debates were the reason why is doing so badly. He is after all is one of the few democrats which focus on the possibility for the party to regain white voters from rural areas that had been abandoned  by the party for their insensitivity toward cultural issues while the majority of the party is focusing on identity politics for only relying on minorities. Jim Antle argue that if Jim Webb left the Democratic Party for McGovern then he leave the Republican Party for Bush, now he is man without party. I disagree, I think that actually one of recent figures of the Democratic Party, a young congresswoman that in a lot of positions is closer to Webb than any of the old rural democrats. Tulsi Gabbard is a rising star congresswoman representing Hawaii, she is of Samoan descent and is the only Hindu American in Congress. One would think than in the party of identity politics she would be a progressive queen but like Webb she is a former veteran who on foreign policy sounds very independent even questioned the Iran Deal. Webb was saying that debates were rigged while Gabbard was calling for more debates. Webb had been praised from National Review, Gabbard too. A devout Hare Krishna and a surfer, the socially conservative positions of his relatives get her in problems in democratic primaries. Jim Webb wants to run as an independent but maybe he could work with democrats while a fresh face like Tulsi Gabbard would advance the cause of realism and independence inside the Democratic Party. I’m a non-interventionist but I think the realist challenge in foreign policy of people like Jim Webb on hawks like Hillary Clinton still could help define the future of the Democratic Party. Webb is a warrior which is still could have a last fight against a totalitarian leader.

(Image source)

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Will America lose the upcoming Cold War?

World War III is coming.

If you think I kid, just read Max Fisher’s write-up about the approaching U.S. confrontation with Russia. It’s enough to make you soil yourself.

Here’s the rationale: Not yet deterred from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Putin is actively restoring Russia’s sphere of influence. He has made a point of invading Ukraine to access his country’s port in Sevastopol. Now he’s openly defying the U.S. by aiding the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Now, I’m no wide-eyed Bill Kristol disciple. I don’t think America needs to keep its empire status. But at the same time, I see a need for order in an uncertain world. There will always be a domineering force on our planet. And, like it or not, that global bully is America. So it’s better to err on the side of caution and to, in the words of Michael Oakeshott, “prefer the familiar to the unknown,” and root for the home team.

The question is: with Barack Obama soon to leave the White House, what presidential candidate is best fit to stand up to aspiring leaders like Vladimir Putin? Who will put the ex-KGB spy and Russian leader in his place?

(more…)

Canadian conservatism, present and past

Canada’s general election is less than a week away, although if you live south of the 49th parallel you could be forgiven for not knowing this. When politicos here tear their gaze away from the spectacle of 2016, they prefer something a little more exotic, especially given Canada’s (not entirely undeserved) reputation for being the political equivalent of vanilla pudding.

This election is more interesting than most, however, for a number of reasons. Canada’s three major parties are running more or less neck and neck, so it’s still anyone’s game five days out. In keeping with the outsider insurgency apparently sweeping the English-speaking political world, one of those parties – the New Democratic Party (NDP) – is a social-democratic outfit that has never governed the country before. Most intriguing to me, though, is the status quo under contention – this center-left country has been governed for the past nine years by the Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Harper is the last of the neocon-types that ran the Anglosphere in the aughts. You remember these guys: we had Bush, of course; the British had Blair; and the man down under was John Howard. There was some flexibility among the cabal, but the ideological glue that bound them was free marketeering at home and aggressive interventionism abroad. Harper was the most junior member of this class and is the only one still around (within two years of his election, Bush, Blair, and Howard would all be out of office). In a larger sense, he represents a kind of globalization of conservatism within the English-speaking world, the supplanting of national political traditions by a fundamentally internationalist ideology.

