A Plea for the Humanities

The humanities help nurture connections within and between diverse societies, offering pathways for constructive engagement. Learning about and respecting outlooks different from our own is crucial to our survival in the twenty-first century, moving us away from tensions created by ignorance and fear toward informed, sympathetic conversation between cultures. That does not mean forsaking our own identities and loyalties, but it does involve developing the capacity to see beyond them. – Richard Godbeer, Professor of History, University of Kansas

On June 4, 2009, President Obama gave a speech at Cairo University that sought to promote understanding and ease tensions between the United States and the Muslim world. Although it had been nearly eight years since a group of violent Islamic extremists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, the country remained at war in Iraq and Afghanistan and divided about how to respond to threats of terrorism and religious-inspired violence at home and abroad.

Obama had come to Cairo “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.” Increased understanding between Islam and the West was essential for peace. “So long as our relationship is defined by our differences,” Obama said, “we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, those who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity.” Obama correctly noted that Islam was replete with teachings that promoted peace and condemned violence, and that most people of the Islamic faith opposed terrorism and had nothing to do with the violence inflicted on 9/11. 

The Cairo speech served educational and diplomatic objectives and was grounded in Obama’s knowledge and understanding of history, religion, and culture. Aided by his education and personal life experiences, he crafted a speech designed to lower tensions and provide historical perspective. Rooted in the humanities, the speech sought to counter the widening rift between Islam and the United States. 

As the previous eight years had demonstrated, a fundamental misunderstanding and aversion to a comprehensive understanding of historic, religious, and cultural dynamics led to a gross miscalculation in the War in Iraq and our response to the war on terror. It also contributed to Islamophobia, discrimination, and prejudice against Muslims within the United States. Obama’s speech, which incorporated his humanities-based education, exemplified how a broad understanding of history and religion, and experience with diverse cultures, leads to a deeper appreciation for differing perspectives and to better communication and judgment. 

America at its best is a nation that supports excellence, learns from history, promotes understanding between people of different religious and racial backgrounds, and engages other nations and cultures with appropriate humility. It is why an educational system founded on the humanities is so important to a free and vibrant democracy, and to American public life.

It is also why I find the Trump administration’s full-scale war on the humanities, the arts, and higher education in American life deeply troubling. Through a series of executive orders and other actions, Trump intends to disband the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), restrict the independence of the Smithsonian Institution, and defund libraries, museums, universities, public radio and television stations, and arts education in communities throughout the United States. Trump’s attacks on these institutions include censoring historical content on federal government and public museum websites, removing books on racial equity and gender identity from military academy libraries, eliminating public support for the arts in diverse communities, and canceling billions of dollars in funding for research at the nation’s top universities. He wishes to fund only causes he considers “patriotic” or that present a glorified perspective of American history and culture.

The administration has cited a variety of reasons for its actions, but rather than propose modest and evidence-based reforms designed to address a particular concern, Trump acts and talks as if he wishes to burn these esteemed institutions to the ground. I believe his actions will cause irreparable harm to the nation that even his supporters will come to regret. But rather than provide a detailed critique of why many of Trump’s executive orders are unconstitutional or grossly misguided, I wish only to explain why public support for the humanities is essential to an informed citizenry, and a free and vibrant democracy. 

The humanities include the academic study of philosophy, history, religion, languages, and the arts, and encompasses literature, poetry, writing, theater, music, and the visual arts. Aristotle believed that a study of the humanities was essential to excellence, and to perfecting of the self. Along with the sciences, the humanities formed the foundation for higher education. Without them our educational system would be nothing more than a series of vocational and professional schools in strict service to the economy. While such skills-based learning is important and necessary, the humanities are essential to a liberal education, with “liberal” in this usage derived from the Latin word liber, meaning “free.” The term itself recognizes that knowledge is liberating and explains why slave owners in early America deprived their enslaved subjects of books and education.

It is true that humanities education sometimes gets a bad rap. Critics contend the humanities provide “soft” knowledge with little utilitarian value in a competitive economy. In the movie Liberal Arts, a young college student asks the film’s protagonist, Jesse Fisher, what he majored in when he attended the same college ten years earlier. “English, with a minor in history,” replies Jesse, “just to make sure I was fully unemployable.” It is a common sentiment. When my father learned I was taking a course my sophomore year on Native American Literature, he cynically asked, “What kind of a job will that get you?” The course itself may not have added anything to my resume, but it is one of the few courses that I remember well to this day, for it helped me to better understand Native American culture and history and made me a better and more informed person. 

And while some might argue that having the time to spend on such pursuits reflects a life of privilege and too much leisure time, I counter that it was my humanities-based liberal arts education that developed my skills in speaking and writing, the art of persuasion, and critical thinking, all skills I needed as a lawyer and that are skills desperately needed in today’s world. 

In Man’s Search for Meaning, the Holocaust survivor, psychologist, and philosopher Viktor Frankl wrote, “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” It is this search for meaning that most explains my interest in the humanities. As the years pass and I become older, the more fully I comprehend how important history and religion, philosophy and literature, art and music, and exposure to diverse cultures, languages, and traditions are to a fully engaged and exalted life. Good literature and the arts enrich our lives, help us better understand and empathize with others, leads to genuine human interactions, and guides us in our human quest for truth and understanding. 

It is why the power of an enjoyable book is so liberating, and why the joy of reading uplifts and enhances our lives. Marilynne Robinson, who wrote a defense of the humanities for The New York Review of Books, contends that an informative book “has a suggestive power far beyond its subject, a potency the affected mind itself might take years to realize.” She once talked with “a cab driver who had spent years in prison. He said he had no idea that the world was something he could be interested in. And then he read a book.” 

According to the 17th Century French Catholic philosopher Blaise Pascal, “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Humanities and the arts contribute to the development of well-rounded human beings with an ethical core and a moral compass, something desperately lacking in the world today judging from the current crop of world leaders.

But why should we publicly fund the humanities? How one answers that question may depend on what sort of society and country one desires. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville perceived education and the humanities as rays of sunlight that spread democracy and enlightenment over the western world: 

From the moment when the exercise of intelligence had become a source of strength and wealth, each . . .  new area of knowledge, each fresh idea had to be viewed as a seed of power placed within people’s grasp. Poetry, eloquence, memory, the beauty of wit, the fires of imagination, the depth of thought, all these gifts which heaven shares out by chance turned to the advantage of democracy and, even when they belonged to the enemies of democracy, they still promoted its cause by highlighting the natural grandeur of man. Its victories spread, therefore, alongside those of civilization and education. Literature was an arsenal open to all, where the weak and the poor could always find arms.

Tocqueville believed that advancements in knowledge enhanced the general welfare of the community and promoted excellence. In an increasingly complex and evolving world, private means alone are inadequate. It is why public support for the humanities and the arts are historically important to a free and democratic society. Without public support, humanities and the arts would benefit only the privileged and affluent. The availability of public funds extends their reach to poor and rural communities, and thus benefits all of society. This is why grants from the NEH and NEA are so important, and why funding cuts to higher education restrict the aid available for lower income students.

Our nation’s founders, although flawed individuals, were highly educated and widely read men. These traits enabled them to inspire a national movement and draft the American ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. It is why the freedom of expression, and of the press, and the free exercise of religious belief and practice were so cherished and embedded into the nation’s founding documents. And it is why the courts have traditionally outlawed efforts to censor news reports or ban books, things free societies that value unfettered thought and creativity simply do not allow.

This is why the current attacks on our educational system and hostility to the humanities are so troubling. In free societies, governments do not dictate what universities can and cannot teach, and do not prohibit courses that express new theories and methods of study simply because they open new avenues of thinking about race and gender. Free societies do not whitewash history, suppress unorthodox religious expressions, or outlaw differing academic notions of gender identity or racial equity.

