Islamic Jihadists At War with the U.S. for 200 Years.
After 9/11 President Bush, and Congress, and the American People finally understood that Islamic Jihadists, the fundamentalists of Islam, were an enemy of the Unites States the likes of which no other American president had ever experienced before, but the President, and Congress, and the American People were mistaken.
Thomas Jefferson was the first American president to have gone to war against fundamentalist Islam - the Islamic Jihadists.
Jefferson had been observing these fundamentalists for some time and he was convinced that one day the Jihadists would return and pose an even greater threat to America.
He was obsessed with the subject and had committed himself to learning everything he could about it.
Most Americans by now are unaware of the fact that over two hundred years ago, the United States had declared war on Islam, and Thomas Jefferson led the charge.
At the height of the eighteenth century, Muslim pirates were the terror of the Mediterranean and a significant swath of the North Atlantic. They attacked every ship in sight and held the crews for exorbitant ransoms. The hostages were subjected to barbaric treatment and wrote desperate, heart-wrenching letters home begging their governments and family members to pay whatever their Mohammedan captors demanded.
These extortionists of the high seas represented the Islamic nations of Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers - collectively referred to as the Barbary Coast - and presented a dangerous and unprovoked threat to the new American republic.
Before the revolutionary war, U.S. merchant ships had been under the protection of Great Britain. When the U.S. declared its independence and entered into war, the ships of the United States were protected by France. Once the war was won, American had to protects its own fleets.
Hence the birth of the United States Navy.
None of this happened as quickly as one might believe. Beginning in 1784, seventeen years before he would become President, Thomas Jefferson left for Paris to become America’s Minister to France. That same year, the United States Congress sought to appease its Muslim adversaries by following in the footsteps of European nations who paid bribes to the Barbary States, rather than engage them head-on in war.
Then, in July of 1785, Algerian islamists captured two American ships and the Dey of Algiers demanded an unheard-of ransom of nearly $60,000.00.
It was extortion, plain and simple, and Thomas Jefferson, now U.S. Minister to France, was vehemently opposed to any further payments. Instead, he proposed to Congress the formation of a coalition of allied nations who together could force the Islamic states into perpetual peace.
This plan now sounds all too familiar in today’s domestic political climate: a coalition of the willing.
Congress, however, was not interested in Jefferson’s plan and decided to pay the ransom (also sounds too familiar in today’s environment).
IN 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with Tripoli’s ambassador to Great Britain to ask him by what right his nation attacked American ships and enslaved American citizens.
He claimed that the right was founded on the laws of their prophet and that it was written in the Koran that all nations who did not acknowledge their authority were sinners. and that it was not only their right and duty to make war upon these sinners wherever they could be found, but to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Muslim slain in battle was guaranteed a place in Paradise.
Despite this stunning admission of premeditated violence on non-Muslim nations, as well as the objections of numerous notable Americans , including George Washington, who waned that caving in was both wrong and would only further embolden their enemy, the United States Congress continued to buy off the Muslims with bribes and ransom money. They paid Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers upwards of one million dollars a year over the next fifteen years, which by 1800 amounted to twenty percent of the Unites States government’s annual revenues.
Jefferson was disgusted. To add insult to injury, when he was sworn in as the third president of the United States in 1801, the pasha of Tripoli sent him a note demanding an immediate payment of $225,000 plus $25,000 a year for every year thereafter. That is about the time when everything changed.
Jefferson let the pasha know, in no uncertain terms, what he could do with his demand. The pasha responded by chopping down the flagpole in front of the U.S. Consulate and declaring war on the United States. Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers immediately followed suit.
Jefferson had been against America raising a naval force for anything beyond coastal defense, but having watched his nation be cowed by Islamic thuggery for long enough, he decided that it was finally time to meet force with force.
He dispatched a squadron of frigates to the Mediterranean to teach the Muslim nations of the Barbary Coast a lesson they would never forget.
Congress authorized Jefferson to empower U.S. ships to seize all vessels and goods of the pasha of Tripoli and also to ‘cause to be done all other acts of precaution or hostility as the state of war would justify’.
When Algiers and Tunis, who were both accustomed to American cowardice and acquiescence, saw that the newly independent United States had both the will and the might to strike back, they quickly abandoned their allegiance to Tripoli.
Nevertheless, the war with Tripoli raged for four more years and flared up once more in 1815. The bravery of the United States Marine Corps in these wars led to the line ‘ to the shores of Tripoli’ in the Marine hymn and they would ever after be known as ‘leathernecks’ for the leather collars of their uniforms that prevented their heads from being chopped off by Muslim scimitars when boarding ships.
Islam, and what its Barbary followers justified doing in the name of their prophet and their god, disturbed Jefferson quite deeply. America had a tradition of religious tolerance, in fact Jefferson himself had coauthored the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, but fundamentalist Islam was like no other religion the world had seen. A religion based upon supremacism whose holy book not only condoned but mandated violence against unbelievers was unacceptable to him.
One of Jefferson’s greatest fears, as stated here in the beginning, was that someday this brand of Islam would return and pose an even greater threat to the United States. Jefferson was definitely ahead of his time on this account.
Long before leaving for France, Jefferson had committed himself to learning everything he could about the tenets of Islam and also about how its radical, warlike doctrine could be defeated without another shot ever being fired.
Jefferson, you see, was never anti-Islam. He as anti-Islamist fundamentalist. There is an important distinction. He did not concern himself with whether his neighbor claimed there were twenty gods or no God, as long as the man neither picked his pocket nor broke his leg. Fundamentalist Islam, though, picks pockets and breaks legs and that is why Jefferson had to find a way to stop it. He was, after all, the father of the separation of church and state.
The underlying problem, however, with fundamentalist Islam is that it is both political and religious. It teaches that the two cannot be separated. This Islamists believe that man-made laws are inferior and must be replaced with God-given Islamic or Sharia Law and that all governments worldwide should become Islamic.
Coupled with the mandate that violence be wreaked upon all unbelievers until they capitulate to Islam’s yoke, fundamentalist Islam is anathema to everything that Jefferson stood for.
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Excerpts drawn from “The Last Patriot”, by author Brad Thor
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
England: The Magna Carta
Magna Carta
June 15, 1215: King John signs the Magna Carta
Succumbing to pressure from the barons, John signed the document at Runnymede and declared that copies should be distributed and publicly read throughout England.
While its initial impact was limited, the Magna Carta served as a significant precedent for future democratic government in the centuries to come, including that of the U.S.
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JOHN, by the grace of God King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and Count of Anjou, to his archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, justices, foresters, sheriffs, stewards, servants, and to all his officials and loyal subjects, Greeting.
KNOW THAT BEFORE GOD, for the health of our soul and those of our ancestors and heirs, to the honour of God, the exaltation of the holy Church, and the better ordering of our kingdom, at the advice of our reverend fathers Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury, primate of all England, and cardinal of the holy Roman Church, Henry archbishop of Dublin, William bishop of London, Peter bishop of Winchester, Jocelin bishop of Bath and Glastonbury, Hugh bishop of Lincoln, Walter Bishop of Worcester, William bishop of Coventry, Benedict bishop of Rochester, Master Pandulf subdeacon and member of the papal household, Brother Aymeric master of the knighthood of the Temple in England, William Marshal earl of Pembroke, William earl of Salisbury, William earl of Warren, William earl of Arundel, Alan de Galloway constable of Scotland, Warin Fitz Gerald, Peter Fitz Herbert, Hubert de Burgh seneschal of Poitou, Hugh de Neville, Matthew Fitz Herbert, Thomas Basset, Alan Basset, Philip Daubeny, Robert de Roppeley, John Marshal, John Fitz Hugh, and other loyal subjects:
* (1) FIRST, THAT WE HAVE GRANTED TO GOD, and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired. That we wish this so to be observed, appears from the fact that of our own free will, before the outbreak of the present dispute between us and our barons, we granted and confirmed by charter the freedom of the Church’s elections – a right reckoned to be of the greatest necessity and importance to it – and caused this to be confirmed by Pope Innocent III. This freedom we shall observe ourselves, and desire to be observed in good faith by our heirs in perpetuity.
TO ALL FREE MEN OF OUR KINGDOM we have also granted, for us and our heirs for ever, all the liberties written out below, to have and to keep for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs:
(2) If any earl, baron, or other person that holds lands directly of the Crown, for military service, shall die, and at his death his heir shall be of full age and owe a `relief’, the heir shall have his inheritance on payment of the ancient scale of `relief’. That is to say, the heir or heirs of an earl shall pay £100 for the entire earl’s barony, the heir or heirs of a knight l00s. at most for the entire knight’s `fee’, and any man that owes less shall pay less, in accordance with the ancient usage of `fees’
(3) But if the heir of such a person is under age and a ward, when he comes of age he shall have his inheritance without `relief’ or fine.
(4) The guardian of the land of an heir who is under age shall take from it only reasonable revenues, customary dues, and feudal services. He shall do this without destruction or damage to men or property. If we have given the guardianship of the land to a sheriff, or to any person answerable to us for the revenues, and he commits destruction or damage, we will exact compensation from him, and the land shall be entrusted to two worthy and prudent men of the same `fee’, who shall be answerable to us for the revenues, or to the person to whom we have assigned them. If we have given or sold to anyone the guardianship of such land, and he causes destruction or damage, he shall lose the guardianship of it, and it shall be handed over to two worthy and prudent men of the same `fee’, who shall be similarly answerable to us.
(5) For so long as a guardian has guardianship of such land, he shall maintain the houses, parks, fish preserves, ponds, mills, and everything else pertaining to it, from the revenues of the land itself. When the heir comes of age, he shall restore the whole land to him, stocked with plough teams and such implements of husbandry as the season demands and the revenues from the land can reasonably bear.
(6) Heirs may be given in marriage, but not to someone of lower social standing.
Before a marriage takes place, it shall be’ made known to the heir’s next-of-kin.
(7) At her husband’s death, a widow may have her marriage portion and inheritance at once and without trouble. She shall pay nothing for her dower, marriage portion, or any inheritance that she and her husband held jointly on the day of his death. She may remain in her husband’s house for forty days after his death, and within this period her dower shall be assigned to her.
(8) No widow shall be compelled to marry, so long as she wishes to remain without a husband. But she must give security that she will not marry without royal consent, if she holds her lands of the Crown, or without the consent of whatever other lord she may hold them of.
(9) Neither we nor our officials will seize any land or rent in payment of a debt, so long as the debtor has movable goods sufficient to discharge the debt. A debtor’s sureties shall not be distrained upon so long as the debtor himself can discharge his debt. If, for lack of means, the debtor is unable to discharge his debt, his sureties shall be answerable for it. If they so desire, they may have the debtor’s lands and rents until they have received satisfaction for the debt that they paid for him, unless the debtor can show that he has settled his obligations to them.
* (10) If anyone who has borrowed a sum of money from Jews dies before the debt has been repaid, his heir shall pay no interest on the debt for so long as he remains under age, irrespective of whom he holds his lands. If such a debt falls into the hands of the Crown, it will take nothing except the principal sum specified in the bond.
* (11) If a man dies owing money to Jews, his wife may have her dower and pay nothing towards the debt from it. If he leaves children that are under age, their needs may also be provided for on a scale appropriate to the size of his holding of lands. The debt is to be paid out of the residue, reserving the service due to his feudal lords. Debts owed to persons other than Jews are to be dealt with similarly.
* (12) No `scutage’ or `aid’ may be levied in our kingdom without its general consent, unless it is for the ransom of our person, to make our eldest son a knight, and (once) to marry our eldest daughter. For these purposes ouly a reasonable `aid’ may be levied. `Aids’ from the city of London are to be treated similarly.
* (13) The city of London shall enjoy all its ancient liberties and free customs, both by land and by water. We also will and grant that all other cities, boroughs, towns, and ports shall enjoy all their liberties and free customs.
* (14) To obtain the general consent of the realm for the assessment of an `aid’ – except in the three cases specified above – or a `scutage’, we will cause the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons to be summoned individually by letter. To those who hold lands directly of us we will cause a general summons to be issued, through the sheriffs and other officials, to come together on a fixed day (of which at least forty days notice shall be given) and at a fixed place. In all letters of summons, the cause of the summons will be stated. When a summons has been issued, the business appointed for the day shall go forward in accordance with the resolution of those present, even if not all those who were summoned have appeared.
* (15) In future we will allow no one to levy an `aid’ from his free men, except to ransom his person, to make his eldest son a knight, and (once) to marry his eldest daughter. For these purposes only a reasonable `aid’ may be levied.
(16) No man shall be forced to perform more service for a knight’s `fee’, or other free holding of land, than is due from it.
(17) Ordinary lawsuits shall not follow the royal court around, but shall be held in a fixed place.
(18) Inquests of novel disseisin, mort d’ancestor, and darrein presentment shall be taken only in their proper county court. We ourselves, or in our absence abroad our chief justice, will send two justices to each county four times a year, and these justices, with four knights of the county elected by the county itself, shall hold the assizes in the county court, on the day and in the place where the court meets.
(19) If any assizes cannot be taken on the day of the county court, as many knights and freeholders shall afterwards remain behind, of those who have attended the court, as will suffice for the administration of justice, having regard to the volume of business to be done.
(20) For a trivial offence, a free man shall be fined only in proportion to the degree of his offence, and for a serious offence correspondingly, but not so heavily as to deprive him of his livelihood. In the same way, a merchant shall be spared his merchandise, and a husbandman the implements of his husbandry, if they fall upon the mercy of a royal court. None of these fines shall be imposed except by the assessment on oath of reputable men of the neighbourhood.
(21) Earls and barons shall be fined only by their equals, and in proportion to the gravity of their offence.
(22) A fine imposed upon the lay property of a clerk in holy orders shall be assessed upon the same principles, without reference to the value of his ecclesiastical benefice.
(23) No town or person shall be forced to build bridges over rivers except those with an ancient obligation to do so.
(24) No sheriff, constable, coroners, or other royal officials are to hold lawsuits that should be held by the royal justices.
* (25) Every county, hundred, wapentake, and tithing shall remain at its ancient rent, without increase, except the royal demesne manors.
