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A few years ago, few places on Earth were as hellish as Iraq’s Anbar Province. Spanning the country’s western desert, Anbar is best known by its major cities, Fallujah and Ramadi, both of which became home bases for Al Qaeda-linked terrorists who flooded across Iraq’s border with Syria and joined with Sunni insurgents to carry out bombings, executions, kidnappings, and torture across the country. A dire Marine intelligence report leaked in September 2006 warned that Anbar was lost, with its government institutions “disintegrated or … thoroughly corrupted and infiltrated by al Qaeda in Iraq.” American war planners contemplated withdrawing troops from the province, and giving up on Anbar altogether.

Since then, Anbar has made an amazing turnaround. Even as the Marines were contemplating an exit, Anbar’s tribal leaders began turning against the foreign jihadis and aligning with the Americans in what came to be known as the Sunni Awakening—a critical step in putting down the insurgency nationwide. By late 2009, Anbar was stable enough that the province turned its focus to rebuilding. To that end, the U.S. government spent roughly $50,000 last year to finance a promotional magazine hyping Anbar’s economic potential. Published by the British trade magazine FDI, which is owned by the Financial Times, the self-described “special report” touted prospects for investment in Anbar’s agriculture, its infrastructure, and its vast reserves of silica. FDI even hinted that tourism might be one of Anbar’s “most promising sectors for investment.” (Isn’t it time you took the kids to Lake Habbaniyah?)

Unfortunately, not all of Anbar’s vital signs are positive. One of them—the story of its governor, Qasim Al Fahadawi—suggests that the optimism for the province may be dangerously premature. And if prospects for Anbar are dimming once again, then so are the prospects for Iraq.

I met Fahadawi during a mid-December visit to Anbar in the company of Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. An engineer and businessman who studied in Germany, Fahadawi fled Iraq in 2006 for the United Arab Emirates, where he enjoyed a life of relative peace and prosperity. He returned after the Sunni Awakening drove out Al Qaeda. On his arrival home, he told one Iraqi website, “I felt like [the province] had been hit by a nuclear bomb. The vital facilities have been destroyed and peoples’ mentalities have been infected.” Fahadawi was heartbroken at the lost potential: “Iraq should be the richest country in the Middle East,” he told another interviewer, “and Anbar should be the richest province in Iraq.”

Since becoming Anbar’s governor in April of 2009, Fahadawi has energetically pursued that vision, working what he says are 18-hour days to jump-start the province’s economy. Fahadawi’s secular nature and business acumen have made him an appealing figure to the west. In August, FDI magazine honored him as the “2009 Global Personality of the Year” for his efforts to win foreign investment everywhere from Great Britain to Turkey. (The same award was subsequently hailed in a U.S. military press release, which did not note that the U.S. government had paid FDI to promote Anbar’s economic potential.)

In Ramadi, Mullen and Fahadawi sat down for a chat. The governor, who has a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache and wore a western business suit and tie, described his bright vision of Anbar’s economic future. The province had begun to export cucumbers, Fahadawi explained. (It was a fact of social as well as economic significance, given that al Qaeda leaders in the province had imposed a bizarre prohibition on women buying the vegetable, deemed too suggestive of male anatomy). To pursue this and other plans, Fahadawi told Mullen he needed loan guarantees of $100 million or more. Mullen demurred, with perhaps a slight smirk. The joint chiefs chairman explained that he does not control the U.S. banking system.

“The best assurance I can offer you is improvement in the security environment here,” Mullen said.

“Security, we can say, is almost achieved right now,” Fahadawi said. “But my vision to achieve security is economics.”

“I completely agree,” Mullen replied, stirring a sugary cup of Iraqi tea.

That was December 18. Less than two weeks later, on the morning of December 30, a car bomb exploded at a checkpoint near Fahadawi’s office in Ramadi. Against the advice of his bodyguards, Fahadawi went outside to survey the scene. A few minutes later a man in an Iraqi police uniform approached his entourage and blew himself up, killing several more people. Initial reports said that Fahadawi, who was seen laying on the ground with his face burned, was one of them. But Fahadawi was lucky. He was rushed to a Baghdad hospital, where doctors amputated a hand and a leg. He is now receiving treatment in the United States. Doctors here have reportedly reattached his left hand.

The near-death experience of an optimist like Fahadawi may be a cautionary tale about the future of Iraq. As the United States prepares to begin a major troop withdrawal later this year, which will have all American troops out of the country by the end of 2011, optimists are describing a stable country ready to stand on its own. But Iraq still endures persistent bombings throughout the country. Two days of explosions on January 25 and 26 in Baghdad killed 75 people—just the latest in a series of attacks in the capital. American officials call such bombings the last gasp of Al Qaeda-linked terrorists determined to destabilize the government and sow fear before upcoming parliamentary elections on March 7. They are heartened, they say, that the bombings haven’t pushed the Sunnis and Shiites back towards 2006-style civil war.

But regular attacks like these suggest that Iraq’s security forces aren’t ready to protect the country on their own. Not in Baghdad, and not in Anbar Province. And that means that Iraq is still a long way from recovery. Foreign investment is hardly likely to pour into a province where the governor’s life can’t be guaranteed. It could be a long while before Qasim Al Fahadawi’s vision of Iraq as a wealthy country is anything more than a cruel mirage.

Michael Crowley is a senior editor of The New Republic. 

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By last summer, it was obvious that John Murtha did not have much time left in Congress. This was partly due to the efforts of Washington ethics cops and Western Pennsylvania Republicans, both of whom had spent the past few years working feverishly, through either judicial or electoral means, to remove him from office. But more than that, there was the simple matter of Murtha’s health. At 77 years old, he’d begun to show obvious signs of deterioration—from increasingly frequent verbal gaffes (like calling his part of Pennsylvania “a racist area”) to physical ones, such as the spill he took while visiting injured troops at Walter Reed. When Murtha died Monday at the age of 77, due to complications stemming from gallbladder surgery, it was sad, but hardly shocking, news.

Unless, that is, you lived in Murtha’s hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. When I visited there last summer, I found that the only thing deeper than the floodwaters that had thrice destroyed the rust belt city was the denial of its residents that Murtha’s 36 years on Capitol Hill were nearing an end. They expressed unswerving confidence that their congressman could not only defy the laws of man—by forever frustrating the efforts of those trying to unseat him—but the laws of nature, as well. The notion that he might have to retire due to poor health was greeted with a snort: Murtha had been a Marine who, as a father of three, had volunteered for Vietnam; he was too tough to retire. “He would like to die in the House,” one of his friends and supporters told me, certain that such an event was a long way off. Murtha’s great aunt, more than one person in Johnstown mentioned to me, had lived into her 90s; and his clean living—“he doesn’t drink, except for coffee”—meant he could count on reaching a similarly ripe old age.

Now that Murtha has confounded the expectations of his constituents, his obituary writers will invariably describe him as “The King of Pork.” While the term is not meant as a compliment—and, in fact, Murtha’s political and legal troubles over the last few years stemmed from that well-deserved reputation—it’s worth remembering that, to the recipients of that pork, Murtha was a hero. For the last 15 years, he steered a steady stream of federal money—by some accounts as much as $2 billion—to Johnstown and, in the process, allowed the city to escape the fate of other once-booming steel towns that were unable to survive the collapse of that industry. Indeed, to visit Johnstown today is to encounter an oasis of relative prosperity—a city that boasts glass-and-steel office buildings, a Wine Spectator-award winning restaurant, even a symphony orchestra—in a desert of economic despair.

When any politician dies, especially one as long-serving as Murtha, his passing will be treated as the passing of more than an individual. And this is already being described as the end of various eras—from the end of the era of Democratic rule in Pennsylvania’s Twelfth Congressional District (which John McCain carried in 2008) to the end of the era of the “old bull” way of doing business on Capitol Hill. But Murtha’s death also signals something more than the death of a man or the death of an era: It likely spells the death of the city he represented.