The United States remains a grand experiment. Tocqueville discernibly uplifted the humanities as essential to a free society, for they nurture and enrich a nation founded upon the right to pursue happiness. Concepts of beauty, eloquence, depth of thought, should belong to all of us. Our universities are among the best in the world because they are based on the concept of liberal education, designed to teach excellence, and enrich the whole person, and because we have supported them with needed funding while protecting their independence and autonomy.

Why should we support the humanities? Because core skills in the humanities help us develop skills in critical thinking, deep research, reading and comprehension, critical analysis, and problem-solving. Because without support for the humanities, education, and the arts, we are a less free, less democratic, less informed, and less vibrant democracy. Without the humanities, our lives are less fulfilled, and our world is a darker place.

America and Baseball Excel with Diversity and Inclusion

Jordan Walker - Jackie Robinson Day (April 15, 2025)

When I look back at what I had to go through in Black baseball, I can only marvel at the many Black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go. – Jackie Robinson

The universal celebration of Jackie Robinson by major league baseball on April 15th each year pays tribute to a true American hero, a man who demonstrated incredible courage and perseverance in the face of bigotry, hostility, and hatred. It is a day when the players on every team wear number 42, the number worn by Robinson and which is permanently retired throughout professional baseball in honor of Robinson’s life and legacy. Although Robinson ultimately helped America overcome prejudice and segregation, we had a long road ahead when Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier on April 15, 1947. It would take the civil rights movement, court decisions, and momentous legislation in the following decades before the nation could achieve even a semblance of racial justice and equality. 

Within the past 100 days, due to a series of Executive Orders from President Trump, we are awash in a severe backlash against the celebration and promotion of diversity and inclusion in American life. The administration has banned books on racial equity from the U.S. Naval Academy library, deleted from government websites references to Black achievement, and threatened to withhold massive federal funds for universities that continue to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. As these dystopian measures proliferate, holding an administrative position in support of such efforts is enough to get you fired from university and government jobs. 

I believe it necessary to discuss in personal terms why celebrations and efforts to promote diversity and inclusion are so important, not only to us as individuals, but also as Americans who share a complex history and unique Constitution. For me, the most profound influences on my early views about the importance of diversity and inclusion in American life came from my interest in baseball. Let me explain.

I fell in love with baseball on a sunny Saturday afternoon in the early summer of 1967, when I was eight years old, and while throwing a rubber ball against the brick chimney on the side of my parents’ house. Careful not to miss the chimney and risk my father’s annoyance by breaking a shingle (sorry, Dad), I fielded ground balls and line drives with my newly acquired leather baseball glove as I played an imaginary game that included an elaborate set of rules and invisible teammates and opponents. At one point, I took a break and went inside to watch the NBC Game of the Week, which on that day featured the St. Louis Cardinals. I immediately fell in love with their red-and-white uniforms that displayed the Birds on the Bat, two Cardinals perched on opposite ends of a yellow bat on each player’s uniform. But I was particularly intrigued by the players on that team, a mix of races and ethnicities who played with gusto, speed, aggressive defense, and strong pitching. 

They had a first baseman named Orlando Cepeda, number 30, whose flare and enthusiasm captivated my young imagination. Cepeda hit a home run that day, which only reinforced my fascination with him. He quickly became my favorite player, a player I wished to emulate. When I played first base for much of my baseball “career” – through Little League, Junior and Senior Babe Ruth League, High School Varsity, and American Legion ball – first base was my favorite and most comfortable position. 

The Cardinals of that era included a roster of brilliant Black stars playing alongside Latino and white players that represented America at its best. I was equally enamored of Bob Gibson, who took the mound every fourth day and was the greatest Cardinals pitcher of all time, Lou Brock, the dashing base stealer and leadoff man in left field, and Curt Flood, the best center fielder in all of baseball (not to mention Bobby Tolan, a future star with the Reds, as reserve outfielder). With the Puerto Rican born Cepeda at first and Dominican born Julian Javier at second, the diversity of their starting lineup was an uplifting example of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech playing out in real life. 

At least, this is how I viewed it as a young white boy from suburban New Jersey in search of role models. And it was these Black and Latino players who formed important role models of my youth, as I watched them play seamlessly and with great chemistry alongside the white starting players (Tim McCarver, Mike Shannon, Dal Maxville, and Roger Maris) and mostly white managers and coaches on those teams. They formed a steady presence on a team that beat the Red Sox in the 1967 World Series and then lost to the Tigers in heartbreaking fashion in the final game of the 1968 World Series (a memory that to this day causes me serious mental anguish).

Julian Javier and Orlando Cepeda

By 1969, the Cardinals would add Vada Pinson in a trade with the Reds to form an all-Black outfield that combined speed, hitting, and defense with flare and excitement. And the Cardinals teams that played throughout the 1970s and 1980s consistently included a diverse mix of Black and Latino players that exemplified the Promise of America and our enduring search for a “more perfect Union.” 

All of this was further reinforced for me when I read From Ghetto to Glory by Bob Gibson, published in 1968 following the Cardinals world championship season the year before. In a powerful way that a good book can do, Gibson’s intelligent and engaging writing exposed me to the inner life and struggles of a young, proud, Black man in 1960’s America. As I described in a 2017 essay (“An Act of Quiet Contemplation: Why Reading Matters”):

Born into extreme poverty in Omaha, Nebraska, during the Great Depression, Gibson’s modest book described his coming of age as a ballplayer during an era of Jim Crow and segregation, and later, civil unrest and Black power, when America was awakened from its history of racial oppression. By taking the time to read his story, I learned to look at the world from another person’s viewpoint, and gained in knowledge and empathy what I lost in my own narrow experience. Simply reading this one book made me a better person. In a small but significant way, it changed my life.

Gibson’s story allowed me to better understand Bob Gibson the man, not just Bob Gibson the baseball player, and to understand his life experience in a more genuine and empathetic way than I could ever glean by watching him on a ballfield or television screen. This 200-page paperback book that cost 75 cents in 1968 allowed me to understand another place and time through the eyes of another person’s experience. I have never forgotten how vital an influence From Ghetto to Glory was in my life, and how the ideal vision of America as a land where everyone can make it without regard to race, religion, or ethnicity was modeled for me on the Cardinals teams of my childhood.

Tolan, Shannon, Gibson, McCarver, and Cepeda (1967 World Series)

In later years, I learned that my somewhat idealized perception of the Cardinals was experienced in real-life by the players themselves. In an interview of Curt Flood by Peter Goldenbock, later published in Spirit of St. Louis (Spike, 2000), Flood reflected on the Cardinals teams of the late 1960s, and how what was a racially and geographically diverse group of ballplayers overcame their differences to develop lasting relationships.

The men of that team were as close to being free of racist poison as a diverse group of twentieth-century Americans could possibly be. Few of them had been that way when they came to the Cardinals. But they changed. The initiative in building that spirit came from Black members of the team. . . . It began with Gibson and me deliberately kicking over traditional barriers to establish communication with the [white players].

. . . Actual friendships developed. Tim McCarver was a rugged white kid from Tennessee and we were black, black cats. The gulf was wide and deep. It did not belong there, yet there it was. We bridged it. We simply insisted on knowing him and on being known in return. The strangeness vanished. Friendship was more natural and normal than camping on opposite sides of a divide which none of us had created and from which none of us could benefit. . . .

It was baseball on a new level. On that team, we cared about each other and shared with each other, and face it, inspired each other. As friends, we had become solicitous of each other’s ailments and eccentricities, proud of each other’s strengths. We had achieved a closeness impossible by other means. . . A beautiful little foretaste of what life will be like when Americans finally unshackle themselves.