(26) If at the death of a man who holds a lay `fee’ of the Crown, a sheriff or royal official produces royal letters patent of summons for a debt due to the Crown, it shall be lawful for them to seize and list movable goods found in the lay `fee’ of the dead man to the value of the debt, as assessed by worthy men. Nothing shall be removed until the whole debt is paid, when the residue shall be given over to the executors to carry out the dead man s will. If no debt is due to the Crown, all the movable goods shall be regarded as the property of the dead man, except the reasonable shares of his wife and children.
* (27) If a free man dies intestate, his movable goods are to be distributed by his next-of-kin and friends, under the supervision of the Church. The rights of his debtors are to be preserved.
(28) No constable or other royal official shall take corn or other movable goods from any man without immediate payment, unless the seller voluntarily offers postponement of this.
(29) No constable may compel a knight to pay money for castle-guard if the knight is willing to undertake the guard in person, or with reasonable excuse to supply some other fit man to do it. A knight taken or sent on military service shall be excused from castle-guard for the period of this servlce.
(30) No sheriff, royal official, or other person shall take horses or carts for transport from any free man, without his consent.
(31) Neither we nor any royal official will take wood for our castle, or for any other purpose, without the consent of the owner.
(32) We will not keep the lands of people convicted of felony in our hand for longer than a year and a day, after which they shall be returned to the lords of the `fees’ concerned.
(33) All fish-weirs shall be removed from the Thames, the Medway, and throughout the whole of England, except on the sea coast.
(34) The writ called precipe shall not in future be issued to anyone in respect of any holding of land, if a free man could thereby be deprived of the right of trial in his own lord’s court.
(35) There shall be standard measures of wine, ale, and corn (the London quarter), throughout the kingdom. There shall also be a standard width of dyed cloth, russett, and haberject, namely two ells within the selvedges. Weights are to be standardised similarly.
(36) In future nothing shall be paid or accepted for the issue of a writ of inquisition of life or limbs. It shall be given gratis, and not refused.
(37) If a man holds land of the Crown by `fee-farm’, `socage’, or `burgage’, and also holds land of someone else for knight’s service, we will not have guardianship of his heir, nor of the land that belongs to the other person’s `fee’, by virtue of the `fee-farm’, `socage’, or `burgage’, unless the `fee-farm’ owes knight’s service. We will not have the guardianship of a man’s heir, or of land that he holds of someone else, by reason of any small property that he may hold of the Crown for a service of knives, arrows, or the like.
(38) In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it.
* (39) No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.
* (40) To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.
(41) All merchants may enter or leave England unharmed and without fear, and may stay or travel within it, by land or water, for purposes of trade, free from all illegal exactions, in accordance with ancient and lawful customs. This, however, does not apply in time of war to merchants from a country that is at war with us. Any such merchants found in our country at the outbreak of war shall be detained without injury to their persons or property, until we or our chief justice have discovered how our own merchants are being treated in the country at war with us. If our own merchants are safe they shall be safe too.
* (42) In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants – who shall be dealt with as stated above – are excepted from this provision.
(43) If a man holds lands of any `escheat’ such as the `honour’ of Wallingford, Nottingham, Boulogne, Lancaster, or of other `escheats’ in our hand that are baronies, at his death his heir shall give us only the `relief’ and service that he would have made to the baron, had the barony been in the baron’s hand. We will hold the `escheat’ in the same manner as the baron held it.
(44) People who live outside the forest need not in future appear before the royal justices of the forest in answer to general summonses, unless they are actually involved in proceedings or are sureties for someone who has been seized for a forest offence.
* (45) We will appoint as justices, constables, sheriffs, or other officials, only men that know the law of the realm and are minded to keep it well.
(46) All barons who have founded abbeys, and have charters of English kings or ancient tenure as evidence of this, may have guardianship of them when there is no abbot, as is their due.
(47) All forests that have been created in our reign shall at once be disafforested. River-banks that have been enclosed in our reign shall be treated similarly.
* (48) All evil customs relating to forests and warrens, foresters, warreners, sheriffs and their servants, or river-banks and their wardens, are at once to be investigated in every county by twelve sworn knights of the county, and within forty days of their enquiry the evil customs are to be abolished completely and irrevocably. But we, or our chief justice if we are not in England, are first to be informed.
* (49) We will at once return all hostages and charters delivered up to us by Englishmen as security for peace or for loyal service.
* (50) We will remove completely from their offices the kinsmen of Gerard de Athée, and in future they shall hold no offices in England. The people in question are Engelard de Cigogné’, Peter, Guy, and Andrew de Chanceaux, Guy de Cigogné, Geoffrey de Martigny and his brothers, Philip Marc and his brothers, with Geoffrey his nephew, and all their followers.
* (51) As soon as peace is restored, we will remove from the kingdom all the foreign knights, bowmen, their attendants, and the mercenaries that have come to it, to its harm, with horses and arms.
* (52) To any man whom we have deprived or dispossessed of lands, castles, liberties, or rights, without the lawful judgement of his equals, we will at once restore these. In cases of dispute the matter shall be resolved by the judgement of the twenty-five barons referred to below in the clause for securing the peace. In cases, however, where a man was deprived or dispossessed of something without the lawful judgement of his equals by our father King Henry or our brother King Richard, and it remains in our hands or is held by others under our warranty, we shall have respite for the period commonly allowed to Crusaders, unless a lawsuit had been begun, or an enquiry had been made at our order, before we took the Cross as a Crusader. On our return from the Crusade, or if we abandon it, we will at once render justice in full.
* (53) We shall have similar respite in rendering justice in connexion with forests that are to be disafforested, or to remain forests, when these were first a-orested by our father Henry or our brother Richard; with the guardianship of lands in another person’s `fee’, when we have hitherto had this by virtue of a `fee’ held of us for knight’s service by a third party; and with abbeys founded in another person’s `fee’, in which the lord of the `fee’ claims to own a right. On our return from the Crusade, or if we abandon it, we will at once do full justice to complaints about these matters.
(54) No one shall be arrested or imprisoned on the appeal of a woman for the death of any person except her husband.
* (55) All fines that have been given to us unjustiy and against the law of the land, and all fines that we have exacted unjustly, shall be entirely remitted or the matter decided by a majority judgement of the twenty-five barons referred to below in the clause for securing the peace (§ 61) together with Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury, if he can be present, and such others as he wishes to bring with him. If the archbishop cannot be present, proceedings shall continue without him, provided that if any of the twenty-five barons has been involved in a similar suit himself, his judgement shall be set aside, and someone else chosen and sworn in his place, as a substitute for the single occasion, by the rest of the twenty-five.
(56) If we have deprived or dispossessed any Welshmen of lands, liberties, or anything else in England or in Wales, without the lawful judgement of their equals, these are at once to be returned to them. A dispute on this point shall be determined in the Marches by the judgement of equals. English law shall apply to holdings of land in England, Welsh law to those in Wales, and the law of the Marches to those in the Marches. The Welsh shall treat us and ours in the same way.
* (57) In cases where a Welshman was deprived or dispossessed of anything, without the lawful judgement of his equals, by our father King Henry or our brother King Richard, and it remains in our hands or is held by others under our warranty, we shall have respite for the period commonly allowed to Crusaders, unless a lawsuit had been begun, or an enquiry had been made at our order, before we took the Cross as a Crusader. But on our return from the Crusade, or if we abandon it, we will at once do full justice according to the laws of Wales and the said regions.
* (58) We will at once return the son of Llywelyn, all Welsh hostages, and the charters delivered to us as security for the peace.
* (59) With regard to the return of the sisters and hostages of Alexander, king of Scotland, his liberties and his rights, we will treat him in the same way as our other barons of England, unless it appears from the charters that we hold from his father William, formerly king of Scotland, that he should be treated otherwise. This matter shall be resolved by the judgement of his equals in our court.
(60) All these customs and liberties that we have granted shall be observed in our kingdom in so far as concerns our own relations with our subjects. Let all men of our kingdom, whether clergy or laymen, observe them similarly in their relations with their own men.
* (61) SINCE WE HAVE GRANTED ALL THESE THINGS for God, for the better ordering of our kingdom, and to allay the discord that has arisen between us and our barons, and since we desire that they shall be enjoyed in their entirety, with lasting strength, for ever, we give and grant to the barons the following security:
The barons shall elect twenty-five of their number to keep, and cause to be observed with all their might, the peace and liberties granted and confirmed to them by this charter.If we, our chief justice, our officials, or any of our servants offend in any respect against any man, or transgress any of the articles of the peace or of this security, and the offence is made known to four of the said twenty-five barons, they shall come to us – or in our absence from the kingdom to the chief justice – to declare it and claim immediate redress. If we, or in our absence abroad the chiefjustice, make no redress within forty days, reckoning from the day on which the offence was declared to us or to him, the four barons shall refer the matter to the rest of the twenty-five barons, who may distrain upon and assail us in every way possible, with the support of the whole community of the land, by seizing our castles, lands, possessions, or anything else saving only our own person and those of the queen and our children, until they have secured such redress as they have determined upon. Having secured the redress, they may then resume their normal obedience to us.
Any man who so desires may take an oath to obey the commands of the twenty-five barons for the achievement of these ends, and to join with them in assailing us to the utmost of his power. We give public and free permission to take this oath to any man who so desires, and at no time will we prohibit any man from taking it. Indeed, we will compel any of our subjects who are unwilling to take it to swear it at our command.
If-one of the twenty-five barons dies or leaves the country, or is prevented in any other way from discharging his duties, the rest of them shall choose another baron in his place, at their discretion, who shall be duly sworn in as they were.
In the event of disagreement among the twenty-five barons on any matter referred to them for decision, the verdict of the majority present shall have the same validity as a unanimous verdict of the whole twenty-five, whether these were all present or some of those summoned were unwilling or unable to appear.
The twenty-five barons shall swear to obey all the above articles faithfully, and shall cause them to be obeyed by others to the best of their power.
We will not seek to procure from anyone, either by our own efforts or those of a third party, anything by which any part of these concessions or liberties might be revoked or diminished. Should such a thing be procured, it shall be null and void and we will at no time make use of it, either ourselves or through a third party.
* (62) We have remitted and pardoned fully to all men any ill-will, hurt, or grudges that have arisen between us and our subjects, whether clergy or laymen, since the beginning of the dispute. We have in addition remitted fully, and for our own part have also pardoned, to all clergy and laymen any offences committed as a result of the said dispute between Easter in the sixteenth year of our reign (i.e. 1215) and the restoration of peace.
In addition we have caused letters patent to be made for the barons, bearing witness to this security and to the concessions set out above, over the seals of Stephen archbishop of Canterbury, Henry archbishop of Dublin, the other bishops named above, and Master Pandulf.
* (63) IT IS ACCORDINGLY OUR WISH AND COMMAND that the English Church shall be free, and that men in our kingdom shall have and keep all these liberties, rights, and concessions, well and peaceably in their fulness and entirety for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs, in all things and all places for ever.
Both we and the barons have sworn that all this shall be observed in good faith and without deceit. Witness the abovementioned people and many others.
Given by our hand in the meadow that is called Runnymede, between Windsor and Staines, on the fifteenth day of June in the seventeenth year of our reign.
June 15, 1215: King John signs the Magna Carta
Succumbing to pressure from the barons, John signed the document at Runnymede and declared that copies should be distributed and publicly read throughout England.
While its initial impact was limited, the Magna Carta served as a significant precedent for future democratic government in the centuries to come, including that of the U.S.
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JOHN, by the grace of God King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and Count of Anjou, to his archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, justices, foresters, sheriffs, stewards, servants, and to all his officials and loyal subjects, Greeting.
KNOW THAT BEFORE GOD, for the health of our soul and those of our ancestors and heirs, to the honour of God, the exaltation of the holy Church, and the better ordering of our kingdom, at the advice of our reverend fathers Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury, primate of all England, and cardinal of the holy Roman Church, Henry archbishop of Dublin, William bishop of London, Peter bishop of Winchester, Jocelin bishop of Bath and Glastonbury, Hugh bishop of Lincoln, Walter Bishop of Worcester, William bishop of Coventry, Benedict bishop of Rochester, Master Pandulf subdeacon and member of the papal household, Brother Aymeric master of the knighthood of the Temple in England, William Marshal earl of Pembroke, William earl of Salisbury, William earl of Warren, William earl of Arundel, Alan de Galloway constable of Scotland, Warin Fitz Gerald, Peter Fitz Herbert, Hubert de Burgh seneschal of Poitou, Hugh de Neville, Matthew Fitz Herbert, Thomas Basset, Alan Basset, Philip Daubeny, Robert de Roppeley, John Marshal, John Fitz Hugh, and other loyal subjects:
* (1) FIRST, THAT WE HAVE GRANTED TO GOD, and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired. That we wish this so to be observed, appears from the fact that of our own free will, before the outbreak of the present dispute between us and our barons, we granted and confirmed by charter the freedom of the Church’s elections – a right reckoned to be of the greatest necessity and importance to it – and caused this to be confirmed by Pope Innocent III. This freedom we shall observe ourselves, and desire to be observed in good faith by our heirs in perpetuity.
TO ALL FREE MEN OF OUR KINGDOM we have also granted, for us and our heirs for ever, all the liberties written out below, to have and to keep for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs:
(2) If any earl, baron, or other person that holds lands directly of the Crown, for military service, shall die, and at his death his heir shall be of full age and owe a `relief’, the heir shall have his inheritance on payment of the ancient scale of `relief’. That is to say, the heir or heirs of an earl shall pay £100 for the entire earl’s barony, the heir or heirs of a knight l00s. at most for the entire knight’s `fee’, and any man that owes less shall pay less, in accordance with the ancient usage of `fees’
(3) But if the heir of such a person is under age and a ward, when he comes of age he shall have his inheritance without `relief’ or fine.
(4) The guardian of the land of an heir who is under age shall take from it only reasonable revenues, customary dues, and feudal services. He shall do this without destruction or damage to men or property. If we have given the guardianship of the land to a sheriff, or to any person answerable to us for the revenues, and he commits destruction or damage, we will exact compensation from him, and the land shall be entrusted to two worthy and prudent men of the same `fee’, who shall be answerable to us for the revenues, or to the person to whom we have assigned them. If we have given or sold to anyone the guardianship of such land, and he causes destruction or damage, he shall lose the guardianship of it, and it shall be handed over to two worthy and prudent men of the same `fee’, who shall be similarly answerable to us.