When Murtha was alive, Johnstown raised myriad monuments to him—placing his name on everything from a technology park to an airport. But the city never prepared itself for the day when its honors to Murtha would have to come in the form of memorials. Johnstown’s success was not a façade, but its prosperity was as dependent on one congressman as it had once been on one industry. It was almost as if Johnstown could not bring itself to imagine—and thus prepare for—what would happen once Murtha, like steel before him, was no longer there to sustain it. And now it will face the consequences of that failure.

To be sure, Johnstown will not cease to exist tomorrow. Or next week. Or even next year. After all, it took decades for Bethlehem Steel to dismantle its Johnstown operations once it decided to leave the city. But, over time, the economic forces that Murtha managed to stave off will begin to take their toll. Lacking a politician with Murtha’s seniority and powerful committee assignments—not to mention, perhaps, a politician with Murtha’s tolerance for the appearance (and perhaps the reality) of ethical impropriety—Johnstown will watch as the river of federal largesse slows to a trickle. And it will watch as the defense contractors that followed those federal dollars by locating their offices in Johnstown and underwriting its civic activities turn their attentions to the hometowns of other congressmen. And slowly, but ineluctably, Johnstown will meet the same fate as the politician who did so much—maybe too much—to keep it alive.

Jason Zengerle is a senior editor of The New Republic.  

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I.

“Trying to explain the doctrine of the Trinity to readers of The New Republic is not easy.” On June 2, 1944, W.H. Auden penned that sentence in a letter to Ursula Niebuhr. On January 26, 2010, Andrew Sullivan posted it as the “quote for the day” on his blog. Displaced and unglossed quotations are always in some way mordant, and bristle smugly with implications. Let us see what this one implies.

Auden was at Swarthmore when he wrote his letter to his friend. He began by thanking her for her admiration of a piece about Kierkegaard’s Either/Or that he had recently published in The New Republic, and then reported that he had just finished, “after writing it four times,” a review for the magazine of Charles Norris Cochrane’s book Christianity and Classical Culture, which had in fact appeared four years earlier. His trouble in completing the piece to his satisfaction was what prompted the remark that Sullivan finds so pleasing and repercussive. Auden’s intense and idiosyncratic theology was flourishing in those years, not least owing to the impact upon his thinking of the friendship and the teaching of Reinhold Niebuhr, Ursula’s very remarkable husband. The Cochrane piece, which barely mentions Cochrane at all, is a fine example of Auden at his most philosophically grandiose and amateurish. “The distinctive mark of classical thought is that it gives no positive value to freedom and identifies the divine with the necessary or the legal.” “A monolithic monotheism is always a doctrine of God as either manic-depressive Power or schizophrenic Truth.” And so on. On metaphysical themes, Auden’s original formulations could sometimes be very obscure. Perhaps that was why my predecessor at this magazine held the article for many months, until late September. “At last, The New Republic has printed my now months’ old piece on Cochrane’s book,” Auden wrote to Ursula in October, “—they’ve cut it about a bit but I’m really quite pleased with it.”

The striking thing about Auden’s discussion of the Trinity in his piece is that, notwithstanding his complaint about the difficulty of explaining it, he fails to explain it. Instead he concedes that it is inexplicable. “The formula,” he declares, is “a foolishness to the reason,” because reason is convinced only “by logical necessity, like the timeless truths of geometry,” and so could not “grasp … the doctrine of three persons” in God. Auden is not be chided for his failure. He followed in a long line of Christian intellectuals who despaired of explanations for this belief. That line included some of the greatest thinkers in the Christian tradition. Augustine, whose treatment of the Trinity was discussed by Cochrane in his book and by Auden in his review, began his influential treatise on the subject by declaring that the aim of his work was “to guard against the sophistries of those who disdain to begin with faith and are deceived by a crude and perverse love of reason.” Aquinas, in the first part of the Summa Theologica, was more direct: “It is impossible to attain to the knowledge of the Trinity by natural reason.” For this reason, he asserted, “we must not attempt to prove what is of faith, except by authority alone, to those who receive the authority; while as regards others, it suffices to prove that what faith teaches is not impossible.” Indeed, the despair of explanation goes all the way back to the Fathers of the Church, who afflicted themselves with the most extraordinary mental contortions–hypostasis, ousia, and the rest–to make the idea of the Trinity seem plausible. They were right, finally, to call it a mystery. To regard a concept as a mystery may be a spiritual triumph, but it is an intellectual defeat.

I wish to confirm Auden’s–and Sullivan’s–suspicion that New Republic people cannot comprehend the Trinity; or at least those New Republic people who are not (in Aquinas’s terms) among “those who receive the authority,” but are the logically minded “others”; or at least this New Republic person. The idea of plurality in the deity, like the idea of corporeality in the deity (Auden would not have had an easier time with the Incarnation!), represents nothing less than a retraction of the monotheistic revolution in thinking about God, a reversal of God’s sublimity, a regress to polytheistic crudity. It is completely inconsistent with everything that my mind instructs me to believe about God’s essence. (I leave aside what my mind instructs me to believe about God’s existence. We are in the realm of theology here, not the realm of philosophy.)

Of course, my stiff-necked opinion about this central tenet of the Christian faith is not only rational, it is also Jewish. The electrifying history of Jewish-Christian disputations in the Middle Ages amply documents the scrupulously argued Jewish refusal to entertain anything but a perfect unity in the conception of God. In the words of an early modern Jewish writer, whose polemical work survives in an unattributed Hebrew manuscript at the Jewish Theological Seminary, “I do not understand this and you will not be able to explain it to me.” That is not a report of a prejudice. It is a report of a view with rationally defensible grounds. The respect one must have for believers one need not have for beliefs.

When Auden joked to Niebuhr that the Trinity could hardly be understood in The New Republic, he was lightly lamenting the spiritual shallowness of the liberalism of his day. He was not alone in this lament, to be sure. The 1940s were the years of the inner deepening of American liberalism, under the influence of Niebuhr, and Schlesinger, and Trilling. Perhaps Sullivan is posting his “quote for the day” to make the same point–except that in his present incarnation he is himself a bizarre kind of liberal, and The New Republic today, a liberal magazine, is not known only, or in some quarters mainly, for its liberalism. It is hard to escape the impression that Sullivan is not liberal-baiting here. No, when he piously implies that the orbit of The New Republic is immune, or hostile, to the eternal verities of Christianity, he is baiting another class of people, and operating in the vicinity of a different canard.

II.

Consider some squibs that Sullivan recently posted on his blog. “Most American Jews, of course, retain a respect for learning, compassion for the other, and support for minorities (Jews, for example, are the ethnic group most sympathetic to gay rights),” he declared on January 13. “But the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing–that celebrates and believes in government torture, endorses the pulverization of Gazans with glee, and wants to attack Iran–is something else. Something much darker.” Michael Goldfarb is the former online editor of The Weekly Standard, about whom the less said, the better. Charles Krauthammer is Charles Krauthammer. I was not aware that they comprise a “wing” of American Jewry, or that American Jewry has “wings.” What sets them apart from their more enlightened brethren is the unacceptability of their politics to Sullivan. That is his criterion for dividing the American Jewish community into good Jews and bad Jews–a practice with a sordid history.

As far as I can tell, Krauthammer’s position on torture is owed to a deep and sometimes frantic concern for American security, and his position on the war in Gaza to a deep and sometimes frantic concern for Israeli security, and his position on Iran to a deep and sometime frantic concern for American and Israeli security. Whatever the merits of his views, I do not see that his motives are despicable. Moreover, Krauthammer argues for his views; the premises of his analysis are coldly clear, and may be engaged analytically, and when necessary refuted. Unlike Sullivan, he does not present feelings as ideas. Most important, the grounds of Krauthammer’s opinions are no more to be found in, or reduced to, his Jewishness than the grounds of the contrary opinions–the contentions of dovish Jews who denounce torture, and oppose Israeli abuses in the Gaza war, and insist upon a diplomatic solution to the threat of an Iranian nuclear capability–are to be found in, or reduced to, their Jewishness. All these “wings” are fervent Jews and friends of Israel. There are many “Jewish” answers to these questions. We all want the Torah on our side. And the truth is that the Torah has almost nothing to do with it.

