Friday, March 18, 2011

The Two Faces of Ben Bernanke

The Two Faces of Ben Bernanke

It is this type of attitude from our top monetary policy maker - to either deny inflation or to lay blame elsewhere - that will accelerate the day of reckoning for the dollar.

Based on his recent public comments, Fed Chairman Bernanke seems determined to give the U.S. dollar the reputation of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak: an unwanted relic of the past that everyone agrees must go, but stubbornly clings to a privileged position. The dollar is currently the world's ruling currency, but, as with Mubarak, I believe that growing public discontent will spur regime change quicker than most pundits expect.

Clearly, the most significant problem facing central bankers around the world is the recent eruption of inflation, which is sparking unrest in Asia and the Middle East. With respect to this issue, Bernanke is alternating his responses through two different personas.

Sometimes he chooses to act like Baghdad Bob, the Iraqi Information Minister who, in the opening days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, continued to deny the presence of American troops even as U.S. tanks rumbled behind him. The parallel to Bernanke's testimony to Congress today is striking.

Speaking to the House Budget Committee, Baghdad Ben not only claimed that there is no evidence of overall inflation in the U.S., but that even food and energy prices are rising less than 1% annually. This is simply not true. He then claimed that the Fed's massive QE purchases of U.S. Treasuries do not distort the yield curve, despite the fact that he has stated repeatedly that the program was specifically designed to lower long-term rates.

The reason behind these lies should be evident. Acknowledging inflationary threats would force him to raise rates. But Baghdad Ben knows that the current economic "expansion" is a lie built on a weak foundation of ultra-low interest rates. He knows that even marginally higher rates will trigger a savage return to recession. In his view, the only choice is to sell us an elaborate fiction - even when it obviously conflicts with the facts.

At other times, Chairman Bernanke assumes the persona of Marie Antoinette by professing regal indifference to how his own actions negatively impact the great unwashed. In a rare Fed press conference last week, Bennie Antoinette showcased this "let them eat cake" attitude by declaring that U.S. monetary policy is solely designed to benefit the U.S., and that any adverse consequences in other countries are not his problem. As a result, he broadly absolved the Fed of any blame for global inflation, putting it instead on foreign governments for not allowing their currencies to appreciate and for keeping their interest rates too low.

It is this type of attitude from our top monetary policy maker - to either deny inflation or to lay blame elsewhere - that will accelerate the day of reckoning for the dollar.

Amazingly, for all its flaws, the buck remains the world's reserve currency. So, for now, the U.S. continues to enjoy all the rights and privileges that come from that status, including lower consumer prices and lower interest rates. But along with those benefits comes the great responsibility of not conducting monetary policy in a vacuum. Since the dollar is the benchmark currency, when it is debased, other currencies must follow suit. Because of the massive printing effort underway for some time now, the dollar has gone from an instrument of stability to an instrument of inflation.

A reserve currency must not go on in perpetual decline. Since abandoning the dollar as a reserve implies radical change with unknown consequences, governments have been very reluctant to take the chance. So, they are acting to preserve the status quo. But, in so doing, they're creating inflation in their own countries. Unfortunately, this strategy may prove more risky in the end.

Other factors are also influencing foreign central bankers to stick with the devil they know. For one, as emerging markets compete to export to the United States, no one wants to surrender what it perceives to be its competitive advantage. None of these governments yet understand that if the dollar were to collapse, new customers would be instantly created in those countries whose currencies appreciate against the dollar.

Emerging markets also feel obligated to protect the value of the trillions of dollars that they already hold in reserve. Like traders throwing good money after bad, their instinct is to average down their cost of their position. The reality is that the more dollars they buy, the more they will ultimately lose. Once they realize that the rise in their own currency will more than offset their dollar losses, they will cut their losses and run.

When emerging-market governments decide they do not want to eat Bennie's cake, but rather keep their own bread prices from rising, they will have to pursue the tighter monetary policies. When that happens, the dollar will lose its reserve status.

When the rest of the world no longer links their currencies to ours, the Fed will truly not have to worry about fueling global inflation. Instead, all of its inflation will burn through our banks accounts right here at home. And that blaze, so concentrated, will burn a lot hotter than the fires we see abroad.