(5) For so long as a guardian has guardianship of such land, he shall maintain the houses, parks, fish preserves, ponds, mills, and everything else pertaining to it, from the revenues of the land itself. When the heir comes of age, he shall restore the whole land to him, stocked with plough teams and such implements of husbandry as the season demands and the revenues from the land can reasonably bear.
(6) Heirs may be given in marriage, but not to someone of lower social standing.
Before a marriage takes place, it shall be’ made known to the heir’s next-of-kin.
(7) At her husband’s death, a widow may have her marriage portion and inheritance at once and without trouble. She shall pay nothing for her dower, marriage portion, or any inheritance that she and her husband held jointly on the day of his death. She may remain in her husband’s house for forty days after his death, and within this period her dower shall be assigned to her.
(8) No widow shall be compelled to marry, so long as she wishes to remain without a husband. But she must give security that she will not marry without royal consent, if she holds her lands of the Crown, or without the consent of whatever other lord she may hold them of.
(9) Neither we nor our officials will seize any land or rent in payment of a debt, so long as the debtor has movable goods sufficient to discharge the debt. A debtor’s sureties shall not be distrained upon so long as the debtor himself can discharge his debt. If, for lack of means, the debtor is unable to discharge his debt, his sureties shall be answerable for it. If they so desire, they may have the debtor’s lands and rents until they have received satisfaction for the debt that they paid for him, unless the debtor can show that he has settled his obligations to them.
* (10) If anyone who has borrowed a sum of money from Jews dies before the debt has been repaid, his heir shall pay no interest on the debt for so long as he remains under age, irrespective of whom he holds his lands. If such a debt falls into the hands of the Crown, it will take nothing except the principal sum specified in the bond.
* (11) If a man dies owing money to Jews, his wife may have her dower and pay nothing towards the debt from it. If he leaves children that are under age, their needs may also be provided for on a scale appropriate to the size of his holding of lands. The debt is to be paid out of the residue, reserving the service due to his feudal lords. Debts owed to persons other than Jews are to be dealt with similarly.
* (12) No `scutage’ or `aid’ may be levied in our kingdom without its general consent, unless it is for the ransom of our person, to make our eldest son a knight, and (once) to marry our eldest daughter. For these purposes ouly a reasonable `aid’ may be levied. `Aids’ from the city of London are to be treated similarly.
* (13) The city of London shall enjoy all its ancient liberties and free customs, both by land and by water. We also will and grant that all other cities, boroughs, towns, and ports shall enjoy all their liberties and free customs.
* (14) To obtain the general consent of the realm for the assessment of an `aid’ – except in the three cases specified above – or a `scutage’, we will cause the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons to be summoned individually by letter. To those who hold lands directly of us we will cause a general summons to be issued, through the sheriffs and other officials, to come together on a fixed day (of which at least forty days notice shall be given) and at a fixed place. In all letters of summons, the cause of the summons will be stated. When a summons has been issued, the business appointed for the day shall go forward in accordance with the resolution of those present, even if not all those who were summoned have appeared.
* (15) In future we will allow no one to levy an `aid’ from his free men, except to ransom his person, to make his eldest son a knight, and (once) to marry his eldest daughter. For these purposes only a reasonable `aid’ may be levied.
(16) No man shall be forced to perform more service for a knight’s `fee’, or other free holding of land, than is due from it.
(17) Ordinary lawsuits shall not follow the royal court around, but shall be held in a fixed place.
(18) Inquests of novel disseisin, mort d’ancestor, and darrein presentment shall be taken only in their proper county court. We ourselves, or in our absence abroad our chief justice, will send two justices to each county four times a year, and these justices, with four knights of the county elected by the county itself, shall hold the assizes in the county court, on the day and in the place where the court meets.
(19) If any assizes cannot be taken on the day of the county court, as many knights and freeholders shall afterwards remain behind, of those who have attended the court, as will suffice for the administration of justice, having regard to the volume of business to be done.
(20) For a trivial offence, a free man shall be fined only in proportion to the degree of his offence, and for a serious offence correspondingly, but not so heavily as to deprive him of his livelihood. In the same way, a merchant shall be spared his merchandise, and a husbandman the implements of his husbandry, if they fall upon the mercy of a royal court. None of these fines shall be imposed except by the assessment on oath of reputable men of the neighbourhood.
(21) Earls and barons shall be fined only by their equals, and in proportion to the gravity of their offence.
(22) A fine imposed upon the lay property of a clerk in holy orders shall be assessed upon the same principles, without reference to the value of his ecclesiastical benefice.
(23) No town or person shall be forced to build bridges over rivers except those with an ancient obligation to do so.
(24) No sheriff, constable, coroners, or other royal officials are to hold lawsuits that should be held by the royal justices.
* (25) Every county, hundred, wapentake, and tithing shall remain at its ancient rent, without increase, except the royal demesne manors.
(26) If at the death of a man who holds a lay `fee’ of the Crown, a sheriff or royal official produces royal letters patent of summons for a debt due to the Crown, it shall be lawful for them to seize and list movable goods found in the lay `fee’ of the dead man to the value of the debt, as assessed by worthy men. Nothing shall be removed until the whole debt is paid, when the residue shall be given over to the executors to carry out the dead man s will. If no debt is due to the Crown, all the movable goods shall be regarded as the property of the dead man, except the reasonable shares of his wife and children.
* (27) If a free man dies intestate, his movable goods are to be distributed by his next-of-kin and friends, under the supervision of the Church. The rights of his debtors are to be preserved.
(28) No constable or other royal official shall take corn or other movable goods from any man without immediate payment, unless the seller voluntarily offers postponement of this.
(29) No constable may compel a knight to pay money for castle-guard if the knight is willing to undertake the guard in person, or with reasonable excuse to supply some other fit man to do it. A knight taken or sent on military service shall be excused from castle-guard for the period of this servlce.
(30) No sheriff, royal official, or other person shall take horses or carts for transport from any free man, without his consent.
(31) Neither we nor any royal official will take wood for our castle, or for any other purpose, without the consent of the owner.
(32) We will not keep the lands of people convicted of felony in our hand for longer than a year and a day, after which they shall be returned to the lords of the `fees’ concerned.
(33) All fish-weirs shall be removed from the Thames, the Medway, and throughout the whole of England, except on the sea coast.
(34) The writ called precipe shall not in future be issued to anyone in respect of any holding of land, if a free man could thereby be deprived of the right of trial in his own lord’s court.
(35) There shall be standard measures of wine, ale, and corn (the London quarter), throughout the kingdom. There shall also be a standard width of dyed cloth, russett, and haberject, namely two ells within the selvedges. Weights are to be standardised similarly.
(36) In future nothing shall be paid or accepted for the issue of a writ of inquisition of life or limbs. It shall be given gratis, and not refused.
(37) If a man holds land of the Crown by `fee-farm’, `socage’, or `burgage’, and also holds land of someone else for knight’s service, we will not have guardianship of his heir, nor of the land that belongs to the other person’s `fee’, by virtue of the `fee-farm’, `socage’, or `burgage’, unless the `fee-farm’ owes knight’s service. We will not have the guardianship of a man’s heir, or of land that he holds of someone else, by reason of any small property that he may hold of the Crown for a service of knives, arrows, or the like.
(38) In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it.
* (39) No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.
* (40) To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.
(41) All merchants may enter or leave England unharmed and without fear, and may stay or travel within it, by land or water, for purposes of trade, free from all illegal exactions, in accordance with ancient and lawful customs. This, however, does not apply in time of war to merchants from a country that is at war with us. Any such merchants found in our country at the outbreak of war shall be detained without injury to their persons or property, until we or our chief justice have discovered how our own merchants are being treated in the country at war with us. If our own merchants are safe they shall be safe too.
* (42) In future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants – who shall be dealt with as stated above – are excepted from this provision.
(43) If a man holds lands of any `escheat’ such as the `honour’ of Wallingford, Nottingham, Boulogne, Lancaster, or of other `escheats’ in our hand that are baronies, at his death his heir shall give us only the `relief’ and service that he would have made to the baron, had the barony been in the baron’s hand. We will hold the `escheat’ in the same manner as the baron held it.
(44) People who live outside the forest need not in future appear before the royal justices of the forest in answer to general summonses, unless they are actually involved in proceedings or are sureties for someone who has been seized for a forest offence.
* (45) We will appoint as justices, constables, sheriffs, or other officials, only men that know the law of the realm and are minded to keep it well.
(46) All barons who have founded abbeys, and have charters of English kings or ancient tenure as evidence of this, may have guardianship of them when there is no abbot, as is their due.
(47) All forests that have been created in our reign shall at once be disafforested. River-banks that have been enclosed in our reign shall be treated similarly.
* (48) All evil customs relating to forests and warrens, foresters, warreners, sheriffs and their servants, or river-banks and their wardens, are at once to be investigated in every county by twelve sworn knights of the county, and within forty days of their enquiry the evil customs are to be abolished completely and irrevocably. But we, or our chief justice if we are not in England, are first to be informed.
* (49) We will at once return all hostages and charters delivered up to us by Englishmen as security for peace or for loyal service.
* (50) We will remove completely from their offices the kinsmen of Gerard de Athée, and in future they shall hold no offices in England. The people in question are Engelard de Cigogné’, Peter, Guy, and Andrew de Chanceaux, Guy de Cigogné, Geoffrey de Martigny and his brothers, Philip Marc and his brothers, with Geoffrey his nephew, and all their followers.
* (51) As soon as peace is restored, we will remove from the kingdom all the foreign knights, bowmen, their attendants, and the mercenaries that have come to it, to its harm, with horses and arms.
* (52) To any man whom we have deprived or dispossessed of lands, castles, liberties, or rights, without the lawful judgement of his equals, we will at once restore these. In cases of dispute the matter shall be resolved by the judgement of the twenty-five barons referred to below in the clause for securing the peace. In cases, however, where a man was deprived or dispossessed of something without the lawful judgement of his equals by our father King Henry or our brother King Richard, and it remains in our hands or is held by others under our warranty, we shall have respite for the period commonly allowed to Crusaders, unless a lawsuit had been begun, or an enquiry had been made at our order, before we took the Cross as a Crusader. On our return from the Crusade, or if we abandon it, we will at once render justice in full.
* (53) We shall have similar respite in rendering justice in connexion with forests that are to be disafforested, or to remain forests, when these were first a-orested by our father Henry or our brother Richard; with the guardianship of lands in another person’s `fee’, when we have hitherto had this by virtue of a `fee’ held of us for knight’s service by a third party; and with abbeys founded in another person’s `fee’, in which the lord of the `fee’ claims to own a right. On our return from the Crusade, or if we abandon it, we will at once do full justice to complaints about these matters.
(54) No one shall be arrested or imprisoned on the appeal of a woman for the death of any person except her husband.
* (55) All fines that have been given to us unjustiy and against the law of the land, and all fines that we have exacted unjustly, shall be entirely remitted or the matter decided by a majority judgement of the twenty-five barons referred to below in the clause for securing the peace (§ 61) together with Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury, if he can be present, and such others as he wishes to bring with him. If the archbishop cannot be present, proceedings shall continue without him, provided that if any of the twenty-five barons has been involved in a similar suit himself, his judgement shall be set aside, and someone else chosen and sworn in his place, as a substitute for the single occasion, by the rest of the twenty-five.
(56) If we have deprived or dispossessed any Welshmen of lands, liberties, or anything else in England or in Wales, without the lawful judgement of their equals, these are at once to be returned to them. A dispute on this point shall be determined in the Marches by the judgement of equals. English law shall apply to holdings of land in England, Welsh law to those in Wales, and the law of the Marches to those in the Marches. The Welsh shall treat us and ours in the same way.
* (57) In cases where a Welshman was deprived or dispossessed of anything, without the lawful judgement of his equals, by our father King Henry or our brother King Richard, and it remains in our hands or is held by others under our warranty, we shall have respite for the period commonly allowed to Crusaders, unless a lawsuit had been begun, or an enquiry had been made at our order, before we took the Cross as a Crusader. But on our return from the Crusade, or if we abandon it, we will at once do full justice according to the laws of Wales and the said regions.
* (58) We will at once return the son of Llywelyn, all Welsh hostages, and the charters delivered to us as security for the peace.
* (59) With regard to the return of the sisters and hostages of Alexander, king of Scotland, his liberties and his rights, we will treat him in the same way as our other barons of England, unless it appears from the charters that we hold from his father William, formerly king of Scotland, that he should be treated otherwise. This matter shall be resolved by the judgement of his equals in our court.
(60) All these customs and liberties that we have granted shall be observed in our kingdom in so far as concerns our own relations with our subjects. Let all men of our kingdom, whether clergy or laymen, observe them similarly in their relations with their own men.
* (61) SINCE WE HAVE GRANTED ALL THESE THINGS for God, for the better ordering of our kingdom, and to allay the discord that has arisen between us and our barons, and since we desire that they shall be enjoyed in their entirety, with lasting strength, for ever, we give and grant to the barons the following security:
The barons shall elect twenty-five of their number to keep, and cause to be observed with all their might, the peace and liberties granted and confirmed to them by this charter.If we, our chief justice, our officials, or any of our servants offend in any respect against any man, or transgress any of the articles of the peace or of this security, and the offence is made known to four of the said twenty-five barons, they shall come to us – or in our absence from the kingdom to the chief justice – to declare it and claim immediate redress. If we, or in our absence abroad the chiefjustice, make no redress within forty days, reckoning from the day on which the offence was declared to us or to him, the four barons shall refer the matter to the rest of the twenty-five barons, who may distrain upon and assail us in every way possible, with the support of the whole community of the land, by seizing our castles, lands, possessions, or anything else saving only our own person and those of the queen and our children, until they have secured such redress as they have determined upon. Having secured the redress, they may then resume their normal obedience to us.
Any man who so desires may take an oath to obey the commands of the twenty-five barons for the achievement of these ends, and to join with them in assailing us to the utmost of his power. We give public and free permission to take this oath to any man who so desires, and at no time will we prohibit any man from taking it. Indeed, we will compel any of our subjects who are unwilling to take it to swear it at our command.
