There’s no good news for Democrats this election season because there’s no good news. Yet it’s hard to believe that the American people this November are going to return the party to power that not too long ago lied the nation into war, doubled the national debt, and collapsed the economy. When has a political party ever been returned to power so soon after destroying the lives and livelihoods of so many people?

There was a window of opportunity to bring Wall Street to heel and to bolster the neglected and maligned public sector institutions, but President Obama chose instead to play nice with the Republican nihilists in the Senate who don’t care about anything other than fooling enough people to win the next election and squeezing every ounce of political gain out of each 24-hour news cycle. It’s hard to believe that even in our duopoly people would be stupid enough to return the Republicans to power after they killed the American dream for so many millions of our fellow citizens. In a normal country, the Republicans would be out of luck for at least a half dozen election cycles.

Then again, the Republican Party has the Koch brothers and every other rich bastard showering them with money; the Supreme Court augmenting its Bush v. Gore disgrace with Citizens United opening up even larger floodgates of corporate political cash; right-wing talk radio from sea to shining sea; Fox “News,” and an enormous echo chamber, etc. Most mainstream media commentators talk about the angry Right as if it were a full-fledged social movement. But in reality, it’s just an elaborate exercise in ruling-class power, the rich versus everyone else, much of it cloaked in Astroturf and liberal sounding “public policy” groups like “Americans for Prosperity,” etc. The Oligarchs control such a loud megaphone they can drown out everybody else. They’re sophisticated too. Vilifying ACORN, and public schools, and the role of government (unless it’s serving corporations and rich people).

In 1988, Michael Dukakis made a fatal error when he failed to defend the term “liberal” when Lee Atwater and Poppy Bush were savaging him and dirtying up the word. Now we’re losing the word “progressive” too. Twenty years later, it appeared for a time that Obama was going to reclaim the legitimacy of government action on behalf of working people and the downtrodden. It appeared that he was going to reclaim the liberal tradition in this country so maligned by both parties since the days of Jimmy Carter.

But he didn’t. And now his party might pay the price.

Often missed in the mainstream commentary about the angry political climate is the fact that it was “conservative” ideas, “conservative” policies, and “conservative” governance that brought the country to the sorry state it finds itself in today. Deregulation for corporations like Goldman Sachs, DeCoster egg farms, and British Petroleum; privatization of vital public services including “national security”; tax cuts for the Oligarchs and corporate behemoths; the wholesale denigration and denuding of vital government functions relating to health and safety and infrastructure; grossly inflated budgets for warfare that are rife with waste, fraud, and profiteering while social programs were slashed that might have helped average folks; not to mention the dumbing-down and Atwaterization of our political discourse.

The entire eight years of the George W. Bush presidency proved what terrible stewards of the common good contemporary Republicans have become. Chalmers Johnson describes Bush in the introduction of his new book, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope. Bush, Johnson writes,

“was a man superficially well enough qualified to be president. The governor of a populous state, he had also been the recipient of the best – or, in any case, most expensive – educations available to an American. Yale College and Harvard Business School might have seemed like a guarantee against a sophomoric ignoramus occupying the highest office in the land, but contrary to most expectations that was precisely what we got. The American public did not actually elect him, of course. He was, in the end, appointed to the highest office in the land by a conservative cabal of the Supreme Court in what certainly qualified as one of the most bizarre moments in the history of American politics. . . . The history books will certainly record that George W. Bush was likely the single worst president in the history of the American republic. Nonetheless, they will also point out that he merely accelerated trends long under way, particularly our devotion to militarism and our dependence on the military-industrial complex.” (p. 3; 5)

There are no longer any truly “teachable moments” in America anymore because for a moment to be “teachable” there must be a populace willing to learn something new. Everything that happens to this country — terrorist attacks, economic collapse, war, bungled natural disasters, oil spills — is absorbed, spun, manipulated, and chewed up until it doesn’t mean anything anymore. It all just becomes more political fodder for the Right to win tactical points in 24-hour increments. It’s death on the installment plan. In the diseased and dysfunctional politics of contemporary America we can see how otherwise sensible people are tricked into fighting against their own interests.

From 1995 to 2007 the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives. Creepy men like Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, Bob Ney, and Jack Abramoff pillaged the treasury and bankrupted the nation while pretending to be more pious than the rest of us. Any criticism of Bush, we were scolded, was a criticism of “America”; to criticize the President in “war time” (even when he was prancing around in a Top Gun costume on an aircraft carrier) we were told was “unpatriotic” or downright “treasonous.” This knee-jerk jingoism ruled the roost. Yet the moment Obama became president no criticism or accusation was out of bounds, “war time” or not.

Right now public schools, public parks, public health, and public safety are all being gutted before our eyes and the Democratic politicians at the local and national levels have thus far been powerless to stop any of it, and in many cases they have been its enablers and “bipartisan” co-conspirators. Even the previously sacrosanct “first responders” (police and firefighters) are being downsized, laid off, “furloughed,” or forced out with early retirement. Look at Sacramento for instance, a Democratic city in a Democratic district in a Democratic state where Democratic constituencies are getting creamed. Where are the Democrats we elected who were supposed to stop the bleeding of the public sector?

While Obama was trying to play nice with Wall Street he allowed the Republican Right to blame our current economic catastrophe on public employees, Fannie and Freddie, unions, taxes, and regulations. The Democrats have already lost the 2010-midterm elections because they have already lost the narrative. And if they do lose big this November it will be because they appeared helpless to stop the draconian cuts in social programs that have eroded the quality of life at the state, county, and municipal levels, which are what people who vote in midterms are going to be thinking about the most. The Republicans didn’t have to “nationalize” the midterm elections because this time around the “local” politics are playing out in their favor.

But the people and organizations who tried to prevent this “preventive” war included the United Nations; people of faith (Muslims, Christians, and Jews); the governments of France, Germany, Russia, China; the Islamic Conference (including Indonesia, the most populated Muslim nation); the Organization of American States; the Arab League; the Organization of African Unity; former President Jimmy Carter; Pope John Paul; 133 members of the U.S. Congress; 10 to 15 million people who took to the streets for peace all over the world on February 15, 2003; Senator Robert Byrd (who articulated a critique of Bush’s war aims on Constitutional grounds); a half dozen intelligence analysts and career civil servants from the State Department and CIA who either resigned or spoke out against this course; and many others.

To assuage these voices of dissent and to win over the American people to this endeavor, the neo-cons who dominated the foreign policy of the Bush Administration and their allies among the pundit and chattering classes at Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and all the rest, capitalized on the fear created by September 11, to win the support of Congress and the American people for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq.

The Neo-conservatives said that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction. He didn’t.

They said he was in league with Osama Bin Laden. He wasn’t.

They predicted that no major post-war insurgency in Iraq would occur. It did.

They said there would be a wave of pro-Americanism in the Middle East and the world if the United States acted boldly and unilaterally. Instead, there was a regional and even global wave of anti-Americanism.

Saddam’s human rights record was not an adequate justification to go to war and the Bush Administration did not seriously try to make it one, until long after the war began and all the other plausible justifications had been proven false.