Sullivan is hunting for motives, not reasons; for conspiracies, which is the surest sign of a mind’s bankruptcy. These days the self-congratulatory motto above his blog is “Of No Party or Clique,” but in fact Sullivan belongs to the party of Mearsheimer and the clique of Walt (whom he cites frequently and deferentially), to the herd of fearless dissidents who proclaim in all seriousness, without in any way being haunted by the history of such an idea, that Jews control Washington. Sullivan might have a look at the domestic pressures–in lobbies and other forms–upon American diplomacy toward China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Cuba, and give a thought or two to the elaborate and sometimes exasperating nature of foreign-policy-making in a democracy; but he prefers not to dive deep into the substance of anything. It is less immediately satisfying than cursing and linking. Does Sullivan think that Obama’s engagement with Iran–which, accurately described, is an engagement with the Iranian dictatorship and not with the Iranian people–is paying off? Does he believe that the Israeli war against Hamas was an unjust war, or that Israel should have continued to absorb Hamas’s rocket attacks–which were indisputably criminal–and not acted with force against them? His answers may be inferred from his various ejaculations–“the pulverization of Gazans,” for example, is a phrase that is calculatedly indifferent to the wrenching moral and strategic perplexities that are contained in the awful reality of asymmetrical warfare–but they are not so much answers as bar-room retorts; moody explosions of verbal violence; more invective from another American crank. Worst of all, the explanation that Sullivan adopts for almost everything that he does not like about America’s foreign policy, and America’s wars, and America’s role in the world–that it is all the result of the clandestine and cunningly organized power of a single and small ethnic group–has a provenance that should disgust all thinking people.

And this is not all that is disgusting about Sullivan’s approach. His assumption, in his outburst about “the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing,” that every thought that a Jew thinks is a Jewish thought is an anti-Semitic assumption, and a rather classical one. Bigotry has always made representatives of individuals, and discerned the voice of the group in the voice of every one of its members. Is everything that every gay man says a gay statement? I will give an example. On October 15, 2001, when the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldered, Sullivan published a piece in the Times of London called “A British View of the US Post-September 11.” In this piece he accused Bill Clinton of “appeasement,” and praised George W. Bush for assembling “the ideal team” for a “task” that “cannot be done by airpower alone,” and had kind words for America’s “world hegemony”–the politics changes, the fever remains the same–and also included this unforgettable sentence: “The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead – and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.” A fifth column! It is a genuinely sinister sentence. I wish to emphasize two features of Sullivan’s  comment. The first is that it is an exercise in demonization: it divides the American people into good Americans and bad Americans. The second is that it is in no way an expression of Sullivan’s homosexuality. It must never be said that when Sullivan lauded the bellicosity of Cheney and Rumsfeld–which wing of American Christianity, by the way, shall we blame for them? –he exchanged the company of the good gays for the company of the bad gays. To say that would be homophobic. Here is what such homophobia would look like: Most American homosexuals, of course, retain a respect for art, and compassion for the other, and support for minorities. But the Sullivan-Shmullivan wing of American homosexuality–that celebrates and believes in torture and war, and endorses the pulverization of Afghan villages with glee, and wants to attack any country where Al Qaeda may be found–is something else. Something much darker. Get it?

III.

A day later, on January 14, Sullivan permitted himself another thought on Israel. This is the whole of it:

“The Netanyahu government has all but declared war on the Obama administration and then openly disses a vital ally, Turkey. The slow cultural shifts in Israel–toward ever more arrogance, more fundamentalism, more Russian immigrant racism, contempt for the Muslim world, military adventurism, and the daily grinding of the Palestinians on the West Bank and pulverization and inhumane blockade of the people of Gaza–well maybe others can explain it. All I can say is: it saddens me, as a longtime lover of the Jewish state. It does not represent the historic mainstream of liberal Jewish society, it is a betrayal of many Jewish virtues that goyim like me deeply admire, and it seems designed for war as some kind of eternal and uplifting state of mind. I hope Israel shifts soon. For Israel’s sake.”

That bit about Sullivan’s love for the Jewish state is poignant, and on behalf of all the good Jews in America I thank him for it, but I am unmoved. This squib is an anthology of banalities and stereotypes. The “arrogance” of Israelis: they are pushy, aren’t they? And the slippery slope from pushiness in Tel Aviv to inhumanity in Jabaliya: it is obvious, isn’t it?  “More fundamentalism,” Sullivan says, but there is no such thing as Jewish fundamentalism, and there has been no such thing as Jewish fundamentalism since early Karaism. (He can Google it.) The settlers on the West Bank and the religious fascists in their midst are not fundamentalists. They represent a particular school of interpretation of scriptural and rabbinical authorities–a debatable one and a deplorable one. But they are not fundamentalists. “More Russian immigrant racism”: it is a problem, though in this region there is a lot of xenophobia to go around, which brings us to “contempt for the Muslim world.” For the entirety of the Muslim world, by the entirety of Israeli society? I think not. And does Sullivan have any notion of the magnitude and the virulence of Muslim contempt for the Jewish world? Muslim contempt for Jews does not justify Jewish contempt for Muslims, of course; but nothing justifies Sullivan’s refusal to give the whole picture. “Military adventurism”: about the wars against Hamas and Hezbollah this is an empty and propagandistic phrase. Whatever went awry in those campaigns, and many Israelis and supporters of Israel were quick to condemn it, they were hardly adventures–unless you believe that the lives of Israelis under attack do not have the same moral import as the lives of Arabs under attack, which is what Sullivan’s malicious epithet suggests. It does not answer the question of whether those wars of retaliation were just wars, it simply dismisses the question. Here, too, Sullivan refuses to give the whole picture. “The daily grinding of the Palestinians on the West Bank”: I was in Ramallah recently, and the situation is more complex and even more hopeful. Anyway, the only thing that will save the Palestinians from the occupation–and a less terrible occupation is still an occupation, which is terrible–is political compromise. With the exception of Salam Fayyad and Mahmoud Abbas on his good days, I do not see a Palestinian keenness for compromise. Again, this does not justify the Israeli lack of the same keenness; but again, nothing justifies Sullivan’s refusal to give the whole picture. If “the Netanyahu government has all but declared war on the Obama administration,” it was after the Obama administration had all but declared war on the Netanyahu government. Obama may have been right about Netanyahu–the skepticism about the latter’s willingness to surrender land for a peace that will bring Palestine into being is not exactly fanciful–but Obama failed miserably, and set everything back. Sullivan’s characterization of the recent history is dishonest. On the other hand, there is no suggestion that Netanyahu is Trig’s dad.

And then Sullivan returns to his condescension toward the Jews. Contemporary Israel is “a betrayal of many Jewish virtues.” I thought that human rights, if this is what Sullivan sees Israel abusing, is not a Jewish virtue, or a Christian virtue, or a Muslim virtue, but a human virtue. Israel is a secular state. The primary offense of Israeli brutality in Gaza was not against Maimonides. But Sullivan desperately wants the Jews to be good Jews, to be the best Jews they can be. He wants edifying Jews. Don’t they realize that if they fail to edify, they may lose his friendship? The fools! Jews ought to determine their beliefs and their actions apologetically, so as not to disappoint “goyim like me.” This is a common phenomenon in the experience of minorities. They may awaken to their autonomy, but they must not go too far. Gays are abundantly familiar with this sort of phony friendship, as are blacks. “It does not represent the historic mainstream of liberal Jewish society”: but what if the historic mainstream of Jewish society were conservative? A day does not go by that I do not do my humble part to prevent such a transformation from coming to pass, but let us imagine that it does. What, then? Will they all be bad Jews, and “something much darker”? Is the Jews’ claim upon American understanding premised upon their conformity to a particular politics? Is their legitimacy conditional? Sullivan’s more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone is cheap. He can keep his sorrow and he can keep his anger.

IV.  

