"I Pledge Allegiance To The Flag And The Fourth Republic For Which It Stands?"

Since Michael Lind dropped names, Bruce Ackerman is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University and Theodore Lowi is the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions at Cornell University. Pretty heady company to consider the meaning of the 2008 election. Unlike Michael Lind, this blogger has no such comrades in ideas. If this is (fair & balanced) big-picture history, so be it.

[x Salon]
Obama And The Dawn Of The Fourth Republic
By Michael Lind

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency may signal more than the end of an era of Republican presidential dominance and conservative ideology. It may mark the beginning of a Fourth Republic of the United States.

In the past generation Bruce Ackerman, Theodore Lowi and I, in different ways, have used the idea of "republics" to understand American history. Since the French Revolution, France has been governed by five republics (plus two empires, a directory and a fascist dictatorship). Since the American Revolution, we Americans have been governed by several republics as well. But because we, like the British, pay lip service to formal continuity more than do the French, we pretend that we have been living under the same government since the federal Constitution was drafted and ratified in 1787-88. Our successive American republics from the 18th century to the 21st have been informal and unofficial.

As I see it, to date there have been three American republics, each lasting 72 years (give or take a few years). The First Republic of the United States, assembled following the American Revolution, lasted from 1788 to 1860. The Second Republic, assembled following the Civil War and Reconstruction (that is, the Second American Revolution) lasted from 1860 to 1932. And the Third American Republic, assembled during the New Deal and the civil rights eras (the Third American Revolution), lasted from 1932 until 2004.

Yes, you read that correctly — 2004, not 2008. A case can be made that the new era actually began four years ago. True, Bush, a relic of the waning years of the previous era, was reelected. But immediately after his reelection, the American people repudiated his foreign policy and his domestic policy, including Social Security privatization. In 2006 the Democrats swept the Republicans out of Congress, and in 2008 they have recaptured the White House.

To be sure, every shift in partisan control of government does not amount to the founding of a new republic. Obama did not win a landslide or have long coattails. His coalition is a slightly larger version of the Democratic Party that was forged in the partisan realignment of 1968-72. And the public is still divided among liberals, moderates and conservatives much as it has been for a decade or two. But my scenario does not depend on Obama's election or even on Democratic control of Congress. The Fourth Republic might have gotten off to a start — a bad start, but a start — under Republican auspices.

Policy shifts, more than public opinion polls or election results, suggest that a truly transformative moment may be upon us. The first three American republics display a remarkably similar pattern. Their 72-year life span is divided into two 36-year periods (again, give or take a year — this is not astrology). During the first 36-year period of a republic, ambitious nation-builders in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton strengthen the powers of the federal government and promote economic modernization. During the second 36-year phase of a republic, there is a Jeffersonian backlash, in favor of small government, small business and an older way of life. During the backlash era, Jeffersonians manage to modify, but never undo, the structure created by the Hamiltonians in the previous era.

We see this pattern of Hamiltonian nation-building and Jeffersonian backlash in the First, Second and Third Republics of the United States. Between 1788 and 1824, the ideas of the centralizing, nation-building Federalist Party of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton succeeded. Although Jefferson and his small-government allies controlled the White House and Congress for much of this period, in practice they implemented a streamlined, cheaper version of the Federalist plan for America. Jefferson's Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, for example, supported a program of infrastructure and industrialization not all that different from Alexander Hamilton's. And Jefferson himself, contradicting his small-government philosophy, exercised sweeping powers as president, purchasing the Louisiana Territory from France on his own initiative and promoting a federal embargo on U.S. exports to Britain and France. The first Jeffersonian backlash came later, under Andrew Jackson and his allies between 1824 and 1860.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 triggered the secession of the South, the Civil War and Reconstruction — the Second American Revolution and the founding of the Second Republic of the United States. During and after the Civil War, Lincoln's Republican Party remade the United States. In addition to crushing the South and freeing the slaves, the Republicans nationalized the banking system, promoted U.S. industry through high tariffs, carpeted the continent with federally subsidized railroads and used the sale of federal lands to pay for state colleges. From 1896, the Jeffersonian backlash against the system created by the Lincoln Republicans was led by Southern and Western agrarian populists and middle-class Progressives in the Northeast who, for different reasons, were alienated from the new order. While they achieved some reforms, the Jeffersonians failed to modify the essential features of the Lincoln-to-Hoover Second Republic.