If-one of the twenty-five barons dies or leaves the country, or is prevented in any other way from discharging his duties, the rest of them shall choose another baron in his place, at their discretion, who shall be duly sworn in as they were.
In the event of disagreement among the twenty-five barons on any matter referred to them for decision, the verdict of the majority present shall have the same validity as a unanimous verdict of the whole twenty-five, whether these were all present or some of those summoned were unwilling or unable to appear.
The twenty-five barons shall swear to obey all the above articles faithfully, and shall cause them to be obeyed by others to the best of their power.
We will not seek to procure from anyone, either by our own efforts or those of a third party, anything by which any part of these concessions or liberties might be revoked or diminished. Should such a thing be procured, it shall be null and void and we will at no time make use of it, either ourselves or through a third party.
* (62) We have remitted and pardoned fully to all men any ill-will, hurt, or grudges that have arisen between us and our subjects, whether clergy or laymen, since the beginning of the dispute. We have in addition remitted fully, and for our own part have also pardoned, to all clergy and laymen any offences committed as a result of the said dispute between Easter in the sixteenth year of our reign (i.e. 1215) and the restoration of peace.
In addition we have caused letters patent to be made for the barons, bearing witness to this security and to the concessions set out above, over the seals of Stephen archbishop of Canterbury, Henry archbishop of Dublin, the other bishops named above, and Master Pandulf.
* (63) IT IS ACCORDINGLY OUR WISH AND COMMAND that the English Church shall be free, and that men in our kingdom shall have and keep all these liberties, rights, and concessions, well and peaceably in their fulness and entirety for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs, in all things and all places for ever.
Both we and the barons have sworn that all this shall be observed in good faith and without deceit. Witness the abovementioned people and many others.
Given by our hand in the meadow that is called Runnymede, between Windsor and Staines, on the fifteenth day of June in the seventeenth year of our reign.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Mass Media: Liberal Media Blindness to Evils of Communism (12Nov09)
Mass Media: Liberal Media Blindness to Evils of Communism (12Nov09)
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/57022
“Better Off Red? Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Recalling the Liberal Media’s Blindness to the Evil of Communism," a report published by the Media Research Center(CNSNews.com)
Twenty years ago this week, the Berlin Wall fell, opening a door to freedom for millions of East Germans who had lived under communism for nearly 50 years. But as a new report documents, much of the major U.S. media coverage of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent downfall of Soviet communism, failed to accurately report the brutal nature of communism and often tipped in favor of the oppressors.
“Communism was a blight on humanity for much of the 20th century. Even Hitler's Holocaust pales next to the 100 million people killed by communist dictators in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Yet our report shows many in the liberal media had a blind spot to this evil ideology,” said Rich Noyes, lead author of the report, “Better Off Red? Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Recalling the Liberal Media’s Blindness to the Evil of Communism.”
“Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, some journalists suggested communism was truly popular among the people it enslaved,” said Noyes.
“After the liberation of Eastern Europe, many journalists argued that the move to capitalism just made things worse, and even with the obvious failure of communism in Europe and Asia, journalists have even recently saluted the virtues of life in Castro's Cuba.”
The report, published by the Media Research Center (MRC) is based upon a compilation and analysis of 22 years of news media reports recorded and archived by the MRC.
Soviet communists occupied East Germany (and East Berlin) at the end of World War II. As the Cold War escalated in the 1950s, movement from East Berlin to West Berlin was restricted more and more by the Soviets.
It is estimated that nearly 3 million people fled from East Germany to West Germany between 1949 and 1961.
To halt the massive emigration, the Soviets in 1961 erected a concrete and barbed-wire wall – the Berlin Wall, separating East and West Berlin – that was 12 feet high, 103 miles long and studded with machine-gun-manned guard towers.
While estimates vary, it is documented that at least 238 people were killed trying to cross over the Berlin Wall into West Berlin over the years and that thousands of other would-be defectors were caught and imprisoned by East German communist police. The last known person to have been killed while trying to cross over the wall was Chris Guffroy, shot on Feb. 5, 1989, while trying to escape to West Berlin.
Before the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, life in communist East Berlin and the Soviet Union was often depicted in positive terms, according to the Better Off Red? report.
For example, then-“CBS Evening News” anchor Dan Rather reported on June 17, 1987, “Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy.”
New York Times journalist Ferdinand Protzman reported on May 15, 1989: “East Germany is the Communist world’s vaunted economic success story, hailed as proof that hard work, discipline and thrift can translate Karl Marx’s theories into reality.”
Andy Rooney of “60 Minutes” wrote in the New York Times on June 26, 1989 that “Communism got to be a terrible word here in the United States, but our attitude toward it may have been unfair. Communism got in with a bad crowd when it was young and never had a fair chance.”
Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today, wrote on Feb. 9, 1990 that “most Soviets don’t want to dump it [communism], just improve upon it.”
After the Berlin Wall fell, it knocked another wall of political dominoes from East Germany through Eastern Europe and then throughout the Soviet Union, leading to that totalitarian state’s collapse in 1991. The country officially became the Russian Federation in 1993, with a president, prime minister and a federal assembly.
During that time, much of the dominant media in the United States lamented the downfall of communism and criticized the rise of free markets and democracy, according to the MRC report.
Noyes and his co-author Scott Whitlock wrote: “As communism retreated from Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990, American reporters seized on the idea that life had suddenly become worse, not better, for those freed from four decades of subjugation.
“Journalists frequently attacked capitalism as somehow more ‘exploitative’ than the totalitarian communism that had officially controlled all economic life.
Viewers were told that communism had provided a ‘security blanket’ for people, who were now ‘miserable’ without the ‘safety net’ and ‘guarantees’ provided by their former masters,” they added.
Some of the news media quotes from that period, as published in the report, include the following:
“Instead of reveling in the collapse of communism, we could head off economic and social havoc by admitting that for most of us, capitalism doesn’t work, either....Homeless, jobless, illiterate people, besieged by guns and drugs, are as bereft of a democratic lifestyle as anybody behind the old Berlin Wall.” – USA Today “Inquiry” Editor Barbara Reynolds, Dec. 8, 1989
“Communism is being swept away, but so too is the social safety net it provided....Factories, previously kept alive only by edicts from Warsaw, are closing their doors, while institutions new to the East — soup kitchens and unemployment centers — are opening theirs.” – Reporter Bert Quint, CBS “This Morning,” May 9, 1990
“East Germany is staggering toward unification, and may get there close to dead on arrival, the victim of an overdose of capitalism.” – ABC reporter Jerry King on the Oct. 1, 1990 “World News Tonight”
“Poles had hoped that the long wait had ended, but it has not. After four decades of standing in communism’s food lines, capitalism has created a new place to wait: at the unemployment office.” – NBC reporter Mike Boettcher, Nov. 16, 1990 “Nightly News”
“Soviet people have become accustomed to security if nothing else. Life isn’t good here, but people don’t go hungry, homeless; a job has always been guaranteed. Now all socialist bets are off. A market economy looms, and the social contract that has held Soviet society together for 72 years no longer applies. The people seem baffled, disappointed, let down. Many don’t like the prospect of their nation becoming just another capitalist machine.” – CNN Moscow reporter Steve Hurst on “PrimeNews,” May 24, 1990
“In the old Soviet Union, you never saw faces like these: the poor, the homeless, and the desperation of the Russian winter. Their numbers are growing. Tonight — is this what democracy does?” – ABC’s Barbara Walters opening “Nightline,” Jan. 14, 1992
“Many here long for the days of Brezhnev. At least then, they say, they had their dignity.” – CBS reporter Tom Fenton, Sept. 24, 1993 “Evening News”
According to The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press), one of the most definitive books on communist atrocities, the political regime in the Soviet Union was responsible for killing at least 20 million people.
Millions of Russians were also recycled through the state’s prison-work camps, the gulag. In addition, some 65 million people were killed in Communist China, 2.5 million in Cambodia, nearly 2 million in Vietnam and an estimated 70,000 in Cuba.
While much of this information was known and accepted by serious scholars in the United States and Europe, many members of the U.S. media either downplayed those facts or focused on other issues when covering either the post-Soviet Union or life today in China and Cuba, according to the report.
“In spite of communism’s appalling human rights record, journalists perversely suggested that the repressive totalitarian system was somehow superior — better for women’s ‘rights,’ for example, or better than the ‘conservative’ Catholic Church,” states Better Off Red?
The report cites examples of this type of journalism, including the following:
“Yes, somehow, Soviet citizens are freer these days — freer to kill one another, freer to hate Jews. … Doing away with totalitarianism and adding a dash of democracy seems an unlikely cure for all that ails the Soviet system.” – Co-host Harry Smith on “CBS This Morning,” Feb. 9, 1990
“The economic and political turmoil that has swept the former Communist East Bloc has hit women the hardest. There’s been a strong backlash against the idea of women’s equality. … Under the Communists, women in the workplace were glorified. And if they needed time off to give birth and raise families, they got it at full pay.” – ABC reporter Jerry King, April 6, 1992 “World News Tonight”
CNN founder Ted Turner compared the KGB with the FBI on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” on Nov. 30, 2008. The FBI, “it’s an honorable place to work,” said Turner. “And the KGB, I think was an honorable place to work. It gave people in the former Soviet Union, a communist country, an opportunity to do something important and worthwhile.”
For a story about Soviet political prisoners being released after communism’s collapse, The New York Times ran a headline on Feb. 12, 1992 that read: “A Gulag Breeds Rage, Yes, But Also Serenity.”
Concerning China, “NBC Nightly News’” John Chancellor reported on June 20, 1989: “Thousands may have been gunned down in Beijing, but what about the millions of American kids whose lives are being ruined by an enormous failure of the country’s educational system. … We can and we should agonize about the dead students in Beijing, but we’ve got a much bigger problem here at home."
CBS reporter Eric Engberg, on the June 7, 1989 edition of “Nightwatch,” said: “Will the military leaders there be embarrassed by this [the Tiananmen Square massacre]? Will this be something like Kent State was for our military?”
On Fidel Castro and communist Cuba, the MRC report states that “even as communism was failing in Europe, journalists continued to lavish positive press on Cuba’s communist regime. Dictator Fidel Castro was painted as a romantic revolutionary, as he had been for more than half a century.”
Authors Noyes and Whitlock also document that “liberal journalists ritualistically repeated Havana’s talking points about their nation having the best health and education systems,” and “during the 2000 custody battle over five-year-old refugee Elian Gonzalez, U.S. reporters weirdly suggested Cuba was ‘a more peaceable society that treasures its children.’”
Some examples of the skewed reporting, according to the report, include the following:
“There is, in Cuba, government intrusion into everyone’s life, from the moment he is born until the day he dies. The reasoning is that the government wants to better the lives of its citizens and keep them from exploiting or hurting one another.” – NBC reporter Ed Rabel on Cuban life, “Sunday Today,” Feb. 28, 1988
“Frankly, to be a poor child in Cuba may in many instances be better than being a poor child in Miami, and I’m not going to condemn their lifestyle so gratuitously.” – Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift on “The McLaughlin Group,” April 8, 2000
“For Castro, freedom starts with education. And if literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on Earth. The literacy rate is 96 percent.” -- Barbara Walters on ABC’s “20/20,” Oct. 11, 2002
Overall, much of the major U.S. media’s reporting on the Berlin Wall and the fall of Soviet communism, as well as communism in general, “failed to accurately portray the evils of communism, with coverage that often tipped in favor of the oppressors, not the oppressed,” the report stated.
“At the very least, journalists should take this opportunity to investigate the human rights abuses and oppression that still exists in the world’s last totally communist states, Cuba and North Korea,” it added.
Asked whether many reporters in the U.S. media were sympathetic to the Soviet Union and its political agenda, Noyes told CNSNews.com that the data indicate that “some journalists seemed to believe there was merit in the communist ideology,” noting Andy Rooney’s op-ed in the New York Times that called communism an “uplifting idea.”
However, in general, said Noyes, “today's liberals are believers in using the power of government to re-shape society to meet their own goals, and liberal journalists are no exception.”
“But if reporters really see their role as speaking truth to power, they should have the deepest suspicion of the concentrated power of the totalitarian state,” he said. “Instead, the coverage too often tips in favor of the oppressors, not the oppressed.”
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/57022
“Better Off Red? Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Recalling the Liberal Media’s Blindness to the Evil of Communism," a report published by the Media Research Center(CNSNews.com)
Twenty years ago this week, the Berlin Wall fell, opening a door to freedom for millions of East Germans who had lived under communism for nearly 50 years. But as a new report documents, much of the major U.S. media coverage of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent downfall of Soviet communism, failed to accurately report the brutal nature of communism and often tipped in favor of the oppressors.
“Communism was a blight on humanity for much of the 20th century. Even Hitler's Holocaust pales next to the 100 million people killed by communist dictators in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Yet our report shows many in the liberal media had a blind spot to this evil ideology,” said Rich Noyes, lead author of the report, “Better Off Red? Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Recalling the Liberal Media’s Blindness to the Evil of Communism.”
“Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, some journalists suggested communism was truly popular among the people it enslaved,” said Noyes.
“After the liberation of Eastern Europe, many journalists argued that the move to capitalism just made things worse, and even with the obvious failure of communism in Europe and Asia, journalists have even recently saluted the virtues of life in Castro's Cuba.”
The report, published by the Media Research Center (MRC) is based upon a compilation and analysis of 22 years of news media reports recorded and archived by the MRC.
Soviet communists occupied East Germany (and East Berlin) at the end of World War II. As the Cold War escalated in the 1950s, movement from East Berlin to West Berlin was restricted more and more by the Soviets.
It is estimated that nearly 3 million people fled from East Germany to West Germany between 1949 and 1961.
To halt the massive emigration, the Soviets in 1961 erected a concrete and barbed-wire wall – the Berlin Wall, separating East and West Berlin – that was 12 feet high, 103 miles long and studded with machine-gun-manned guard towers.
While estimates vary, it is documented that at least 238 people were killed trying to cross over the Berlin Wall into West Berlin over the years and that thousands of other would-be defectors were caught and imprisoned by East German communist police. The last known person to have been killed while trying to cross over the wall was Chris Guffroy, shot on Feb. 5, 1989, while trying to escape to West Berlin.
