If I were Roger Cohen or Paul Krugman I’d demand extra combat pay for having to appear on the same page as that moron Kristol Today he’s typed something called “The Choice They Made,” and says the Declaration of Independence is an example of how liberty sometimes requires the bold leadership of a few individuals. Mr. Cohen’s column is titled “A Terrible Bust is Born,” and he says yes, a bear market is upon us. But not everyone is suffering as the Dow dives. Mr. Krugman writes about “The Obama Agenda” and says we could do a lot worse than a rerun of the Clinton years. But Barack Obama’s most fervent supporters expect much more. Here’s that wretched excuse for a human being kristol:
Half a century ago the philosopher Leo Strauss remarked that the passage in which the Declaration of Independence proclaims its self-evident truths “has frequently been quoted, but, by its weight and its elevation, it is made immune to the degrading effects of the excessive familiarity which breeds contempt and of misuse which breeds disgust.”
I’ve had occasion to test this claim. The last few years, we’ve spent July Fourth at the house of friends who have had the assembled company read the entire declaration. It’s a longer document than one thinks; the charges against the king take quite a while to get through.
But I can report from firsthand experience that the declaration as a whole, and not just its most famous phrases, remains remarkably immune to the degrading effects of excessive familiarity. I was doubtful at first that reading the declaration would enhance the overall beer-and-hamburger experience of the day. But the effort has proved more thought-provoking and patriotism-stirring than I expected.
So this year, perhaps pressing our luck (and patience), I’m thinking of proposing the reading of an additional text: Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Roger Weightman of June 24, 1826.
With regret, the 83-year-old Jefferson wrote that his ill health compelled him to decline the invitation to travel to Washington for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of American independence. But then, perhaps knowing this would be his final word, Jefferson sets forth in stirring prose his faith in the universal significance of the Declaration of Independence:
“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government.”
Jefferson claims his faith is based on the progress of enlightenment. He is confident that “all eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.” Indeed, “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view, the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god.”
Jefferson may have been overly sanguine that the spread of the light of science would necessarily strengthen the cause of human rights. But even the optimistic Jefferson was well aware that the enemies of liberty and equality could regroup and resist — certainly abroad, perhaps even at home.
That’s one reason he trusted that “the annual return of this day” would “forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.” Our devotion — and the sacrifices inspired by that devotion — are needed to make effectual the palpable truth of human equality.
The fate of equality, Jefferson makes clear, also depends on those who see further than, and act first on behalf of, their fellow citizens. In the letter, Jefferson pays tribute to his fellow signers — “that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword.” He wishes he could meet with the few of that band who still survived “to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made.”
So the signers of the declaration made the bold and doubtful choice for independence. Their fellow citizens ratified the choice. But they might have been slow to act if the worthies had not moved first.
For, as the declaration itself notes, “all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” The people are conservative. Liberty sometimes requires the bold leadership of a few individuals.
Perhaps that’s why the representatives, who have signed on behalf of “the good people” of the colonies, “mutually pledge to each other” their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor in support of the declaration. Their pledge isn’t to the people. The pledge is an individual one by the signers to one another.
And the pledge has to be supported by a sense of honor — even of sacred honor. The declaration’s assertion of equal rights, one may say, is supported by what is necessarily unequal, the sense of honor of those acting on the people’s behalf.
Shortly after writing the letter to Weightman, Jefferson died at home in Monticello. On that very same day — the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the declaration, July 4, 1826 — in Quincy, Mass., Jefferson’s fellow drafter and signer John Adams also died. Yet as Adams reportedly said on his death bed, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”
Yes. And Thomas Jefferson is spinning in his grave considering the way that Kristol and his ilk have trashed the Constitution. Here’s Mr. Cohen:
There’s no escape these days, is there? Even in the land of the “Celtic Tiger,” whose growth rates were Europe’s envy in recent years, a typical headline in The Irish Times runs: “Enveloping sense of gloom saps consumer sentiment.”
