Political History

To judge from his faltering campaign for healthcare reform, President Obama, well-read as he is, appears to have neglected to read Machiavelli. If he had done so, the American president would have learned this from the Florentine statesman and philosopher in "The Prince":

All but the most ostrich-like of conservatives recognize that their movement is at its lowest ebb in more than three decades. Democrats control the presidency and both chambers of Congress, and the polarization of the two major parties has rendered conservatives more isolated and irrelevant to policymaking than in their previous stints in the minority. Democrats are using their majorities to pass sweeping changes in public policy that will reshape the contours of the American state for decades to come, and it hardly matters whether

In my first foray into political life in the 1970s, I worked during college on the staff of a liberal Democrat in the Texas state Senate. Only a few years earlier, Patty Hearst had been kidnapped and brainwashed by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and a moral panic about cults seducing college kids was sweeping the nation. One result was the rise of a new, thankfully ephemeral profession: "deprogrammers" who for pay would kidnap a young person from a cult and break the spell, by means of isolation, interrogation… more

In its push to solve the long-term problems of U.S. healthcare and energy in only a few months by means of comprehensive reform legislation, the Obama administration and the Democratic majority could be inspired by the story of Henry Clay's success in framing the Compromise of 1850. In the greatest feat of his long career in American politics, the great Kentucky senator put together a comprehensive package of reforms that won bipartisan support, resolved outstanding issues about slavery and the territories annexed from Mexico after the Mexican War… more

Robert McNamara has died. Notwithstanding his previous career at Ford in the 1950s and his later career as president of the World Bank, Robert Strange McNamara will always be remembered for his service as secretary of defense for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations during the height of the Second Indochina War, known in the U.S. as "the Vietnam War." In death, as in life, he is likely to prove to be a Rorschach test for what people think about that conflict and the four-decade Cold War of… more

A generation of American activists was inspired by the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, which promised moral clarity amid the cruel compromises of the cold war. As Barack Obama vividly explained in Dreams from My Father, he was one of them. Given the foreign policy dilemmas that the president will face in the years ahead, it's worth thinking through the lessons of the South African transition.

Is America a Christian nation, as many conservatives claim it is? One American doesn't think so. In his press conference on April 6 in Turkey, President Obama explained: "One of the great strengths of the United States is … we have a very large Christian population -- we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."

Freedom is at the heart of the American identity, shaping both personal lives and political values. The ideal of authoring one's own life has inspired the country's best and worst moments--courage and emancipation, but also fear, delusion, and pointless war.

For his part, Jedediah Purdy creates an idea-packed sandwich in “A Tolerable Anarchy”: first a slice of radical American autonomy, which frightened both Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke (unnecessarily); then a slice of practical constraint on that autonomy, produced by Mother Nature herself in the form of a warming climate; and in between, a tour of American political history as it relates to the essence of freedom in different eras. This tour of freedom and its discontents passes through slavery… more

Today’s young people have considerably more progressive opinions about economic issues than do their elders. Under-30s voted very strongly for Barack Obama in 2008 and expressed liberal views about the economy (and about other issues) in pre-election polls. Observers and strategists are now asking whether we will see a lasting change in American politics as a result of the Millennials’ arrival. It is possible that they are liberal because they are young, and they will move to the right as they grow older. But analyses of the trajectories across… more