Worst President Ever

Slate has published a readable gloss on the political life of Herbert Hoover (in office 1929-1933), who is widely considered to be one of the worst Presidents ever. It was Hoover's misfortune to have the stock market crash just seven months into his Presidency, but it was Hoover's choice to take a largely "hands off" approach to economic recovery and social welfare. Unsympathetic to the suffering masses ("Nobody actually starved," he said) and unwilling to let the government prop up relief programs, Hoover became incredibly unpopular and was booted out of office after one term. It was Hoover's successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who would craft the New Deal as the government's response to the economic downturn.

The article begins with this wonderful, and telling, anecdote:

In 1932, the parents of a 4-year-old went to court to change his legal name. Christened Herbert Hoover Jones in 1928, when the commerce secretary and Republican presidential nominee was a national hero, the boy deserved relief, said his parents, from "the chagrin and mortification which he is suffering and will suffer" for sharing a moniker with the now-disgraced chief executive. His new name: Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones.

Palin's Conduct a "National Disgrace"

Christopher Hitchens is at best a moderate liberal but perhaps more accurately seen as a centrist, Samuel Huntington-type: a political secularist who firmly supports the grand, civilizational struggle against "radical Islam." Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw his endorsement for Barack Obama on Slate.com.

It's true that Hitchens musters a sort of qualified praise for the Democratic ticket ("the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience"). But the British-born, Oxford-educated Hitchens is unqualified in his disdain for the McCain-Palin ticket. Here's the magazine critic's assessment of Palin's cross-country rallying over the past couple of weeks:

The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: "What does he take me for?" Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party's right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama's position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.

Ouch! As if that weren't bad enough, Hitchens has a few choice words regarding Palin's doing McCain's "dirty work" on the campaign trail:

[Last week's debate showed] Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.

One gets the impression from these passages that Sarah Palin -- who she is, what her function seems to be in this race, how she's carried herself since being nominated the Republicans' VP choice -- stands in Hitchens's mind for everything that's wrong with the Republican party today. Whereas selecting the infinitely more qualified Joe Lieberman (whom I disagree with fundamentally on the political issues but recognize as a capable and "experienced" leader) might have swung Hitchens toward McCain's camp, it's been Palin's selection that has left him wondering whether the Republican party is even invested in retaining its diminishing credibility to the American public.

I would point out that the Republicans' credibility has long been in tatters, not least because of the profound ideological gerrymandering that's gone into over thirty years of constituting the so-called "Southern Strategy." That method of wresting working-class whites in the South (and other agricultural/postindustrial regions in the US) away from the Democratic party has been responsible for the most horrifying and divisive political maneuvers in the past century: Willie Horton, "welfare queens," Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill, and anti-Arab sentiment. These discourses fall squarely on the shoulders of the Republican party, and Sarah Palin's career as a VP candidate is built on its foundations. Her entrance into the national political arena should come as no surprise, then -- it's the absurd yet unsurprising culmination of years of Republican ideological warfare in the form of moral haranguing, religious crusading, and racist/sexist scapegoating.

Despite Hitchens's shortsighted view of the situation, let's hope his wish that the American people will pronounce a resounding verdict against John McCain and Sarah Palin comes to fruition.

Obama's on Their Side

Compromise, negotiation, tact... or is it pandering? The contest for President of the United States has begun in earnest. One sure sign of this is Barack Obama's values-laden politicking in recent weeks. Exhibit A is the following national campaign ad, which, as John Dickerson points out, is desperately intent on portraying Obama as being "just like one of us."



It's unfair of me to take Sen. Obama to task for trying to appeal to white Americans, and particularly to those who self-identify as reasonable, average folk. Clearly he's got to reach out to as many people as possible if he's to have a chance of winning the November election. But maybe it's too bitter a pill for me to swallow to see that 1) the aforementioned ad needs to be whitewashed (including mention of Obama's African father) in order to appeal to these demographics, and 2) Obama has to deploy an all-American, up-by-the-bootstraps life narrative in order to appear as an upstanding (black) candidate.