Austrolibertarianism as a Starfish

Austrolibertarianism as a Starfish

Mises Daily: by

[The 2011 Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture, given on March 10 at the Austrian Scholar's Conference. An MP3 audio file of that lecture is available for download.]

It's the most privileged honor to be here at the Austrian Scholar's Conference and deliver the Mises lecture. It's carnival in Brazil this week, but to me the real feast is happening right here!

Professor Salerno wanted me to speak about how Misesian ideas can change Brazil and Latin America; I'll say a few words about that, but also I'll talk about Austrolibertarianism, our particular freedom philosophy, whose pillars are the non-initiation of force and private property. And I will relate it to two aspects:

  1. My experience as an executive of a performance-based organization, the one founded by Brazilian partners led by Jorge Paulo Lehman, who now are the controlling shareholders of Anheuser-Busch Inbev, whose present CEO is Carlos Brito. I'll draw from that experience and from the lessons those great people continue to provide.

  2. The book The Starfish and the Spider.

Let me start with a flavor of the book. It is a five-year-old business book that talks about what exactly is a decentralized organization — its strengths and weaknesses — by comparing it to two animals whose structures superficially look similar: a starfish (it is actually a sea star, not a "fish," but I will henceforth use the term adopted by the authors), and a spider.

The spider has a central body and eight legs. The starfish has a central body and five arms. Internally, however, their biology is completely different.

If you cut a leg of the spider, well, you have a crippled seven-legged spider; but if you cut the head, what happens? It dies. It can't live without its command center. We are familiar with spider organizations: corporations, governments, and traditional think tanks with CEOs, hierarchies, headquarters, etc.

If you would cut an arm off a starfish, however, another one will grow. And if you would cut it in half, an amazing thing happens: two starfish, two organisms survive.

There is a species of starfish, the Linckia, that if one were to cut all five arms off of, it would grow five separate organisms. Each arm generates an autonomous creature. There is no central organ, and each arm has its own organs, stomach, muscles, and way of feeding itself; except for a nerve ring that connects the arms. That's a decentralized organization.

When you look at the world today, more and more starfish organizations are sprouting, and in our Austrolibertarian intellectual movement, I would argue that we are starting to behave like an adaptable, hard to combat, starfish; with each institute or organized initiative behaving as an arm of the starfish, and the nerve ring being the Austrolibertarian doctrine. I'll get back to that.

"Brazilians place more trust in the death certificate than in the presence of the dead body."

First of all, a few words on Brazil. Brazil has always had a statist mentality. For example, while in the United States you would ask "How much money do you make?" we Brazilians ask "how much do you receive?" — as if it were a grant or gift — as opposed to a get-what-you-give mentality in the United States.

My father used to say that Brazil is "an island of initiative completely surrounded by government."

Brazil also has an ingrained red-tape mentality. He also said that "Brazilians place more trust in the death certificate than in the presence of the dead body."

We were famous back in the 1980s for holding a world record! The record for inflation — and even between 1990 and 1994, less than 20 years ago, the average annual inflation was above 1000 percent. At the peak, prices would rise 1 percent per day. Every price was indexed daily to the official daily-inflation index. Prices rose daily, investments rose daily, even deposits in your current account and assets rose daily, but wages rose only monthly or by fortnight. Workers and middle class would get their wages by fortnight and rush to the very large supermarkets to buy nonperishables.

By 1994, the Brazilian people had had enough of corrosive inflation, exchange-rate superdevaluations, and government surprise plans and packages (which were usually accompanied by week-long bank holidays) and demanded a halt. Politicians finally decided to act because they were suffering: presidents were being impeached; central-bank presidents and ministers changed every six months or so, etc. Therefore, the government increased taxes (which is bad), balanced the budget, drastically decreased money creation, and floated the currency.

Since then, we are now a normal country, that is, a social democracy, with a big government. We are "normal" because we took care of the most pressing problems: spiraling government debt, inflation, and balance of payment deficits. We are now reaping the benefits of that commitment to stability, while the rest of the world is going in the opposite direction, with huge deficits and out-of-control money printing.

The first organized effort to promote the ideas of liberty started by the Instituto Liberal (IL) — founded in Rio in 1982. Its objective is basically to translate and publish books of the Austrolibertarian tradition. Its founder, Donald Stewart, a construction businessman, translated Human Action and Interventionism. The IL expanded in an autonomous and decentralized fashion to other capitals by the initiative of local businesspeople. Most of those funders had a special-interest agenda, and didn't stick to the same libertarian line adopted by Donald.