None of what Flood described would have been possible had professional baseball not intentionally promoted diversity and inclusion by opening the game to all races and ethnicities, and to consider and recruit talented ballplayers whatever their background. Only two decades earlier, Gibson, Flood, Brock, and Cepeda would not have been given a chance. And yet, it was these very players who uplifted the team and their fans, and helped them achieve greatness. And it was these players who inspired a young white boy from New Jersey to better understand how much better life is when we break down barriers of prejudice and open ourselves to the benefits of inclusion. Indeed, every stage of my personal and work life has been enhanced when diversity and inclusion were uplifted and actively sought as a worthwhile goal.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not a zero-sum game. When we celebrated Black History month with speakers and events during my time at the U.S. Attorney's Offices in Washington and Philadelphia, all of us who participated were better and more informed because of it. When those same offices actively sought to recruit and hire a diverse core of attorneys and staff, it simply meant that the pool of possible candidates was broad enough to include all qualified applicants. Everyone benefited and no one was discriminated against. When my wife's community theater group recently put on a performance of Ragtime, which explores America in the early twentieth century and examines painful aspects of its racially prejudiced and anti-immigrant past, the production required cast members that reflected the diversity of the story. The resulting performance was among the most compelling and enriching experiences of the more than two decades Andrea has been involved in community theater productions.

Diversity and inclusion in American life is not always easy. It sometimes requires an openness to vulnerability and discomfort. But the end result is personal growth and a more honest and enriched life. All of us are better when diversity and inclusion thrive. We all suffer when institutions and people ignore and suppress the rich and varied texture of our complex history.

Baseball's celebration of Jackie Robinson is an important reminder of the flawed American past, when segregation and exclusion was the norm. It is simply a fact that, for major league baseball’s history prior to Robinson, and until all teams were integrated and baseball approached the meritocracy of most professional sports today, the nostalgic history of Ruth and Gehrig, Cobb and Hornsby, DiMaggio and Greenberg, comprised a time when Blacks were excluded from baseball. Facts are a stubborn thing and efforts to hide any portion of history renders it incomplete.

The Negro Leagues were proof of how good the African American players were and have always been, how much they deserved to compete on an equal footing with their white counterparts, and how much they loved the game and wanted to be included in the American pastime. They had their own leagues, filled stadiums and parks with their own fans, and had incredibly talented players who travelled the country to play in cities where baseball was appreciated for the truly American sport it was, not for the color of a player’s skin. The color barrier existed not within the game played between the foul lines, but in the minds of the men who controlled the major leagues prior to Robinson. When the better angels finally prevailed, baseball helped lead America on its long, slow march toward equality that we are still walking to this day.

America will never achieve its true potential unless diversity and inclusion are valued and prized in all walks of life, when we recognize everyone as deserving of a chance, and provide all with equal opportunities to compete and thrive and achieve, not as Blacks or whites, Hispanics or Asians, but as Americans on a fair and even playing field, under one flag and one Constitution for all. That goal is to be cherished, not hidden.

Lou Brock, Curt Flood, and Vada Pinson (1969)

A spirit of harmony can only survive if each of us remembers, when bitterness and self-interest seem to prevail, that we share a common destiny. – Barbara Jordan

Lessons of History: Vietnam and the Loss of American Goodness

Bamboo hut in flames, Ben Suc, Vietnam (January 1967)

I was eight years old in 1967, living an insular, middle-class existence in the suburbs of New Jersey, a thoroughly American life in a country I believed was the beacon of freedom and a light unto the nations. I was taught at an early age that we were a virtuous nation who welcomed the poor and those yearning to be free. We had come to the aid of Europe in World War II and defeated the Nazis in a war that took the lives of my dad’s oldest brother and over 400,000 Americans. We were the land of the free and home of the brave. We were the good guys. 

Like most Americans of that era, I believed in the general goodness of the United States and viewed our military forces with the sort of reverence I feel when I tour the campuses of West Point and Annapolis. Although I was vaguely aware of a war in a far-off land where the government had sent American troops to fight, it had negligible impact on my young life. My political consciousness came of age in 1968, when I saw images of body bags of dead American troops lifted from military planes on the nightly news and learned of my father’s growing questions as a Lutheran pastor about the justness and morality of America’s involvement in the war. Within a year, the son of my dad’s secretary would be one of the young men in those body bags, and a letter I had sent to him overseas, full of baseball clippings and updates, was returned as undeliverable.

What I did not understand at the time was just how wrong America’s leaders were about what motivated the revolutionary forces of Ho Chi Minh, why and how Ho had defeated the French colonial forces a decade earlier that resulted in the country being divided into North and South, and why Ho and the forces in the north were winning the support of the peasant population throughout the southern portion of the country that we called South Vietnam. President Johnson was to blame for expanding America’s troop presence in Vietnam, which by 1967 was approaching 500,000. But he was not alone in accepting the simplistic dogma that dominated the Cold War thinking of U.S. political and military leadership, which believed in the now discredited “Domino Theory”—that if one country in a region came under the influence of the Communists, then other nations would fall like dominoes and succumb to Communism. 

The more I learned about American involvement in Vietnam, the more disheartened I became. As a young American patriot, I assumed we supported the good people in the conflict, people who like us believed in democracy and freedom. But then I learned that the leaders of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem and his brutal brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were not so good, did not embrace democracy, and had no legitimacy among their own people. Then and later, I would ask questions. If America was not defending a vibrant democracy, why were we sending our young men there? Why were they dying in a land they knew nothing about, fighting for a cause they did not understand? Why did American war planes drop bombs and napalm on Vietnamese forests, destroy the countryside, and kill a million people, including many, many civilians? Why did American bombers drop more tons of explosives in Southeast Asia than had been dropped on Germany and Japan combined during all of World War II?

These were questions without satisfying answers. In looking back on the conflict more than fifty years later, at least two things are evident. First, as stated in The Vietnam War, the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary, the war began “in good faith, by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and cold war miscalculations. And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions, made by five American presidents, belonging to both political parties.” 

Second, the American war effort in Vietnam resulted from a fundamental failure of U.S. leadership and the American public to view the people of Vietnam as human beings and their land as a precious part of the Earth. Americans were not unique in failing to conceive of our perceived enemies as sub-human. If history is any guide, it is a fundamental flaw in the human condition. But for the first time since the start of the Cold War, the Vietnam War complicated our view of America as exceptional or special when compared to other nations.

This past week I read a reprint of The Village of Ben Suc (New York Review Books, 2024) by Jonathan Schell, originally published as a full-length article in the July 8, 1967, edition of The New Yorker. Schell was then a 24-year-old journalist who wrote a first-hand account of a single military operation in and around the South Vietnamese village of Ben Suc, which before American troops arrived was a prosperous village of around 3,500 people of mostly farmers who tilled the land bordering the Saigon River. The people of Ben Suc cultivated extensive orchards of mangoes and grapefruit and operated small shops run by merchants in the village marketplace. 

Schell embedded himself with a division of the U.S. military tasked with conducting search-and-destroy missions in the South. Their objective was to root out the Vietcong (people sympathetic to and supportive of the North Vietnamese forces), destroy their villages and tunnels, resettle the civilians who remained, and attempt to win their “hearts and minds.” American troops believed Ben Suc was in an area dominated by Viet Cong, and thus everyone who lived there was suspicious. Besides, one could not easily distinguish who among the civilian population was Viet Cong or simply happened to live there. The American troops did not speak the language and did not understand the culture, so simple things like what clothes someone wore were frequently interpreted as indicative of whether the person was Viet Cong or an “innocent” civilian. Not surprisingly, these clues could be unreliable indicators.