Before the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, life in communist East Berlin and the Soviet Union was often depicted in positive terms, according to the Better Off Red? report.
For example, then-“CBS Evening News” anchor Dan Rather reported on June 17, 1987, “Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy.”
New York Times journalist Ferdinand Protzman reported on May 15, 1989: “East Germany is the Communist world’s vaunted economic success story, hailed as proof that hard work, discipline and thrift can translate Karl Marx’s theories into reality.”
Andy Rooney of “60 Minutes” wrote in the New York Times on June 26, 1989 that “Communism got to be a terrible word here in the United States, but our attitude toward it may have been unfair. Communism got in with a bad crowd when it was young and never had a fair chance.”
Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today, wrote on Feb. 9, 1990 that “most Soviets don’t want to dump it [communism], just improve upon it.”
After the Berlin Wall fell, it knocked another wall of political dominoes from East Germany through Eastern Europe and then throughout the Soviet Union, leading to that totalitarian state’s collapse in 1991. The country officially became the Russian Federation in 1993, with a president, prime minister and a federal assembly.
During that time, much of the dominant media in the United States lamented the downfall of communism and criticized the rise of free markets and democracy, according to the MRC report.
Noyes and his co-author Scott Whitlock wrote: “As communism retreated from Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990, American reporters seized on the idea that life had suddenly become worse, not better, for those freed from four decades of subjugation.
“Journalists frequently attacked capitalism as somehow more ‘exploitative’ than the totalitarian communism that had officially controlled all economic life.
Viewers were told that communism had provided a ‘security blanket’ for people, who were now ‘miserable’ without the ‘safety net’ and ‘guarantees’ provided by their former masters,” they added.
Some of the news media quotes from that period, as published in the report, include the following:
“Instead of reveling in the collapse of communism, we could head off economic and social havoc by admitting that for most of us, capitalism doesn’t work, either....Homeless, jobless, illiterate people, besieged by guns and drugs, are as bereft of a democratic lifestyle as anybody behind the old Berlin Wall.” – USA Today “Inquiry” Editor Barbara Reynolds, Dec. 8, 1989
“Communism is being swept away, but so too is the social safety net it provided....Factories, previously kept alive only by edicts from Warsaw, are closing their doors, while institutions new to the East — soup kitchens and unemployment centers — are opening theirs.” – Reporter Bert Quint, CBS “This Morning,” May 9, 1990
“East Germany is staggering toward unification, and may get there close to dead on arrival, the victim of an overdose of capitalism.” – ABC reporter Jerry King on the Oct. 1, 1990 “World News Tonight”
“Poles had hoped that the long wait had ended, but it has not. After four decades of standing in communism’s food lines, capitalism has created a new place to wait: at the unemployment office.” – NBC reporter Mike Boettcher, Nov. 16, 1990 “Nightly News”
“Soviet people have become accustomed to security if nothing else. Life isn’t good here, but people don’t go hungry, homeless; a job has always been guaranteed. Now all socialist bets are off. A market economy looms, and the social contract that has held Soviet society together for 72 years no longer applies. The people seem baffled, disappointed, let down. Many don’t like the prospect of their nation becoming just another capitalist machine.” – CNN Moscow reporter Steve Hurst on “PrimeNews,” May 24, 1990
“In the old Soviet Union, you never saw faces like these: the poor, the homeless, and the desperation of the Russian winter. Their numbers are growing. Tonight — is this what democracy does?” – ABC’s Barbara Walters opening “Nightline,” Jan. 14, 1992
“Many here long for the days of Brezhnev. At least then, they say, they had their dignity.” – CBS reporter Tom Fenton, Sept. 24, 1993 “Evening News”
According to The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press), one of the most definitive books on communist atrocities, the political regime in the Soviet Union was responsible for killing at least 20 million people.
Millions of Russians were also recycled through the state’s prison-work camps, the gulag. In addition, some 65 million people were killed in Communist China, 2.5 million in Cambodia, nearly 2 million in Vietnam and an estimated 70,000 in Cuba.
While much of this information was known and accepted by serious scholars in the United States and Europe, many members of the U.S. media either downplayed those facts or focused on other issues when covering either the post-Soviet Union or life today in China and Cuba, according to the report.
“In spite of communism’s appalling human rights record, journalists perversely suggested that the repressive totalitarian system was somehow superior — better for women’s ‘rights,’ for example, or better than the ‘conservative’ Catholic Church,” states Better Off Red?
The report cites examples of this type of journalism, including the following:
“Yes, somehow, Soviet citizens are freer these days — freer to kill one another, freer to hate Jews. … Doing away with totalitarianism and adding a dash of democracy seems an unlikely cure for all that ails the Soviet system.” – Co-host Harry Smith on “CBS This Morning,” Feb. 9, 1990
“The economic and political turmoil that has swept the former Communist East Bloc has hit women the hardest. There’s been a strong backlash against the idea of women’s equality. … Under the Communists, women in the workplace were glorified. And if they needed time off to give birth and raise families, they got it at full pay.” – ABC reporter Jerry King, April 6, 1992 “World News Tonight”
CNN founder Ted Turner compared the KGB with the FBI on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” on Nov. 30, 2008. The FBI, “it’s an honorable place to work,” said Turner. “And the KGB, I think was an honorable place to work. It gave people in the former Soviet Union, a communist country, an opportunity to do something important and worthwhile.”
For a story about Soviet political prisoners being released after communism’s collapse, The New York Times ran a headline on Feb. 12, 1992 that read: “A Gulag Breeds Rage, Yes, But Also Serenity.”
Concerning China, “NBC Nightly News’” John Chancellor reported on June 20, 1989: “Thousands may have been gunned down in Beijing, but what about the millions of American kids whose lives are being ruined by an enormous failure of the country’s educational system. … We can and we should agonize about the dead students in Beijing, but we’ve got a much bigger problem here at home."
CBS reporter Eric Engberg, on the June 7, 1989 edition of “Nightwatch,” said: “Will the military leaders there be embarrassed by this [the Tiananmen Square massacre]? Will this be something like Kent State was for our military?”
On Fidel Castro and communist Cuba, the MRC report states that “even as communism was failing in Europe, journalists continued to lavish positive press on Cuba’s communist regime. Dictator Fidel Castro was painted as a romantic revolutionary, as he had been for more than half a century.”
Authors Noyes and Whitlock also document that “liberal journalists ritualistically repeated Havana’s talking points about their nation having the best health and education systems,” and “during the 2000 custody battle over five-year-old refugee Elian Gonzalez, U.S. reporters weirdly suggested Cuba was ‘a more peaceable society that treasures its children.’”
Some examples of the skewed reporting, according to the report, include the following:
“There is, in Cuba, government intrusion into everyone’s life, from the moment he is born until the day he dies. The reasoning is that the government wants to better the lives of its citizens and keep them from exploiting or hurting one another.” – NBC reporter Ed Rabel on Cuban life, “Sunday Today,” Feb. 28, 1988
“Frankly, to be a poor child in Cuba may in many instances be better than being a poor child in Miami, and I’m not going to condemn their lifestyle so gratuitously.” – Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift on “The McLaughlin Group,” April 8, 2000
“For Castro, freedom starts with education. And if literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on Earth. The literacy rate is 96 percent.” -- Barbara Walters on ABC’s “20/20,” Oct. 11, 2002
Overall, much of the major U.S. media’s reporting on the Berlin Wall and the fall of Soviet communism, as well as communism in general, “failed to accurately portray the evils of communism, with coverage that often tipped in favor of the oppressors, not the oppressed,” the report stated.
“At the very least, journalists should take this opportunity to investigate the human rights abuses and oppression that still exists in the world’s last totally communist states, Cuba and North Korea,” it added.
Asked whether many reporters in the U.S. media were sympathetic to the Soviet Union and its political agenda, Noyes told CNSNews.com that the data indicate that “some journalists seemed to believe there was merit in the communist ideology,” noting Andy Rooney’s op-ed in the New York Times that called communism an “uplifting idea.”
However, in general, said Noyes, “today's liberals are believers in using the power of government to re-shape society to meet their own goals, and liberal journalists are no exception.”
“But if reporters really see their role as speaking truth to power, they should have the deepest suspicion of the concentrated power of the totalitarian state,” he said. “Instead, the coverage too often tips in favor of the oppressors, not the oppressed.”
Sarah Palin: The New Populist (12Nov09)
The Palin Persuasion
Matthew Continetti: A Case For The New Populism.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/12/opinion/main5630041.shtml
If Sarah Palin visits Nashville on her book tour, she really ought to stop by the Hermitage. Andrew Jackson's plantation is a lot more than a beautifully restored example of Greek Revival architecture and design. It's also a monument to the seventh president's democratic legacy--of rule by the people, of competitive commercial markets, of entrepreneurial individuals lighting out to the territories. It's a legacy to which Palin is heiress. And one she ought to embrace.
To be sure, by today's standards, Jackson's record is mixed. He was a slave owner whose Indian policy was nothing less than cruel. His war on the Second Bank of the United States had some dreadful economic consequences. But, when we look at Jackson today, the positive traits stand out.
More than any other politician of his era, Andrew Jackson aligned himself with the common man against self-dealing elites.
Lacking formal education, he nonetheless understood that incumbents, whether in the market or in politics, raise barriers to entry in order to protect their positions. And because he sought to unsettle those entrenched interests, Jackson was at the vanguard of a spirited popular upheaval.
The Jacksonian era was the first populist moment in American politics.
But it wasn't the last. There is something about the structure of American democracy that encourages periodic upsurges in popular opinion directed at nogood-niks on the East Coast. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Democratic congressman and thrice presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan rallied his followers against agglomerations of power in New York and Washington. In Jackson's time, the bad guys had been Nicholas Biddle, his bank, and supporters of the tariff. In Bryan's time, the bad guys were the corporate monopolists who squelched individual risk-taking and their bag-men in the legislature whose monetary and trade policies favored big business over the small farmer.
Bryan's reputation, like Jackson's, has pockmarks. He was sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan. He prosecuted Darwin's theory of natural selection in the heavily publicized Scopes "monkey" trial of 1925.
The elites of Bryan's time certainly hated the prairie populist.
To them, he was an ill-mannered dunce from the boonies and his supporters nothing more than a rabble. Such anxiety was understandable. Bryan was a rebel. He liked to quote Jackson's adage of "equal rights to all and special privileges to none." He didn't want to overturn the government, but he did want to ensure that government lived up to its duty to "protect all from injustice and to do so without showing partiality for any one or any class."
In Bryan's view, the nation's elites had grown complacent. Irresponsible. In their lust for power, they endangered the American ethos of equality of opportunity.
Over the last century, the popular energies that fueled Jackson and Bryan shifted to the right side of the political spectrum.
Increasingly, the public directed its animosity at the bureaucratic and governmental elites who robbed ordinary folk of liberties in the pursuit of "social justice."
At the judges who designed busing schemes that disrupted neighborhood schools.
At government-induced inflation and high marginal tax rates that destroyed savings and prevented the taxpayer from spending his earned income as he saw fit.
At regulatory agencies that micromanaged the trucking, airline, power, and telecommunications sectors to the detriment of competition, innovation, and affordability.
For the last quarter century, right-wing populism, often infused with social conservatism, has been the most demonized force in American politics--and also the most interesting and dynamic.
When the historian Michael Kazin wrote his 1995 book The Populist Persuasion, he counted Ronald Reagan among Bryan's heirs.
These days, references to Bryan show up in unexpected places. Kazin notes that Bryan's second-favorite book (the first was the Bible) was The Jefferson Cyclopedia, a collection of the third president's thoughts organized by topic.
When you google "Jefferson Cyclopedia" today, the first link doesn't take you to the Democratic party. It takes you to the Campaign for Liberty, a Ron Paul group.
In this country, whenever the public concludes that elite behavior is opaque and self-interested, a popular reaction ensues.
In part, Barack Obama was elected president because of widespread discontent with the way Washington had managed its basic roles of fighting wars and maintaining the financial system.
But Obama, who advertised that he had the common touch during the campaign, has governed as an elitist.
He's dismissed the populist revolts against his policies.
And so Americans continue to look at New York and Washington with suspicion.
Trust in government remains low.
The president's job approval rating is less than 50 percent.
Congressional approval is at a dismal 20 percent.
When the average American looks at the headlines, he sees the government bailing out large, failed, politically connected enterprises even as the unemployment rate rises to 10 percent.
The average American sees the Obama administration exaggerating the role its fiscal stimulus has played in reviving the economy, even though unemployment is higher than the administration's models predicted.
(The average American also understands that there is no way to measure the number of jobs the White House has "saved.")
The Average American sees the president and Congress eager to pass a costly health care bill against the public's wishes; businesses funding Democratic campaigns so as not to be punished; the rich increasingly voting Democratic.
In short, the average American sees a river of power and wealth flowing inexorably to Washington, D.C.
The public's negative reaction to Beltway profligacy has been visceral.
The government is shoveling money to powerful interest groups, and the man on the street feels left out.
In September, the Democratic pollster Peter Hart asked registered voters who they thought had benefited most from the Obama administration's economic policies.
Sixty-two percent said the main beneficiary had been the "large banks."
In contrast, 65 percent said the "average working person" and "small businesses" had not been helped.
Seventy-three percent said "my family/myself" had not been helped.
Public opinion registers a widespread skepticism of government and elite decision-making.
The percentage of voters who say that government is doing too much has risen to 50 percent.
The percentage of voters who say that government should "worry more" about keeping the deficit low has risen to 62 percent.
When pollsters ask voters what their priorities are, the economy is always the number one answer, but the deficit and national debt are not far behind.
In the September NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, for instance, the deficit was voter priority number three. These worries are more than punctilious accounting. They relate to larger concerns over the government's unchecked fiscal power and its right role in American society.
What's most interesting about the popular ferment is that it transcends party.
The number of self-identified independents has risen as the number of Democrats and Republicans has declined (in the GOP's case, to a generational low).
About twice as many people call themselves "conservative" as "Republican," which means that a large chunk of potential Republican voters are alienated from the national party.
We saw this divergence at play in the fight over the populist candidacy of conservative Doug Hoffman in New York's 23rd Congressional District.