The substantial money was spent on lavish headquarters and bad books.

The pseudo network of ILs didn't have the libertarian nerve ring connecting the cells, and it capitulated to special interests. They shared the same name, but segregated into quite different creatures, losing their status as a network. The IL in Rio is still around; it was always small, but has shrunk further, and is only a shadow of what it was in its early years.

At about the same time, in 1983, a group of people from Porto Alegre started an elite leadership study-group for entrepreneurs (the IEE) with a free-market doctrine. They also set up an annual conference that now is the largest in Brazil, the Forum da Liberdade, with about 6,000 people attending last year.

MisesBrasil officially launched with a Conference right before the Forum. It was a success with 200 people per day attending, mostly young people and students that were already following our work online. Lew Rockwell, Joseph Salerno, Tom Woods, and Mark Thornton were there. We had very positive coverage by the two main weekly magazines in Brazil (which have in excess of 1,500,000 copies of combined circulation), and had two full pages in each of them.

In the liberal-libertarian spectrum we have arguably the largest following base, in Portuguese, in the world, with more than 3,000 people per day visiting our site. We have published or republished 17 books.

The Forum da Liberdade had as its theme Mises and his Six Lessons, as his Economic Policy is known in Brazil. Each of the 6,000 participants got a copy of six lessons. Tom spoke at the Forum, and each panel was based on one of the six lessons. They had a wonderful exhibit quoting Mises, heralding panels with pictures and stories about his life, etc.

We are hosting our second conference next month, where we will have as speakers Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Guido Hülsmann, Bob Murphy, Peter Klein, and others. We expect a larger public than last year. The mainstream media is also beginning to pay attention to us. In summary, there are huge challenges, and we are just starting, but we are on a roll.

So much for MisesBrasil.

Let's get back to Austrolibertarianism and our big challenges. In my opinion, we have the some of the best ideas and the best people developing ideas — why are we still a marginal, fringe, school of economics?

We are standing on the shoulders of the scholastics, Bastiat, Menger, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, and the present-day stars. Our ideas have better explanatory power of the consequences of government interventions than competing theories. Our ideas are consolidated, tested through more than 100 years, some even centuries. Ideas are not holding us back.

So, which barriers that are making us drag?

What's more, we are small, bottom-up, voluntary, and flexible, while the statists' organizations, starting with the government itself, but also other organizations such as the UN and the IMF, are big, coercive and centralized. Governments are inefficient, slow, corrupt: the Katrina governmental disaster, the war on drugs, and countless other examples come to mind.

How come we do not dominate the mainstream, as we once did 100 years ago?

Let me first differentiate how we behave as individuals and how we behave as teams. What is the actual role played by organizations? I mean organizations such as the Mises Institute, or MisesBrasil, and other organized efforts to promote ideas? Do we need them?

Can we have a starfish system made only by individuals? Or in order to be a well-functioning starfish must we work as organizations, or teams, or cells, behaving as the arms? Can individuals behave as cells?

I would argue that it is very difficult to do so, and it's an uphill battle for individuals.

Freedom lovers and freedom-fighting individuals, i.e., ourselves, participate in the ongoing battle of ideas, and there are those who discuss and write every day — they are very important.

However, individuals alone are not equipped with what's necessary to pursue objective goals in a systematic, organized, and effective way. What we need is a team, of great people, working together.

A great organization, company, or institute is formed by great people, working together. Period. Not ideas, not books. It's formed by people that understand the social environment, that have insights, know how to market them, have the best connections (which helps to raise funds), and that drive all of the execution capacity to achieve the objectives. Great people are those that may be better than each one of us, if we give them a few years. Those make a great team, and we need to attract and retain them.

A team of great people needs to filter, translate and transmit the ideas, to journalists, writers, editors, and other opinion leaders. I call opinion leaders those 20 percent or so of the population that can grasp and act on an idea. Those are our most obvious customers.

Think about John Papola and the Hayek versus Keynes video, and other short materials we see from time to time on the Internet, for example, and that inspire us. These are wonderful exceptions, of individuals working without the support of a great team, and doing the almost impossible, guided only by their dreams and passions. But, a team of good people could do even more, and systematically. For every Papola, unfortunately there are thousands that act individually, but are not able to effect change.