Bush’s grand strategy for the Middle East was hashed out in the 1990s by these same neo-cons who are few in number and have worked together in and out of government for years. The Project for a New American Century became the mouthpiece for this group disseminating the ideas of Administration insiders such as Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, and others. In January 1998, the PNAC wrote an open letter to President Bill Clinton, forcefully calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. “The policy of ‘containment’ of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding,” they argued, and “we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold sanctions.” These developments endanger “our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s oil supply.” The letter never mentioned “terrorism” but raised the issue of WMD and concluded: “the only acceptable strategy” was “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.”

The January 1998 letter to Clinton was signed by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Dov Zakheim, William Schneider, Jr., and Peter Rodman – all top officials in the Defense Department; Richard Armitage, Paula Dobriansky, and John Bolton; Zalmay Khalilzad and Elliot Abrams ; and Robert Zoelick. So potent was their call to remove Saddam, that in October 1998, amidst the heated debate of the midterm elections, Congress passed the “Iraq Liberation Act” that made it official U.S. policy to overthrow Saddam.

In December 1998, President Bill Clinton launched “Operation Desert Fox.” In the following eight months, the U.S. and Britain fired over 1,100 missiles in eight months at 359 targets inside Iraq killing at least 300 Iraqi civilians.

The PNAC churned out other policy papers in the 1990s with the same general thrust: Now that the Soviet Union no longer existed, the U.S. must use its military power to secure dominance over the Earth, especially the oil producing regions thereby controlling the energy supplies of any future rival.

This Pax Americana would require an aggressive, unilateral foreign policy free from the hindrances of multilateral organizations or treaties, as well as new military bases, and the will and ability to project American power anywhere. An influential PNAC paper from September 2000 states: “At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.” It called for a major military build up and singled out Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as immediate targets.

In the run up to the war, these neo-cons in the Pentagon set up the “Office of Special Plans.” According to Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski who worked with the group, “Instead of developing defense policy alternatives and advice, OSP was used to manufacture propaganda for internal and external use, and pseudo war planning.” She watched Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith cook the intelligence from May 2002 to February 2003, often relying on dubious Iraqi exiles for information, to support the already made decision to go to war with Iraq.
Said Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski: “I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president.”

Based on this spun and concocted intelligence, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations General Assembly on February 5, 2003: “Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That’s enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.”

On March 30, 2003, ten days after the war began, Rumsfeld said: “We know where [Iraq's WMD] are – they’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat.”

Repeated like a mantra by Administration officials was the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed “26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulin, one and a half tons of nerve agent VX, and 6,500 aerial chemical bombs.”

In Cincinnati, on October 7, 2002, President Bush said: “The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. . . . Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.” [This aluminum tube charge was later proven bogus by both the International Atomic Energy Agency and David Kay's Iraq Survey Group.]

An ABC News poll published on December 17, 2002 found that 89 percent of Americans believed Iraq “does possess chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.” In a similar poll, about 70 percent said they believed Saddam had something to do with 9-11 (which he did not).

President Bush said during his State of the Union on January 28, 2003: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Yet former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had been charged by the National Security Council to follow up on the uranium from Niger story, went public in July 2003 saying that the White House knew this information was false well before the President’s speech. In any case, it was a highly unusual step for a president to announce to the world sensitive intelligence information which is never done casually. The Niger uranium story was based on documents that were shown conclusively to be rather amateurish forgeries. [I probably should add here that lying to Congress is an impeachable offense.]

Cheney said on Meet the Press on March 16, 2003: “We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.”

Bush and his National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice both on occasion used the image of a mushroom cloud in sounding the alarm of the Iraqi threat.

In a Vanity Fair interview after the occupation of Iraq was a fait accompli, Wolfowitz said: “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason” for going to war.

In April 2003, the United Nations requested that its weapons inspectors be allowed back in to Iraq, they, after all, possessed the knowledge and experience to find the WMD; but the Bush Administration firmly rebuffed this idea. Instead, David Kay’s Iraq Survey Group of 1,400 inspectors spent 30,000 hours scouring Iraq for WMD. They found none.

Buried deep inside Dr. Kay’s report to Congress is the following statement: “Information found to date suggests that Iraq’s large scale capability to develop, produce, and fill CW munitions was reduced – if not entirely destroyed – during Operation Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of UN sanctions, and UN inspections.” Kay chose not to include this telling admission in either his introductory remarks or his conclusion.

Buried even deeper inside Kay’s report was this: “To date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material.”

The imminent threat posed by Iraqi chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons turned out to be not so imminent.

When the statue of Saddam came down on April 9, 2003, there was great rejoicing in America – Administration mouthpieces proclaimed a victory for liberty on par with the fall of the Berlin Wall – but when two American soldiers were killed in Firdos Square by suicide bombers about 36 hours later, the incident wasn’t even reported, let alone the irony pointed out.

When Bush landed in a Navy plane on the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 looking martial and gallant in a fighter pilot uniform, helmet tucked under his arm, declaring “Mission Accomplished,” his approval ratings were soaring at around 75 percent.

By August 26, 2003, 139 Americans had died in Iraq since Bush’s triumphant carrier landing; by September 24, it had climbed to 341 killed, and so on and on and on for the next seven years. Today it stands, (as President Obama pointed out in his speech), at 4,426, with at least 30,000 wounded.

Although the Pentagon says that it is not interested in enemy “body counts,” conservative estimates range between 100,000 and 150,000 Iraqi civilians killed.

American soldiers in Iraq still find themselves in a confusing combat environment (even though the “combat” is over), forced to fight in a foreign land where winning the “hearts and minds” of a people they know little about is crucial to the success of their mission.

Hand crafted bombs began claiming the lives of more Americans in Iraq than any other weapon. At first, they were usually made from discarded artillery shells with a detonator wired to a garage door opener or doorbell. They could be set off just about anywhere, buried along roadways or dropped out of vehicles. Fake bombs were set to waste the time of explosive disposal squads or to draw soldiers into ambushes with small arms. New bombs showed up in Iraq wiring together multiple explosives in a “daisy chain” to explode in several places, several yards apart, killing or maiming for life American service men and women. Lately, assassins using silencers are murdering Iraqi police officers in broad daylight.

Then there are the suicide bombers and the enormous car and truck bombs. Missiles attached to donkey carts or fake electricity generators have been used to deadly effect – often with booby traps of explosives hidden in the wheel wells of vehicles.

American soldiers are still risking their lives every day in Iraq, “combat” or no “combat,” and many more will die for this policy our neo-con leaders handed down to us.

The debacle in Iraq is not merely a result of errors in planning or poor decision-making. In devising their plans for Iraq, the neo-cons in the Bush Administration repeatedly and insistently dismissed the vast array of research assembled by think tanks and warnings of its own officials in the State Department and the CIA and the military.

For a small group of men with little understanding of Iraq, warfare, or “nation-building,” or “counterinsurgency,” is just the arrogant belief that they, and they alone, knew better than anyone else about what was in the United States interests. Their view required not just monumental arrogance but also a cavalier disregard for the life and death consequences of being wrong.

The “threat” Saddam Hussein posed was not “imminent.” The war made Americans more hated in the world, especially in the Islamic world; and has made our people more vulnerable to attack both at home and overseas.