We see it in the ongoing debate over whether populist talk radio is good for the GOP's electoral prospects.
Above all, the public is dissatisfied with the solutions that both parties have to offer.
But, because today's populists lack institutional support, and because they don't have a programmatic agenda, they vent their frustrations in disorganized ways. The left-wing populists rail against CEO compensation, bank bailouts, and lobbyist influence in government.
The right-wing populists attack the auto bailouts, government spending, and Obamacare. There is no central authority directing the tea party protestors. There was no single leader who ordered the 9/12 taxpayer march on Washington. Instead, you have multiple voices, with overlapping (and sometimes contradictory) antagonisms, agendas, and priorities.
The upshot is a creative and unregulated political marketplace. The most compelling figures and ideas prosper. No one has a dominant position. But it's also clear that what Michael Barone has called the "balance of enthusiasm" in politics is now squarely on the right. And yet, like all markets, the political trading post is prone to bubbles, excesses, rumors, and even the occasional conspiracy theory.
All of which creates a gigantic opening for a politician to display imagination and leadership.
An opportunity for a figure who will separate the good populism (championing free-enterprising individuals) from the bad (concocting loony theories and vilifying "enemies of the people").
Someone who will give voice to the millions:
who don't want government aggrandizing the powerful;
who don't want government risking dangerous fiscal imbalances;
who do want public policies that create the conditions for a general prosperity.
Someone, in other words, who can play the same role in contemporary politics that Jackson, Bryan, and Reagan did in the past.
She lives in Alaska.
The similarities between Jackson, Bryan, Reagan, and Sarah Palin are striking.
This is not to say that they are alike in every respect. Nor is it to say that Palin's achievements to date rank with the others'. And, of course, American populism is a deep and complex tradition. But it's nonetheless true that a couple of traits span the centuries and unify these four political figures. The first is the reaction they provoke among the elites of their age--what one might call the "Coonskin Cap Critique." The second is their advocacy of dispersed power, open markets, and American individualism.
Elites regard challenges to their authority with condescension and contempt.
They routinely underestimate the capacities of populist leaders.
They mock their enemies as uneducated provincials who lack expert knowledge and therefore have no place interfering in politics.
They contemptuously refer to the supporters of populist politicians as an ill-kempt and dangerous mob.
When Andrew Jackson's supporters flooded the capital to celebrate their hero's ascent to the presidency, elite opinion was aghast.
In his Andrew Jackson, H.W. Brands quotes a D.C. resident writing:
To us, who had witnessed the quiet and orderly period of the Adams administration, it seemed as if half the nation had rushed at once into the capital. It was like the inundation of the northern barbarians into Rome, save that the tumultuous tide came in from a different point of the compass. The West and the South seemed to have precipitated themselves upon the North and overwhelmed it.
Supreme Court justice Joseph Story was equally shocked: "The reign of King 'Mob,' seemed triumphant," he lamented.
The press of William Jennings Bryan's time saw the same thing.
They called his supporters revolutionaries. Anarchists. Socialists. Dangers to the republic.
In one editorial cartoon, Bryan is portrayed as a snake.
In another, he's portrayed as an unruly little boy showing off the ugly contraption he's built--the populist Democratic party--to a worried Uncle Sam.
When the Reagan era rolled around, the Gipper's conservative supporters were "right-wing extremists" engaged in a racist "backlash."
Later, "angry white men" brought Newt Gingrich to power in the 1994 Republican Revolution.
When Sarah Palin-loving activists held anti-big government tea parties and engaged in rowdy behavior at congressional town halls in the summer of 2009, Democrats took out the carving knives once more.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer wrote of an "ugly campaign" that was "simply un-American."
The advocates of the Coonskin Cap Critique love to tar their opponents as dangerous zealots.
The Philadelphia Monthly likened Andrew Jackson and his followers to "Peter the Hermit" and "his rabble of Christian vagabonds." Nicholas Biddle, head of the Bank of the United States, described Jackson's veto message killing the bank as "a manifesto of anarchy, such as Marat and Robespierre might have issued to the mob."
To H.L. Mencken, William Jennings Bryan was the "Fundamentalist Pope" who represented everything the Sage of Baltimore disliked about America.
During the 1980 presidential campaign, liberals sought to portray Ronald Reagan as an ideologue and lunatic who risked plunging the world into armageddon.
In one editorial, the Nation declared, "We believe that a Ronald Reagan victory increases the chances for nuclear war."
Last year in Newsweek, Jon Meacham wrote that "-Palin's populist view of high office" is "dangerous."
Then, when Sarah Palin brought up Barack Obama's association with William Ayers on the campaign trail, the pundit tribe went nuts.
Bill Maher likened a Palin rally to a "hate-fest."
E.J. Dionne speculated that John McCain may have "become the midwife of a new movement built around fear, xenophobia, racism, and anger."
The Chicago Sun-Times columnist Andrew Greeley wrote that Sarah Palin was "a racist with her eye on the White House."
The elite's great fear is that their supposed intellectual inferiors might rule them.
John Quincy Adams described Jackson as "a barbarian and savage who could scarcely spell his own name."
The journalist Charles Willis Thompson wrote of Bryan, "He did not merely resemble that average man, he was that average man."
(Even historians can't help taking shots at Bryan's intellectual ability. His "capacity to convince himself," Richard Hofstadter wrote, was "probably the only exceptional thing about his mind.")
Michael Kinsley pronounced Reagan "not terribly bright."
Nicholas von Hoffman found it "humiliating" that "this unlettered, self-assured bumpkin" had been elected president.
To William Greider, Reagan was a "hopeless clown."
It's Pavlovian: Whenever the arbiters of educated opinion witness the emergence of a populist leader, they spew insults.
Sarah Palin has been called--among many, many other things--a "bantamweight cheerleader" (Maureen Dowd), an "airhead" (Charles Wohlforth), an "idiot" (Victoria Coren), a "character too dumb even for daytime TV" (Matt Taibbi), a "puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious beliefs" (Taibbi again), and a "white trash trophy wife wearing glasses so she looks intellectual" (Catherine Deveny).
Sarah Palin's opponents will go to any lengths to prove that she is stupid.
They've forged her SAT scores.
They've prank-called her posing as foreign leaders.
They tout every rumor or myth that fits into their world view and dismiss all contrary evidence.
At root, the Coonskin Cap Critique is about the battle between the country and the city.
Jackson's strongest supporters were small landowners on the Appalachian frontier finally able to exercise the franchise.
Bryan's were the indebted prairie farmers who took a hit during an era of falling agricultural prices.
By the age of Reagan, America was transitioning rapidly to a service economy, and most Americans lived in cities and suburbs.
The geographical frontier had closed.
But the imaginative frontier--the beckoning American horizon of innovation and enterprise--remained.
Intellectuals belittled Reagan because he believed in this frontier of the imagination.
Cosmopolitans detested him because he represented the provincial folkways of small town America.
In a 1980 Nation essay, E.L. Doctorow wrote that Reagan was the product of such towns as Galesburg, Monmouth, and Dixon--just the sorts of places responsible for one of the raging themes of American literature, the soul-murdering complacency of our provinces, without which the careers of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Willa Cather, to name just a few, would never have found glory.
The best and brightest fled all our Galesburgs and Dixons, if they could, but RonaldReagan was not among them.
Twenty-eight years later, in describing Sarah Palin's Wasilla, the journalist Heather Mallick wrote that "small towns are places that smart people escape from, for privacy, for variety, for intellect, for survival. Palin should have stayed home."
The antiprovincial, antipopulist critique is not only perennial. It's indestructible.
Because Andrew Jackson was the founder of the modern Democratic party, we have a tendency to look at him through big-government eyes. We draw a line that starts with Jackson, runs through Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR, and ends up at Barack Obama. But the facts are more complicated than that.
Jackson and Bryan were representatives of an American system where self-made folks reaped the fruits of their labor without government meddling.
There's a connection between a faith in the democratic wisdom of the crowd and support for free markets.
Jackson and Bryan didn't feel that government should play favorites or manipulate society according to intellectual fashions.
They felt it should level the playing field so that men of all stations, possessed with initiative and enthusiasm, could thrive in commercial society.
As Richard Hofstadter wrote in the American Political Tradition (1948), like the Jacksonians, "Bryan felt that he represented a cause that was capable of standing on its own feet without special assistance from the government. The majority of the people, he declaimed, who produced the nation's wealth in peace and rallied to its flag in war, asked for nothing from the government but 'even-handed justice.' "
Ronald Reagan possessed a similar optimism about the individual capacities of the American people.
Ronald Reagan's basic faith in American decency--his democratic faith--was more than a personal tic or a political tactic.
It was one of the pillars of Ronald Reagan's philosophy.
It gave Ronald Reagan the courage to dismiss moral equivalence in foreign policy and challenge Democratic existing beliefs.
If you believe--as Jackson, Bryan, and Reagan did--that left to their own devices Americans will create a free, just, and prosperous society, the task of politics is simple.
Identify the obstacles impeding the American spirit and eliminate them.
Is tight money dampening economic growth? Kill the national bank.
Are tariffs depressing farm wages? Reduce them.
Is inflation robbing the middle class and high taxes limiting investment? Squeeze out inflation and lower the tax rates.
The people will take care of the rest.
In the past, populist leaders have understood that when large organizations--corporate or governmental--exercise power, the main beneficiaries tend to be large organizations.
The populist therefore aligns himself or herself with the folks who aren't displayed in portraiture. He/She is on the side of the small businessman and the ordinary individual.
"When the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages, artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer, and the potent more powerful," Jackson wrote in his bank veto message, "the humble members of society--the farmers, mechanics, and laborers--who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government."
Likewise, the 1908 Democratic party platform, with Bryan as the nominee, stated: " 'Shall the people rule?' is the overshadowing issue which manifests itself in all the questions now under discussion."
Among other things, the platform attacked "the heedless waste of the people's money."
It called for free trade and the "reduction of import duties."
It favored the "election of United States Senators by direct vote of the people."
Later in the 20th century, President Ford would nod to the populists when he said, "Here, the people rule."
In a 1978 radio commentary that he wrote while overlooking traffic from a hotel room window, Reagan distilled the populist belief in individual ability.
"They are not 'the masses,' or as the elitists would have it, 'the common man,' " Reagan said of the people driving cars on the highway below.
"They are very uncommon. Individuals, each with his or her own hopes and dreams, plans and problems, and the kind of quiet courage that makes this whole country run better than just about any other place on earth."
Reagan's mission was to remove the obstacles that prevented these men and women with "quiet courage" from realizing their potential.
Populist leaders have held very modest views of government.
"Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government," Jackson wrote in his bank message.
"Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions."
In Bryan's view, government was so easily corrupted that it needed to be subject to constant democratic renewal.
"The conscience of the nation," the 1908 Democratic platform stated, "is now aroused to free the Government from the grip of those who have made it a business asset of the favor-seeking corporations."
Reagan famously likened government to a baby--"an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."
And Sarah Palin?
Time and again, she has run against elites who, in her view, are ignoring the public interest.
She overthrew a three-term incumbent mayor of Wasilla because he wasn't as conservative as the people he represented.
She used sales tax revenues and bond issues to help the town grow into a thriving suburb.
She knocked off a Republican energy commissioner, a Republican attorney general, and an incumbent Republican governor because she felt that they were helping themselves and their friends and not the Alaskan people.
As governor, she passed a sweeping ethics reform, changed the tax code so Alaskans got their fair share of oil revenues, and introduced competition and transparency into the construction of a natural gas pipeline.
Palin has an intuitive faith in builders and traders, in hockey moms and plumbers.
She is clearly on the side of competitive, entrepreneurial capitalism.
But she hasn't spent much time on the national stage. Nor has she tied her pointed criticisms of the Obama agenda and the liberal media to a larger argument about how ordinary people with common sense can rescue the American economy and revitalize American democracy.
Sarah Palin has Jacksonian instincts, but she still hasn't forged her own political persuasion. Time to add flesh to the bone.
For example, take energy policy.
Last week, when Joe Biden traveled to upstate New York to campaign for Democratic congressional candidate Bill Owens, the vice president took aim at Sarah Palin. "The fact of the matter is that Sarah Palin thinks the answer to energy was 'drill, baby, drill,' " Biden said. "No, it's a lot more complicated, Sarah, than 'drill, baby, drill.' "
A good sign of condescension is when someone tells you that "things are more complicated" than you think.
In truth, as Sarah Palin pointed out on her Facebook page later that day, she has "always advocated an all-of-the-above approach to American energy independence."
It was Biden and not Sarah Palin who was treading dangerous policy ground.
Sarah Palin's positions align squarely with the American people's.
In an August ABC News/Washington Post poll, for instance, almost two-thirds of respondents supported more oil and gas drilling.
A 52-percent majority favored building more nuclear power plants.
A similar majority supported additional coal mining.
Fifty-one percent wanted "more power plants that burn oil, coal, and natural gas."
And another two-thirds favored constructing nuclear power plants within 50 miles of their homes.
The popular and sensible approach to energy policy is obvious.
Remove the restrictions on offshore oil exploration--if Obama thinks it's fine for Brazil to drill offshore, why can't the United States?
Lower tariffs and reduce subsidies for domestically produced ethanol.
Get rid of the regulations limiting the construction of oil refineries.
Dismiss airy prophecies about "peak oil," "green jobs," and "limits to growth."
Pledge, instead, that Americans will have access to as much of the cheapest, cleanest energy they need to stimulate the economy.
Sarah Palin is right.
No limits.
"All of the above" is best.
Or take health policy.
In the tradition of Jackson, Bryan, and Reagan, Palin could point out that the price of health care is rising because the market in health care is broken.
When you buy insurance in the individual market, you don't receive the same tax break as large corporations who buy group plans for their employees. Instead of one, more-or-less free market for health insurance, there are 50 heavily regulated state markets.
The mandates for insurance that state governments impose--guaranteed coverage for hair plugs or in vitro fertilization, for instance--increase prices.
And since an individual cannot shop for insurance across state lines, a young, healthy person in mandate-manic New York cannot buy a low premium, high-deductible plan on offer in lightly regulated Utah.
Meanwhile, state and federal government, which accounts for a large (46 percent in 2006) and growing portion of national health spending, uses its monopoly power to bid down the price of the medical services it purchases, and thereby raises costs for everyone else.