We can talk about this being merely a strategic effort to win votes, a pragmatic acknowledgment that a black liberal from Chicago needs to downplay his blackness and political beliefs in order to have a real shot at the Presidency. My question, though, is whether there's a point at which this effort at reaching out actually begins to chip away at the principled political vision that Obama has placed at the center of his campaign. In other words, how far are Obama and his supporters willing to go in order to convince folks that he's their candidate? Does Obama continue to try to sound as though "he's on their side," in complete alignment with their core values, or does he ask the tougher questions of what those values mean in everyday life, why people hold them dear, and what the best policies to nourish those values might be.

Perhaps Obama's perceived misstep of referring to white working-class Pennsylvanians as "bitter" came closest to asking the sorts of questions I outline here. Of course we all know how that turned out -- it almost cost him the Democratic nomination. So maybe the practical, give-and-take approach is the best route to take.

But then consider Exhibit B: Obama's reaction to the Supreme Court's bare-majority decision yesterday which says that the death penalty is a form of punishment that is incommensurate with the act of raping a child. The case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, featured a 43-year-old man who was sentenced to death in Louisiana in 2003 for raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter. Writing for the majority (which included Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer) was Justice Anthony Kennedy, again the crucial swing vote between the liberal and conservative blocs on the Court.

Unsurprisingly, the dissenting Justices accused the Court's opinion of being too "sweeping," effectively outlawing the death penalty in cases which don't involve the murder of the victim(s). Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the decision prevented states from applying the full force of their capital punishment measures "no matter how young the child, no matter how many times the child is raped, no matter how many children the perpetrator rapes, no matter how sadistic the crime, no matter how much physical or psychological trauma is inflicted, and no matter how heinous the perpetrator’s prior criminal record may be." Adding a questionable sense of morality to this litany of legal oversights, Republican Presidential candidate John McCain bemoaned the decision, saying, "That there is a judge anywhere in America who does not believe that the rape of a child represents the most heinous of crimes, which is deserving of the most serious of punishments, is profoundly disturbing.”

I've come to accept such reactions as the Supreme Court rounds out its docket for the year and announces its major decisions. But Barack Obama's response to the case surprised me. In a move that has got some people saying Obama wanted to avoid a Michael Dukakis-type gaffe on the issue of capital punishment, Obama said, "I disagree with the decision. I have said repeatedly that I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes. I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime." Obama concluded by suggesting that if a state passes a law which levels the death penalty against such a crime, then that state should be allowed to impose it. This strong-armed states' rights position is unusual territory for Obama, and as enough commentators have pointed out, it locates his position squarely in the same camp as the conservative Justices.

Perhaps Obama achieved his goal in "disagreeing" with the Court's opinion in Kennedy v. Louisiana. Surveying readers' comments on several news websites, I've seen a smattering of, "This is the best thing I've heard come out of Obama's mouth," and, "Up to now I wasn't convinced, but Obama's got my vote after this." There have also been responses like my own, which basically say that Obama has been giving up too much by currying favor with the "values" demographic -- social conservatives, people of faith, law-and-order types. Unlike the folks "on the fence," though, those of us who object to Obama's stance on the case are unlikely to cancel our votes for him because of it. The issue is one among many, sure, but we also realize, to some degree, that Obama isn't addressing his reliable base in making such reactionary comments; he's talking to people "on the other side."

Like Justice Kennedy and yesterday's majority, I believe that the administration of capital punishment in this country is already fraught with arbitrary decision-making and line-drawing. But unlike the dissenters, John McCain, and Barack Obama, I would argue that allowing states to pursue the death penalty in non-murder cases extends, rather than narrowly limits, the reach of these arbitrary decrees. Who, after all, determines the degree of a crime's "heinousness," its relative "sadism," its offense to what's good and pure? If you ask me, any form of rape is "heinous," regardless of the age of the victim. In fact, we actually lose a great deal of footing in our fight against sexual abuse and gendered violence by conceding that the rape of an 8-year-old child is somehow more dastardly than the rape of an adult woman. Rape is always, under every circumstance, a heinous crime.