The Third Republic of the United States was built by New Deal Democrats and liberal Republicans between 1932 and 1968. During the initial Hamiltonian phase, even more power was centralized in the federal government, which carried out national economic regulation, built power plants and electric grids, highways and airports, created Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance, and used federal power to dismantle racial segregation. Inevitably the period of Hamiltonian reform was followed by a Jeffersonian backlash that lasted from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush. Once again, populists and libertarians emphasizing different parts of the Jeffersonian legacy tinkered with the new order but failed to overturn it. Under Reagan and the second Bush, the right managed to cut income taxes and capital gains taxes. But their failure to shrink the size of post-New Deal government meant that their tax cuts, instead of inspiring less spending, merely produced enormous deficits.

George W. Bush was not only the final president of the Jeffersonian backlash period of Roosevelt's Third Republic, but the last president of the 1932-2004 Third Republic itself. The final president of a republic tends to be a failed, despised figure. The First Republic, which began with George Washington, ended with James Buchanan, a hapless president who refused to act as the South seceded after Lincoln's election. The Second Republic, which began with Abraham Lincoln, ended with the well-meaning but reviled and ineffectual Herbert Hoover. The Third Republic, founded by Franklin Roosevelt, came to a miserable end under the pathetic George W. Bush.

The election of 2004 was a fluke, like the election of 1824. The Jacksonian era — that is, the Jeffersonian backlash period of the 1788-1860 First Republic — began in 1824, even though John Quincy Adams became president after losing the popular vote to Andrew Jackson. (Jackson won the next two elections.) Likewise, the Fourth Republic arguably began in 2004, the narrow reelection of George W. Bush notwithstanding. 2008 is Year Four of the Fourth American Revolution.

If this analysis is right, what causes these cycles of reform and backlash in American politics? I believe they are linked indirectly to stages of technological and economic development. Lincoln's Second American Republic marked a transition from an agrarian economy to one based on the technologies of the first industrial revolution — coal-fired steam engines and railroads. Roosevelt's Third American Republic was built with the tools of the second industrial revolution — electricity and internal combustion engines. It remains to be seen what energy sources — nuclear? Solar? Clean coal? — and what technologies — nanotechnology? Photonics? Biotech — will be the basis of the next American economy. (Note: I'm talking about the material, real-world manufacturing and utility economy, not the illusory "information economy" beloved of globalization enthusiasts in the 1990s, who pretended that deindustrialization by outsourcing was a higher state of industrialism.)

Naturally, the Americans alive during the founding of new American republics have other issues on their minds. The Civil War was fought over slavery, not steam engines, and the New Deal, for all of FDR's commitment to nationwide electrical power fed by hydroelectric dam projects, was animated by a vision of social justice. The broad outlines of technological and economic change merely provide the frame for the picture; the details depend on the groups that emerge victorious in political battles.

That is why it is too early to predict the outline of the Fourth American Republic. Its shape depends on the outcomes of the debates and struggles of the next generation. But it is possible to speculate about its life span. If the pattern of history holds, the Fourth Republic of the United States will last for roughly 72 years, from 2004 (or, if you like, 2008) to 2076. And if the pattern of the past holds, we will see a period of Hamiltonian centralization and reform between now and 2040, followed by an approximately 36-year long Jeffersonian backlash motivated by ideals of libertarianism and decentralization.

And even if I am right that the new era began four years ago, historians are likely to identify the first president of the Fourth Republic of the United States as Barack Obama, not George W. Bush. Obama may join Washington, Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the short list of American presidents who, thanks both to their own leadership and the fortuitous timing of their elections, presided over the refounding of the United States. Yes, he can.

[Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life. Lind holds a B.A. from the University of Texas-Austin, an M.A. from Yale University, and a J.D. from University of Texas-Austin.]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

Forget Minnesota's Michele Bachmann! Texas Has Its Own Wingnut!

The Austin Fishwrap followed the lead of this blog in calling out the wacko True Republican Woman on the Texas State Board of Education. To paraphrase KeithO, Cynthia Dunbar is today's "Worst Person In The World." Even battier than Dunbar are the wackos in SBOE District 10 who elected her in 2006. If this is (fair & balanced) Lone Star lunacy, so be it.