Then, two weeks later, Sullivan posted whatever was in his head about “Jihadism and The Israel Question,” which is certainly better than “Jihadism and The Jewish Question.” “Jihadism has many causes,” he reflectively began. Then he remembered himself and continued: “But the idea that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and pulverization of Gaza can be bracketed entirely out of that dynamic is loopy. … It’s clear that taking the Israel-Palestine question off the table would help us tackle Jihadism immensely. If the US were to help to establish a Palestinian state and could be shown to stand up to Netanyahu’s continual provocation, it would help the US advance its interests in the region and the world.” Sullivan then concedes that “it would not remove or emasculate [that is not the problem!] the more irredentist factions, the Qaeda core, the Saudi nutjobs, and the Mumbai maniacs. But it would help shift the paradigm in which they can use the daily humiliations of Arabs in the West Bank or the horror of the Gaza attack as ways to move the Muslim middle.” And that, of course, is what “those who want to brandish Gitmo, embrace torture, and accelerate Israel settlements,” “those who want a civilizational war,” hope to avert. They “intensify the polarization that the Jihadists relish.”

Sullivan seems unaware that his analysis is nothing more than a digital version of the traditional analysis of Arabists in Washington since 1948, and even before. This analysis is not entirely incorrect: America’s alliance with Israel has often interfered with America’s interests in the Arab world. This is obvious to any student of history. But the American alliance with Israel, like a good deal of American foreign policy, though not these days, was never only an affair of interests. Sullivan is apparently indifferent to the moral dimension of the alliance. On January 6, moaning that he is “sick of the Israelis and the Palestinians,” he noted also that “I’m sick of having a great power like the US being dictated to in the conduct of its own foreign policy by an ally that provides almost no real benefit to the US, and more and more costs.” The high moral dudgeon of the heartless realist: that is quite a trick. Like all of America’s other allies, Israel is a sovereign state, and like all of America’s other allies, it sometimes exercises its sovereignty in ways that baffle or infuriate us; but Sullivan’s patience is wearing thin. “My own view is moving toward supporting a direct American military imposition of a two-state solution,” he wildly announces, “with NATO troops on the borders of the new states of Palestine and Israel.” A new war! Even better, a new war of liberation! Never mind that Israel is a sovereign and a democratic state, and that Palestine is not remotely unified on behalf of such a solution. But at least it would not be a war against a Muslim country. And now that you mention it, isn’t it time that we attacked a Jewish country? It would prove our even-handedness, wouldn’t it? But alas, there’s no way AIPAC will allow it.    

Having demanded that the Jews behave apologetically in America, Sullivan now demands that the United States behave apologetically in the world–that it adjust its relationship with Israel to the preferences of the Muslim peoples. This is a little like decrying the election of a black president because it will inflame white racists. (Sullivan writes about the “middle” and the “core” in the Muslim world as if they were the independents and the base in Massachusetts.) But peace between Israelis and Palestinians should be made primarily for them and by them. And anti-Americanism, like anti-Semitism and many versions of anti-Zionism, cannot be adequately understood as a response to the actions of Americans, Jews, and Zionists. Prejudice is not an instance of empirical thinking, as the tenacity of anti-Americanism after the election of Barack Obama demonstrates. There is a progressive president in America now, enchanted by “engagement” and by Muslims. In the universe of jihadism, however, this alters nothing. As a matter of numinous conviction, the jihadists are anti-Americans and anti-Semites and anti-Zionists, and their anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism. They do not want to take the Israel-Palestine question off the table, they want to take Israel off the map. Their goals are literal and maximal. Their worldview is unfalsifiable; their “paradigm” does not “shift.” They do not make Sullivan’s distinction between Israel’s existence and Israel’s actions. If the two-state solution were to come into being, the jihadists would consider their job half-done.

It is true that peace and Palestine would have a modest and marginal impact upon the reputation of the United States in the Muslim world. But the scale of this impact is too inconsiderable to assure anything that Israel does an important place among the causes of jihadism. It may be “loopy,” as Sullivan says, for Israeli policy to “be bracketed entirely out of that dynamic,” but it is even loopier to include it significantly within it. Jihadism is a violent political theology determined by ideas and fantasies that do not come from America or Israel, and its abhorrence of freedom, materialism, democracy, modernity, and the West exceeds even its abhorrence of Jews. We do not determine who Muslims are, and they are more than their reaction to us. What does Sullivan really know about the origins and the writings of the jihadist tradition? Yet he has an even more brilliant theory of the origins of Muslim anti-Americanism. He accounts for it not only in terms of Israel’s policies, but also in terms of “those who want to brandish Gitmo, embrace torture, and accelerate Israel settlements.” The neocons, once more. They are what stand between America and Muslim adulation. Bad Jews are making bad Muslims! I doubt that even Krauthammer believes that Krauthammer is this important. The neocons have deranged Sullivan. I suppose they must take what victories they can get. This would count as merely a small comic episode in American political anthropology, except that Sullivan’s bitterness crosses the line into something that is neither small nor comic.

V.

I will conclude this unpleasantness here, though there are more rants by Sullivan that merit attention. Criticism of Israeli policy, and sympathy for the Palestinians, and support for a two-state solution, do not require, as their condition or their corollary, this intellectual shabbiness, this venomous hostility toward Israel and Jews. I have striven for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, and territorial compromise, and two states, for many decades now, but Sullivan’s variety of such right thinking is completely repugnant to me. There are decent and indecent ways to advocate change. About the Jews, is Sullivan a bigot, or is he just moronically insensitive? To me, he looks increasingly like the Buchanan of the left. He is the master, and the prisoner, of the technology of sickly obsession: blogging–and the divine right of bloggers to exempt themselves from the interrogations of editors–is also a method of hounding. Of course, it is impossible to know what is in a man’s heart; but on the basis of what Sullivan has written, I would urge him to search his heart. Such a reckoning would involve more than the “my bad” efficiency of internet introspection. I do not expect to see it. If explaining the Trinity to readers of The New Republic is not easy, imagine how hard it will be to explain all this. 

Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic.  

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Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone

By Stanislao Pugliese

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 426 pp., $35)

In June 1950, Ignazio Silone and Arthur Koestler, two of the most prominent anti-communist writers of that era, attended a convivial dinner party in West Berlin. They had gathered with several other intellectuals to celebrate the founding conference of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an American-sponsored riposte to the Soviet Cominform’s “peace conferences” of the preceding year. Those were the early days of the Cold War, and more than a hundred Western writers, critics, and cultural figures had converged on the blockaded city of Berlin to demonstrate solidarity with its people and to resist the Soviet cultural and political offensive. According to Koestler’s wife, Mamaine, Koestler got drunk and repeatedly accused Silone of ignoring Koestler’s fraternal feelings for him. Silone was behaving, said Koestler, “as if he were a broad-bottomed Abruzzi peasant” and Koestler “a cosmopolitan gigolo.”

Silone made some mollifying remarks and claimed to be mystified by the outburst, but he was probably bluffing. Taciturn and even morose by inclination, and an uncharismatic speaker, he had the satisfaction of having just bested the loquacious Koestler in their public discussion about policy, while Koestler’s volubility reflected his own frustration at having lost the argument. The dispute had been about how best to respond to Soviet propaganda. Koestler advocated fighting fire with fire and carrying the propaganda war to the enemy by means of radio stations beamed at the satellite countries and the publication of books, magazines, and newspapers aimed at the Soviet bloc. Silone urged a less confrontational policy of promoting social and political reforms at home and merely showcasing Western cultural achievements abroad, so as to teach by example.

Their differences reflected a gathering split in the anti-communist left in Europe (and to a lesser extent in America) that would persist for the next twentyfive years. The question was how to straddle the divisions between left and right in the West in opposing Soviet expansionism and the political pressure from the East. Koestler maintained that progressives should hold their noses (if need be) and join an alliance between left and right to fight the greater evil of Stalinism. Silone, out of an instinctive anti-Americanism and lingering nostalgia for his communist past, disagreed. In his native region of Italy, he argued, “half the Abruzzi peasants” were communists and the other half were not, but since both were “fighting against Prince Torlonia,” you could not ask the non-communists to oppose the communists. (Prince Torlonia was the largest landowner and political leader of the region where Silone spent his childhood.) Stalinism and the threat that it posed was trumped, for Silone, by the more ancient struggle between the left and the right in Europe, and the left could never accept an alliance with reactionary forces.