Medicare fraud is rampant. Defensive medicine increases expenditures. And doctors and hospitals are under no obligation to share prices with consumers until after services are rendered--which means that patients cannot shop around for the most affordable treatments.
What's a populist to do?
Trust in the commercial ideal, and dismantle the regulatory barriers to true competition and innovation in the health care marketplace.
Next, consider the financial sector.
The government is doing its best to prop up failed giants at the expense of competition and innovation.
Held to the standards of the marketplace, companies like GM, Chrysler, AIG, GMAC, and Citi probably would disappear.
They'd be bought and sold, carved up into little pieces, and the overpaid CEOs who made bad bets would lose their jobs.
Instead, these firms are on government life-support.
Hundreds of billions in taxpayer money is propping them up.
The dollars keeping GM alive and UAW workers employed are dollars that could be spent more productively elsewhere.
The dollars enriching Vikram Pandit and his cronies are being financed by Americans who aren't even born.
Worse, rather than bury the idea of "too big to fail," the Obama regulatory scheme would enshrine it.
The administration seems bent on repeating the same mistakes that Japan made in the 1990s, when political favoritism triumphed over regulated capitalism.
The result was the zombie banks that haunt the Japanese economy to this day.
Jackson, Bryan, and Reagan would be furious at the way the financial crisis has been handled.
They would want to break down the ossified constellations of power.
They would want to let new businesses replace the old.
Step one is to set a timeline for withdrawal from the bailout state.
Policymakers need to be clear that they have no intention of maintaining these huge transfers of wealth for much longer. Rather than micromanage government-owned banks and auto companies, they need to focus on weaning them off the federal teat. For the banks, a complicated and technocratic regulatory scheme isn't necessary. A few simple rules that separate the solvent banks from the insolvent would suffice.
Feeling outrage and impotence over the actions of Wall Street bankers and government regulators is natural and understandable, Sarah Palin could say. But the answer isn't further government control and politicization. It's using government to break apart concentrations of power--and then stepping back to watch as the market imposes its iron discipline.
Last year the public elected an inspirational leader who promised change. Barack Obama promised to open government, end insiderism, and confer no special privileges. He promised to reach across the aisle and adopt his opponents' best ideas.
This was all an illusion.
As the Obama presidency has developed, people have realized that this is not the change they sought.
The Treasury secretary is a tax cheat overseeing a Wall Street bailout program.
The congressman in charge of the tax code is under investigation for various frauds.
From auto bailouts to the stimulus to health care, the president has implemented or advocated policies of which the people disapprove.
Obama's governing style is based on personal interaction with major policy stakeholders. So, when the president formulates a policy, he brings into the White House all the titans of industry and top lobbyists who might be affected. The rule applies whether the issue is the financial system, climate change, or health care: Obama listens to and makes deals with market incumbents. The theory is that such negotiations will produce legislation that satisfies everyone involved. But whatever the benefits, the costs are all too clear:
Incumbent stakeholders use government access to drive out competition, increase their leverage, and limit transparency.
In other words, Obama has rejected the tradition of Jackson, Bryan, and Reagan.
Obama has rejected putting trust in the common wisdom and collective judgments of the American people.
Obama has sought comfort in the "expert" knowledge of technocratic elites.
Liberal Democrats in Congress set the agenda.
The unions drive trade, health, and labor policy.
The bankers drive economic policy.
Joe Six Pack is left out in the cold.
But the elites continue to mess things up.
Confidence in American institutions continues to erode.
Faith in the American future continues to decline.
Is there an exit?
Yes.
All it would take is for a populist leader like the one in Wasilla to pick up the Jacksonian, Bryanite, Reaganite torch and deliver this simple message to Obama and the political class:
You shall not press down upon the brow of mankind this big-government crown of thorns.
You shall not crucify mankind upon the cross of Goldman Sachs.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
(Weekly Standard) Matthew Continetti is the associate editor of The Weekly Standard. His The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried To Bring Down a Rising Star is published this week by Sentinel Books.
Matthew Continetti: A Case For The New Populism.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/12/opinion/main5630041.shtml
If Sarah Palin visits Nashville on her book tour, she really ought to stop by the Hermitage. Andrew Jackson's plantation is a lot more than a beautifully restored example of Greek Revival architecture and design. It's also a monument to the seventh president's democratic legacy--of rule by the people, of competitive commercial markets, of entrepreneurial individuals lighting out to the territories. It's a legacy to which Palin is heiress. And one she ought to embrace.
To be sure, by today's standards, Jackson's record is mixed. He was a slave owner whose Indian policy was nothing less than cruel. His war on the Second Bank of the United States had some dreadful economic consequences. But, when we look at Jackson today, the positive traits stand out.
More than any other politician of his era, Andrew Jackson aligned himself with the common man against self-dealing elites.
Lacking formal education, he nonetheless understood that incumbents, whether in the market or in politics, raise barriers to entry in order to protect their positions. And because he sought to unsettle those entrenched interests, Jackson was at the vanguard of a spirited popular upheaval.
The Jacksonian era was the first populist moment in American politics.
But it wasn't the last. There is something about the structure of American democracy that encourages periodic upsurges in popular opinion directed at nogood-niks on the East Coast. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Democratic congressman and thrice presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan rallied his followers against agglomerations of power in New York and Washington. In Jackson's time, the bad guys had been Nicholas Biddle, his bank, and supporters of the tariff. In Bryan's time, the bad guys were the corporate monopolists who squelched individual risk-taking and their bag-men in the legislature whose monetary and trade policies favored big business over the small farmer.
Bryan's reputation, like Jackson's, has pockmarks. He was sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan. He prosecuted Darwin's theory of natural selection in the heavily publicized Scopes "monkey" trial of 1925.
The elites of Bryan's time certainly hated the prairie populist.
To them, he was an ill-mannered dunce from the boonies and his supporters nothing more than a rabble. Such anxiety was understandable. Bryan was a rebel. He liked to quote Jackson's adage of "equal rights to all and special privileges to none." He didn't want to overturn the government, but he did want to ensure that government lived up to its duty to "protect all from injustice and to do so without showing partiality for any one or any class."
In Bryan's view, the nation's elites had grown complacent. Irresponsible. In their lust for power, they endangered the American ethos of equality of opportunity.
Over the last century, the popular energies that fueled Jackson and Bryan shifted to the right side of the political spectrum.
Increasingly, the public directed its animosity at the bureaucratic and governmental elites who robbed ordinary folk of liberties in the pursuit of "social justice."
At the judges who designed busing schemes that disrupted neighborhood schools.
At government-induced inflation and high marginal tax rates that destroyed savings and prevented the taxpayer from spending his earned income as he saw fit.
At regulatory agencies that micromanaged the trucking, airline, power, and telecommunications sectors to the detriment of competition, innovation, and affordability.
For the last quarter century, right-wing populism, often infused with social conservatism, has been the most demonized force in American politics--and also the most interesting and dynamic.
When the historian Michael Kazin wrote his 1995 book The Populist Persuasion, he counted Ronald Reagan among Bryan's heirs.
These days, references to Bryan show up in unexpected places. Kazin notes that Bryan's second-favorite book (the first was the Bible) was The Jefferson Cyclopedia, a collection of the third president's thoughts organized by topic.
When you google "Jefferson Cyclopedia" today, the first link doesn't take you to the Democratic party. It takes you to the Campaign for Liberty, a Ron Paul group.
In this country, whenever the public concludes that elite behavior is opaque and self-interested, a popular reaction ensues.
In part, Barack Obama was elected president because of widespread discontent with the way Washington had managed its basic roles of fighting wars and maintaining the financial system.
But Obama, who advertised that he had the common touch during the campaign, has governed as an elitist.
He's dismissed the populist revolts against his policies.
And so Americans continue to look at New York and Washington with suspicion.
Trust in government remains low.
The president's job approval rating is less than 50 percent.
Congressional approval is at a dismal 20 percent.
When the average American looks at the headlines, he sees the government bailing out large, failed, politically connected enterprises even as the unemployment rate rises to 10 percent.
The average American sees the Obama administration exaggerating the role its fiscal stimulus has played in reviving the economy, even though unemployment is higher than the administration's models predicted.
(The average American also understands that there is no way to measure the number of jobs the White House has "saved.")
The Average American sees the president and Congress eager to pass a costly health care bill against the public's wishes; businesses funding Democratic campaigns so as not to be punished; the rich increasingly voting Democratic.
In short, the average American sees a river of power and wealth flowing inexorably to Washington, D.C.
The public's negative reaction to Beltway profligacy has been visceral.
The government is shoveling money to powerful interest groups, and the man on the street feels left out.
In September, the Democratic pollster Peter Hart asked registered voters who they thought had benefited most from the Obama administration's economic policies.
Sixty-two percent said the main beneficiary had been the "large banks."
In contrast, 65 percent said the "average working person" and "small businesses" had not been helped.
Seventy-three percent said "my family/myself" had not been helped.
Public opinion registers a widespread skepticism of government and elite decision-making.
The percentage of voters who say that government is doing too much has risen to 50 percent.
The percentage of voters who say that government should "worry more" about keeping the deficit low has risen to 62 percent.
When pollsters ask voters what their priorities are, the economy is always the number one answer, but the deficit and national debt are not far behind.
In the September NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, for instance, the deficit was voter priority number three. These worries are more than punctilious accounting. They relate to larger concerns over the government's unchecked fiscal power and its right role in American society.
What's most interesting about the popular ferment is that it transcends party.
The number of self-identified independents has risen as the number of Democrats and Republicans has declined (in the GOP's case, to a generational low).
About twice as many people call themselves "conservative" as "Republican," which means that a large chunk of potential Republican voters are alienated from the national party.
We saw this divergence at play in the fight over the populist candidacy of conservative Doug Hoffman in New York's 23rd Congressional District.
We see it in the ongoing debate over whether populist talk radio is good for the GOP's electoral prospects.
Above all, the public is dissatisfied with the solutions that both parties have to offer.
But, because today's populists lack institutional support, and because they don't have a programmatic agenda, they vent their frustrations in disorganized ways. The left-wing populists rail against CEO compensation, bank bailouts, and lobbyist influence in government.
The right-wing populists attack the auto bailouts, government spending, and Obamacare. There is no central authority directing the tea party protestors. There was no single leader who ordered the 9/12 taxpayer march on Washington. Instead, you have multiple voices, with overlapping (and sometimes contradictory) antagonisms, agendas, and priorities.
The upshot is a creative and unregulated political marketplace. The most compelling figures and ideas prosper. No one has a dominant position. But it's also clear that what Michael Barone has called the "balance of enthusiasm" in politics is now squarely on the right. And yet, like all markets, the political trading post is prone to bubbles, excesses, rumors, and even the occasional conspiracy theory.
All of which creates a gigantic opening for a politician to display imagination and leadership.
An opportunity for a figure who will separate the good populism (championing free-enterprising individuals) from the bad (concocting loony theories and vilifying "enemies of the people").
Someone who will give voice to the millions:
who don't want government aggrandizing the powerful;
who don't want government risking dangerous fiscal imbalances;
who do want public policies that create the conditions for a general prosperity.
Someone, in other words, who can play the same role in contemporary politics that Jackson, Bryan, and Reagan did in the past.
She lives in Alaska.
The similarities between Jackson, Bryan, Reagan, and Sarah Palin are striking.
This is not to say that they are alike in every respect. Nor is it to say that Palin's achievements to date rank with the others'. And, of course, American populism is a deep and complex tradition. But it's nonetheless true that a couple of traits span the centuries and unify these four political figures. The first is the reaction they provoke among the elites of their age--what one might call the "Coonskin Cap Critique." The second is their advocacy of dispersed power, open markets, and American individualism.
Elites regard challenges to their authority with condescension and contempt.
They routinely underestimate the capacities of populist leaders.
They mock their enemies as uneducated provincials who lack expert knowledge and therefore have no place interfering in politics.
They contemptuously refer to the supporters of populist politicians as an ill-kempt and dangerous mob.
When Andrew Jackson's supporters flooded the capital to celebrate their hero's ascent to the presidency, elite opinion was aghast.
In his Andrew Jackson, H.W. Brands quotes a D.C. resident writing:
To us, who had witnessed the quiet and orderly period of the Adams administration, it seemed as if half the nation had rushed at once into the capital. It was like the inundation of the northern barbarians into Rome, save that the tumultuous tide came in from a different point of the compass. The West and the South seemed to have precipitated themselves upon the North and overwhelmed it.
Supreme Court justice Joseph Story was equally shocked: "The reign of King 'Mob,' seemed triumphant," he lamented.
The press of William Jennings Bryan's time saw the same thing.
They called his supporters revolutionaries. Anarchists. Socialists. Dangers to the republic.
In one editorial cartoon, Bryan is portrayed as a snake.
In another, he's portrayed as an unruly little boy showing off the ugly contraption he's built--the populist Democratic party--to a worried Uncle Sam.
When the Reagan era rolled around, the Gipper's conservative supporters were "right-wing extremists" engaged in a racist "backlash."
Later, "angry white men" brought Newt Gingrich to power in the 1994 Republican Revolution.
When Sarah Palin-loving activists held anti-big government tea parties and engaged in rowdy behavior at congressional town halls in the summer of 2009, Democrats took out the carving knives once more.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer wrote of an "ugly campaign" that was "simply un-American."
The advocates of the Coonskin Cap Critique love to tar their opponents as dangerous zealots.
The Philadelphia Monthly likened Andrew Jackson and his followers to "Peter the Hermit" and "his rabble of Christian vagabonds." Nicholas Biddle, head of the Bank of the United States, described Jackson's veto message killing the bank as "a manifesto of anarchy, such as Marat and Robespierre might have issued to the mob."
To H.L. Mencken, William Jennings Bryan was the "Fundamentalist Pope" who represented everything the Sage of Baltimore disliked about America.
During the 1980 presidential campaign, liberals sought to portray Ronald Reagan as an ideologue and lunatic who risked plunging the world into armageddon.
In one editorial, the Nation declared, "We believe that a Ronald Reagan victory increases the chances for nuclear war."
Last year in Newsweek, Jon Meacham wrote that "-Palin's populist view of high office" is "dangerous."