The neo-cons and President Bush claimed to know what was in America’s interest, but they refused to debate it honestly.

If the Congress and the American people knew the truth about Iraq in 2002 and 2003, they would never have gone to war.

To be silenced by a complacent media and the attack dogs of the jingoistic Right – to remain silent when we have been systematically lied to would be to betray the fundamental ideals for which our troops have sacrificed their lives on that “battle field” half a world away.

Lustig offers three cogent and elegantly argued essays, “California at the Edge”; “Voting, Elections, and the Failure of Representation in California”; and “A People’s Convention for California.” His “California at the Edge” leads off the work where Lustig shows that although California’s politics are often talked about as being “broken,” it’s “clearly not broken for everyone.” Corporations and wealthy individuals have been able to increase their share of the state’s wealth over the last two decades often at the expense of the greater good. Lustig’s later chapters not only identify the causes of the state’s political crisis but also point to ways out of it. Few political analysts have a better grasp of what plagues California’s institutions than Lustig, who is a Professor of Government at California State University, Sacramento, and his articles shed light on the state’s problems where more often than not there is only heat. He has culled a selection of diverse scholarly voices to fill out the volume’s other essays that establish Remaking California as an invaluable book for anyone seeking to better understand the state’s deep political troubles and possibly to begin organizing to alleviate them.

Lustig casts a wide net by including essays from varying ideological viewpoints. The second essay that appears in this volume is by the veteran Sacramento Bee Capitol reporter and analyst, Dan Walters, whose proclivities lean toward blaming the public employee unions and the Democratic Party for the state’s crisis. Walters is smart and does his homework but his forte is to bemoan the problems inherent in California politics without offering any viable solutions. No one is going to argue with Walters when he declares that California is a political basket case. But his analysis in his essay titled “Decline and Fall,” though demonstrating a respect for facts and clarity that one would expect from a conscientious journalist, unlike almost all the other essays, lacks any fruitful suggestions about how California might dig itself out of the pit it finds itself in.

One contradiction that stands out in Walters’ essay in Remaking California is his take on the effect term limits has had on governance. Although Walters acknowledges that Proposition 140, passed in 1990, which set term limits for legislators and eliminated their pensions “made serving in the legislature a less attractive career option,” he concludes that “while term limits didn’t improve the legislature’s performance, they probably didn’t diminish it much either.” (p. 34) This assertion contradicts every other essay in the book where the other authors argue that term limits have been an unmitigated disaster for the state government, strengthening lobbyists and corporate interests and producing weak and inexperienced lawmakers who cannot begin to grasp the complexities of their offices in so short a time period, especially with issues like the budget, immigration, and water allocation staring them in the face. Walters not only disagrees on term limits with the other contributors to the book, he apparently disagrees with himself, stating in subsequent paragraphs that term limits did in fact contribute to gridlock and dysfunction when he writes about “the ideological polarization and domination by outside interests born of term limits and gerrymandered districts.” (p. 36) (The only good I can see coming out of Prop 140 was the unseating of former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown whose entrenchment seemed that it could only be overcome via term limits. Willie Brown’s style of “governance” was on full display recently when he was out shilling in favor of PG&E’s monopoly power grab, Proposition 16, which thankfully the voters had enough sense to reject.)

Several authors in Remaking California point out that although California’s population consists of 43 percent white people, these citizens make up about 65 percent of the voting population. In addition, as Ronald Schmidt, Sr. explains in his essay, “California’s Political Demography,” Latinos in California as of 2006 constituted 36 percent of the state’s population but only 17 percent of its voters. (p. 123) Anyone familiar with Walters’ reporting for the Bee knows which group of voters he is talking to.

Professor Lenny Goldberg’s piece, “Proposition 13: Tarnish on the Golden Dream,” is a superb short essay on all of the unintended (and some intended) consequences of the property tax “revolt” of 1978. “Between 1974 and 1978, assessments on single-family homes rose by 120 percent,” Goldberg writes, “while business property assessments increased by only 26 percent.” No wonder there was a white middle-class tax revolt! But Goldberg also shows how big corporations and business associations, including massive commercial real estate holdings, have benefited disproportionately from Prop 13, and that the anti-tax measure “meant an immediate loss to local governments of $5.8 billion.” (p. 45) By May 1979, Goldberg notes, “the public sector had laid off one hundred thousand employees, seventy-two thousand of them in schools.” (p. 45) It would be difficult to find a better argument made for the so-called split-roll (allowing family-owned houses to remain under Prop 13 protection but not commercial property) than the one Goldberg lays out in this compelling article.

Goldberg also takes on the devastating impact of the “two-thirds” rule to pass new taxes that Prop 13 enshrined in the state Constitution. “As a matter of democratic decision making as well as implementation,” Goldberg writes, “this system is highly problematic. It means that every ‘no’ vote on a tax is worth twice a ‘yes’ vote in terms of getting final approval.” And therefore “over the years hundreds of local tax proposals have been defeated, not because they received less than a majority, but because they received less than a supermajority.” (p. 50; 51) Most Californians are unfamiliar with the procedures of governance and blame the party “in power” in the legislature for the stalemate on budgets and taxation, which for many years has been the Democrats. But the reality is more complicated: the Democratic majority receives all the blame and the wrath from voters but none of the credit for any accomplishments; while a recalcitrant and extremist Republican “minority” that is as crazy as anything that might leap from Sarah Palin’s twitter feed maintains a stranglehold on the state’s finances without ever having to cop to the fact that they are the ones responsible for this sorry state of affairs, which has de-legitimized the state government in the eyes of most Californians.

The least convincing essay of the collection, (along with Walters’), is the one by Professor Emeritus of Government, John Syer, titled “Reforming the Executive.” Unbelievably, after witnessing seven years of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s catastrophic governorship, Syer argues in favor of increasing the powers of the governor by “unifying” the state’s executive through eliminating the seven elected offices that currently share executive powers with the governor. “Eliminating seven elected offices does not guarantee that solid candidates will run for governor in the future,” Syer writes. “The stronger the governorship is, however, the more likely it is to attract talented leaders.” (p. 98) (I don’t know how anyone who has lived through seven years of Arnold Schwarzenneger’s governmental clusterfuck, or who now spies Meg Whitman’s opulent candidacy can come to that conclusion.) “As world supplies of food, water, and oil become more scarce,” Syer continues, “Californians must select governors who are willing to speak hard truths, willing to resist entrenched interests, and willing to forgo short-term popularity. Governors of California must be able to direct administrative teams that know how to solve complex problems.” (p. 98) Okay, two points: 1). Gubernatorial candidates always promise to show these attributes; and 2). With the Constitution as it is how strengthening the executive powers of the governor is going to help “solve” California’s “complex problems” is anybody’s guess. What would California look like today if Schwarzenegger had the power, as Syer recommends, to appoint the Controller, the Treasurer, and the Attorney General? “The justification for a fractured executive in California is no longer persuasive,” Syer concludes, “the need for a unified executive is more apparent than ever.” (p. 98) At least Syer is trying to offer what he believes to be a partial solution to California’s political gridlock, (although he’s dead wrong), Walters offers nothing.