The recessionary Irish story is familiar, a mirror of developments in the United States, Britain and elsewhere: disappearing credit, plunging house prices, sapped consumer confidence, falling demand, lost jobs, and inflationary stirrings driven by record prices for oil and other commodities.
In Britain, Gordon Brown’s poll ratings are the lowest for any Prime Minister since World War II, a reflection of the woes of a service-dominated economy. He makes Bush’s popularity look enviable — an achievement. The Irish economy is expected to contract this year after growing 4.5 percent in 2007.
Bye-bye, tiger. Hello, bear.
Yes, a bear market is upon us with the Dow Jones Industrial Average now off 19.9 percent from its October record. (A bear market is typically defined as a decline of 20 percent or more.) A terrible bust is born.
But we had good times, didn’t we? Over the past decade, China, India and Russia joined global markets, doubling the labor force (at least) and changing the relationship between capital and labor in the former’s favor. Business leaders had many more cheap workers at their disposal, not least because technology eliminated distance. One result was the rich thrived.
Another was low inflation. Imports of goods produced by cheap labor in Asia ensured that: the Wal-Mart dividend spread.
But as with most things, there was another side to the coin. Those hundreds of millions of people emerging from poverty, moving to cities from central China or Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, began to consume.
They asked for wage rises. They started to eat two meals a day instead of one. They needed building materials for homes. After acquiring bicycles, they got scooters. Now they’re starting to offload scooters for cars.
These neo-consumers created new pressures, and not only on the environment: commodities went through the roof and oil hit $140.
A post-cold-war wealth shock became a resources shock. Inflation returned. That’s where we are.
But not everyone is suffering as the Dow dives. That’s worth recalling. The new consumers are still living better. I wrote a few weeks back that the world is no longer flat, it’s upside-down. In the BRIC economies — Brazil, Russia, India and China — confidence persists.
There’s a reason. The four emerging behemoths’ combined reserves stand at close to $3 trillion, almost ten times where they were in 2001. Their share of world output has doubled in that period to 16 percent. The military dominance of the United States is no longer matched by economic dominance.
One way of looking at the current crisis is as an adjustment between the old economic power structures of the world and the emergent ones. It can’t be resolved by the ancien régime alone. The G-8 and permanent members of the U.N. Security Council must be expanded to reflect today’s realities.
One such reality is debt-ridden America’s economic vulnerability. Many politicians, including Missouri’s Republican governor, Matt Blunt, have been protesting the $46.6 billion bid by a Belgian-Brazilian company for Anheuser-Busch, maker of Budweiser.
This Bud’s for who? How can Bud fall to foreigners?
I’ve got a message for panicked U.S. Budists: get used to it. InBev’s bid for an American icon, championed by a Brazilian chief executive, won’t be the last as the cash-rich of an upside-down world prowl for acquisitions.
We in the West should be familiar with the predator instinct. I lunched early last year with Walter Eberstadt, a wise old Lazard hand, now retired. “Years ago, I watched a man flogging a horse, and finally the horse just lay down and died,” he told me. “And that horse is our financial system. We’re driving it beyond the limit. We’re living as if it can produce more energy than it is able to do. Everyone’s leveraged to the hilt. Whatever happened to good husbandry?”
Of course I didn’t sell. Bull markets are heady things.
Those were the days when risk had been re-priced by banks on the basis that it did not exist. Bankers were passing around toxic mortgage securities like Grandma’s cookies. They’ve since learned a $400-billion lesson that globalization doesn’t make risk vanish, whether in New York or London or Dublin.
Rough days lie ahead — since 1960 the average bear market has taken stocks down 31 percent — but out of the carnage may emerge a world where the old and new powers, as well as rich and poor, find some more reasonable balance, and American society some of its lost social coherence.
This city, after all, is one where a great poet wrote of “All changed, changed utterly.”