“Silone always comes back sooner or later to the Abruzzi peasants and Prince Torlonia,” commented Mamaine when reporting these conversations, and she was right. Silone’s deep attachment to his roots was well known. As Stanislao G. Pugliese, Silone’s first biographer in English, writes in his new book, an understanding of those roots is crucial to understanding Silone’s works. Pugliese cites Silone’s autobiographical essay, “Emergency Exit,” written shortly before the Berlin conference, in support of this claim: “Everything I have written up to now,” Silone asserted, “and probably everything I will write in the future, even though I have traveled and lived abroad for many years, refers only to that part of the country which can be seen from the house where I was born—no more than twenty or thirty miles in any direction.”

Silone was born in 1900 in a part of southeastern Italy known as the Abruzzo, a land of howling wolves and rugged mountains, in Pugliese’s words, and of “saints and stonecutters,” in Silone’s. In the years of Silone’s youth it was still a remote and benighted region, dominated by a small and powerful aristocracy (led by Prince Torlonia) and populated for the most part by cafoni, downtrodden peasants barely able to read or write or eke out a living from the unforgiving soil. Silone, born Secondo Tranquilli, was the son of a small landowner, and so not quite a peasant himself, but he identified with the cafoni out of sympathy for their poverty, and as the result of a difficult and haunted childhood. By the age of eleven he had seen four brothers and sisters die of illness (an older sister had perished before he was born), and in his twelfth year he saw his struggling father die, too. His impoverished mother, left with two sons to care for, tried to make a living as a weaver, but she herself perished, in 1915, in a terrible earthquake that leveled the family’s hometown of Pescina and devastated the entire region, killing over thirty thousand people and leaving Secondo, who was fourteen, and his younger brother Romolo, who was eleven, to be raised by their maternal grandmother.

Pugliese describes the earthquake as having inflicted a trauma on Silone comparable to the shock inflicted on Dostoyevsky by his pretended execution. The young boy never forgot the sight of his dead mother being pulled from the ruins of their toppled house, and he associated it in his mind with the sufferings of the poor peasants around him. Observing the vast divide between the luxurious lives of the aristocracy and the bitter struggle for survival of the cafoni in and around Pescina, and influenced by “burning rage against all forms of injustice inherited from his father,” he developed socialist leanings early. Later, after arriving at a school in Rome to continue his education, and confronted by the greed and corruption fostered by the distribution of earthquake relief, he joined the Young Socialists, rising quickly to become their leader. In 1921, he became a founding member of the clandestine Italian Communist Party.

A year later the still-young Tranquilli entered into what was to become the defining struggle of his life, against the Italian fascist regime led by Benito Mussolini, which affected his future in two important ways. First, he was obliged to spend a great deal of time traveling abroad in Spain, Germany, France, and the Soviet Union on party work, an uncomfortable arrangement for a patriot as attached to the soil as he was. Second, he had to master the art of secrecy, taking on a baffling and ever-changing array of party aliases— over a dozen, according to Pugliese— including the one that later stuck, Ignazio Silone, which he adopted in 1923 while languishing in a Spanish jail.

Secrecy became a passion for Silone, along with its necessary corollary, the ability to keep silent. This was evident in a turning point in his career during a visit to Moscow in 1927. Both he and Palmiro Togliatti, who were together leading an Italian delegation to a meeting of the Communist International, refused to sign a resolution expelling Leon Trotsky from the party without being allowed to read the document that supposedly incriminated him. Trotsky was expelled anyway by a resolution that was claimed to be “unanimous.” Togliatti made his peace with the Soviet leaders, and later became the head of the Italian Communist Party, but Silone kept silent, while gradually becoming alienated from his comrades. At the end of the 1920s, having contracted tuberculosis and fallen into a severe depression, he hid his increasing alienation from the Communist Party by moving to a clinic in Davos, Switzerland; but in the summer of 1931 he was expelled from the party anyway for his failure to support the party line.

It was during his illness and convalescence in Switzerland that, without any formal experience in fiction, Silone wrote his first and most famous novel, Fontamara, a work of polemical social realism that bore witness to his homesickness for his beloved Abruzzo and the peasant community that he had left behind. Its hero, he later said, was not so much an individual as “the rural proletariat, the eternally suffering peasants,” although the novel tells their story through the rebellion of a single peasant, Barbera Viola, against the new fascist regime and his transformation into a fledgling revolutionary. Viola is ultimately arrested, tortured, and brought to his death in a fascist jail—an emblem of the fate of the cafoni under fascism.

Fontamara appeared first in German in 1933, and was quickly translated into twenty-seven languages, turning its author into an international celebrity. But the novel could not be published in Silone’s native Italy, because of his communist and anti-fascist reputation. He soon followed it with another novel set in the Abruzzo, Bread and Wine. It told the story of Pietro Spina, a communist who returns to his native region to judge the prospects for revolution. Spina is a much more self-conscious and intellectual hero than Viola. The hero of Fontamara had still embodied the revolutionary zeal of Silone’s youth, but the hero of Bread and Wine ends up disillusioned and disgusted with the party that inspired him.

Pugliese notes that Bread and Wine is considered by many to be Silone’s finest novel. It is more discursive than Fontamara, but also a more mature work of ideas—a reflection in fiction on the dilemma of ends and means that tortured so many intellectuals in the twentieth century. A third novel, The Seed Beneath the Snow, completed in 1940, constitutes the last in what Silone considered a trilogy. It continues the tale of Spina, who goes willingly to his death at the hands of the fascists for the sake of personal loyalty to his former comrades.

Pugliese is not terribly interested in Silone’s fiction. He pays only cursory attention to the novels, dwelling more on their subject matter than on their literary qualities. What really interests him is Silone’s politics. Among Silone’s writings, he seems to prefer The School for Dictators, a non-fictional satirical monograph couched in dialogue, and written shortly before The Seed Beneath the Snow, to the novel that followed it. He observes that for Silone the distinguishing quality of fascism was not that it pitted one class against another (which it undoubtedly did), nor that it perpetuated inequality (ditto), but that it mobilized and marshaled “all the relics of primitive barbarism that still survive in modern man,” transferring to the political arena “many pre-logical and a-logical relics of a primitive mentality” lurking beneath the “varnish” of civilization. The fascists had also been successful, according to Silone, in “contaminating many of [their] political opponents” by forcing them to struggle against fascism with fascist methods, thereby becoming “barbarians themselves. Red barbarians.”

There can be little doubt that Silone had put his finger on one of the prime reasons why fascism flourished in so much of “civilized” Europe—it expressed an almost irresistible atavism, which was why it remained the chief ideological and political enemy for Silone even after his break with communism (for Koestler it was the other way around). Silone evidently feared fascism’s pull precisely because of its great appeal to “the masses,” who were dangerously vulnerable to unreason and brutality. But while the argument that fascism had “contaminated” its opponents may have some truth to it, the implication that fascism somehow pre-dated—and was more innocent than—communism is false. Both, in their modern form, arose from the ashes of World War I at approximately the same time. But Silone was not yet prepared to equate the two, and he could never quite bring himself to do so. One of the charges he was to level against Koestler and likeminded anti-communists was that they were too inclined to use the same methods as their opponents to achieve their goals. The equivalent charge against Silone (and many other ex-communist intellectuals) has to be that they hid behind their hatred for fascism and soft-pedaled their criticisms of communism.

Silone’s was a particularly complex and ambiguous and tortured case. During World War II, for example, after he had rejoined the Italian Socialist Party and become chief of its foreign office in exile, he was contacted by Allen Dulles of the American Office of Strategic Services (the OSS was the predecessor of the CIA), and became a conduit for passing money and information between the Americans and members of the Italian resistance, and for keeping an eye on the communists in the resistance. This prompted the adoption of more aliases, and Silone was so successful at concealing his true position that he wound up in a Swiss jail on suspicion that he was still a communist. As it happens, his relationship with the OSS caused him to soften his earlier hostility to capitalist America, but he maintained his left-wing principles and continued to insist to the Americans that after the war, even though Italy would be occupied as an enemy power, its people should be allowed to hold free elections and decide on their own form of government, which he was convinced would be a socialist one.