Then, when Sarah Palin brought up Barack Obama's association with William Ayers on the campaign trail, the pundit tribe went nuts.
Bill Maher likened a Palin rally to a "hate-fest."
E.J. Dionne speculated that John McCain may have "become the midwife of a new movement built around fear, xenophobia, racism, and anger."
The Chicago Sun-Times columnist Andrew Greeley wrote that Sarah Palin was "a racist with her eye on the White House."
The elite's great fear is that their supposed intellectual inferiors might rule them.
John Quincy Adams described Jackson as "a barbarian and savage who could scarcely spell his own name."
The journalist Charles Willis Thompson wrote of Bryan, "He did not merely resemble that average man, he was that average man."
(Even historians can't help taking shots at Bryan's intellectual ability. His "capacity to convince himself," Richard Hofstadter wrote, was "probably the only exceptional thing about his mind.")
Michael Kinsley pronounced Reagan "not terribly bright."
Nicholas von Hoffman found it "humiliating" that "this unlettered, self-assured bumpkin" had been elected president.
To William Greider, Reagan was a "hopeless clown."
It's Pavlovian: Whenever the arbiters of educated opinion witness the emergence of a populist leader, they spew insults.
Sarah Palin has been called--among many, many other things--a "bantamweight cheerleader" (Maureen Dowd), an "airhead" (Charles Wohlforth), an "idiot" (Victoria Coren), a "character too dumb even for daytime TV" (Matt Taibbi), a "puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious beliefs" (Taibbi again), and a "white trash trophy wife wearing glasses so she looks intellectual" (Catherine Deveny).
Sarah Palin's opponents will go to any lengths to prove that she is stupid.
They've forged her SAT scores.
They've prank-called her posing as foreign leaders.
They tout every rumor or myth that fits into their world view and dismiss all contrary evidence.
At root, the Coonskin Cap Critique is about the battle between the country and the city.
Jackson's strongest supporters were small landowners on the Appalachian frontier finally able to exercise the franchise.
Bryan's were the indebted prairie farmers who took a hit during an era of falling agricultural prices.
By the age of Reagan, America was transitioning rapidly to a service economy, and most Americans lived in cities and suburbs.
The geographical frontier had closed.
But the imaginative frontier--the beckoning American horizon of innovation and enterprise--remained.
Intellectuals belittled Reagan because he believed in this frontier of the imagination.
Cosmopolitans detested him because he represented the provincial folkways of small town America.
In a 1980 Nation essay, E.L. Doctorow wrote that Reagan was the product of such towns as Galesburg, Monmouth, and Dixon--just the sorts of places responsible for one of the raging themes of American literature, the soul-murdering complacency of our provinces, without which the careers of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Willa Cather, to name just a few, would never have found glory.
The best and brightest fled all our Galesburgs and Dixons, if they could, but RonaldReagan was not among them.
Twenty-eight years later, in describing Sarah Palin's Wasilla, the journalist Heather Mallick wrote that "small towns are places that smart people escape from, for privacy, for variety, for intellect, for survival. Palin should have stayed home."
The antiprovincial, antipopulist critique is not only perennial. It's indestructible.
Because Andrew Jackson was the founder of the modern Democratic party, we have a tendency to look at him through big-government eyes. We draw a line that starts with Jackson, runs through Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR, and ends up at Barack Obama. But the facts are more complicated than that.
Jackson and Bryan were representatives of an American system where self-made folks reaped the fruits of their labor without government meddling.
There's a connection between a faith in the democratic wisdom of the crowd and support for free markets.
Jackson and Bryan didn't feel that government should play favorites or manipulate society according to intellectual fashions.
They felt it should level the playing field so that men of all stations, possessed with initiative and enthusiasm, could thrive in commercial society.
As Richard Hofstadter wrote in the American Political Tradition (1948), like the Jacksonians, "Bryan felt that he represented a cause that was capable of standing on its own feet without special assistance from the government. The majority of the people, he declaimed, who produced the nation's wealth in peace and rallied to its flag in war, asked for nothing from the government but 'even-handed justice.' "
Ronald Reagan possessed a similar optimism about the individual capacities of the American people.
Ronald Reagan's basic faith in American decency--his democratic faith--was more than a personal tic or a political tactic.
It was one of the pillars of Ronald Reagan's philosophy.
It gave Ronald Reagan the courage to dismiss moral equivalence in foreign policy and challenge Democratic existing beliefs.
If you believe--as Jackson, Bryan, and Reagan did--that left to their own devices Americans will create a free, just, and prosperous society, the task of politics is simple.
Identify the obstacles impeding the American spirit and eliminate them.
Is tight money dampening economic growth? Kill the national bank.
Are tariffs depressing farm wages? Reduce them.
Is inflation robbing the middle class and high taxes limiting investment? Squeeze out inflation and lower the tax rates.
The people will take care of the rest.
In the past, populist leaders have understood that when large organizations--corporate or governmental--exercise power, the main beneficiaries tend to be large organizations.
The populist therefore aligns himself or herself with the folks who aren't displayed in portraiture. He/She is on the side of the small businessman and the ordinary individual.
"When the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages, artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer, and the potent more powerful," Jackson wrote in his bank veto message, "the humble members of society--the farmers, mechanics, and laborers--who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government."
Likewise, the 1908 Democratic party platform, with Bryan as the nominee, stated: " 'Shall the people rule?' is the overshadowing issue which manifests itself in all the questions now under discussion."
Among other things, the platform attacked "the heedless waste of the people's money."
It called for free trade and the "reduction of import duties."
It favored the "election of United States Senators by direct vote of the people."
Later in the 20th century, President Ford would nod to the populists when he said, "Here, the people rule."
In a 1978 radio commentary that he wrote while overlooking traffic from a hotel room window, Reagan distilled the populist belief in individual ability.
"They are not 'the masses,' or as the elitists would have it, 'the common man,' " Reagan said of the people driving cars on the highway below.
"They are very uncommon. Individuals, each with his or her own hopes and dreams, plans and problems, and the kind of quiet courage that makes this whole country run better than just about any other place on earth."
Reagan's mission was to remove the obstacles that prevented these men and women with "quiet courage" from realizing their potential.
Populist leaders have held very modest views of government.
"Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government," Jackson wrote in his bank message.
"Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions."
In Bryan's view, government was so easily corrupted that it needed to be subject to constant democratic renewal.
"The conscience of the nation," the 1908 Democratic platform stated, "is now aroused to free the Government from the grip of those who have made it a business asset of the favor-seeking corporations."
Reagan famously likened government to a baby--"an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other."
And Sarah Palin?
Time and again, she has run against elites who, in her view, are ignoring the public interest.
She overthrew a three-term incumbent mayor of Wasilla because he wasn't as conservative as the people he represented.
She used sales tax revenues and bond issues to help the town grow into a thriving suburb.
She knocked off a Republican energy commissioner, a Republican attorney general, and an incumbent Republican governor because she felt that they were helping themselves and their friends and not the Alaskan people.
As governor, she passed a sweeping ethics reform, changed the tax code so Alaskans got their fair share of oil revenues, and introduced competition and transparency into the construction of a natural gas pipeline.
Palin has an intuitive faith in builders and traders, in hockey moms and plumbers.
She is clearly on the side of competitive, entrepreneurial capitalism.
But she hasn't spent much time on the national stage. Nor has she tied her pointed criticisms of the Obama agenda and the liberal media to a larger argument about how ordinary people with common sense can rescue the American economy and revitalize American democracy.
Sarah Palin has Jacksonian instincts, but she still hasn't forged her own political persuasion. Time to add flesh to the bone.
For example, take energy policy.
Last week, when Joe Biden traveled to upstate New York to campaign for Democratic congressional candidate Bill Owens, the vice president took aim at Sarah Palin. "The fact of the matter is that Sarah Palin thinks the answer to energy was 'drill, baby, drill,' " Biden said. "No, it's a lot more complicated, Sarah, than 'drill, baby, drill.' "
A good sign of condescension is when someone tells you that "things are more complicated" than you think.
In truth, as Sarah Palin pointed out on her Facebook page later that day, she has "always advocated an all-of-the-above approach to American energy independence."
It was Biden and not Sarah Palin who was treading dangerous policy ground.
Sarah Palin's positions align squarely with the American people's.
In an August ABC News/Washington Post poll, for instance, almost two-thirds of respondents supported more oil and gas drilling.
A 52-percent majority favored building more nuclear power plants.
A similar majority supported additional coal mining.
Fifty-one percent wanted "more power plants that burn oil, coal, and natural gas."
And another two-thirds favored constructing nuclear power plants within 50 miles of their homes.
The popular and sensible approach to energy policy is obvious.
Remove the restrictions on offshore oil exploration--if Obama thinks it's fine for Brazil to drill offshore, why can't the United States?
Lower tariffs and reduce subsidies for domestically produced ethanol.
Get rid of the regulations limiting the construction of oil refineries.
Dismiss airy prophecies about "peak oil," "green jobs," and "limits to growth."
Pledge, instead, that Americans will have access to as much of the cheapest, cleanest energy they need to stimulate the economy.
Sarah Palin is right.
No limits.
"All of the above" is best.
Or take health policy.
In the tradition of Jackson, Bryan, and Reagan, Palin could point out that the price of health care is rising because the market in health care is broken.
When you buy insurance in the individual market, you don't receive the same tax break as large corporations who buy group plans for their employees. Instead of one, more-or-less free market for health insurance, there are 50 heavily regulated state markets.
The mandates for insurance that state governments impose--guaranteed coverage for hair plugs or in vitro fertilization, for instance--increase prices.
And since an individual cannot shop for insurance across state lines, a young, healthy person in mandate-manic New York cannot buy a low premium, high-deductible plan on offer in lightly regulated Utah.
Meanwhile, state and federal government, which accounts for a large (46 percent in 2006) and growing portion of national health spending, uses its monopoly power to bid down the price of the medical services it purchases, and thereby raises costs for everyone else.
Medicare fraud is rampant. Defensive medicine increases expenditures. And doctors and hospitals are under no obligation to share prices with consumers until after services are rendered--which means that patients cannot shop around for the most affordable treatments.
What's a populist to do?
Trust in the commercial ideal, and dismantle the regulatory barriers to true competition and innovation in the health care marketplace.
Next, consider the financial sector.
The government is doing its best to prop up failed giants at the expense of competition and innovation.
Held to the standards of the marketplace, companies like GM, Chrysler, AIG, GMAC, and Citi probably would disappear.
They'd be bought and sold, carved up into little pieces, and the overpaid CEOs who made bad bets would lose their jobs.
Instead, these firms are on government life-support.
Hundreds of billions in taxpayer money is propping them up.
The dollars keeping GM alive and UAW workers employed are dollars that could be spent more productively elsewhere.
The dollars enriching Vikram Pandit and his cronies are being financed by Americans who aren't even born.
Worse, rather than bury the idea of "too big to fail," the Obama regulatory scheme would enshrine it.
The administration seems bent on repeating the same mistakes that Japan made in the 1990s, when political favoritism triumphed over regulated capitalism.
The result was the zombie banks that haunt the Japanese economy to this day.
Jackson, Bryan, and Reagan would be furious at the way the financial crisis has been handled.
They would want to break down the ossified constellations of power.
They would want to let new businesses replace the old.
Step one is to set a timeline for withdrawal from the bailout state.
Policymakers need to be clear that they have no intention of maintaining these huge transfers of wealth for much longer. Rather than micromanage government-owned banks and auto companies, they need to focus on weaning them off the federal teat. For the banks, a complicated and technocratic regulatory scheme isn't necessary. A few simple rules that separate the solvent banks from the insolvent would suffice.
Feeling outrage and impotence over the actions of Wall Street bankers and government regulators is natural and understandable, Sarah Palin could say. But the answer isn't further government control and politicization. It's using government to break apart concentrations of power--and then stepping back to watch as the market imposes its iron discipline.
Last year the public elected an inspirational leader who promised change. Barack Obama promised to open government, end insiderism, and confer no special privileges. He promised to reach across the aisle and adopt his opponents' best ideas.
This was all an illusion.
As the Obama presidency has developed, people have realized that this is not the change they sought.
The Treasury secretary is a tax cheat overseeing a Wall Street bailout program.
The congressman in charge of the tax code is under investigation for various frauds.
From auto bailouts to the stimulus to health care, the president has implemented or advocated policies of which the people disapprove.
Obama's governing style is based on personal interaction with major policy stakeholders. So, when the president formulates a policy, he brings into the White House all the titans of industry and top lobbyists who might be affected. The rule applies whether the issue is the financial system, climate change, or health care: Obama listens to and makes deals with market incumbents. The theory is that such negotiations will produce legislation that satisfies everyone involved. But whatever the benefits, the costs are all too clear:
Incumbent stakeholders use government access to drive out competition, increase their leverage, and limit transparency.
In other words, Obama has rejected the tradition of Jackson, Bryan, and Reagan.
Obama has rejected putting trust in the common wisdom and collective judgments of the American people.
Obama has sought comfort in the "expert" knowledge of technocratic elites.
Liberal Democrats in Congress set the agenda.
The unions drive trade, health, and labor policy.
The bankers drive economic policy.
Joe Six Pack is left out in the cold.
But the elites continue to mess things up.
Confidence in American institutions continues to erode.
Faith in the American future continues to decline.
Is there an exit?
Yes.
All it would take is for a populist leader like the one in Wasilla to pick up the Jacksonian, Bryanite, Reaganite torch and deliver this simple message to Obama and the political class:
You shall not press down upon the brow of mankind this big-government crown of thorns.
You shall not crucify mankind upon the cross of Goldman Sachs.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
(Weekly Standard) Matthew Continetti is the associate editor of The Weekly Standard. His The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried To Bring Down a Rising Star is published this week by Sentinel Books.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Veterans Day Quote (3)
“The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war.” (Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit)
Veterans Day Quote (4)
“The most persistent sound which reverberates through men’s history is the beating of war drums.” (Arthur Koestler)
Veterans Day Quote (5)
“This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.” (Elmer Davis)
Veterans Day Quote (6)
“Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.” (Michel de Montaigne)
Veterans Day Quote (7)
“I think there is one higher office than president and I would call that patriot.” (G. Hart)
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