In an excellent essay, Osha Meserve and Erik Ringelberg outline California’s perennial water crisis and discuss its unsustainable nature and its fueling of the North-South divide that plagues the state. They point out that the eight counties of the San Joaquin Valley are among the most productive on the planet growing “more than $20 billion worth of crops each year, more than the rest of California combined, and more than any other state.” (pp. 158-159) The Sacramento Delta region provides “a portion of the drinking water supplies for 23 million people from the Bay Area down to San Diego.” The public’s water supply is competing with the diversion to feed the voracious appetite of huge private agribusiness interests guaranteed to cause political and regional conflicts “for the foreseeable future,” Meserve and Ringelberg conclude. (After reading this chapter I was struck by how foolish and shortsighted Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson’s decision was to allow the city manager to turn over to the multinational corporation, Nestle, rights to privatize part of Sacramento’s municipal water supply for its own profits while charging the company less than a penny per gallon without offering any resistance.) Meserve and Ringelberg clearly show that no community in California can afford to give away this precious resource and that the state must not continue to support wasteful and unsustainable water use through its often bizarre and numerous public subsidies.

Part IV of Remaking California is dedicated to possible remedies for the state’s ailments. Mark Paul, Micah Weinberg, and Jeff Lustig, in two lengthy and substantial essays, pretty much lay out exactly what needs to be done to save the state: the outdated 1879 Constitution that was written at a time when California had fewer than one million people must be reformed and substantially changed. It must be brought into the 21st Century to provide a template for governance for a political entity now encompassing the eighth largest economy in the world that has a population nearing 40 million people. The old Constitution, with its totally dysfunctional amendments, such as term limits, the two-thirds rule, and laws restricting how the General Fund is spent, is a straight-jacket on the state suffocating its vibrancy and turning off citizens to the very concept of “representative” government. In one recent poll of Californians the legislature had a 9 percent approval rating and the governor about 20 percent. These numbers are just about as low as they can statistically go, which raises the question of whether a system deserves to be called a “democracy” if it is held in such low esteem by its people.

Given the constraints of the state’s antiquated and anachronistic Constitution the politicians are hamstrung and the public sees them as deserving nothing but our complete contempt. The system is broken, but as Lustig points out in the lead essay, it’s not broken for everyone. The corporations and other wealthy private interests seem to love the current failed system just the way it is because they never have to worry about facing an empowered electorate. The result will be that any attempt to truly reform the Constitution will be opposed by the kind of political money we’ve seen Meg Whitman throw around like so much pocket change.

Remaking California is a superb primer for anybody who wishes to digest California’s problems and work to save the Golden State. The long slide into insolvency and mediocrity we’ve witnessed for the past quarter century, but brought to a kind of apotheosis under Arnold Schwarzenegger’s catastrophic governorship, must not be allowed to continue. The Constitutional straight-jacket that keeps the state government in gridlock and voters in despair is the same institutional structure that brought the pathetically unqualified body builder into the governorship in the first place. Unless California’s citizens, who have among them some of the most creative and smartest people in the world, pursue fundamental reforms the state could end up as a Balkanized corporate feudal system with Queen Meg ruling by moneyed Divine Right. Remaking California points the way, but will the citizens follow?

Creating Urgency:

Getting Them to Apply NOW

Remember. . . .

*Students don’t buy benefits

*They buy to ease or avoid pain

*Finding and burrowing into that pain moves the sale to a
CLOSE

*Also, the close of the sale is really just a beginning

Any institution that calls itself a “university” yet tells its enrollment officers to “burrow” down deep into the “pain” of its students with the aim of hooking them into government-subsidized debt to rake in the profits not only doesn’t deserve to be accredited, but should be barred from having any access to federal student aid programs.

It turns out that if a for-profit “college” can “close” the sale (enrollment) of a student who only stays in school for a couple of weeks it gets to pocket a big share of that student’s federal aid. Pretty Sweet, Uh?

Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa is right now trying to change this unsatisfactory situation. In the last 10 years enrollment in these for-profit diploma mills, which have their hands deep inside the till of federal student aid programs, grew from 600,000 to two million students. The federal financial aid to students at the for-profit “universities” has gone from $4.6 billion in 2000 to more than $23 billion in 2010. And the “University” of Phoenix and other “for-profits” won’t even release their dropout rate numbers!

When the Government Accountability Office (GAO) under George Kutz recently sent out “secret shoppers” to enroll in the “University” of Phoenix, and other for-profit “colleges,” it found that 100 percent of the time — in fifteen out of fifteen cases, (and all caught on video tape!) — the enrollment officials followed the “Always Be Closing” guidelines. Fifteen out of fifteen times they refused to answer students’ basic questions, denied them the opportunity to speak with a financial aid counselor, and even refused to provide them with information about the size of the loan they were about to sign and the timetable for repayment.

The incentives are all wrong. Instead of being there to help students receive an education at an affordable cost to better prepare them to join the workforce, these “for-profits” are employing the most egregious money-grubbing tactics to bilk their students and the federal government. How’s that for an Alma Mater? Senator Harkin and the GAO’s work has exposed once and for all how utterly corrupt these for-profit “universities” and “colleges” really are.

At a time when the faculties of public colleges and universities are being told by their administrators how they should imitate the for-profits like the “University” of Phoenix (as USC Education Professor William Tierney did in an op-ed to the Sacramento Bee) –  because they represent some sort of idealized “private sector” efficiency model — Senator Harkin’s and the GAO’s revelations are all the more stunning. In California, the community college brass recently tried to ram through a transfer of credit deal with Kaplan as a way to stretch its budget. Luckily, the faculty senate refused to go along. Harkin and the GAO have just driven a stake in the heart of the monster that insists on privatizing public colleges and universities.

The “University” of Phoenix, which is owned by something called “the Apollo Group,” (probably named after the moon landing because its profits are astronomical), has resisted providing documents to Harkin’s committee, the most important body in the federal government dealing with education. And where is Arne Duncan our vaunted Secretary of Education? Too busy privatizing public K through 12 schools to be bothered with reining in the for-profits that are ripping off America’s college students.

The only “student learning outcomes” these for-profit corporations posing as colleges recognize are those that fill their own pockets with tax dollars that are supposed to be going to deserving students who just want an education.

Instead of explaining to the press why decent people in this country should be shocked and outraged at Mr. Breitbart’s smear tactics that dragged the good name and reputation of an excellent public servant through the mud, Gibbs offered a mealy-mouthed “apology” on behalf of the White House. The apology then became the story, not Breitbart.

Gibbs’s handling of the episode enabled the mainstream media to turn on a dime from looking at Breitbart’s motives and tactics to asking the question: “Why did the Obama administration act so hastily in firing Sherrod?” It’s a legitimate question that reporters would ask in any case, but Gibbs could have kept the focus on the smearer instead of the smearee. Gibbs should have hit back at Breitbart and his soul mates at Fox News and AM talk radio for lying about Sherrod and manipulating the video to falsify her words.

What would Ari Fleischer or Tony Snow do if they had faced a similar controversy involving a demonstrably false accusation coming from the extremist end of the blogosphere? Apologize on behalf of the President? Hardly. They’d hit back at its source and hit back hard.