Acknowledging this does not compromise the Court's stance on capital punishment. It brackets the moralizing fetish of the sanctity of the American child, articulates the broad political goal of fighting against sexual violence in all forms, and recognizes the Court's decision as a pragmatic solution to the problem of capital punishment -- because it's such an arbitrary and imperfect punitive measure, the most our nation is willing to grant certain states is the ability to execute convicted murderers. In contrast, McCain's and Obama's responses effectively legitimate the death penalty in this Louisiana case on the grounds of a moral judgment -- we know a crime that merits capital punishment when we see one. (The dissenting Justices' opinion avoids such bald moralism and sticks to calling the majority opinion "sweeping," which is in effect a legal, not a moral, critique.)

Barack Obama's few weeks of being the presumptive Democratic nominee for President has energized this country's electorate in a way that we haven't seen for close to fifty years. His candidacy still holds forth a lot of promise. But I'd be lying if I said that his campaign ad and his response to Kennedy v. Louisiana didn't disappoint me. The greatest political orator of our generation no longer seems to be speaking to me.

An Insightful "Conservative"

Jon Swift is the alias of a blogosphere humorist who describes himself as a "reasonable conservative who likes to write about politics and culture." Of course, like the "real" Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the Englishman of letters known especially for his biting satirical wit, this self-description is but a ruse. Jon Swift skewers conservative ideology and media talk by pretending to be their staunchest defender. Swift takes his cue from The Colbert Report -- addressing contemporary politics and news events -- but his writing is smarter, and more subtle, not unlike the work of the real Swift.

Jon Swift's tagline motto is: "Since the media is biased I get all my news from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Jay Leno monologues." And indeed most of his writing is devoted to pointing out the illogic of much conservative mass media. (His tagline itself is illogical -- the mass media is biased, but in his favor, and Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Jay Leno [whom I agree is both desperately unfunny and the biggest, dumbest misogynist on television] lie not at the margins of the public sphere but precisely in its center.) A recent post retains Swift's satirical tone while making fun of the mass media's lionization of Tim Russert, who, it should be said, did much to actually lower journalistic standards for public-interest inquiry of politicians and political institutions.

These observations aside, I was introduced to Jon Swift's world by virtue of his celebrated Amazon.com reviews. Back in 2006 Jon Swift posted reviews of books by the likes of Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and David Horowitz. These books -- hardly worth the paper they're printed on -- spewed far right-wing ideology like it was gospel and participated in the Republicans' drumming up support among its base in preparation for the 2006 mid-term elections. Well, Jon Swift took these folks to task not by dismissing them out of hand but by approaching them from a ridiculously literal, arch-conservative perspective. It was a performance befitting Jonathan Swift's classic essay "A Modest Proposal" (1729), which suggested that the Irish might alleviate their economic woes by selling children born into poverty as food for the rich.

Unsurprisingly, Amazon removed all of Jon Swift's reviews. Thankfully, he kept back-ups, and his complete archive of reviews can be found here. Notice that he begins each review with, "I have not actually read this book but..." Which, at least for me, captures the essence of so much that's wrong with the arch-conservative mindset (or, for that matter, any extremist political ideology which is less attuned to actually existing socioeconomic conditions and more interested in defending its theoretical coherence).