[x Austin Fishwrap]
Editorial: Directing Education From The Fringe

Cynthia Dunbar, Texas SBOE District 10

It is shameful that Cynthia Dunbar is overseeing public education in Texas. She is an embarrassment who has brought heaping amounts of ridicule to this state.

Who is Cynthia Dunbar? She is an elected member of the State Board of Education, representing parts of Austin and Travis County. And she is author of a bizarre attack on President-elect Barack Obama published on the Christian Worldview Network.

In it, Dunbar says there will be a terrorist attack on America "by those with whom Obama truly sympathizes to take down the America that is [a] threat to tyranny." She goes on in the pre-election rant to say Obama will use that attack to declare martial law and expand his powers.

"I sincerely believe that an Obama Administration would ultimately mean one thing: the end of America as we know her," Dunbar wrote. "(W)e know all too well the attack this great Country undergoes on a daily basis from our own militant leftist Judicial Branch. Can you imagine how much worse this will get with Obama appointees?"

That could be dismissed as the ranting of a deluded right-wing conspiracy nut, but it was written by an elected state official, one overseeing the education of millions of Texas schoolchildren. Even after she was vilified for the disgraceful screed, Dunbar stood by what she wrote.

Dunbar, 43, was elected to the education board in 2006 from District 10, which includes the northern half of Austin and Travis County, as well as Bastrop, Williamson, Fayette, Lee, Milam and part of Fort Bend counties, among others. There are 15 education districts in Texas, each covering huge swaths of territory and multiple counties.

Education board elections occur under the radar, with few voters knowing anything about the candidates. In recent years, ultraconservatives have used the obscure nature of these elections to gain a foothold on the board to push a radical, anti-evolution, anti-intellectual agenda. And public education in Texas has suffered for it.

Dunbar has a law degree from Regent University, the Virginia school founded and run by conservative televangelist Pat Robertson. She lists herself as an anatomy teacher but won't tell even the Texas Education Agency at which school she teaches.

Although she was elected to supervise public education in Texas, Dunbar home schools her children. In fact, she was elected with the help of the Texas Home School Coalition. She lives in Richmond in Fort Bend County and ran in and lost the Republican primary earlier this year for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's congressional seat.

Dunbar has attacked the teaching of evolution in science classes — classes her home-schooled children don't attend — and appointed the director of a creationist institute to the task force looking at the state's science curriculum.

Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott expressed dismay about Dunbar's comments, saying they were unfortunate and regrettable. However, Scott and the Texas Education Agency have no jurisdiction over the elected board members.

It would be admirable if other state officials, including Governor Rick Perry and Lt. Governor David Dewhurst, condemned Dunbar's seditious ravings. It is long past the time for state leaders to confront board members who make a mockery of public education in Texas.

Who is Cynthia Dunbar? She is a disgrace to public education and an embarrassment to Texas.

Copyright © 2008 The Austin American-Statesman

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.

In Second-Place & Gaining

Athenian democracy lasted for 241 years. The Land O'The Free & The Home O'The Brave is in second-place as the longest-lived democracy. The Athenian version of democracy did not extend to its slaves. Our version of democracy abolished slavery nearly 150 years ago and on November 4, 2008, the ultimate repudiation of the legacy of slavery rang throughout the land. If this is a (fair & balanced) fulfillment of destiny, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
An Eternal Revolution
By Oorlando Patterson

Barrack Obama’s victory marks the end of another magnificent chapter in America’s experience of democracy. But rather than being seen as a radical transition, it is best viewed as part of an ever-evolving process that began with the election of George Washington in 1789. To interpret it as a foundational change, ushering something new and unknown, is to diminish the past, to unduly singularize Mr. Obama’s achievement and to raise unrealistic expectations about his presidency.

Mr. Obama owes his victory, first, to his gift of leadership and personality: the hybrid cool of his charisma, his cathartic power to mine unity from difference. But his triumph depended on voters, first prone to see his candidacy as exotic, to recognize it as something that could (and would) only happen here. That they did stems in large part from the founding fathers’ clear vision of the ideal makeup of a democracy: an inclusive electorate, political participation and political power sharing.