Here’s Mr. Krugman:
It’s feeling a lot like 1992 right now. It’s also feeling a lot like 1980. But which parallel is closer? Is Barack Obama going to be a Ronald Reagan of the left, a president who fundamentally changes the country’s direction? Or will he be just another Bill Clinton?
Current polls — not horse-race polls, which are notoriously uninformative until later in the campaign, but polls gauging the public mood — are strikingly similar to those in both 1980 and 1992, years in which an overwhelming majority of Americans were dissatisfied with the country’s direction.
So the odds are that this will be a “change” election — which means that it’s very much Mr. Obama’s election to lose. But if he wins, how much change will he actually deliver?
Reagan, for better or worse — I’d say for worse, but that’s another discussion — brought a lot of change. He ran as an unabashed conservative, with a clear ideological agenda. And he had enormous success in getting that agenda implemented. He had his failures, most notably on Social Security, which he tried to dismantle but ended up strengthening. But America at the end of the Reagan years was not the same country it was when he took office.
Bill Clinton also ran as a candidate of change, but it was much less clear what kind of change he was offering. He portrayed himself as someone who transcended the traditional liberal-conservative divide, proposing “a government that offers more empowerment and less entitlement.” The economic plan he announced during the campaign was something of a hodgepodge: higher taxes on the rich, lower taxes for the middle class, public investment in things like high-speed rail, health care reform without specifics.
We all know what happened next. The Clinton administration achieved a number of significant successes, from the revitalization of veterans’ health care and federal emergency management to the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and health insurance for children. But the big picture is summed up by the title of a new book by the historian Sean Wilentz: “The Age of Reagan: A history, 1974-2008.”
So whom does Mr. Obama resemble more? At this point, he’s definitely looking Clintonesque.
Like Mr. Clinton, Mr. Obama portrays himself as transcending traditional divides. Near the end of last week’s “unity” event with Hillary Clinton, he declared that “the choice in this election is not between left or right, it’s not between liberal or conservative, it’s between the past and the future.” Oh-kay.
Mr. Obama’s economic plan also looks remarkably like the Clinton 1992 plan: a mixture of higher taxes on the rich, tax breaks for the middle class and public investment (this time with a focus on alternative energy).
Sometimes the Clinton-Obama echoes are almost scary. During his speech accepting the nomination, Mr. Clinton led the audience in a chant of “We can do it!” Remind you of anything?
Just to be clear, we could — and still might — do a lot worse than a rerun of the Clinton years. But Mr. Obama’s most fervent supporters expect much more.
Progressive activists, in particular, overwhelmingly supported Mr. Obama during the Democratic primary even though his policy positions, particularly on health care, were often to the right of his rivals’. In effect, they convinced themselves that he was a transformational figure behind a centrist facade.
They may have had it backward.
Mr. Obama looks even more centrist now than he did before wrapping up the nomination. Most notably, he has outraged many progressives by supporting a wiretapping bill that, among other things, grants immunity to telecom companies for any illegal acts they may have undertaken at the Bush administration’s behest.
The candidate’s defenders argue that he’s just being pragmatic — that he needs to do whatever it takes to win, and win big, so that he has the power to effect major change. But critics argue that by engaging in the same “triangulation and poll-driven politics” he denounced during the primary, Mr. Obama actually hurts his election prospects, because voters prefer candidates who take firm stands.
In any case, what about after the election? The Reagan-Clinton comparison suggests that a candidate who runs on a clear agenda is more likely to achieve fundamental change than a candidate who runs on the promise of change but isn’t too clear about what that change would involve.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that Mr. Obama really is a centrist, after all.
One thing is clear: for Democrats, winning this election should be the easy part. Everything is going their way: sky-high gas prices, a weak economy and a deeply unpopular president. The real question is whether they will take advantage of this once-in-a-generation chance to change the country’s direction. And that’s mainly up to Mr. Obama.