Jon Swift gets the tone right here, and that's what makes his voice so effective, and at times so laugh-out-loud funny. My favorite review has got to be his take on Mark R. Levin's Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America. Levin is one of those conservative legal commentators who willfully ignores the Court's demonstrable conservative bent, as well as the fact that Republican-appointed judges make up the vast majority of federal court appointees, to lambaste the few (remaining) "liberal" social measures that the Court has protected. Levin has to blind himself to all of this as he puts the Republican machinery of fantasizing that liberals control everything (the media, the courts, etc.) into full gear. Levin's book is the definition of spin in legal circles.

Jon Swift's review doesn't explain these things to us, nor does it seek to. In fact, the review doesn't say much about anything... except for the movie Men in Black. Titled "I love Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones," it reads:

I have not actually read this book but I love the movie with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. I thought it was very funny and very imaginative with all of the alien creatures. I don't remember the movie saying anything about the Supreme Court but I know they often change books when they adapt them into movies. Even though I agree with everything Justice Scalia says he does sometimes seem like an alien from another planet, which I mean in a good way.

That barb against Scalia is even funnier upon realizing that, for the arch-conservative, reading Levin's book is precisely akin to watching Men in Black -- neither says "anything about the Supreme Court." They do, however, put on a good show.

The Task of the Reviewer

I began posting book reviews on Amazon.com about a year ago to kick-start the process of writing on a daily basis. My dissertation had suffered long periods of dormancy, and posting book reviews was just one of the ways I thought I could teach myself how to enjoy writing -- any form of writing -- in view of schedules and deadlines.

I was also spurred to enter that virtual universe of Amazon.com reviewing after reading Michael Eric Dyson's contribution to the New York Public Library's series on the seven deadly sins: Pride. I maintain that this is a dreadful piece of writing. I found Dyson's book to be at once self-indulgent and hollow: brash and condescending without any hint of self-reflexive criticism. A good third of the book is devoted to Dyson's own career, and he betrays not an iota of irony when he takes two former students to task (he basically insults them in prose) for supposedly being disruptive in one of his classes. As you can see for yourself, my review reflects my very low opinion of this book.

But having had some familiarity with the defensive nature of people's responses to Amazon.com reviews (especially when it comes to political and social commentary), I added a closing paragraph to my review that revealed my stakes in critiquing Dyson: a progressive myself, I believe public-intellectual showmanship by the likes of Dyson does a disservice to progressive critical thinking. It brings our discourse down to the level of a polemical shouting match, and it touches on only the most superficial layer of social and political understanding (e.g., Dyson hails Halle Berry's and Denzel Washington's winning Oscars as being "good" forms of pride, over and against the KKK's "bad" form of pride).

The very next review I wrote, on Herman Grey's Cultural Moves, was just as critical, but this time I approached my argument from a more "academic" perspective. I again revealed my stakes in this act of criticism: as someone thoroughly invested in black cultural studies and African American cultural production more generally, I think Grey's sociological determinism seeks not to understand black arts on its own terms but to regurgitate the theoretical point that black arts is always "different" from presumably "white" hegemonic cultural production. Cultural Moves, for me, is a book of academic navel-gazing and not a sincere effort to think about what black arts might mean for its actual practitioners and receivers.

So you can see I've been very careful with how I approach reviewing on Amazon.com. I'm keen on making critical points, but I'm also aware of the various audiences I'm addressing -- I try to inaugurate a conversation between me and them that makes clear my position (with which they may or may not agree) and my investment in making that position. To be sure, I apply such a degree of care to books that are explicitly "about" social and cultural affairs: Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope, to take the most recent example.

Having explained all that, you can imagine my surprise when someone took the time to send me a message, via Amazon.com, to let me know she finds my reviews heinous:

"Hi,
You gave Fukuyama's (!) book 5 stars essentially saying, 'hey please, come line this reactionary's pockets with money' - and Rachel Roy etc. - and you gave Herman Gray's book ONE star? Ugh! Must you review? - can't you go join some neocon think tank or something and stop ruining people's ratings with your lame criticisms? Better yet - write your own book for critique. Thank you."

Well, there goes "writing for an audience"!