For, to the conservatives of Canada’s past, Harper would be an almost unrecognizable figure. From John A. Macdonald, the first Conservative PM, to John Diefenbaker, the last before the neoconservative ascendancy, Canadian conservatism was consistently opposed to Harper’s twin idols of interventionism and the free market. Economically, protectionism, robust government investment in society, and welfare spending underpinned conservative policies. Inasmuch as foreign military adventures were considered, it was reluctantly (though not necessarily intelligently) in the service of Britain and the empire for which the conservatives felt so passionately. And in what will always be Canada’s dominant foreign policy issue – relations with the United States – the old Canadian Right took an entirely different tack.

In 1911, for instance, the Conservative Prime Minister Robert Borden won largely on the basis of his opposition to lower trade barriers between Canada and the United States. Fifty-two years later, in a sign of the changing times, John Diefenbaker fell from the premiership largely for resisting American pressure to deploy nuclear missiles within Canada. Though the Conservatives maintained friendly relations with their neighbor to the south, they feared that America’s liberal culture, supported by its vast economic and military strength, could swamp their country and unmoor it from its traditional foundations. To conservatives like George Grant, “to be Canadian was to build a more ordered and stable society than the liberal experiment in the United States.” Such an endeavor would always be jeopardized by threats from without; challenged from within, its failure was inevitable.

For better or worse, the pessimists on the Right were not proved wrong. After the fall of Diefenbaker, the Conservative Party was banished to the political wilderness for over two decades (excepting a 9-month stint in power between 1979 and 1980). It was during this period that Canada shook off almost all of its remaining British trappings, changing the flag, the constitution, and the culture (this process, by which the old Anglo-Canadian identity was swapped for a culturally neutral, civic nationalism is well-documented in the excellent The Other Quiet Revolution). When the Conservatives retook Ottawa in 1984, they were a changed party governing a changed country. They had become more or less what they are today: champions of free markets and free trade at home  (NAFTA was a Conservative priority), and reliably deferential to American foreign policy abroad.

But in the age of Trump, Sanders, and Corbyn, it’s clear that the game is changing, and the political arrangements of the recent past are under threat. In such a systemic crisis, the idea that formerly obscure or moldering ideologies – like Canada’s traditional conservatism – might make a comeback is increasingly plausible. At the very least, I suspect this will be the last race the Harper-types run for some time.

The limits of private governance

I was invited to respond to Ed Stringham’s new book and lead essay on Cato Unbound. Here is a snippet.

The success of private governance depends on whether the previous actions of participants are easily identifiable. If so, cheaters will be avoided and cooperators will be interacted with again. However, there are a class of people for whom their previous actions are not easily identifiable.

Imagine you are an entrepreneur in the third world. You have started a business, but cannot grow it because you are capital constrained. Banks are unwilling to lend you money because the government cannot be trusted to recover capital if you are late during repayment. Because you are a new entrepreneur there is not enough information about your ability and willingness to repay loans for the bank to simply trust you.

If we ignore the government failure of enforcing the banking contract, it is also apparent that a private governance mechanism cannot solve this need. And a recent paper by David McKenzie suggests it is stronger than usually recognized.

McKenzie examines the results of a business competition in Nigeria where a randomized selection of 729 firms were given an average of $50,000. After three years he found, “Surveys tracking applicants over three years show that winning the business plan competition leads to greater firm entry, higher survival of existing businesses, higher profits and sales, and higher employment, including increases of over 20 percentage points in the likelihood of a firm having 10 or more workers. These effects appear to occur largely through the grants enabling firms to purchase more capital and hire more labor.”

The conversation will continue and I will likely add additional commentary here. After the conversation has ended I plan to summarize it here.

Social class in America: the inequality we ignore

When Paul Fussell wrote Class in 1983, social class in America was “notably embarrassing”; sociologist Paul Blumberg, three years earlier, had called it “America’s forbidden thought”. Today, with the focus of media, academic, and political rhetoric on matters of race and sex, class consciousness—to use an admittedly dangerous term—seems absent from the public mind. Rather than being forbidden, the matter of social class as something which can transcend race has been all but forgotten.