Good organizations are systematic and effective; they avoid floating ideas in a disorganized way, through channels and forms that might not work. That happens because they are goal-based, they have metrics, goals, they measure them, they benchmark. They are slim, adaptable, and "localize," or as we say at MisesBrasil, "tropicalize," the product and strategy. In some places and times, a natural-rights approach may be effective; in others a value-free approach might be more appropriate. In some occasions articles might work better than books, in others radio shows may get more results.

"Our product cannot be one that advocates the initiation of force, or an attack on property rights, but it may have different flavors for different consumers."

Imagine a beer company; its product is beer; our product is Austrolibertarianism. The beer company may have different labels of beer, with different flavors, and it's the same with us — provided, however, there is no toxic substance. They have their quality standards, and so do we. Our product cannot be one that advocates the initiation of force, or an attack on property rights, but it may have different flavors for different consumers. That's tropicalization.

And tropicalization does not only affect the ideas and the way we market them, but also how you attract talents and funding. Brazil, for instance, is much different from the United States. We don't have, for instance, a culture of donations by individuals, and we don't get tax breaks — so we opted for sponsorships by big business and stay close to the mainstream media.

The Brazilian controlling shareholders of most of our mainstream media are very sympathetic to libertarian ideas. Veja, the main weekly magazine, for example, has recently announced they will always write "state" with a small "s". They wrote a marvelous editorial justifying that decision. That really took us by surprise. That's an editorial policy we also have at MisesBrasil.

But whatever we choose do in terms of marketing or funding, we must always keep the quality standard of our product, as does the beer company. Otherwise we will fail like the network of ILs in Brazil did back in the 1980s.

Ok, so we have ideas, different flavors, and a team of great people working together. How do we manage the team?

An organization, in the same way as individuals, needs dreams.

Dreams are natural, they keep us going — being with a person, traveling to some remote place, being employed by some company, doing well at school, buying that car, etc.

In addition, thinking big takes the same work as thinking small. Therefore, we should think big.

But we need to set realistic dreams and goals; one must know 80 percent how to get there and learn the other 20 percent along the way. People must buy into it, commit to it — passion, energy. If we know only 20 percent how to get to the goal, and must learn 80 percent along the way, it's an adventure, not a realistic goal.

Some individuals do have some goals such as "end the state." If this were a goal for a real-life organization, it would be an adventure. But it is ok, because it is personal, doesn't involve others or a team. The only downside is that this individual gets frustrated, because there is a good chance it will not happen in his lifetime. For organizations, though, it cannot be an "adventure-type" goal.

For MisesBrasil we use metrics: those may be the reach of our ideas in the media (mainstream and Internet), book sales, fundraising for new projects, or any other performance indicator that correlates reasonably well with the efforts of the team.

What kind of pressure should we put in the future? We have to constantly aim to raise the bar.

Too much pressure is bad, because people may panic, but too little is bad as well. We are at our best when under pressure and have deadlines. Think about it: in the days before this very event, I presume that everyone that made it perfect like it is was totally focused, making sure everything would work right. Everyone turned their Facebooks off, spent less time in petty conversations, etc.

As catalysts — managers, or team leaders, we need to apply that same pressure, with deadlines, all year round.

It's like the high jump. If you set it low, people would jump only enough to clear the hurdle, because we are rational and minimize energy.

Additionally, there should be an environment of meritocracy, candor, and informality.

  1. Meritocracy

    We should reward the best! The best should be promoted, to have more space, more responsibility, regardless of seniority and even the strict adherence to our ideology. If a person is young, and does not agrees 100 percent with our doctrine, but is very talented, he or she must be promoted. We can train him or her. That's not a problem, as long as he or she helps us achieve our goals.

    The risk is that we don't have to courage to promote the best without regard to seniority or strict adherence to our ideology; the talented people would see through it, and leave or stay away, and we may be stuck with a mediocre team.

  2. Candor

    People must know where they stand. The team needs constructive and respectful feedback, of the type "here you are doing well; this you need to improve." In the company I used to work for, Jorge Paulo Lehman's Banco Garantia, we used to do this two times a year. Talented people are high maintenance, and need a continual feedback process to grow. Besides, we know the status quo is not our friend, especially if we want to achieve our dreams.