By war’s end, Silone was also, at last, prepared to make his twenty-year-old break with the Communist Party explicit and public. He did so in “Emergency Exit,” his contribution to The God That Failed, a remarkable volume of testimony by ex-communists conceived and edited by Arthur Koestler and Richard Crossman. The essay included a lot about Prince Torlonia and the Abruzzo cafoni, but what got Silone into trouble was his revelation about visiting Moscow in 1927 and refusing to sign the resolution condemning Trotsky. This was his first public mention of it, and Trotsky’s widow published a scathing letter accusing him of moral cowardice for waiting twenty-two years to reveal the truth about the infamous and supposedly “unanimous” resolution. Meanwhile Silone was back in postwar Italy and served as a Socialist deputy from 1946 to 1948, when he played a leading role in preventing an alliance between the Socialist and Communist parties. He also published two more novels, A Handful of Blackberries and The Secret of Luca, in which his estrangement from communism became a major theme.

Pugliese notes that the story of Silone’s zigzag path into socialism, and then from socialism into communism and back to socialism again, is complicated by his many omissions and silences, and his selfevident penchant for myth-making; unfortunately these attributes seem to have contributed to the chaos in Pugliese’s baffling book. Pugliese is determined not to write a conventional, chronological biography, and not to seem “omniscient” or overbearing, but he ties himself in such knots to avoid the pitfalls he fears that he falls into the opposite trap of repeatedly losing his way in his own narrative, which in many respects is rambling and unfocused to the point of incoherence. He aims to treat Silone’s life thematically, slicing it up into chapters on Silone and the Communist Party, Silone’s writing and exile, Silone and post-fascism, Silone and cold war culture, and so on, but although he has interesting things to say about all these topics, his disregard for chronology or coherence leads him to repeat facts, dates, and anecdotes over and over again to fit each new context, leading the reader’s eyes to glaze over and his mind to wander. This is something of an achievement in a biography of a figure as riveting as Silone.

Silone still awaits a proper biography in English, but for those who already know something of his life and work, Pugliese is worth wading into. His analysis of Silone’s ideas on fascism, and his account of the geopolitical intricacies of the postwar settlement in Europe—along with Silone’s complicated maneuvers between the parties, and his ambivalent attempts to become a politician—is very skillfully done. Pugliese shows why Silone, despite his refusal to allow the Italian Socialist Party to collaborate with the communists, found it so hard to engage in the kind of ideological warfare that Koestler advocated. In his essay for The God That Failed, Silone emphasized that his expulsion from the party had been “a very sad day for me, a day of mourning, of mourning for my youth.” He never forgot the communist idealism of his early days and his affection for his comrades, even when he was forced to acknowledge the infernal corruption of the party machine. After the war, Silone seemed unable to commit himself completely to any political program and increasingly held himself aloof from political life. Interestingly, he also disdained the easy antifascism that was popular in Italy at the time. To be “anti” only sustained the illusion that the fascists were still powerful enough to be worth opposing.

Silone turned instead to Europe, having concluded as early as 1946 that remaking Europe was even more important than remaking its individual countries. “The unification of Europe is the fundamental political task of our generation,” he declared. “If we do not solve this problem our generation can consider itself an historic failure.” The following year, as president of the PEN Center in Italy, he spoke at an international PEN conference in Basel on “The Dignity of Intelligence and the Unworthiness of Intellectuals,” pointing to the unique responsibility that intellectuals bore toward society, and to the inability of most of them, including himself, to rise to the challenge. In 1949, at another PEN conference, he admonished writers and intellectuals not to submit to the power of the state, or to become “vassals” of those in power anywhere. And demonstrating again his perpetual drive for evenhandedness, he charged them to resist “the corruption of the mass media” in the West.

It was natural in these circumstances for Silone to reach out to European writers like himself. He was part of the generation of the 1930s that took it for granted that writers should also be men of action, and as in the cases of many of his fellow writers, it cost him many years in exile. He and Koestler had first met in fact in communist literary circles in Switzerland before the war, and then again in Rome in 1948, soon after the success of Koestler’s masterpiece Darkness at Noon. Koestler, who agreed with Silone about Europe and the political direction it should take, had come fresh from meetings in Paris with Sartre, Camus, and Malraux, and their discussions of what to do about Europe. Silone knew the French writers through his own frequent visits to Paris and contributions to Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes and other French journals. All of them—Silone, Koestler, Camus, Sartre, Malraux—had been with the Communist Party at one time or another, and all of them were preoccupied with the prospects for socialism and supported the concept of a united continent. Indeed, for a brief time in the late 1940s, it looked as if they might all line up behind a common concept of Europe as free, united, anticommunist, and social democratic.

The concept was shared by the American liberals who had successfully established the Marshall Plan for Western Europe and helped to organize the Congress for Cultural Freedom conference in 1950, but the moment for unity—or, at least, a unity that included America— soon passed. None of the three French writers attended the Berlin conference, though Camus and Malraux sent messages of support. Malraux, like Koestler, was ready to accept America’s leading role in Europe, and to make a pact of convenience with the political right (he eventually joined de Gaulle’s government as minister of information), convinced that it was the only realistic way to oppose communism. Sartre, steadfastly anti-capitalist and anti-American, briefly tried to find a “third way” between the two blocs, but moved leftward to become an apologist for Stalinism. Camus, who was closest to both Silone and Koestler, bitterly opposed Sartre’s defense of the Soviet Union and clung to a sort of third way of his own; and though Silone parted company from Camus over decolonization and the war in Algeria, he fully supported him in his disputation with Sartre.

In Berlin, Silone had the satisfaction of prevailing in his argument with Koestler that the West should devote itself to cultural and political self-improvement and make the competition with the Soviet bloc peaceful rather than confrontational, and his influence on the organizers of the conference within the CIA turned out to be crucial. One outcome of his preferred policy was the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s eventual decision to found a stable of literary magazines in Europe and Asia to showcase the cultural richness of the free countries. It was only natural that Silone should become co-editor of a new Italian journal, Tempo Presente, similar to sister journals such as Encounter in Britain, Preuves in France, and Der Monat in West Germany. Silone proved to be an excellent editor: cosmopolitan, sophisticated about literature, and politically astute— though not astute enough (as the more cynical Koestler was) to spot the hidden hand of the CIA behind the CCF.

In 1967, when word of the CIA’s role in supporting the Congress for Cultural Freedom leaked out, it provoked a huge scandal among intellectuals in Europe and the United States, and Silone was thrown on the defensive. His ideological enemies pointed to his wartime work with the OSS as evidence that he must have been an American spy all along, and that in editing Tempo Presente he had simply carried out the orders of the CIA—a ridiculous accusation in light of the magazine’s record of intellectual independence and its frequent criticism of Western institutions. (A part of the genius of the CIA’s early leaders was to give the writers and intellectuals it supported a free hand.)

In the inflamed context of postwar Italy, however, where a portion of the intelligentsia was still on the defensive about its collaboration with Mussolini and another portion consisted of communists and fellow travelers (and the two camps, for obvious reasons, overlapped), the appearance of such an easy target was hard to resist. Silone was not helped at this juncture by his reputation for stubbornness and his penchant for secrecy. The Polish writer Gustav Herling, a frequent contributor to Tempo Presente and a close friend of Silone’s, once described him as “truly a man who did not speak much and who knew how to keep a secret,” and even Silone’s second wife and literary collaborator Darina Silone described his character as “difficult” and his personality as “very complex.” No one, she added, “ever knew him completely,” voicing an insight that was to attain new relevance after Silone’s death.

Silone, meanwhile, retreated into his private world. Keeping his own counsel and hewing to his own path, he held aloof from politics and remained independent of official circles, turning down offers to become Italy’s ambassador to France or to head Italy’s newly established state TV network. Literature was still his main métier, and apart from some journalism he published a novel, The Fox and the Camelias, set in Switzerland between the wars (his only novel not set in the Abruzzo); a play, The Story of a Humble Christian, based in part on the life of Father Charles de Foucauld, a French holy man; and a collection of autobiographical essays, Emergency Exit, named for the essay that had originally appeared in The God That Failed. Both the play and the essays were critical and commercial successes, and in his last years Silone was showered with honors. When he died in 1978, the president of Italy lauded the writer—in terms that many of his compatriots now shared— as the “noble, rigorous, inflexible, democratic conscience of contemporary Italian culture.”