But certain questions are only answerable in terms of socioeconomic class. When one asks, as the Washington Post did recently, why the country’s “most progressive cities” are losing their Black residents; or, as the Atlantic has asked, why “blue” cities are often unaffordable for middle-class families; or why the poorest county in the country—Owsley County, Kentucky—is about 98% non-Hispanic White; the progressive cries of racial injustice fall flat.

When I was growing up in suburban areas of the peripheral South, there was no “social class” per se—there were merely different kinds of people. Some lived in houses, others lived in trailers; some moved a lot, others didn’t; some always had money in their pocket, others didn’t. But more importantly to me as a kid, some people looked and acted very differently from others; some read books and others didn’t; some listened to the music I liked and others didn’t. These latter differences, especially the petty disagreements between subcultures which are so important to post-WWII Western youth, did much to cloud my vision of the socioeconomic divisions which were at the root of so many of them.

Such divisions are, ultimately, a matter of differences in shared experience–vocational experience in particular. Differences in shared experience are related to nearness and similarity; people are especially likely to form group identities with those to whom they perceive themselves to be geographically close and similar in culture or likeness. If someone lives far away and has no relation to you, you probably don’t perceive any deep commonality with them–unless you simulate nearness with the help of, say, the Internet.

To draw a useful map of class in the United States, then, means knowing what are the most socially divisive differences in vocational experience–in other words, the differences which are most likely to determine: 1) what kinds of people you live near and 2) what your (sub)cultural norms are, not to mention 3) your material conditions. Some of these might be: whether you have gone to college, whether you own a business, what your credentials are, etc. We can develop such a map in greater detail in the future, but for now we can distinguish an educated class–those living in what Charles Murray calls superZIPs–and an uneducated one. The two are easy to tell apart:

Several teenage church members spent a weekend helping to repair an elderly woman’s small house on a winding country road. For some, the experience was an eye-opener.

“I don’t usually encounter people who aren’t like us,” Zach Hannan, a River Hill High School senior who hopes to become a doctor, said as he joined adults replacing a damaged kitchen floor. He added, “I’m not used to seeing small houses.”

Hannan said that he has accompanied his parents, both psychologists, on cruises to Europe and Alaska and that most of his friends have been to Europe, too. Working nearby, Brandon Pelletier, who headed to Ohio State University this fall to study business, said his friends all have smartphones and shop for high-end clothes at the local mall.

So why, with all this in mind, are “America’s most progressive cities” in the process of “losing African Americans”? For the same reason that Chicanos in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago want “White hipsters” to stop moving in: the educated class is culturally unlike the urban minorities in places like Chicago and Austin, and, more to the point, it makes use of material conditions–gainful employment, home ownership, stable location, etc.–that the uneducated, of any race, urban or rural, do not enjoy in the same proportion. It wields greater social capital as well as economic capital, and both are dependent on social networks which members of the uneducated classes tend not to belong to. This means that, as happily egalitarian as the gentry might be, gentrification doesn’t somehow induct poor Blacks into their ranks. Eric Tang at the Washington Post answers his own question, and does so in terms of class:

It’s not that these cities are no longer liberal, per se, but that the brand of (neo)liberalism they now celebrate is unaccountable to the concerns championed by lower-waged workers[.]
[…]
It’s a liberalism that has, quite literally, left no room for the low-waged worker, particularly African Americans.

Not to mention poor and rural Whites, who not only do not benefit from affirmative action, but are discriminated against by universities. Whatever “White privilege” the educated class has, poor Whites are missing out.

Progressivism, then, is a signal of class; perhaps the greatest impediment to its acceptance by more Americans is economic insecurity. After all, if you went to a good school and make more money than most of the country, bloating the bureaucracy a little more doesn’t sound so bad. But if your livelihood is threatened by possible layoffs, high rent, and debt–in other words, if you’re one of an increasing number among the uneducated middle classes–voting Democrat may be simply unaffordable.