Schell described how, in January 1967, American forces attacked the village, killed two to three dozen people, and forced all the civilians, mostly women, children, and the elderly, from their homes and their land into a makeshift refugee camp. The American soldiers with which Schell was embedded then proceeded to torch the villagers’ homes, dousing the grass roofs with gas and lighting them on fire. As Schell described it:

The demolition teams arrived in Ben Suc on a clear, warm day after the last boatload of animals had departed down the river for Phu Cuong. G.I.s moved down the narrow lanes and into the sunny, quiet yards of the empty village, pouring gasoline on the grass roofs of the houses and setting them afire with torches. Columns of black smoke boiled up briefly into the blue sky as the dry roofs and walls burned to the ground, exposing little indoor tableaux of charred tables and chairs, broken cups and bowls, an occasional bed, and the ubiquitous bomb shelters. Before the flames had died out in the spindly black frames of the houses, bulldozers came rolling through . . . uprooting the trees . . . When the demolition teams withdrew, they had flattened the village . . . [and then] Air Force jets sent their bombs down on the deserted ruins . . . as though, having once decided to destroy it, we were now bent on annihilating every possible indication that the village of Ben Suc had ever existed.

The American operation, as Schell matter-of-factly described, destroyed the entire village to nothingness. U.S. forces would repeat this type of campaign in villages throughout the region with comparable results. 

Schell wrote mostly about the people involved—the peasants, now homeless, who were removed from the village and placed into camps, and the American soldiers who put them there. He described “the villagers crouched along the road with their bundles of belongings while American infantrymen ducked in and out of the palm groves behind them, some pouring gasoline on the grass roofs of the houses and others going from house to house setting them afire.” When he asked a captain why it was necessary to destroy the entire village and surrounding area, the captain explained that clearing out the area would allow them to see things more clearly. “From now on, anything that moves around here is going to be automatically considered V.C. and bombed or fired on. The whole [region] is going to become a Free Zone. These villages are all considered hostile villages.”

What to do with all the rounded-up civilians created problems of their own. Placing them in a confined area where shelter and facilities were yet to exist, caused sanitary and health issues. How exactly were American troops, now aided by the Army of Vietnam (ARVN), supposed to win over the “hearts and minds” of people who had just lost everything at the hands of the Americans who had destroyed their homes and way of life? Schell described what he saw at the Phu Loi refugee camp, where the villagers from Ben Suc were taken:

On the first day, over a thousand people were brought in. When they climbed slowly down from the backs of the trucks, they had lost their appearance of healthy villagers and taken on the passive, dull-eyed, waiting expression of the uprooted. It was impossible to tell whether deadness and discouragement had actually replaced a spark of sullen pride in their expression and bearing or whether it was just that any crowd of people removed from the dignifying context of their homes and places of labor, learning, and worship, and dropped, tired and coated with dust, in a bare field would appear broken-spirited to an outsider.

Villagers in the camp told Schell stories of their previous lives. “I was born in Ben Suc,” said an old man sitting on a mat, “and I have lived there for sixty years. My father was born there also, and so was his father. Now I will have to live here for the rest of my life. But I am a farmer. How can I farm here? What work will I do?” The man complained about the rice the Americans fed them, which was the same rice the villagers fed to their pigs. Schell explained that the Vietnamese, like most East Asians, were particular about the color, texture, and flavor of their rice, which went beyond taste and nutrition. To the victims of this conflict, even the trivial things mattered, something the American soldiers did not understand. How could they?

It is impossible to read The Village of Ben Suc and conclude that the Americans were the heroes in this story. And yet, Schell’s elegant, unemotional prose and nonjudgmental tone does not make you upset at the individual soldiers he describes and quotes in the book. These were mostly 19 and 20-year-old men caught up in a war they did not ask for, in a land they did not even know existed a few years earlier. They were interacting with people whose language and culture they did not understand. They did what they were trained to do, followed orders and commands they were required to follow, and performed their jobs as soldiers caught in a dangerous and morally ambiguous war. As described by Wallace Shawn in the book’s introduction:

They were fairly nice young men. The problem was only that they knew basically nothing about the place to which they’d been sent, they had no idea why they were there, and they didn’t really know what they were supposed to do there; they had no idea what sort of danger these Vietnamese peasants could possibly pose to their own American families back home; they had no idea what their “enemy” was fighting for; and they had no idea why they were supposed to kill certain Vietnamese peasants but not others, and what exactly it was about those they were assigned to kill that made them worthy of death.

When Schell asked a young soldier whether he was concerned with killing innocent civilians, he said, “What does it matter? They’re all Vietnamese.” It was a common feeling among the troops who perhaps needed to justify what they were doing, at least to the extent they gave it any thought.

I have discovered over the years that many Americans often give the Vietnam War perfunctory treatment because it does not fit the narrative of unambiguous American goodness. It may explain why our country never quite came to terms with Vietnam, and why we continue to struggle with discussing other troubling aspects of our history. 

U.S. armed forces in Vietnam destroyed entire villages and often shot civilians indiscriminately. Most Americans were shocked to learn in 1968 of the My Lai massacre, in which U.S. soldiers rounded up and murdered over four hundred civilians in a four-hour stretch in the Quang Ngai province of South Vietnam. U.S. soldiers shot groups of women, children, and elderly men at close range, raped Vietnamese women, and executed 150 civilians after herding them into an irrigation ditch.

As revealed in subsequent investigations into America’s role in the war, My Lai was not an isolated event. In late 1968, General Julian Ewell, who earned the nickname Butcher of the Delta during his time in Vietnam, led Operation Speedy Express, an effort to eliminate North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong in a show of overwhelming force within the Mekong Delta. A whistle blower reported having observed U.S. artillery indiscriminately attacking civilians, U.S. helicopter gunships shooting at frightened farmers as they ran away, and troops on the ground attacking and killing countless women and children. U.S. troops killed an estimated 7,000 civilians in the operation, equivalent to a "My Lai each month" as described by the whistle blower. Although General William Westmoreland ignored the report, an internal Pentagon investigation later confirmed the allegations. And yet, not a single American was ever held to account.

The young Americans who committed atrocities in the Vietnam War were not inherently bad or immoral people. Indeed, most were “fairly nice young men.” They performed the tasks their superiors ordered, and did so in a land and a war they did not understand. But they did so with a brazen indifference to the humanity of the Vietnamese civilians whom they killed. Thoughtlessness, complacency, and overconfidence in American goodness, not evil young soldiers, were the primary culprits. As Wallace Shawn explained:

At least until relatively recently, most Americans have liked to think of themselves as well meaning, friendly, basically decent people. That wasn’t an entirely false belief in 1966, and it’s not even entirely false now. But reading this book today, over half a century after it was written, over half a century since the village of Ben Suc was obliterated, and over ten years since Schell’s death, I feel Schell’s steady, questioning eye still staring at all the innocent people maimed and killed around the world by the possibly overconfident friendly Americans.

Nations that believe too much in their own exceptionalism and goodness can quickly suffer a loss of moral clarity, especially in times of conflict and war. And when belief in one’s goodness is combined with indifference to the humanity of the perceived enemy, there is a heightened risk that otherwise decent people will commit terrible deeds. 

It has always been more popular to divide people, groups, and nations into good and bad, moral and evil. This tendency is not a uniquely American trait, but it is nonetheless an American characteristic. Despite the American tendency to think of ourselves as always siding with goodness, our actions during the Vietnam War caused Americans to appropriately question the justness and righteousness of our cause. But the more we learn of America’s actions during the Vietnam War, the more we must conclude that Americans did not wear the white hats in that conflict. It is a lesson of history we should take to heart so as not to repeat past mistakes. 