Silone’s posthumous reputation seemed entirely safe, but the taciturn, introverted survivor of the Abruzzo earthquake had one last secret up his sleeve. It was revealed in 1996, when an Italian historian caused a sensation when he accused Silone of having spied for the fascist police between the wars. The evidence was to be found in a series of letters signed by a certain "Silvestri” to Guido Bellone, a high-ranking fascist police official in Rome, which the historian had unearthed in the government archives. Pugliese devotes his best and most gripping chapter to a detailed account of the controversy that divided Italian public opinion over whether the letters were genuine or not. Silone’s supporters maintained that they were forgeries, whereas his opponents held that the handwriting was undoubtedly Silone’s. Moreover, the key document in the collection, an emotional appeal to Bellone to release the writer from their arrangement, dating from 1930, appeared to suggest a collaboration that had lasted over ten years.

Somewhat hyperbolically, Pugliese compares the fallout from these heated allegations to the impact of the Dreyfus affair in France. Members of the pro-Silone camp pointed to numerous inconsistencies and weaknesses in the evidence: there were surprisingly few letters to account for a whole decade; no other high-ranking fascist seems to have known about the letters, and no fascists had ever used the information that Silone was a spy, even when they could have destroyed him with it; and there was no conclusive evidence— other than the handwriting—that “Silvestri” was Silone. A senior Communist Party official took another tack, alleging that Silone had actually been a triple agent, having pretended to spy on party members so he could winkle information from the fascist police that would be useful to his communist comrades. This would account for the fact that another bitter enemy of Silone’s, Palmiro Togliatti, did not denounce him when, as minister of justice after the war, he had access to these files.

The balance of informed opinion swung against Silone. Further documents were unearthed to show that Silone had a good reason for approaching the police two years before writing his incriminating letter: in 1928, his beloved younger brother Romolo had been arrested and tortured in jail (where he died two years later) on suspicion of being a member of the Communist Party (which he wasn’t). Commentators speculated that Silone, who was an active member of the party, must have been racked with guilt over this injustice, and was probably prepared to do anything to get his brother out. This still left open the question of whether he had been in contact with Bellone much earlier, and whether, as further documents suggested, he had acted as an informer when in Switzerland between the wars. There was even specula- tion that Silone had secretly “confessed” his crimes in one or other of his novels or in his first play, aptly entitled And He Hid Himself. But none of these details seemed important beside the enormity of the fact of his collaboration.

Pugliese catalogs the many books, articles, and debates that have poured forth since these revelations in painstaking and fascinating detail, and he is forced to conclude (as Silone’s widow, Darina, also concluded) that at least some of the documents are provably in Silone’s handwriting and therefore genuine. But what does the collaboration mean for our understanding of Silone’s life and work? Some on the left in Italy and elsewhere have rushed to denounce the author as yet another deceitful apostate “like Orwell” (for his list of communist sympathizers delivered to the British Foreign Office during World War II), and therefore not worth reading or respecting, while more cautious critics see the denigration of Silone from the opposite point of view as just the latest in a series of recent attacks from the left on Orwell, Koestler, Camus, and other writers who turned against the Communist Party.

Pugliese ultimately comes down on the side of those who believe that Silone’s work speaks for itself, and endorses Alexander Stille’s conclusion that the recent scandals “don’t diminish the power of Silone’s writings.” D. H. Lawrence once wrote that readers should “judge the tale, not the teller,” having in mind the difference between the complex artistic message embodied in a novel or poem and what was said outside the work by or about the author, but Lawrence’s dictum fits Silone’s case as well. To anyone who reads his novels and his journalism, it is perfectly obvious where he stood with regard to both fascism and communism, whatever compromises he may have felt obliged to make in his everyday life. As Pugliese shows (and as Silone himself asserted), he was fundamentally religious in his worldview—an “apprentice saint,” in the words of R. W. B. Lewis—who tried in vain to reconcile the secular promise of socialism with the transcendent vision of Christianity. He fell victim to the tragedy of his age. Caught between the hammer of totalitarianism and the anvil of twentieth-century reality, Silone, like so many of his peers, “sought in politics that which politics could not grant him.” Like other mortals, he made mistakes, lost his way, and sinned; but it is in, and for, his work that Silone will be rightly remembered, and that is why we still need to read him.

Michael Scammell’s new book, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, has just been published by Random House.

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It was always going to be tricky for Congress to pass a big climate-change bill this year. And now, post-Scott Brown, the odds are looking even bleaker. A lot of panicky Dems are blanching at the thought of another knockdown legislative brawl before the midterms, and there's even been talk of a smaller "energy-only" bill that would dish out subsidies for various technologies but wouldn't set hard limits on greenhouse gases. Cap-and-trade still has its backers in the Senate, but picking up 60 votes looks increasingly daunting.

So is that it? If the Senate falters, is the country out of options for cutting carbon pollution? Not exactly. There's still the Environmental Protection Agency. Recall that, back in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA was required to regulate greenhouse gases under the existing Clean Air Act if it found those gases posed a threat to public health and welfare (which, most scientists agree, they do). The Bush administration put off making that call, but Obama's EPA head, Lisa Jackson, went ahead last year with a formal endangerment finding. The agency is already using its power to draft new fuel-economy rules for cars and light trucks. The next step will be to start regulating stationary sources like power plants and factories, a task that's much more fraught.

For a long time, no one thought it would come to this. The Clean Air Act, after all, was designed to handle conventional air pollutants like lead or sulfur-dioxide. Using it to address global warming would be clunkier than a climate bill specially crafted by Congress. If anything, the EPA option was mainly seen as a spur to stubborn lawmakers: Surely they'd work to pass their own climate legislation, so that the agency didn't have to crack down with rules that polluters were really going to hate. As Arkansas Democrat Mark Pryor put it last year, "I've always been reluctant on cap-and-trade, but [the EPA's authority] might put that in a different light."

But now that climate legislation is floating in limbo, things are looking different. The EPA really might end up being the last resort for reining in greenhouse gases. Which means it’s time to ask: Can the agency actually handle the job?

EPA officials have stayed fairly tight-lipped on their exact plans going forward, but here's a sketch of how many experts think the agency would go about cracking down on greenhouse gases. In March, the EPA will propose its new fuel-economy standards for cars and light trucks (the goal is an average of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016). And as soon as that happens, the agency would be legally obligated to begin the process of regulating stationary sources, too—though the precise timeline here is still fuzzy.

The first wave of regulations would involve the EPA's "Prevention of Significant Deterioration" program. Anyone who wanted to build a new power plant or factory—or upgrade an existing facility—would need to apply for a state permit and adopt "best available control technology" for greenhouse-gas emissions. The EPA hasn't specified what technologies that might entail, but it could mean anything from more efficient processes for cement kilns to forcing coal-fired plants to switch to cleaner natural gas. The appropriate technologies would be decided on a plant-by-plant basis. Since this would only apply to new plants—or plants undergoing significant upgrades—it wouldn't affect the vast majority of existing polluters. (There will also, no doubt, be messy disputes over what counts as a "significant" upgrade, a Clean Air Act battle that's been raging for decades.) Still, this first step would make a splash almost immediately. "No one in their right mind is going to propose a new coal-fired plant after this," says David Bookbinder, the Sierra Club's chief climate counsel.

Now, here's where the headaches start. The EPA has proposed a "tailoring rule" to make sure that this program only applies to very large polluters emitting more than 25,000 tons of carbon-dioxide per year. That way, the regulations wouldn't affect, say, individual buildings that burn heating oil, or small businesses. But the tailoring rule is a rather significant revision to the original Clean Air Act, and the Chamber of Commerce and other industry groups are likely to challenge it in court. In essence, these groups would prefer that the EPA rules hit everyone and cause chaos, forcing the Obama administration to back off entirely.