What the Obama people need is a tough, partisan flak-catcher/deflector who can make the television rounds in real time early in the first 24-hour news cycle when the white supremacists launch their next set of smears against some hapless public servant inside the Administration. It’s a big government. A “target-rich environment” members of the Far Right might say. There are other Shirley Sherrods at many levels inside the departments, bureaus, and agencies of the government who can have their public statements twisted and edited to create the next “scandal,” which will presumably prompt Gibbs’s next apology.

It’s a strange political discourse that leaves egg on the faces of the first African-American President and the NAACP while the right-wing racist who concocted the smear walks away unscathed and free to do it again. There’s blood in the water now. The White House showed its skittishness when it comes to accusations of “reverse racism” in the Administration. Why can’t President Obama hire a more skilled and partisan press secretary? Say what you will about Ari Fleischer and Tony Snow, but no one can say they weren’t good at their jobs.

One of Rahm Emanuel’s assistants, Jim Messina, even praised the Department of Agriculture for dispatching with Ms. Sherrod quickly as if it were a sign of smart media management instead of total cowardice in the face of an unsubstantiated rumor perpetrated by an untrustworthy source.

What this White House needs is a “special liaison for media affairs” (or something of the sort) – someone experienced like Howard Dean – to go on TV and defuse these racial controversies when the Breitbarts and the Foxes orchestrate the next one, (and there will be a next one, and a next one after that, and . . . ) — and with style and unapologetic partisanship dispatch with them as efficiently as Fleischer and Snow used to do with anyone who suggested that it might be an open question whether Iraq had WMD or not.

This fall, in the heat of the midterm campaigns, there will be another Breitbart-style hit piece on one or more African-American members of the administration — one that might hold up better than the one aimed at Sherrod. You can set your watch by it. Let’s hope the Obama White House handles it better than it did this last one. After all, these racist smears are just like streetcars, one pulls away and you know there’s another one coming right behind it.

Wait a minute! Is that so?

“Widespread skepticism?”

The New York Times and the Washington Post did not express any of this “widespread skepticism” in February and March 1968 (the period covered by the recently released Senate Foreign Relations Committee documents). Neither did the television news networks CBS, NBC, ABC. Nor did any of these news sources ever offer a correction or a retraction of their breathless reportage of the “Reds” who fired on the U.S.S. Maddox and the C. Turner Joy in an “unprovoked attack, in international waters, while on routine patrol.” I don’t know what history books Bumiller is looking at but I can assure her that there was NOT “widespread skepticism” about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in the mainstream news media in February and March 1968.

Who is Bumiller kidding?

Bumiller’s take on the truthfulness of the Johnson Administration’s version of what took place in early August 1964  is nothing but after-the-fact rubbish. Bumiller of all people. A bona fide graduate of the Judy Miller school of journalism who wrote a hagiography about Condi Rice — even while Condi was lying about the WMD in Iraq (which was just as egregious as LBJ’s lies about the Gulf of Tonkin).  Bumiller — of all people — makes this assertion?  Wow!

If Bumiller really believes that her peers in the establishment press in February/March 1968 were expressing “widespread skepticism” about the facts concerning the Gulf of Tonkin Incident then shouldn’t she have been a little more “skeptical” herself when her good friend Condi Rice (along with Rummy and Cheney and the rest of the gang) were launching their own pretext for invading Iraq?

The media critic and author, Norman Solomon, long ago asked the Washington Post for a retraction on its terrible, falsehood-laden reportage on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and they told him that there’s no way they would offer a retraction because they’d have to repudiate virtually all of their reporting on the Vietnam War. (War Made Easy.)

Tom Brokaw does the same thing that Bumiller did in this piece: Pretend she knew all along that the Vietnam War was based on a pack of lies when in reality the establishment press that Brokaw and Bumiller represent helped sell the war in Vietnam by its martial and virulently anti-communist reporting (as they did the war in Iraq). Bumiller, like Brokaw, is rewriting history to make herself and her establishment news colleagues appear like they are (and were) better journalists than they really are (or were).

The fact is that in February/March 1968 if anyone wanted to see “widespread skepticism” about the facts of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident they wouldn’t find it in the pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post — they’d have to pick up a copy of Ramparts or some other radical magazine, whose reporters were smeared as commies or leftists.

Bumiller wasn’t skeptical about WMD in Iraq, so why should we believe her when she makes a claim (without evidence) that there was “widespread skepticism” about the Tonkin Gulf Incident in February/March 1968? The American People didn’t learn the facts about the lies around the Gulf of Tonkin Incident until 1971 with the publication of the Pentagon Papers.  In early 1968, the public had no clue about the extent of the lies relating to the super-secret CIA/DoD “OPLAN-34A” and the “Desoto missions” where the U.S. was coordinating coastal raids north of the 17th parallel.  And even after Daniel Ellsberg spilled the beans representatives of the establishment news media refused to cop to the fact that they had been stenographers for the powerful who wanted war.

What Bumiller is showing us is that 40 years from George W. Bush’s 2003 WMD scare we can expect establishment journalists to claim there was “widespread skepticism” about the WMD, when in reality they were once again stenographers for the powerful who wanted war.  Bumiller and the gang are even worse than their early-’60s predecessors though because they had the example of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident to draw on and adjust their reportage of 2002-2003 accordingly.  A lot of good that “widespread skepticism” served!  They dismissed those of us who were making the Gulf of Tonkin comparisons during the run-up to the Iraq War.

Destroying the state’s only work-training program in a period of 12.5 percent unemployment and record home foreclosures might sound pretty extreme but Schwarzenegger still enjoys press coverage that paints him as a “moderate,” most recently in the form of a 1,500-word love letter by Jennifer Steinhauer of the New York Times. If any journalist bothers to look at his record it should be clear that Schwarzenegger doesn’t really believe in the public sector. He has repeatedly said that government cannot do anything worthwhile for society. He was a cheerleader for the Bush-Cheney policies of deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. He has recklessly held the state’s budget hostage to ram through policies that won’t take effect until long after he exits the stage, policies which have virtually no support outside his coterie of sycophants.

No California governor, not Ronald Reagan, not George Deukmejian, not Pete Wilson, has so bludgeoned the state’s employees. After “furloughing” public workers, which was the equivalent of a 14 percent pay cut, Schwarzenegger’s latest gambit is to cut their pay down to the level of the federal minimum wage, which is lower than California’s. Schwarzenegger is so committed to this abuse that he is literally going to court to force the State Comptroller John Chiang to comply. Chiang has been trying to reason with the extremists who run the governor’s office that it’s technically impossible to implement the plan given the state’s decrepit computerized payroll system and that the action would also violate federal labor law. Undeterred, Schwarzenegger pushes on without any rational purpose (since it will end up costing the state more in the long run), and without any concern for the lives of 200,000 hard-working Californians who, through no fault of there own, find themselves once again in Schwarzenegger’s cross-hairs. It’s nothing more than holding state workers hostage to extort Democratic legislators into doing his bidding.

The Democratic “leaders” in Sacramento during Schwarzenegger’s reign continue to capitulate to him. From Don Perata to Darrell Steinberg to Fabian Nunez to Karen Bass to John Perez – all of them have failed the voters who elected them; they’ve failed to be advocates for their core supporters; and they’ve failed to stand up and show some guts when the time called for it.