Antiwar rally, Washington, D.C., 1971

Robert Caro’s Epic Tale of Robert Moses and the Love of Power Remains a Tour De Force

Bob Moses had learned what was needed to make dreams become realities. He had learned the lesson of power. – Robert Caro, The Power Broker

Fifty years after its publication, I finally read The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Vintage Books 1974), the Robert Caro masterpiece widely considered among the best nonfiction books ever written. A large and dense 1,162 pages excluding notes, when I suggested to Andrea that I should bring The Power Broker with us on our two-week trip to France in October, she responded with a hint of sarcasm, “Why don’t you just pack a bowling ball?” When I finished the book in December, I felt a distinct sense of accomplishment, the bookworm’s equivalent to hiking the Appalachian Trail. 

Having grown up in central New Jersey, the dominant presence of New York City was always in the background. My dad grew up in Jersey City and frequently crossed the Hudson River into the city as a young man to work summer jobs and to attend baseball games at the Polo Grounds. Even when he grew older and we lived in central Jersey, he remained fascinated with New York’s public infrastructure, its magnificent skyline and its many bridges, tunnels, and expressways. On the few occasions my dad and I drove across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge from the Staten Island Expressway and then onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he would express a sense of awe for what it must have taken to build and connect all of the major thoroughfares of New York and surrounding areas.

Verrazano Narrows Bridge

I had no idea then the role Robert Moses had played in the design, building, and oversight of almost all the public infrastructure of New York. Although he never held elected office, Moses did more to shape and mold modern day New York than anyone who ever lived. In The Power Broker, Caro provides a definitive and engaging account of the life and times of Robert Moses. But his book is primarily a dissertation on power—how Moses obtained it, kept it, and used it as a weapon for over four decades.

Moses wielded unchecked power for decades while holding a series of unassuming positions in New York state and local government—New York City Parks Commissioner,  New York State Council of Parks, Chair of the Long Island State Park Commission, New York City Planning Commission—at one point holding twelve titles at once. Caro said that, when he started the book, he did not really know anything about how power worked in New York. And when he talked with the politicians, they did not know how Moses acquired his power. They knew only that he had it. 

It was not always so. As a young man, Moses dreamed of a city with parks and scenic drives and great beaches accessible to the people who lived there. He also was a public minded idealist determined to use his Yale and Oxford education to reform New York City’s civil service system. Although Moses failed to make a mark in those early years, early failures taught him important lessons, just as later successes confirmed what he eventually took to heart. Without power, you accomplish nothing. 

As Caro explains, it was through the creation of independent public authorities (historically, entities that sell bonds to finance public projects), and Moses’ role in heading them, that gave Moses the means to obtain and hold onto power through countless Governors and Mayors. As Chair of what became the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, from 1934 to 1968, Moses controlled hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The Authority’s quasi-governmental and independent nature enabled Moses to fund dozens of new infrastructure projects with almost no outside input or oversight. As head of Triborough, Moses had absolute control over the revenues collected from the bridges and tunnels in New York City, and these revenues dwarfed any money the city could raise on its own. With that money came the power to control how to spend it and what public projects to fund.

Once Moses obtained power, he commanded any room he entered with a combination of charisma and intimidation, and he used power to design and build important things—parks, highways, bridges, playgrounds, housing, tunnels, beaches, zoos, civic centers, and exhibition halls. During the Depression, his projects employed 84,000 laborers who added skating rinks, boathouses and tennis courts, baseball diamonds and golf courses to every park in the city. Over time, he built 658 playgrounds in New York City when most cities had almost no parks and playgrounds. He built thirteen impressive bridges that distinctively mark the New York landscape. He oversaw the construction of two tunnels (Queens-Midtown and Brooklyn Battery). He built 627 miles of roadways and thoroughfares that allowed millions of people to drive into and through the city every day. And he oversaw massive urban renewal projects that replaced poor neighborhoods with huge public housing structures. In so doing, Moses radically transformed the physical fabric of New York and inspired cities throughout America to implement similar development projects. 

Moses’s achievements in building housing projects and highways were comparable, in the words of Caro, not to the achievements of an individual person, but to an era, equivalent to the Age of Skyscrapers and the Age of Railroads.

But Robert Moses did not build only housing projects and highways. Robert Moses built parks and playgrounds and beaches and parking lots and cultural centers and civic centers and a United Nations Building and Shea Stadium and a Coliseum and swept away neighborhoods to clear the way for a Lincoln Center and the mid-city campuses of four separate universities. He was a shaper not of sections of a city but of a city. He was, for the greatest city in the Western world, the city shaper, the only city shaper. In sheer physical impact on New York and the entire New York metropolitan region, he is comparable not to the works of any man or group of men or even generations of men. In the shaping of New York, Robert Moses was comparable only to some elemental force of nature.

Moses’ power stemmed in part from his reputation as the man who could Get Things Done. He knew every provision in every law because he had drafted the very laws that created his positions and gave him unbridled authority with no public accountability. In his early years, while working for Governor Al Smith in the 1920s, Moses developed a reputation as the best drafter of legislation in the State. Later, when he became the head of the Triborough Authority, he could spend public money with little transparency and no accountability because that is how Moses designed it. 

During the New Deal, the federal government was looking to spend substantial amounts of money on public works projects, but they needed shovel ready projects that would put people to work immediately. Before other cities and states had developed such plans, Moses masterfully created them, complete with engineering blueprints and all the required documentation, which made it easy for the Works Progress Administration and other New Deal agencies to approve and fund his projects. He was so good, in fact, that New York received a disproportionately large share of the public works money appropriated during the New Deal. 

By securing the funding, Moses then hired people to perform the projects, which put him in great stead with the unions. He awarded lucrative contracts to the construction companies and the concrete, pavement, and steel suppliers needed to build playgrounds, parks, roads, and bridges. He hired the best and brightest engineers, architects, and designers, and he pressured everyone to meet inhuman deadlines. He spread around the massive revenue he controlled and gained the loyalty of the most powerful institutions in the city and the country – the banks, the unions, the construction companies, the major law firms, the insurance companies – everyone with the power and influence to pressure any politician who might wish to change how Moses did things. One call from Moses to the key influencers would flood a council member’s or mayor’s office with calls and demands to retreat. And they always did.

Caro brilliantly describes Moses's evolution from a public-spirited man of ideals to a man singularly consumed by power for power's sake. The book captures the many dimensions of Moses's personality, from the charming host of extravagant parties—which helped him curry favor with the politicians, the press, the moneyed interests, anyone who could help him obtain and hold onto power—to the mean-spirited and vindictive person he would become to anyone who questioned or opposed his projects and designs. He employed McCarthyite tactics before McCarthyism was a thing, employing gossip, false rumors of scandals, and spies to destroy the reputations of anyone who dared challenge him. 

Moses’s arrogant refusal to consider alternative proposals, even if they could more efficiently achieve a project’s aims without destroying an entire neighborhood or enable the city to economically expand or improve the regional rails and subways, were legendary. As Caro writes, Moses was “blind and deaf to reason, to argument, to new ideas, to any ideas except his own.” Under Moses’s reign, New York became a city of traffic jams and congested roads and expressways while ignoring desperately needed improvements to the city’s subways, commuter rails, and buses. 

Moses did not foresee America’s growing reliance on the automobile, which in the most populated metropolitan area in the country became exponentially worse each year. Each new expressway was supposed to solve New York’s growing traffic problems. But with every new road and highway, the traffic only became worse. No matter how many smart people recommended that the millions of people who needed to commute in and out of the city every day could do so more easily and in less time with more and better rail systems, subways, and buses, Moses would not listen. 