This was a vision that terrified as much as it fascinated the conservative men who were often amazed at what they had signed on to in 1787: a revolutionary “charter of power granted by liberty,” in James Madison’s nervously triumphalist prose. So they promptly ensured that it would only very slowly threaten the political hegemony of older white men.

Three groups, in particular, were excluded from the process: blacks, women and the young. The history of American democracy can be read in good part as the struggle of all three to become fully included in the process. The 2008 campaign was remarkable in the way all three groups worked together to realize, finally and fully, the ambivalent vision of the founders.

Most important to the Obama victory was the long struggle of black Americans to be incorporated in the public sphere. That entailed not just the dismantlement of Jim Crow but the election of black officers at all levels of the political system. The sheer presence of significant numbers of blacks in positions of political authority was as much the cause as the consequence of the profound change in white political attitudes. Colin Powell’s flirtation with a presidential run was a critical point in this shift in white attitude, effectively priming the nation for the possibility of a black candidate. But so too were the appointments of blacks such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown.

And while disdained by most social scientists, the cultural dimension of black public incorporation also prepared the way: a white population that venerates Will Smith, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan, its youth steeped in hip-hop, has already gone a long way toward accepting a black leader in the highest office of the public sphere, even if whites are reluctant to do the same in their segregated private lives.

Of equal importance in explaining Senator Obama’s triumph, however, are American women. This campaign was, in a remarkable way, a condensed re-enactment of the entire intertwined struggle of blacks and women for political inclusion. White women first rejected their confinement to the role of virtuous motherhood in the private sphere of the early Republic by championing the very public struggle for the abolition of slavery. In much the same way, the modern second wave of feminism was facilitated by, and partly modeled on the black civil rights movement.

Black achievement has always presaged female advancement, not always from the noblest of motives: if blacks could vote, enjoy protection from discrimination and run for office, so should women. Hillary Clinton’s forceful campaign, however important, pales in comparison with this historic American tendency in explaining why a female president is now a near certainty and not long off.

But women have always repaid the debt. A quiet but momentous change took place in the 1980s that was just as important as the civil rights movement in explaining Barack Obama’s victory: the epochal shift in the voting behavior of women who, for the first time since enfranchisement, voted in greater numbers, and more progressively, than men. In raw demographic terms, the most important factor in explaining the Obama victory was women voting by a 13 percent margin in his favor, while men were almost evenly split. President Obama would neglect this base of support at his peril.

Finally, there is the much discussed resurgence in the youth vote. Here, again, change is best viewed as a critical moment in a pre-existing process. American youths have long voted at distressingly low levels, although the turnout of eligible voters between 18 and 29 surged moderately between 2000 and 2004, from 36 to 47 percent. While Tuesday’s exit polls are showing only an incremental change in this rate, Mr. Obama had a powerful impact on youth activism, deploying young Americans in voter mobilization ground operations and in the game-changing use of the Internet for voter outreach and campaign finance.

Young voters went 2-to-1 in Mr. Obama’s favor on Tuesday. Their advocacy in the Iowa caucuses was likely the decisive factor in his all-important victory there. The most lasting effect of all this may be a permanent shift of the youth vote toward the Democratic Party, although one can certainly expect the Republicans, who made successful efforts on campuses in the Ronald Reagan years, to mount a challenge.It appears, too, that the intense bonding of younger Americans with the youthful Mr. Obama initiates the transmission of power from baby boomers, who have for so long consumed the nation’s assets and attention, to a younger generation from whom so much has already been taken, in social security and resources.

To view the election of Barack Obama as notable only as an example of breaking through a racial barrier is to misunderstand the greater flow of our ever-more-inclusive democracy. America has, at last, delivered, in creating the most sublime example of democratic governance since its invention in Greece 25 centuries ago.

[Orlando Patterson is a professor of sociology at Harvard and the author — most recently — of The Ordeal of Integration (1997). Patterson received the National Book Award in 1991 for the first volume in Freedom, Volume 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991) and Volume 2: A World of Freedom (1993). Patterson received a B.S. from the University of the West Indies and a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

Get the Google Reader at no cost from Google. Click on this link to go on a tour of the Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, load Reader with your regular sites, then check them all on one page. The Reader's share function lets you publicize your favorite posts.