    Sometimes you might have a person that is not delivering. You might feel pity, you might delay a decision to let him or her go. You would say, "well he studied under Rothbard, he is such a nice guy," "let's wait some more time to see if she improves and delivers." It's not going to happen. Don't waste his or her time.

    As a professor in a classroom, you would never do that. Grades are grades, there can be no rationalizations, because it is best for the person as well. For scholarships, it's the same thing. People are different; we are individuals — that's our philosophy, right?

  3. Mises Academy: Stephan Kinsella teaches Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics
  4. Informality

    People should be able to speak their minds, in a cultural and physical environment that is conducive to continuous communication. We should avoid letting people hide in their own corners.

    When we decided to start MisesBrasil, we didn't yet know Lew Rockwell personally, and contacted him by email to ask whether we could start translating articles. We got a prompt email back, with one simple sentence: "Please, do translate." That's a great example of efficacy and informality.

A great team must also raise the funds for projects, be it a conference, video, books, or other. Funding for projects, in my experience, is easier, because the sponsor sees the product and its immediate result.

But, as importantly, we must also raise funds to pay for the good team's work! Because we need a team of talented people, potentially staying for a whole career, they must know they will be rewarded, and they will live a good life if they stay — for this we need funding, specifically for that purpose.

But it doesn't necessarily mean that endowment funds are the way to go. I'll explain with an example from The Starfish and the Spider.

It's the story of the Apache people. When the Spaniards arrived in America, they found huge empires. In 1519, Cortés and his 80 men arrived in Central Mexico, which was dominated by the Aztec Empire, with Tenochtitlan as capital — only a couple of other cities in the world were larger. It was a centralized empire, with Montezuma II as supreme leader. Cortés had a meeting with Montezuma, in which he said, "give me all your gold, and I won't kill you." He didn't fulfill his promise, took Montezuma prisoner, and then killed him. The Aztec people lost their drive with the death of Montezuma, and crumbled. They were quickly defeated.

The same happened in South America, with the Inca Empire. Pizarro followed the same "take-the-gold, kill-the-leader strategy" with Atahualpa.

Further north in Mexico, in the present day United States, the Spaniards encountered the Apaches — and lost. The Apaches were a much less sophisticated people than the Aztecs and the Incas — they had never built a pyramid or a paved road, or even a town. But they distributed political power: they weren't a coercive, "leader-calls-the-shots" people like the Aztecs and the Incas; they worked voluntarily, without a supreme leader.

They had leaders, but they were spiritual leaders, who led by example only — the Nant'ans. One of the famous Nant'ans was Geronimo, who never commanded any army. When he decided to fight, all Apaches joined him not because Geronimo said so, but because they thought it was a good idea; but you didn't need to.

Apache decisions were made at different places. An attack may have been planned at one tribe, organized at another, and executed at a third place.

The anthropologist Tom Nevins explains that the Spaniards started to kill Nant'ans, but immediately new ones emerged. They also tried to put fire to and destroy villages, but the Apaches became nomads. Try to catch them now! The Apaches even unwillingly gained control of territory they didn't control before.

The Spaniards lost to the Apaches. The Mexicans, later, also lost to the Apaches. The Americans finally defeated the Apaches, in the 20th century, by giving cattle to the Nant'ans. Previously, they led by example, now they could reward and punish tribe members using this valuable resource. The Nant'ans began fighting each other in tribal councils for control. The power structure became hierarchical and centralized. This finally broke down the Apache society.

That explains my skepticism of endowment funds — people shouldn't be chasing the endowment money, but working toward the dream. That makes things more challenging, because fundraising must be a continual, full-time job.

Another interesting example from The Starfish and the Spider: AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, which is totally decentralized. Bill Wilson, the founder and an alcoholic himself, after many attempts to cure himself through specialists, realized that it is far easier not to comply with a commitment of sobriety to a specialist than to a group of your peers. His initiative became an instant success.

As the organization expanded autonomously to other cities, Bill was faced with the decision to whether or not to claim control and centralize it. He decided to let it stay an open system, without a central command. Therefore, there is not even a way to know how many members or circles there are. The AA became flexible, equal, and mutating. The Apaches mutated and became nomads, while the AA mutated and today helps food addicts and gamblers. Well, it may even mutate to cure Charlie Sheen!