Because the Legislature must produce a “supermajority” of 67 percent to pass a budget, a tiny and irresponsible Republican minority has just enough seats to block any budget it doesn’t like – which is any budget that is protective of public institutions. Schwarzenegger then uses his executive control over the Legislature to make insane demands like eliminating welfare and impoverishing the state’s public sector workforce. A phony “standoff” ensues until Democratic “leaders” come crawling on their hands and knees, which they always do, only to seal themselves off behind closed doors to “negotiate” a budget. When they emerge from the governor’s office the result is always the same: the public sector gets fleeced again. Each year at budget time, Schwarzenegger divides and conquers the Democrats’ political base by pitting public employee unions and other liberal advocacy groups against each other. He is currently once again terrorizing state workers and their families to get changes in the way their pension plan is managed that would not take effect until years from now, long after he is back home in his Jacuzzi smoking his pricey cigars.

All of this pain and suffering inflicted on the people who work for the Great State of California is so that the top 1 percent of taxpayers, about 150,000 individuals, who have nearly doubled their share of the state’s total income since 1993, don’t have to pay any additional taxes. It’s class warfare. Twenty years of privatizing and deregulating have resulted not only in the putrefaction of California’s public institutions, but also the hardening of class lines and the cementing of an oligarchy.

In a real democratic republic – res-publica – the Democrats who hold solid majorities in both chambers of the Legislature would produce their own budget, even an ersatz one, and then send it to the governor for his signature or veto. They could send him virtually the same budget over and over again for a period of days, weeks, or months. Headlines would read: “Governor Schwarzenegger Vetoes Another Budget,” followed by op-eds asking: “Why Doesn’t Schwarzenegger Compromise?” Let the Governor veto the budget a thousand times. Each time the Democratic leaders could tell the press how “disappointed” they are with his intransigence. The Democrats could also highlight the pain and suffering – even in the private sector – that Schwarzenegger’s budget extremism has caused. Instead, the Democratic “leaders” choose to go behind closed doors in the governor’s office where they always get taken for a ride. That’s a hell of a way to run the world’s eighth largest economy with a population larger than Canada’s. It’s ironic that President Obama has gone to great lengths to cultivate mutually beneficial economic ties with the G-20 nations while the nation passively sits by and watches as California drops into the Pacific Ocean.

If we’re going to have a form of corporate feudalism in California then we might as well turn over the reins of power to a real monarch. The billionaire princess, Meg Whitman, who wants to be governor as a steppingstone toward becoming the first woman president, is perfect for that regal distinction. She has already spent over $90 million of her own money to buy the governorship. And it looks like she bribed one of the nation’s top Republican strategists, Michael Murphy, to join her campaign with a million dollar “investment” in his production company. Her Majesty is currently running a slick TV commercial attacking her opponent, Attorney General Jerry Brown, which has the production qualities of a Pepsi ad buy. Whitman wants to fire 40,000 state workers, hack off another $15 billion from the budget, privatize government services including the pension plan, and lavish more tax cuts on big corporations and her rich Republican friends. In addition to her hit pieces on Brown, Whitman is also running what the advertising executives on the “Tuesday Team” of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign used to call “feel-good ads.” We see wind turbines and redwood forests, beaches and exciting cityscapes, with Meg in soft-focus sharing with her subjects in an intimate setting a string of saccharine Reaganisms. She very well could be the next governor of California.

“Our schools will not improve if we entrust them to the magical powers of the market. Markets have winners and losers. Choice may lead to better outcomes or to worse outcomes . . . Our schools cannot improve if charter schools siphon away the most motivated students and their families in the poorest communities from the regular public schools. Continuing on this path will debilitate public education in urban districts and give the illusion of improvement. . . . Our schools will not improve if we expect them to act like private, profit-seeking enterprises. Schools are not businesses; they are a public good.” (p. 227)

This last point – that “schools are not businesses; they are a public good” – is what President Barack Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, (like Margaret Spellings before him) fails to understand. Secretary Duncan has used his $4.3 billion in “Race to the Top” cash as a cudgel with which to beat down teachers (and especially their unions), denigrate what they do in the classroom based on quantitative data of dubious value, and to promote “market” policies of coerced privatization that debase the teaching profession — all in the name of “improving” public schools. No wonder Secretary Duncan was persona non grata at the recent convention of the nation’s most important gathering of educators. (What a brilliant move it is to alienate public school teachers, a central pillar of the Democratic base, right before the 2010 midterm elections! Genius, I tell you! Genius!)

Ravitch notes that Secretary Duncan appointed Joanne S. Weiss, “a partner and chief operating officer of the NewSchools Venture Fund” to “design and manage the Race to the Top.” Weiss, according to Ravitch, is “an education entrepreneur who had previously led several education businesses that sold products and services to schools and colleges.” (p. 218) So like George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind,” the Obama Administration has decided to turn over its hallmark educational policy to union busting profiteers?

At a time when state governments across the country, especially California, are using the budget crisis brought on by the economic meltdown as an excuse to roll back public education and beat up teachers and their unions, the Democratic administration in Washington is throwing its weight behind the privatizers and MBAs, joining the chorus of teacher bashing that seems to have come out of nowhere. Arne Duncan has never taught a class in his life and has thus far shown an arrogant disregard for professional teachers who have decades of hands-on experience inside the classroom. The “moderate” Republican governor of California, (whose budget eliminates welfare in the state), has also endorsed a bill by a troglodyte Republican in the State Legislature that would urge school districts to lay off, rehire, transfer, and assign teachers with no regard to seniority or collective bargaining contracts. In effect, it would make Wal-Mart workers out of professional educators.

Nobody in power seems to be listening to what teachers have to say about how best to improve public education. The Administration is telling teachers that all those envelopes they licked, and all those doors they knocked on, and all those phone calls they made to help elect Obama in 2008 were nothing but a goddamned waste of time.

And this raises a more fundamental point: Arne Duncan and other privatizers of public education don’t know the difference between being a “teacher” and being an “instructor”; nor do they understand the difference between a “class” and a room full of students. They want to reduce professional educators to mere instructors, where all subjects, including arts, humanities, and science, are standardized and homogenized and handed to children as if instructing them on the techniques of CPR. The classroom is then reduced to an irreverent gaggle “instructed” on how to take a standardized test by Wal-Mart workers scared to death about losing their jobs. That’s a long way from John Dewey! “Memorization, regurgitation – vegetation,” would be an apt slogan.

“There are many examples of healthy competition in schools,” Ravitch writes, “[b]ut the competition among schools to get higher [test] scores is of a different nature; in the current climate, it is sure to cause teachers to spend more time preparing students for state tests, not on thoughtful writing, critical reading, scientific experiments, or historical study. Nor should we expect schools to vie with one another for students, as businesses vie for customers, advertising their wares and marketing their services. For schools to learn from one another, they must readily share information about their successes and failures, as medical professionals do, rather than act as rivals in a struggle for survival.” (p. 228)

The closing of schools and lay offs of teachers in the communities surrounding California’s capital city have been devastating and demoralizing to educators. The brutal budget cuts have made it more difficult year after year for teachers to do their jobs. Budget cuts are followed by more budget cuts. Teachers are told each September that they’re just going to have to make do with less, which means larger class sizes, cuts to music, art, literature, physical education, lack of supplies, low morale. And then useless politicians from both parties lecture teachers blaming them for all of society’s failings to properly fund public schools. This cycle must be broken. Diane Ravitch has done educators a favor by honestly appraising the terrible consequences of policies she once championed. If we have to wait twenty years for Arne Duncan to see the light, it will be too late.