To Caro, the reason for Moses’s intransigence was simple. The roads and bridges Moses built as head of the Triborough Authority meant more revenue and thus more power for him to wield. Mass transit, which he did not control, would diminish his power. And so, for decades New York severely neglected its subways and railroads, which inconvenienced millions of people and made the traffic, pollution, congestion, and noise all the worse. Moses thereby condemned generations of people to sit for hours in traffic rather than commute by rail.

The mayors, the governors, the council members, the people who in theory had the legal authority to override Moses’s totalitarian application of power, were scared to challenge him. As he continued to hold a monopoly on power in New York, Moses’s disregard for poor and nonwhite residents, and his refusal to understand or listen to their needs and concerns, permanently contributed to the inequality and systemic racism that continues to infect the city’s landscape to this day.

Yet Moses effectively cultivated a mythological reputation as an incorruptible public servant that the press was only too happy to promote. Because he had a reputation as the one person who got things done, who cut through red tape and any rules or laws that stood in the way, the politicians allowed him to take control of the city’s urban renewal efforts and oversee public housing, an area with which he had no expertise. Moses lacked empathy, especially for the poor and working class. He grew up in an affluent, privileged environment, attended private schools, graduated from Yale and Oxford, and drove around the city in a chauffeured limousine. He had no experience with, understanding of, or consideration for the people in need of public housing, the poor, people of color, and those with no political power. 

Caro understood that any study of power must examine not only how power is exercised and the good it accomplishes, but also who is hurt by it. Caro performed meticulous research and interviewed hundreds of people, including people negatively impacted by Moses’s decisions in the least powerful neighborhoods of New York. Moses designed the roads to transport large numbers of people in and out of Manhattan, but his focus was on benefiting certain types of people. Every road and expressway he built resulted in mass evictions and displacement of the city’s mostly poor and working-class residents. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes at a time when New York was in desperate need of affordable housing, all to make room for one of Moses’ thoroughfares.

Cross-Bronx Expressway

In one particularly compelling chapter of the book, entitled “One Mile,” Caro describes how Moses ignored the concerns of the people living in the East Tremont section of the Bronx as he planned the layout of the seven-mile Cross-Bronx Expressway. After World War II, East Tremont was a working-class Jewish neighborhood consisting mostly of refugees from the ghettos of Eastern Europe. These were not wealthy or powerful people, nothing like the successful, far more affluent Jews who lived by then in Central Park West. But they were industrious, law-abiding people who had built a stable and friendly neighborhood that was conveniently located to everything they needed. The nearby subway lines made it easy to get to the Lower East Side and the garment district, where a sizable number of them worked. The neighborhood had plentiful shops and businesses and jobs, good schools and nearby parks for the children, movie houses, and the Bronx Zoo, all within walking distance. To the people of East Tremont, the neighborhood was like a family. 

But Moses wanted to build the Cross-Bronx Expressway straight through the heart of the neighborhood. He sent eviction notices to over 1,500 families (affecting over 5,000 residents) with immediate instructions to vacate their homes and find new, mostly unaffordable housing in other less convenient, crime-ridden neighborhoods, where they knew no one and were not always welcome. Neighborhood activists raised objections with local leaders and city council members, all of whom agreed that Moses’ plans were crazy and said they would help. But nobody could help. Robert Moses had no tolerance for opposition and no interest in changing his plans, even though there were better alternatives. When others pointed out that all Moses had to do was move the proposed expressway two blocks south, where almost no one lived, and thus save the neighborhood and avoid evictions, Moses dismissed outright such “nonsense.” Even when it was shown that re-routing the expressway would save money and keep the expressway straighter than Moses’s proposed route, he still refused to listen. As Caro explained:

Neighborhood feelings, urban planning considerations, cost, aesthetics, common humanity, common sense—none of these mattered in laying out the routes of New York’s great roads. The only consideration that mattered was Robert Moses’ will. He had the power to impose it on New York.

In the end, Moses was not interested in preserving things. He only wanted to build things. Grandiose things. He simply did not care how his projects affected individuals, how many people they displaced, or how his plans negatively impacted neighborhoods. What type of park a particular neighborhood needed or wanted was uninteresting to Moses. He dismissed the opinions of others outright. Caro details countless occasions when one of Moses’ bright engineers and designers proposed easy fixes to neighborhood concerns, only to be at the receiving end of an angry, mean-spirited rant by Moses. Indeed, over the years, loyal staff members lost their jobs simply because they suggested minor improvements to a shovel ready project that Moses wanted to push through.

By the end of The Power Broker, it was difficult to find much to like about Moses the man. When in 1968 Moses finally met his match in Governor Rockefeller and was forced to resign, I felt a sense of relief, even satisfaction. “The age of Moses was over,” writes Caro. “After forty-four years of power, the power was gone.” 

And yet, Caro’s writing is so good that, by the final pages, one almost feels sorry for Moses when no one takes his phone calls, and he perceives nothing but ingratitude for all the "great" things he has accomplished. The book sadly ends with the words, “Why weren’t they grateful?” 

There is a reason The Power Broker won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and is, as described by "The Power Broker Breakdown" podcast on 99% Invisible, “perhaps the most important and complete explanation of how cities are formed, how neighborhoods are destroyed, bridges are erected, roads are laid down, parks are designed, fortunes are made, lives are ruined, and power is amassed.” Even after fifty years, Caro deserves all the accolades he has received for writing The Power Broker. Despite its length and crushing density, it remains a compelling and masterful history of Moses, the workings of power, and the shaping of modern New York.

Robert Moses Statue - Babylon, New York

From McCarthy to Trump: The Right's 75-Year Crusade Against Government

Ever since I participated in the Economic Policy Semester at American University in the Fall of 1980, I have been interested in the role of government in American society. As a 21-year-old college student, studying in Washington during the 1980 elections was an exciting time. As one of several hundred students from around the country with politically diverse viewpoints, I engaged in many lively conversations that continue to resonate with me today. My classmates and I debated the social worth of government, the importance of regulatory agencies, the benefits of public housing, job training, and poverty programs, the need for U.S. foreign aid, and whether myriad other federal programs benefited society. 

Forty-five years ago, Republicans and Democrats were frequently but not always on opposite sides of these debates. The two parties each had a healthy mix of liberals, moderates, and conservatives so the lines were not always clearly delineated. Most of the arguments were between self-identified liberals (including me), who believed that the role of government was to facilitate a better and more equitable society while protecting individual liberties, and conservatives, who wanted less government and advanced the virtues of unfettered free markets and rugged individualism.

In college, these liberal-conservative debates were mostly about the means to achieving common goals that we all shared. Although a few classmates on the left wanted to overthrow the chains of capitalism and a few on the right wanted to dismantle the federal government and return to an agrarian economy of the 1700’s, most of us fell within a reasonable centrist sphere of liberal to conservative thought.

Of course, American politics has always had fringe elements on the Right and Left. Other than the first three years of LBJ’s Great Society in the mid-1960s when the governing coalition leaned left on social and economic issues, since World War II, American presidential administrations from Truman to Carter have governed from the pragmatic center. During most of this era, conservative public intellectuals ranging from William F. Buckley, Jr., to George Will and Irving Kristol, and publications like The Public Interest and The National Review, protested from the sidelines what they viewed as the excesses of the New Deal and Great Society. They argued for a smaller, less bloated federal bureaucracy and advocated private solutions to the nation’s ills. And yet, they understood and did not dispute that government provided many essential services for people in a complex and dynamic economy. 

As President Kennedy stated at a 1962 press conference, although Americans had been “conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint—Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate,” most of the nation’s problems are “technical problems, administrative problems” that “do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.” When it came to preserving and protecting the institutions of our democracy, the Liberal Establishment was a pretty conservative bunch.