When the record industry first faced Napster 10 years ago, it was tough for them, because they were up against a very decentralized network, but Napster still had an identifiable CEO, management, and central servers. Napster lost via lawsuits.

The decentralized music network then mutated, and further developed the Peer-to-Peer anonymous technology. The customers' information was still centralized in some of the mutated initiatives, which allowed further persecution. Eventually everything was spread and decentralized and now we have torrents. And we mostly don't recognize the record industry as it once operated.

Lew is like Bill Wilson of the AA — he catalyzed the idea, built the main cell and got out of the way for the talents to rise and cells to spring up like MisesBrasil and many others.

At first it may seem LvMI is a spider — it has a board, a CEO, some hierarchy, a physical address. But look again — Auburn is not where the organization exists. The professors are spread all over the world, there's no formal hierarchy, and we have the Mises and Rothbard Institutes acting independently, and at the same time as a network.

If you would thump the Mises Institute on the head, would Austrolibertarianism die? No! Is there a clear division of roles among the cells? No! Is knowledge concentrated? No! Are cells self-funded or are they centrally funded? I wish the Mises Institute would throw some checks at us, but no, we are not centrally funded! Ladies and gentleman, we then reach the conclusion we are genuine starfish. As with the Internet, if one pulled down half of its sites, it would survive.

We're a cell-based, independent, underground network. We are building the network as we speak. Because it is an open system, more and more people want to contribute, first as individuals, and then — which is what really makes a difference — as a team, as independent cells.

And if we are talking about people that would like to start an Austrolibertarian cell, you don't need more than to put up a site, and start translating and publishing material. Just do it. It's simple, and virtually costless. We've done it in Brazil, Gabriel Calzada has done it in Spain, the Joachims have done it in Sweden, Vlad in Romania, and likewise in Poland, Japan, Russia, Belgium, and other places. To build a great team, of course, is more of a challenge, but they are sprouting, because we have the example of Lew and the LvMI team.

When the network fully develops and the network effect kicks in, or should I say accelerates, there's no stopping us. The centralized statists won't be a match for us!

Is the Tea Party's Revolution Serious?

Is the Tea Party's Revolution Serious?

Mises Daily: by

[Transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode "The Tea Party's Revolution"]

The Whites of Their Eyes

Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard and a journalist whose work appears in the major mainstream media. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are on the list of publications to which she contributes, as is The New Yorker, where she's listed on the masthead as a "staff writer." Her latest book, which was published back in September by Princeton University Press, is called The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History. Unsurprisingly, it reads rather like a long magazine article.

It meanders here and there in a leisurely fashion; it includes tidbits from Lepore's reading in American history and other tidbits from interviews she conducted with members of the contemporary tea-party movement, but it seems never to really reach any particular point. In the end, it doesn't really end; it just stops. She raises some big questions — "What was the Revolution about? What is history for? Who are we?" — but never really answers them.

If there is any overarching argument to The Whites of Their Eyes it would seem to be this: the members of the contemporary tea-party movement believe, according to Lepore, in a version of American history that she dismisses as "a fantasy," an 18th century with

no slavery, poverty, ignorance, insanity, sickness, or misery … only the Founding Fathers with their white wigs, wearing their three-cornered hats, in their Christian nation, revolting against taxes, and defending their right to bear arms.

This outright "fiction," Lepore argues, may, for example, be accused of having "compressed a quarter century of political contest into 'the founding,' as if ideas worked out, over decades of debate and fierce disagreement, were held by everyone, from the start." She quotes an exchange between Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. "Who's your favorite Founder?" Beck asks Palin. "Um, you know, well," she replies. "All of them."

It is not, of course, clear whether Mrs. Palin actually knows the names of any of these Founders Beck was asking her about, as it is not clear whether she knows anything else at all about them either. It is relatively certain, however, that Glenn Beck does know both who the Founders were and at least something about what they said and did. He has claimed, for example, that Thomas Paine, "was the Glenn Beck of the American Revolution," a not entirely implausible interpretation of the facts.

The problem, however, at least as Lepore sees it, is that Beck is a devotee of the tea-party movement's version of American history, which she calls not "just kooky history [but] antihistory." Then she decides that perhaps a better term for it is "historical fundamentalism." And for the rest of the book, that's the term she goes with. "Historical fundamentalism … is to history," she writes, "what astrology is to astronomy, what alchemy is to chemistry, what creationism is to evolution."