As it was with South Vietnam’s “Army of the Republic of Vietnam” (ARVN) it is futile to try to train locals in Afghanistan to kill their own people on behalf of foreigners. There will be desertions, spies, informants, corruption, and low morale. Those few who might be prepared to fight will fear the abilities of their Muslim brothers because they fight with fire in their bellies, which cannot be measured or quantified. There are no meaningful “metrics” with which to gauge success or failure. America’s Afghan enemies aren’t going anywhere. They’re in it for the long haul. Ten years, twenty years, fifty years – it doesn’t matter. It’s their country and they have nowhere else to go.

As the journalist Michael Hastings recently revealed in his Rolling Stone article, which ultimately led President Obama to fire General Stanley McChrystal as his top commander in Afghanistan, there are turf battles and divisions between the diplomats (or “nation builders”) and the military personnel saddled with the dismal task of trying to kill an enemy that lives and works among the civilian population.

The Afghan guerrillas have access to vast sanctuaries in the tribal regions on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan “border,” hence, the term “Af-Pak.” They cannot be expected to make themselves easy to wipe out and there is every indication that the Pakistani government is hedging its bets not wanting to alienate these mujahedeen fighters because for decades these elements have proved themselves useful to Pakistan in its fight against India over Kashmir.

The widespread corruption in Afghanistan cannot be realistically controlled or even substantially reduced. Lining the pockets of corrupt officials at the highest echelons of Afghan society is not only a waste of money but it also costs the lives of American and NATO soldiers. The Karzai brothers are deeply involved in the illicit opium trade and this opens the door for all manner of mischief by America’s enemies.

Karzai is a lot like Ngo Dinh Diem was in South Vietnam: If the CIA overthrew him the situation would most likely grow even more unstable, which is probably the only reason why Obama’s national security team has chosen to allow him to stay in power despite the corruption, incompetence, and unpopularity of his regime.

Going back to October 2001, the United States’ policy in Afghanistan has been beset by faulty analyses, false premises, and lies. The white-hot desire for revenge following 9-11 led the American government to an aggressive policy that failed to include serious long-term planning. Diverting the U.S. military’s attention to Iraq in March 2003 only rendered impossible the attempt to stabilize Afghanistan after the Taliban were ousted.

The American and NATO soldiers, along with their hapless Afghan counterparts, are not fighting in Afghanistan for “liberty” and “freedom” as Western society has come to understand these concepts since the Enlightenment. The warlords and tribal chieftains with whom the United States is allied have little desire to transform their homeland into a modern secular society.

Michael Hastings’ reporting also suggests that among the U.S. military officers in Afghanistan there are a number of ticket punchers. General McChrystal himself demonstrated this tendency when George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld promoted him after he showed that he was willing to cover up the truth about the friendly fire death of Cpl. Pat Tillman.

Congressional oversight of the Afghan war has been lagging with politicians flying in for photo ops and flying out again only to hold press conferences extolling the “progress” that is being made. Congress has failed to ask the tough questions about this war and has instead given the American people a steady stream of platitudes about “winning.” The constant killing of civilians undermines winning the “hearts and minds” of the people. “Apologies” and payouts to the victims’ families have little effect in quelling the seething animosity that most Afghans hold toward the occupying Westerners. Another $33 billion for Afghanistan is another $33 billion wasted.

William Pfaff, in The Irony of Manifest Destiny, writes:

“The proposition that the United States can or should devote the next fifteen, or fifty, years to ‘making’ modern nations of Afghanistan or Pakistan, by means of a massive introduction into those countries of American officials, advisors, and teachers, as well as soldiers to suppress military uprising or resistance to such an effort, seems to me not ignoble, but simply breathtakingly ignorant, impractical, indifferent to historical experience and the political limits on nations, and contrary to the will as well as the interests of all of the peoples involved.” (p. 158)

“We grew up with a set of assumptions. If you were born in the United States between, say, 1945 and 1965, you were raised in a basically liberal political culture when liberalism was the default position. . . . [But] what if all these presumptions I grew up with were wrong? What if Reagan wasn’t an aberration? What if Roosevelt and [Lyndon] Johnson were the aberrations?” (10)

In Tomasky’s typology of American history progressive social movements are deviations from a steady state of deeply conservative “individualism” where private concerns supersede the quest for the common good.

Tomasky argues that many of President Obama’s harshest critics on the left are reacting that way because they don’t want to admit to themselves that the “feelings of invincibility and redemption” after the 2008 election “were misplaced,” and that “the power and euphoria were somehow counterfeit.” (12) So leftists were just swept up in emotion? This pop psychology attempt to explain the “feelings” of Obama’s progressive critics cannot be proven. “We’ve experienced the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s,” Tomasky writes, “and the only mass movement to emerge from that reality is a right-wing populist one.” (11) But might the election of Obama suggest that there’s more than one “mass movement” afoot. Although it was probably not his aim, Tomasky capitulates to a narrative of American history that leans toward delegitimizing social activism from the Left.

Tomasky might see the New Deal as an “aberration” but the historian Liz Cohen, in The Making of the New Deal, along with other historians, has shown that there was a grassroots component to the New Deal that was far removed from the wheeling and dealing among power brokers in Washington, D.C. Indeed, much of what we see as the New Deal came from thousands of ordinary citizens working together to build their local communities after the devastation of the Great Depression. And, yes, there were many communists and socialists and other leftists deeply involved in this social activism. The CIO wouldn’t have been possible without the social organizing skills of communists. “Aberrations?” Or as “American” as cherry pie?

Tomasky tends to overlook the leftist critiques leveled against FDR as well as JFK and LBJ, which helped push all three presidents in a more progressive direction. Contradicting Martin Luther King, Jr.’s view of the “arc” of history, Tomasky cites Salvatore and Jefferson Cowie’s paper in the journal of International Labor and Working-Class History, which argues that the New Deal and the Great Society both represent “abnormal (and extremely fleeting) moments of commonality in an arc of American history that otherwise bent strongly away from any notion of a common good and toward the primacy of the individual.” (11)

But running counter to Tomasky’s new narrative one might note that over a century before the New Deal that the rise of Jacksonian Democracy expanded the franchise to include property-less males, which was a relatively radical innovation. Abolitionism followed as well as the earliest official moves toward winning the franchise for women codified at Seneca Falls. After the Civil War, which freed the slaves and gave us the 14th Amendment, came the era of “Radical Reconstruction” that sought to bring justice to the victims of slavery. Soon thereafter the Knights of Labor were leading railroad strikes and, along with the budding American Federation of Labor, there were repeated attempts at full-fledged industrial unionism evidenced by the rise of the Industrial Workers of the World. Americans could have rejected these reforms and organizations, but they didn’t. So were all of these developments prior to the New Deal in Tomasky’s view “aberrations?”