First, I'm not sure exactly what this person meant by adding "Rachel Roy etc." (i.e., Rachael Ray) to the mix in such an offhand manner. Is Rachael Ray a political "reactionary"? Or does this person take issue with Ray's admittedly populist (heaven forbid "mainstream"!) approach to home cooking? (There are longstanding debates on Amazon.com about Rachael Ray's "dumbed-down" approach to cooking, with elitist "foodies" taking the masses to task for their lack of "taste," in both senses of that term.) Whatever the case may be, I can only imagine this person was attempting to flash her liberal, hipster, and/or anti-mainstream credentials by denouncing my positive reviews of Rachael Ray's cookbooks.

More important, however, is her claim that I'm somehow a political reactionary myself for giving Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads a positive review. Now the full text of my review clearly states that what I appreciate about this book is the candor and intelligence with which Fukuyama critiques the problem of George W. Bush's war-mongering and interventionist attempt to "spread democracy" the world over. It's Fukuyama's contention that the philosophical roots of neoconservative thinking insist strongly against such interventionism. (And so unlike other Amazon.com reviewers who seem to think Fukuyama is defecting from neoconservative principles, I actually point out that he's lambasting Bush for not holding true to them.) My review clearly states that I disagree with philosophical neoconservativism but that I appreciate the critique of Bush Fukuyama is able to mount in its name. Fukuyama's is a well-reasoned argument, in my estimation, and one way, out of many, of trying to work through the implications of Bush's disastrous, pig-headed foreign policy.

If there's anything I'm guilty of, at least based on my review, it's the belief that the project of democratic reform must first take root in the actual communities supposedly in need of democratic reform. This is the belief, over and against interventionism, of the need to buffer civil society with strong institutions and shared power structures. It's a belief shared by conservative realists, liberal socialists, and NGOs alike. Now it may not be the "utopian" post-power structure that many of my colleagues in graduate school advocate for, but it is, in my opinion, a real, viable alternative to the pressing issue of U.S. imperialism acting under the guise of "spreading democracy." Where I differ radically from Fukuyama, then, is in how "institution-building" as such is conceived: I reject neoconservative principles and support Western European-style socialism, where civil society is strengthened by the state not letting market capitalism run roughshod over the interests of the people, especially the poor and working classes.

Of course I doubt my critic actually read my review: it seems she only compared my star ratings among books (especially Herman Grey's, for whatever reason) and made up her mind that I belonged in a "neocon think tank." As for her claim that my review "line[s] [Fukuyama's] pockets with money," I would simply point out to her that if one were to live life divesting from supposedly reactionary causes and businesses, we'd have to give up most, if not all, of the commodities and amenities that infuse modern society. It's not just Fox News and Wendy's I'm talking about here. I also hear the Coors family is rather conservative (that's an understatement, by the way), and who really knows what Whole Foods is up to these days (for the record, I like Whole Foods)? (On Whole Foods and this ideology of "organicism" in our supermarkets, see Michael Pollan's widely celebrated The Omnivore's Dilemma.)

In the end, I'm quite happy to have provoked a response from my critic. I doubt she'll ever want to hear what I have to say here, but then again critical debate in general is somewhat lacking on the Internet, owing to the medium's immediacy and tendency to evoke knee-jerk, defensive responses. Perhaps we'd do better speaking in person.

As for my future as an Amazon.com reviewer, I'll carry on just as I have carried on: making critical points, saying what I liked and disliked, reviewing books both popular and obscure, "academic" and mainstream, and always being wary that I'm writing for an audience.

The one thing I will refuse is heeding to some sort of ideological litmus test, of which my critic and many of my professional colleagues are equally guilty. For my critic, I'm not liberal or progressive enough. For some of my colleagues, I'm not radical or "utopian" enough. My task as a reviewer is not to meet any ideological standard that demands an "enough." It is simply to be this: insistently and self-reflexively critical.