More specifically,

historical fundamentalism is marked by the belief that a particular and quite narrowly defined past — "the founding" — is ageless and sacred and to be worshipped; that certain historical texts — "the founding documents" — are to be read in the same spirit with which religious fundamentalists read, for instance, the Ten Commandments; that the Founding Fathers were divinely inspired; that the academic study of history (whose standards of evidence and methods of analysis are based on skepticism) is a conspiracy and, furthermore, blasphemy; and that political arguments grounded in appeals to the founding documents, as sacred texts, and to the Founding Fathers, as prophets, are therefore incontrovertible.

As Lepore points out, the Founding Fathers "weren't even called the Founding Fathers until Warren G. Harding coined that phrase in his keynote address at the Republican National Convention in 1916." He used the phrase again a few years later, "during his inauguration in 1921," in an inaugural address written in what H.L. Mencken described as

H.L. Mencken's
Notes on Democracy

the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.

It was in that very same speech that Harding attested his "belief in the divine inspiration of the founding fathers."

Lepore provides inconclusive anecdotal evidence, which I nevertheless find persuasive, that the tea-party movement is mainly just a bunch of disaffected Republicans who really care nothing for small government or individual liberty but merely want to see the GOP back in the White House and back in control of Congress. For example, she cites a 2010 New York Times/CBS News poll as revealing that "63 percent of self-described tea party supporters gain most of their television news from Fox, compared with 23 percent of all adult Americans," and Fox News is, of course, little more than the outsourced publicity arm of the Republican Party.

She also presents such evidence from her own interviews with members of the tea-party movement. She found that

Tea partiers liked to describe their movement as a catchall — Austin Hess identified himself as a libertarian, Christen Varley described herself as a social and fiscal conservative — but it didn't catch everything. Opposition to military power didn't have a place in the twenty-first century tea party. It did, however, have a place in the Revolution.

Moreover, the commitment to individual liberty exhibited by many of those Lepore talked with was rather scant, to say the least. She interviews one tea partier, Christen Varley, who is working "to try to get a ban on same-sex marriage on the ballot." Lepore "asked her whether that didn't amount to more government interference, but the problem, she said, was that the government had interfered so much already that it had nearly destroyed the family, and the only thing for it was to use the government to repair the damage." In other words, "I oppose large, intrusive government, except when I don't." Where could you find a better definition of conservatism?

At another point in her period of interaction with the tea partiers, mostly in Boston, Lepore asked a self-proclaimed libertarian, Austin Hess, "if he was troubled by Christen Varley's work with the Coalition for Marriage and the Family. 'We do not discuss social issues and foreign policy issues,' he said." Later,

I asked Austin Hess whether he was worried Sarah Palin was hijacking the tea party. He shrugged. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," he said. "I don't agree with her about a whole lot of things, but we're not conducting purity tests. We're building coalitions."

Ten lectures
with Ralph Raico

Lepore also finds anecdotal evidence of historical ignorance among the contemporary tea partiers. She talks with a Midwesterner named Patrick Humphries, for example, who tells her he "was born in Indiana and grew up in Iowa." Humphries believes, like most of his fellow tea partiers, that the policies of the Obama administration represent a "radical change" — a "government takeover of the economy." But of course Obama's actual policies are merely the policies all presidential administrations, both Republican and Democratic, have pursued for nearly 80 years. They are virtually indistinguishable from the policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Much of the tea party talk about the supposed evil of the Obama administration is really just empty rhetorical excess.

And Lepore does have a tendency to take the contemporary tea partiers' somewhat overheated rhetoric a bit too literally. She seems to think, for example, that they really want to return to the 18th century — or, to be more exact, to the way government was conducted back then. And that is something Lepore herself does not want.

She tells the sad story of Peter Franklin Mecom, Benjamin Franklin's nephew, the son of his sister Jane. When Jane's husband, Edward Mecom, died, Lepore writes, he

left his wife with nothing but debts, not least because, long before he died, he had lost his mind. Whatever ailed him, it was heritable. When Jane's son Peter fell prey to the Mecom madness, Benjamin Franklin paid a farmer's wife to take care of him.