Back then, the Republican Party expressed concern for fiscal responsibility and used phrases like “sensible limits,” “shared sacrifice,” and “common ideals.” They discussed the balance between “mutual obligation” and “individual responsibility.” But that is no longer true. Today, so-called conservatives are mostly silent on these concepts – in fact, it is not unusual for the Right to accuse as socialist anyone who utters “common ideals” or “shared sacrifice.” In President Trump’s recent address to a joint session of Congress, we heard no such phrases and instead listened to boastful praise for the massive dismantling of the federal government led by Elon Musk and his band of 20-year-old technocrats. How did we get here?

In The Death of Conservatism: A Movement and Its Consequences (Random House 2010), Sam Tanenhaus asserts that today’s increasingly polarized politics and radical rightward shift within the Republican Party that led to the rise of the Tea Party (where his book ends)—and, by logical extension, to Trumpism—originated during the advent of the Cold War in the late 1940s, when talk of the “enemy within” and congressional witch hunts into allegedly “secret” Communist cabals within the federal government were the regular subject of news reports. 

Starting in 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led a series of high-profile investigations into the Truman and Eisenhower administrations in a failed attempt to expose subversive elements in the upper echelons of government, including the U.S. Army, State Department, and CIA. Along with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which investigated subversive elements in Hollywood and among the ranks of American artists, professors, writers, and intellectuals, a lot of people were harmed and some ruined with scant evidence of Communist infiltration. By the time McCarthy had been exposed as a drunkard and a fraud, the John Birch Society (JBS) picked up where McCarthy left off, even accusing President Eisenhower of being a Communist agent. On the day President Kennedy visited Texas in November 1963, former General Edwin Walker, a prominent JBS member, printed and distributed thousands of leaflets all over Dallas accusing the President of treason against the United States. 

Although they lacked legitimate power, McCarthy’s and the Birchers’ true accomplishment was to fuel the Right’s antigovernment crusade and hatred of “Washington bureaucrats” that continues to this day. That the government was perceived as the “enemy” of the people would increasingly become a staple of Republican politics over the next half-century. Respectable conservatives like Buckley, Will, Kristol, and other philosophically minded types understood that such denunciations primarily came from “crackpots” and amounted to an attack on America itself. Indeed, Buckley tried to purge the Birchers from the conservative movement and, post-McCarthy, thoughtful conservatives rejected extremism and sought a more pragmatic and realistic examination of government. 

Politicians who attempted to upset the consensus politics of the time did not fare well. When Barry Goldwater was nominated as the Republican candidate for president in 1964, the outcome proved that far-right conservatives were out of touch with most Americans. Through his book, The Conscience of a Conservative (ghostwritten by Brent Bozell, a strong supporter of Joseph McCarthy and a member of the John Birch Society), Goldwater promised a total dismantling of the welfare state. “I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size,” wrote Goldwater. “My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.” Voter’s rejected Goldwater’s candidacy by huge numbers. Lyndon Johnson won the 1964 presidential election by a landslide, winning 44 states to Goldwater’s six (the electoral college tally was 486 – 52 in favor of LBJ) and the popular vote by 61.1% to 38.5%. (Unlike 2024, that was an actual landslide and mandate.)

Goldwater’s humiliation at the polls temporarily moderated the Republican Party and helped elect Richard Nixon in 1968. Nixon came to fame during his HUAC days and was known for playing dirty politics. But as William Safire noted, Nixon was a politician “willing and even eager to surprise with liberal ideas” in the tradition of former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, a Conservative Party leader who outmaneuvered his opposition by governing with liberal innovation. As Tanenhaus explains, “Nixon consistently departed from movement antigovernment doctrine.” He created the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, instituted affirmative action programs, and endorsed expansionist Keynesian economic stimulus programs, all things that are anathema in Republican circles today. 

Ironically, Nixon’s downfall at the behest of Watergate may have helped spark the Right’s burning suspicion of the “dark liberal forces” and media elites arrayed against Nixon. “The argument that political power emanated from an alliance of liberal government bureaucrats and a sympathetic press,” writes Tanenhaus, “became a favorite theme in the movement’s next phase.”

Over the next decade, a growing antigovernment animus broadened within the Republican Party that reached a pinnacle in the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Reagan was the first president in my lifetime who ran and won on an explicitly antigovernment platform. Photogenic with an amiable personality, Reagan preached that government was the enemy and not the solution. He represented a strain of conservatism that wished to upset the New Deal coalition that had retained power for the previous 50 years. 

Reagan gave voice to a long-standing belief among the more conservative wing of the Republican Party that an elite corps of salaried, mid-level managers and government administrators had amassed unprecedented authority and shifted power from private business interests to an unelected administrative state. It would not be long before terms like “good vs. evil” began to emerge on the Right when discussing social programs, environmental regulations, foreign aid, and many areas of federal governmental action. Reagan was particularly skilled at exploiting a pent-up anger towards government programs that Reagan charged took money from hardworking Americans and re-distributed it to the undeserving poor through entitlements and welfare programs.

But although Reagan promoted an antigovernment philosophy, he did not actually govern that way. As David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, has noted, “not one major spending program was abolished during the Reagan presidency.” Although Reagan promoted the virtues of the private sector and free markets, he understood, as George Will has written, that government, “unlike an economic market, has responsibilities” that included aiding those for whom the market does not provide through “policies that express the community’s acceptance of an ethic of common provision.” 

According to Tanenhaus, “conservatism entered its most decadent phase” during the 1990s, when the Right went all in on the “culture wars.” Rush Limbaugh replaced George Will as a spokesperson for the conservative cause. Republicans started to place loyalty to the “movement” above civic responsibility. They began rejecting notions of the common good and consensus politics. Republican politicians who dared to compromise or find common ground with the “enemy” were shunned. When the country elected Barack Obama in November 2008, Republicans made it their mission to limit Obama to one term (it failed) and uniformly opposed his major initiatives, even though many of Obama's proposals adopted conservative ideas.

The Right’s shared disdain for government, combined with a distaste for compromise, has only metastasized with the rise of Trump. They are more interested in destroying, rather than conserving, the institutions, traditions, and mutual obligations of civil society. As recently as three decades ago, moderate Republicans formed a sizable and influential segment of the party. Today, the party’s House and Senate caucuses are firmly committed to the politics of polarization and destruction – a pro-Trump orthodoxy that does not allow dissent or independent thought. 

“Therein lies the paradox of the modern Right,” writes Tanenhaus. “Its drive for power has steered it onto a path that has become profoundly and defiantly un-conservative—in its arguments and ideas, in its tactics and strategies, above all in its vision. . . . Classical conservatives have all either deserted the Right or been evicted from it.” This has become most prominent in the resurgence of the John Birch Society and its legacy of conspiracy theories that has become a dominant strain on the Right. Opposition to big government has become opposition to government itself, and the social institutions that sustain democracy. The current White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, has publicly equated federal workers with “radical left Communists” and “criminal cartels.”

Although Trump personally has no firmly held political convictions other than a fervent belief in his own aggrandizement, the movement he leads has finally, after many decades in the political wilderness, attained true power. While most of its proponents identify as conservative, the policies being enacted are anything but conservative in the classical sense. Trumpism is a non-ideological movement, consisting of right-wing evangelicals, isolationists, America Firsters, Christian nationalists, an assortment of libertarians, and a large collection of conspiracy theorists and alternative reality types who reject traditional news reporting. They perceive the institutions of democracy, government, education, media, and international diplomacy as hostile forces out to destroy the “real America,” which under Trump's worldview includes only Trump loyalists.