One doesn’t get the sense that middle- and working-class people are as conscious of this as they were, say, a century ago. Americans seem no longer to be as suspicious of the very wealthy as they once were. With the neoliberal GOP moving leftward on social issues and the Democrats losing their economic populism, we are left with two brands of big-government quasi-libertarianism: one for the dwindling middle class, and one for the gentry and their expanding class of dependents. Huey Long and William Jennings Bryan would find both parties hostile to what they stood for; more to the point, so would most of the American political establishment prior to the late 20th century.

To think that the implementation of egalitarian ideas would cause such an ever-growing class divide–an increasingly racial one at that!

Help me start a History of Virginia podcast

Recently I’ve become addicted to podcasts. I listen to them when I walk to and from work, when I’m cooking dinner, on the way to the bar, on the way to church — everywhere. The podcasts of Mike Duncan and Robin Pearson in particular –“History of Rome” and “History of Byzantium” — have been really enjoyable.

Now I want to try my own hand at it, with a podcast about the history of Virginia. Having gotten more confident doing radio over the past year, thanks to guest hosting gigs on the Mike Church Show, I think I can pull something like this off.

I still have much of the reading material from undergraduate history courses at W&M and Colonial Williamsburg saved as PDFs that I can dust off, and already have 30 or so books on various parts of Virginia history that I’ve begun collecting. However, this is quickly becoming expensive, and before I can begin I need to fill in the gaps, and especially gather more material pertaining to the Seventeenth Century.

So, I’d like to ask for your help. I’ve put together an Amazon wish list of books I’d like to have, all covering the colonial period (if all goes well, we’ll continue from there). If you sort the list by priority you will see that I’ve put those on Jamestown and the Seventeenth Century first, for obvious reasons. There’s also the Hornbook of Virginia History, a reference book that contains population figures, lists of who holds what office, and other information that will help guide my research and writing.

In terms of how the show will work, I will try to maintain a coherent narrative as much as possible, but I am committed to a couple of things: One, to have more interviews than is typical for this kind of podcast — having worked at Colonial Williamsburg’s public affairs office and corresponded with several colonial historians, it would be criminal of me not to highlight their work in their own words. And second, to not be afraid to focus on personal stories and other digressions that may or may not make good one-off episodes (think, for you podcast listeners, more Dan Carlin and less Mike Duncan).

There are several reasons why I think a more digressive approach is called for. First of all, Virginia is not an empire. In Augustus’ day, the Roman Empire contained more than 50 million people. Virginia wouldn’t pass a half-million until around the time the Declaration of Independence was signed. It’s a more human-scale story, in time and space, and less suited to grand narratives.

Second, Virginia is blessed with a long line of chroniclers with close connections to it, and they often approach their subject with palpable affection, first among them Samuel Kercheval, a correspondent of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote about the early settlement of the Shenendoah. I say “chroniclers,” because many were not academic historians. Many were newspapermen, like the legendary Virginius Dabney, who edited the Richmond Times-Dispatch for 33 years, or his one-time assistant Parke Rouse, Jr, who went on to run the publishing division of Colonial Williamsburg in 1953, or Virginian Pilot columnist Guy Friddell, author of the amusing ’60s tourist-baiting tract, What is it about Virginia? While this is probably not unique to Virginia, as an editor I’m fascinated by the way the state’s mythology and self-conception have so often been shaped by stately journalists with an unusual curiosity about history.

Other writers had different careers entirely, like the Jacobite nostalgist Edgar Erskine Hume, a highly-decorated Army officer and Chief Surgeon during the Korean War. While not neglecting current scholarship — there’s plenty on the list — I think all these people are worth getting into, along with homegrown mid-century academic historians like Philip Alexander Bruce and Raymond Dingledine.

These folks are all on the Amazon wish list, their works are largely out of print but not too expensive. With your help, I’ll be able to post the first episode in a couple of months.