The care she provided did not, however, meet Jill Lepore's standards. "Whenever I hear people … talk about getting back to what the founders had," she writes, "a government that won't give money to people who don't work, I think about Peter Franklin Mecom: he was tied up in a barn, like an animal, for the rest of his life." Nor does Mecom's case represent the full extent of Lepore's dissatisfaction with the politics of the late 18th century. "In eighteenth-century America," she writes, "I wouldn't have been able to vote. I wouldn't have been able to own property, either." And her rejection of that prospect is flat and final. She writes, "I don't want to go back to that."

She approvingly quotes Thurgood Marshall's 1987 remark in which he mocked what he called the "complacent belief that the vision of those who debated and compromised in Philadelphia yielded the 'more perfect union' it is said we now enjoy." Marshall expressed a certain skepticism about "the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers" and noted that "the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual rights … we hold as fundamental today."

There is merit in this statement — though a historically literate libertarian would remonstrate a bit about Marshall's wording. It's doubtful, for example, that a civil war was actually "required" to get rid of slavery, and not all of those constitutional amendments Marshall seemed to hold in such high regard were "required" either, not if the end you had in view was the protection of individual rights.

The one in 1920 that permitted women to vote was doubtless "required" for that objective to be achieved. But what about the provisions of the Reconstruction Amendments that effectively turned over to a monstrously enlarged federal government all the matters that had previously been concerns of the various states? Did this have the effect of better protecting the individual rights of Americans? The matter is, at the very least, debatable.

The important point, however, is that no tea partiers I know of are asking that the government policies of the late 18th century be adopted anew — that slavery be reinstituted, that women be denied the right to vote and the right to own property. What the tea partiers are asking is rather that our current government be run according to the principles that underlay the American Revolution. But there's the rub. For what are those principles?

The Founding Fathers didn't agree with each other about everything. In fact, the more you read their letters and other writings, the more it seems that they agreed with each other about virtually nothing except the desirability of breaking with England and establishing a new government for what had been 13 separate English colonies. This is presumably why Glenn Beck asked Sarah Palin to name her favorite Founder, and it was her ignorant belief — or so, at least, it seems to me — that the founders all agreed that made her unable to answer his question.

If you think of the American Revolution as most modern libertarians do, as having been a major event in the libertarian tradition, as having been underlain by essentially libertarian ideas, if what at least some tea partiers want is that our current government be run according to libertarian principles — well, then, what they want is a federal government that scarcely exists, a federal government closer to the one that operated under the Articles of Confederation than to any US federal government that has existed since adoption of the Constitution. If, like most tea partiers, however, you're a conservative, then the principles you probably believe underlay the American Revolution were "no taxation without representation," the right to bear arms, and, of course, the doctrine that the United States was to be a "Christian nation."

It is a skewed understanding of the Revolution that permits such a view as this, of course, which is Lepore's point. What today's tea partiers think they know about the American Revolution is partial and selective when it isn't absolute bunkum.

Jill Lepore believes, and I agree with her, that it would be better if the tea partiers got their facts right, so that their understanding of the meaning of the American Revolution was more nuanced and closer to the actual truth.

She is inclined to blame her own profession for the problem. Academic historians stopped writing for the general reader decades ago, she argues, and began turning out highly specialized scholarship that frankly didn't expect any readers other than fellow professors.

She has a point, but I myself am a firm believer in the view that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. The horse has to want a drink. The American electorate has to want the truth about American history. Too many Americans really don't want truth — any truth. What they want is mythology that will confirm their prejudices.

Those of us who communicate with the public about history do have to get out the word about what American history really is. But just doing that won't guarantee a change in public attitudes toward the American Revolution. We still need a thirsty horse.

1 comment:

Montana said...

I real hope one of these retreads and blowhards runs for president, not because they have a chance of winning but because I like to see the train wreck that they will cause.

Faux News Candidates:
former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin ”The I graduated Early”,
former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga. “The I Love The Interns”,
former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee “The Huckster Reverend”,
former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. “The I Love the Gays”,
former UN Ambassador John Bolton “The I Love The War ”

I Finace Myself:
former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney “The Flip-Flopping Fudger”,
former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush “The I Am Not My “Dumb Ass” Brother”,

Employed Long Shots:
Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. “The History, I Don’t Need No Stink’n History”,
Mississippi Gov./ former tobacco lobbyist, Haley Barbour “The last White Hope”

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