In just six weeks, Trump and Elon Musk have sought to eliminate dozens of long-standing and essential federal programs and agencies. Little thought is put into the proposed cuts other than personal revenge. The whole purpose seems to be to radically dismantle the federal government and reverse all the progress we have made over the last 100 years in civil rights, the environment, workplace safety and health, the social safety net, diplomacy, and the building of the post-War alliance. 

Trump also seeks to impose a rigid orthodoxy within government that puts fealty to Trump above the Constitution. He is radically eviscerating the independence of all executive branch agencies. He has openly politicized and imposed loyalty tests on traditionally non-political, independent institutions such as the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA. He fired 18 Inspectors General whose job was to independently monitor federal agencies and ferret out actual waste, fraud, and abuse. Although the courts may yet have their say, the Trump administration intends to eliminate the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Education Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, and numerous other departments. He has fired thousands of government workers in every agency throughout the government and has vowed to drastically reduce the size of the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and the Veterans Administration. He repeatedly attacks the country’s most elite universities and wishes to eradicate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives from public and private life. 

None of these actions have included careful study and debate, for they are designed to produce random chaos and destruction. The result will predictably wreak havoc on the economy and detrimentally impact the lives of millions of Americans, many of whom voted for Trump.

We have always had strands of far Right, antigovernment extremism on the fringes of American society. As a lone senator, McCarthy could only do so much damage and the Eisenhower faction soon controlled the Republican Party. The Birchers, the conspiracy theorists, and other peripheral elements made noise, but they existed on the sidelines. That is no longer the case. The antigovernment extremists are currently in power, and the damage they are doing to the country, the economy, and the social fabric of America, is profound and potentially unlimited. We are living in dangerous times.

The need for responsible government, which used to be a high ideal of conservative philosophy, has never been greater. The current crop of spineless Republicans who used to claim allegiance to our democracy now slavishly support an authoritarian patriarchy akin to monarchy. Now is the time for true conservatives to stand up to speak. It may be the only hope we have to preserve the Constitution and the foundations of our Republic.

Remembering Gene Hackman

A man who comes to a place like this, either he's running away from something, or he has nowhere else to go. – Myra Fleener (Barbara Hershey) on Coach Norman Dale (Gene Hackman), Hoosiers

As iconic figures extolled and venerated by the rest of us, movie stars have the advantage of immortality. Even after departing life, they leave behind a body of work we may continue to explore. With the recent death of Gene Hackman, we have lost one of the great actors of my lifetime. I do not generally mourn the loss of famous people. After all, I don’t know them personally, and I don’t know if they were kind and decent human beings in their everyday lives. It is misguided to assume that an actor’s on-screen characters are a true reflection of their personal character. It is, after all, their job to play an assigned role and not themselves. The best actors are good because the characters they play have no relation to their personal likability or moral worth as human beings.

As I grow older, and this may be something I need to get used to, the obituary pages are more frequently filled with people I grew up with, even if I did not know them personally. With Gene Hackman, however, I feel a sense of loss because many of the roles he played so well were so relatable. Hackman was an everyman. He was the bus driver and train operator you said hello to on your daily commute, the coach or teacher you looked up to, the military commander you feared and respected, the flawed detective caught in an ethical dilemma. He could be serious, funny, authoritative, sensitive, arrogant, humble, likeable and mean, and sometimes many of these things all at once.

I have not seen all of Hackman’s movies, and I had to research his forty-year body of work as a reminder of how accomplished and varied his roles were. Three of my favorite Hackman characters were the gritty, rules-be-damned FBI agent in Mississippi Burning, the coach in need of redemption in Hoosiers, and the conflicted clergyman, devoid of faith, battling to save a handful of survivors in The Poseidon Adventure. But he had so many great roles, including as “Popeye” Doyle, the crass and relentless narcotics detective in The French Connection, for which he won an Oscar for best actor in 1971. 

“There’s no identifiable quality that makes Mr. Hackman stand out,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times in 1988. “He simply makes himself outstandingly vital and real.” Hackman played widely diverse roles with equal skill and proficiency. From the delightfully playful villain Lex Luthor in Superman to a mean-spirited, corrupt sheriff in Unforgiven, he was semi-likeable and evil at the same time. He was surprisingly funny in several understated comedic roles, including as a morally uptight, conservative senator in The Birdcage, as a former president running for mayor of a small town in Welcome to Mooseport, and as the estranged family patriarch in The Royal Tenenbaums. And he mastered the roles of complex men internally conflicted by professional and ethical discord, such as a paranoid surveillance expert in The Conversation and a widowed college professor with an overbearing father in the 1970 film I Never Sang for My Father. His many good roles in so many good films over the years make it difficult to compose a definitive top ten or twenty list.

But for me, the film that best captures the subtle quality of Hackman’s screen presence is Hoosiers, the story of a small high school’s triumph against all odds to win the Indiana High School Championship in 1952. Hackman played Norman Dale, the coach with a tarnished past who is given one last chance at redemption. Although a small budget movie, Hoosiers is among a select list of highly memorable sports films, and it resonated with me entirely because of the understated manner of Hackman’s performance. 

We learn early in Hoosiers that Coach Dale is a flawed man. He is desperate to save his career, while atoning for a past mistake. Slightly contemptuous of the small midwestern town in which he finds himself, Dale is a stubborn, uncompromising, strong-willed coach in a place that treats high school basketball as the most important thing in the world. As an outsider with a mysterious past, the townsfolk lack faith in Dale. Many of the town’s outspoken boosters want the coach fired after an underwhelming start to the season and because he stubbornly refuses to adapt to their way of doing things. 

But Dale perseveres in the face of adversity and refuses to give up even when most of the town has given up on him. Dale gradually bonds with his players and helps them come together as a team and win against all odds. In time, the coach’s willingness to be vulnerable, and his ability to empathize with the complex lives of his players and the community to which he was exiled, helps him achieve quiet salvation. 

As someone who played high school sports, including basketball for a less-than-mediocre team in central New Jersey, I believe that Hackman’s understated yet complex performance in Hoosiers showed what a good coach should and should not be. Like many of Hackman’s roles, his character in Hoosiers combined likability with complexity. His character evolved from a man set on his coaching ways, to a more understanding and empathetic coach who listened to his players and welcomed the contributions of others. 

But it is more than Hackman’s skillful acting that saddens me most with his passing, for I can continue to watch his films and appreciate his acting skills. No, it is a combination of how he carried himself, the sensitivity he displayed, the complexity of his characters, and his general demeanor that I will miss the most. In many of his films, and especially his role in Hoosiers, Hackman reminded me of my older brother Steve, who died at 61 more than seven years ago. Hackman even looked a little bit like a younger Steve and many of Hackman’s characters displayed Steve’s similar mannerisms, a rough and slightly rugged edge combined with the vulnerability and humility of someone who makes a lot of mistakes and keeps on going. 

Some of Hackman’s appeal may also be that, like my brother, life was not always easy and smooth sailing. Hackman was 13 years old when his father left the family. As the young teenage Hackman played in the street, his father merely waved at his son as he drove away. It was the last time Hackman ever saw his father. Hackman was 36 before he got his first real break in Hollywood as Warren Beatty’s sidekick in Bonnie and Clyde. Before then, he had served in the Marines and worked odd jobs in California and New York, from truck driver to doorman, until finally achieving any success as an actor. Much like my brother Steve, Hackman didn’t have the typical looks of a leading man, and yet he was appealing and relatable in ways that connected with people. He was full of grit and honesty and possessed a distinctive understanding of the many flawed, conflicted men he played. 

The teenage protagonist of The Wonder Years once said, "Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose." If for no other reason than he reminds me of my older brother, I will continue to watch films starring Gene Hackman and keep him as a presence in my life through the gift of film, just as I do with Steve, through the gift of memories.