[Peace-discuss] [sf-core] What are the chances?

[C. G. Estabrook]

Mike--

Historians (and others) should pay attention to the dean of American revisionist historians, William Appleman Williams, who pointed out that the liberal account of the 1932 election (do-nothing Hoover supplanted by activist FDR) was a myth. The principal planks of the Democrats' 1932 platform were a call for a balanced budget and a condemnation of the incumbent administration's excessive spending. (Sound familiar?) It was the popular outcry and the extremity of the situation that reversed the course of the quite plastic Roosevelt. In 1933, certainly, politics were in the street, not the ballot box.

In fact, in an interesting example of the rule that the poets often get there first, the late Gore Vidal paints a far more accurate picture of that election in his novel "The Golden Age" than we learnt from American consensus-historians.

On the argument, "We must support the child-killer in the White House, or else Romney will appoint a bad judge to the Supreme Court!" - it should be unnecessary to note that these things are rather unpredictable: the liberal Warren court was the result of Republican appointments; the neoliberal business court that brought us deregulation was the result of Democratic appointments; and the liberals' bete noire Justice Scalia is the one SC member who has said unequivocally (anent Obama's unconstitutional assertion of the right to indefinite imprisonment without trial), "The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the executive."

On the record, Scalia is more likely to keep whistle-blowers and thought-criminals out of Obama's jails than Stephen Breyer is.

In general, American historians have a lot to apologize for, in the years since the dean of the Harvard history department, Arthur Schlesinger, became the court jester of the Kennedy administration. (Some, like Appleman Williams, whom Schlesinger called a Communist in McCarthy time, did a much better job.)

Chomsky, who's not a mathematician, had to learn some math (recursion theory) to accomplish his revolution in linguistics, and at the same time he was puncturing these American ideological illusions (e.g., "On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War," 1967). His memory of that time is that academic mathematicians asked if he got the right answer; academic historians asked where he got his history degree...

Regards,

Carl

On Sep 2, 2012, at 11:26 PM, Mike Lehman <rebelmike at earthlink.net> wrote:

> As a historian, in my opinion I think you're drawing the wrong analogy 
> from 1932. If Romney wins, it will be as if Hoover won in 1932 -- and 
> then you can hope all you want about the people having any impact on his 
> greed and lust for power.
> 
> Frankly, I wouldn't take much in the way of political advice from the NY 
> Times anyway. I read it regularly, just as I listen to what the 
> president has to say from time to time. Do I invest in either? Are you 
> kidding?!?
> 
> Douthat's puppy love for Ryan, the "policy entrepreneur" kind of makes 
> me want to puke. Serial greed freak, maybe. Policy presumes it at least 
> benefits the public and nothing I've seen from Romney is anything more 
> than the Pig of Greed wearing Sarah Palin's lipstick.
> 
> Two bad choices? Don't presume that they're equally bad, which seems to 
> be the point of the argument that it's no skin off anyone's knee if 
> Romney happens to manage to buy the presidency this time around. Give 
> those jerks another shot at packing the Supremes and Carl will likely be 
> scratching out marks on a prison wall along with other thought 
> criminals, even though he and Romney probably do agree on abortion. I've 
> yet to figure out how folks that claim to believe in small government 
> want it to be just the size to forcibly fit in the womb. The present 
> situation, while it may gall some, at least leaves these decisions to a 
> woman's conscience, where it should be. I have yet to figure out how 
> some people seem to talk to god enough to claim to know what s/he thinks 
> on this matter, which is likely to be a lot more complicated than a 
> Republican platform plank.
> 
> Not that I trust Obama more than a cup of warm spit on much of anything. 
> But there are two possibilities of who wins in November and I know which 
> one I'd prefer to have to put up with given that bad hand, even though I 
> won't be voting for him.
> Mike Lehman
> 
> On 9/2/2012 7:02 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> > Ross Douthat has a column in the NYT today in which he too draws a comparison with 1932:
> > <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/opinion/sunday/douthat-franklin-delano-romney.html>.
> >
> >> On Sep 2, 2012, at 3:52 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> >>> 
> >>> Although I won't vote for either one of them, it's not at all clear to me whether a Romney or an Obama presidency would add more to the sum of human happiness, since they both profess the same murderous economic and military policies (for all their efforts at product differentiation).
> >>> Obama's re-election cannot avoid being interpreted as approval of those policies (cf. Little Bush's "political capital" in 2004), while Romney's election might be seen as their rejection, despite his protestations.
> >>> Perhaps, like FDR in 1932, a victorious Romney may be driven to reverse his professed positions, if the popular demand is strong enough. Politics is in the streets, not the ballot box.
> >>>