My CSU colleague, Charles Postel, in The Populist Moment, (which won both the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Bancroft last year), has reconfigured our understanding of Populism. Postel debunks many of the myths associated with the movement and sheds new light on the Populists’ embrace of science and technology that defined “modern” America. Far from an “aberration,” as Tomasky would have it, the Populists pushed the envelope on issues of social justice even within a rigidly stratified society.

The same could be said of the Progressives going back to Hull House in Chicago. Surely, the movement that gave the nation the direct primary, the initiative, the recall, and the referendum; the 17th Amendment; the scientific planning of water and sewage systems; the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Acts; the juvenile criminal justice system, and so on, should not be seen as a set of freak accidents. These lasting reforms can hardly be seen as “aberrations.”

Tomasky cites the Cornell historian, Nick Salvatore, to buttress his dreary interpretation of American history. Salvatore, (for whom I was a teaching assistant), wrote a masterful biography of Eugene Victor Debs, therefore Tomasky should be aware that Debs won about 900,000 votes when he ran for president as a Socialist in 1912. The presidential election of 1912 is one of the more interesting of the 20th Century because it effectively pitted two very progressive candidates and a socialist against the incumbent president who had profoundly disappointed those most committed to deploying the powers of government against entrenched private interests.

(One could even argue that the founding of the nation itself deviates from Tomasky’s clean historical pattern of primordial conservatism in American political culture. The men who wrote up the United States Constitution might have been burghers concerned about their own property rights but they invented a system of governance based on high Enlightenment ideals that cut against the grain of every established regime in the Old World. The new experiment in self-government threatened and angered the monarchies in Europe and was a dramatic departure from custom and tradition. They could have established a quasi-monarchical system tied to the dominant Protestant Church with presidential succession occurring only upon the death of the president. The Constitution could have been far less radical than it was.)

I don’t mean to imply that the conservative Right was irrelevant in these earlier periods of reform; quite the contrary. The battles were enjoined and the class struggle and labor conflicts were often bitter and bloody. In fact, the United States has one of the bloodiest labor histories of any industrial democracy. But to see these periods of reform as “aberrations,” as Tomasky does, only denigrates those who sacrificed their lives in those struggles standing up for their ideals and trying to make the United States a more fair and just country. Tomasky’s theory is also bad history because it papers over what is a key engine of social change.

Not to flog a dead horse, but the only way we can really understand the “Red Scare” of the 1920s or the McCarthy era of the 1950s is to see them as backlashes against the huge reform waves that crested and crashed in American society preceding them. Hence, one could just as easily conclude that the periods of right-wing retrenchment were the “aberrations.”

And then there’s Tomasky’s other big “aberration”: the Great Society. But the pressures that gave rise to the landmark reforms passed, not only in 1964 and 1965, but by the 89th Congress had been building for decades. The Watts riot and the social dislocations it exposed needed to be addressed in some active way or the federal government would have lost legitimacy, like ignoring a hurricane or an oil spill. Critics of JFK and LBJ said they didn’t move fast enough or bold enough; and who were these critics that moderate historians more often than not agree with today? They were a bunch of “aberrant” left-wingers!

I only raise these thumbnail historical points to illustrate how off base and defeatist Tomasky’s take on American history is in this piece. Elsewhere Tomasky writes: “To compare unfavorably our time to that one [the mid-1960s] is, unless one installs appropriate caveats, pointless; like complaining about cabbage because it doesn’t taste like ice cream.” (9) This notion that anything that happened before today cannot be adequately invoked to derive lessons or guidance negates the very idea of looking to history for inspiration, hope, and direction. Why should anyone bother reading about Lincoln, TR, or Robert F. Kennedy if their past examples have no relevance to contemporary America?  And is it true that all we are doing is “complaining?”

(This “cabbage” and “ice cream” point is really a straw man.  Here Tomasky is telling historians that we’re a bunch of brain dead positivists incapable of discerning qualitative differences in historical periods.  But qualitative studies and comparisons are key aspects of what modern historians do.  It’s like telling a convention of dentists that they might want to look into the effects of tooth decay.)

In an aside, Tomasky admits that he supports the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. He also cites Michael Walzer who failed to denounce George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.  But he calls progressives (or leftists) who criticize Obama “disgruntleists” and “impatients.” Tomasky offers us an alternative narrative that offers a sweeping revision of American history but doesn’t tell us why his understanding of history justifies his support for the war in Afghanistan/Pakistan.

(The least Tomasky could do if he insists on lecturing progressives for “misusing” history is to explain why he believes there are historically-informed reasons for the U.S. to continue its occupation of Afghanistan; and maybe at least mention the twisted “history” that the Bush Administration used to justify the Iraq war.)

After spending twelve-and-a-half pages in a fourteen-page article arguing exactly the opposite position, Tomasky then concedes that “at certain crucial points” Obama “allowed the liberal base to feel ignored and condescended to, and even if a president can’t and won’t fulfill all the goals the base has in mind, he cannot do that.” (13) These are precisely the kinds of critiques the left has been aiming at the President and the object of Tomasky’s criticism in the piece.

“It is unreasonable to expect him [Obama] to be an FDR or an LBJ, given the far more favorable political waters those two navigated.” Okay, we can give Tomasky that point. But it should also be pointed out that Obama has had majorities in both houses of Congress.  (Reagan, who in Tomasky’s portrayal of history represents the normative state, never had a majority in the House.)

Tomasky also notes that in the Congress “the Blue Dog faction has more power than the liberal faction and probably always will because the moderates hold a stronger trump card – it’s only in their districts that the Democrats can ever expand their majority as we saw in 2006 and 2008.” (13) Here he is willing to accept Blue Dog dominance as if it is an unalterable fact of nature such as gravity or water flowing to its lowest point. What about the 2010 census and demographic changes? What about primary challenges in Blue Dog districts? What about the Tea Partiers delegitimizing Republican candidates in some seemingly safe districts? What about unforeseen crises like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and its local political effects? Are the political consequences of these types of actions and events so easy to predict?

The truth is that historically-speaking multiple “sides” are always deeply involved in an ongoing struggle against each other and duking it out in countless ways: in the workplace, within governmental institutions, at the ballot box; etc.; the powerful against the less powerful, capital against labor, Right against Left.

Although it contains many useful historical facts from both the New Deal and Great Society eras, the thrust of Tomasky’s piece is that the Republican Right owns this country and will retake control inexorably. It’s really a despairing article for anyone on the left, which leads me to wonder what exactly is the point? It’s one thing to tell Obama’s progressive critics to back off through informing them of all the good things Obama has accomplished, most recently the $20 billion “shakedown” of BP, which is one of my personal favorites, but to conclude that everything the Left has accomplished throughout history as little more than “aberrations” inside a solidly conservative polis is just too defeatist to let go unchallenged. Tomasky understands that “despair will produce defeat,” but he states this only after offering us a huge dollop of despair to make his point. “The use or misuse of history as a blunt weapon is a trope that guarantees despair,” he writes. (14) And on this point, he knows of what he speaks.