If the EPA can survive that challenge, it would then have to figure out how to regulate existing polluters. This part is crucial: The original Clean Air Act ended up grandfathering in existing coal plants, which perversely gave utilities incentives to keep their oldest and dirtiest boilers chugging along for as long as possible. The agency has a variety of options here. According to Jason Burnett, a former EPA official who helped craft greenhouse-gas rules during the Bush years, one plausible scenario would see the agency setting pollution targets for different industrial sectors under section 111 of the Clean Air Act, the "New Source Performance Standards" program. Cement kilns and nitric-acid plants would get regulated first, possibly as soon as this year. After that would come oil and gas refineries, and, later still, fossil-fuel power plants. These rules could involve anything from inflexible limits (i.e., kilns have to emit no more than a certain amount of carbon-dioxide per ton of cement produced) to a carbon-trading program, although the latter would be much dicier, legally speaking.

So could all these EPA regulations actually do as much as a cap-and-trade bill to rein in greenhouse gases? Yes and no. Some environmental groups are studying whether EPA rules, if combined with an ambitious energy bill from Congress that promoted cleaner power sources and had ample incentives for efficiency, could at least help the United States achieve the near-term emission cuts by 2020 that many scientists think are necessary to stave off the worst effects of global warming. "There's a lot of low-hanging fruit that can be grabbed through efficiency and switching from coal to natural gas. A good energy bill combined with regulations might get us there," says Bookbinder. But, he cautions, the EPA alone can't bring about sweeping long-term reductions: "The only way to cut emissions 80 percent by 2050 is to put a price on carbon, and the only folks who can do that are in Congress.” After all, EPA rules are a relatively blunt instrument—having regulators suggest, for example, that polluters adopt specific technologies would constrain innovation.

There's also the question of cost. EPA regulations would, in all likelihood, prove pricier for polluters than a flexible cap-and-trade system from Congress. For a utility that owns a lot of creaky old coal-fired plants, it may be cheaper just to pay $12 per ton of carbon-dioxide under cap-and-trade—or to lobby Congress for free permits—than to implement millions of dollars worth of equipment upgrades per an EPA mandate. That's why most industry groups would prefer that Congress come up with its own system.

Then again, that's also a reason why many environmentalists prefer the EPA approach, or at least see it as an important complement to a congressional bill. "We don't want to see a cap-and-trade bill give life to a whole new generation of coal plants on their last legs," says Steven Biel, the clean energy campaign director for MoveOn.org, which has pushed to preserve the EPA's authority. (A number of congressional staffers say that the EPA's juridiction over greenhouse gases would have to be overriden in any eventual climate bill, although, thanks to pressure from groups like MoveOn, some members are now backing away from this view.)

Another problem with going the EPA route is that there are plenty of legal uncertainties involved. Industry groups are certain to sue the agency at every turn, which could bog down the regulatory process. Still, say some experts, as long as the agency takes care in drafting its rules, it can probably survive the flurry of legal challenges. "The EPA has a good track record here," says Burnett. "Even during the last eight years, the record wasn't always stellar, but the courts still upheld most of the agency's rules. That's something within EPA's control: They can decide how much legal risk they want to take." Lawsuits might be able to slow down the EPA for a few years, but probably not much more than that.

The biggest potential sticking point with the EPA approach is that Congress can always put a stop to it, if it chooses. In the Senate, Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski has put forward a bill that would strip the agency of its authority over greenhouse gases, and she has the support of 36 Republicans and three conservative Democrats. That's clearly not enough to enact a law (let alone overcome an Obama veto), but things could change if the GOP picks up more seats this fall. Alternatively, Congress could block the EPA from getting the funds it needs to regulate greenhouse gases (Obama asked for about $43 million in his latest budget). "That's the problem with this notion that the EPA is somehow holding a gun to Congress's head, forcing us to pass legislation," says one Democratic Senate aide. "Because the first thing that occurs to people here is, 'Hey, I know a way to get out of that.' "

That means that, in the coming months, many climate advocates may have to shift gears. Instead of talking about the EPA's authority as some terrifying prospect that only the passage of a cap-and-trade bill can stop, the EPA option could increasingly get framed as something worth defending in its own right. Especially since it may be one of the few viable options left for tackling climate change.

Bradford Plumer is assistant editor of The New Republic.

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WASHINGTON -- If President Obama gets to sign a health reform bill, as I believe he will, one reason may be Rep. Jay Inslee's difficult experience renovating his kitchen.

He told his kitchen story at a House Democratic caucus held after Republican Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts sent Inslee's colleagues into paroxysms of dismay, chaos and fear. Brown's triumph reduced the Democrats' majority in the Senate to "only" 59, and this led many in both houses to want to give up on health reform altogether. Even Obama was sounding an uncertain trumpet.

This made no sense to Inslee, a Democrat from Washington state. First elected to the House in 1992, he was swept out of office in the 1994 Republican landslide that followed the collapse of Bill Clinton's health care efforts. Four years later, Inslee returned to Congress.

"I introduced myself as a fella who was defeated in 1994, the last time we didn't pass meaningful health care reform," Inslee recalls saying. "I said it was a painful event, and I didn't want them to go through that pain." In politics, he told his colleagues, assuming the "fetal position" can be the most dangerous thing to do.

And then he recounted all the grief he and his family went through while work on their kitchen renovation dragged on and on and on. "During that time, I had bloodlust against my contractor," Inslee said. "Six months went by, and he was still arguing with the plumber. Eight months went by, and there were still wires hanging down everywhere, and he was having trouble with the building inspector."

But eventually, the job got done. "And now I love that kitchen," Inslee recalls saying. "I bake bread in that kitchen. My wife cooks great meals in that kitchen. The contractor's now a buddy of mine, and I've had beers with him in that kitchen."

Inslee looked at his colleagues and declared: "We've got to finish the kitchen." His point was that Americans won't experience any of the benefits of health care reform until Congress actually puts a new system in place. 

I called Inslee about his kitchen oration after Rep. David Wu, D-Ore., told me it was one of the turning points in calming Democrats' nerves. "Now," Wu says, "people run into him in the hallway, smile and say, 'Finish the kitchen.'"

There is only one plausible way to finish the kitchen. The House needs to pass the Senate bill and both chambers need to approve amendments to it. At least two amendments are essential to getting the bill through the House. They involve reducing the burden of the tax on so-called Cadillac health care plans, which is wildly unpopular with House members and voters; and getting rid of the special Medicaid subsidy deal for Nebraska, which just about everyone hates. Even Nebraska's Ben Nelson, the senator for whom that deal was put together, wants it out.

The House and Senate disagree over the order in which these things should be done, but they can resolve this. The real problem is that some Senate Democratic moderates are petrified that Republicans will make terrible trouble if the amendments are passed through the "reconciliation process," which is fancy congressional talk for majority rule. Reconciliation bills require a simple majority of the Senate, not the 60 votes that, wrongly, have come to be necessary to get any bill through.

But if Democrats are that intimidated by Republicans, they should just give up their majority. And this fear is politically shortsighted. Right now, every Democrat in the Senate has to defend a vote for the health care bill anyway, with nothing to show for it -- and this includes defending the Nebraska deal.

By contrast, voting for amendments to the original Senate bill would be a sign that Democrats heard the message from Massachusetts. Brown won in part because the Nebraska buy-off became a symbol of unseemly legislative logrolling. And many voters would welcome a reduction in a tax on health plans.

Moreover, as Inslee points out, if democracy's new rule is that nothing gets done without 60 percent of the available votes, Scott Brown, who got 52 percent in Massachusetts, would not be sitting in the Senate.

Democrats can finish the kitchen. Or they can face the wrath of voters who will wonder why the contractors they sent to Washington left all the wires hanging, and the plumbing disconnected and useless.

E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.      

(c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group

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The idea that Republicans haven’t had a chance to present their ideas on health care reform is a bit mind-boggling. Five separate congressional committees had hearings; each chamber had floor debates. That’s hundreds of hours the GOP had to talk about health care, all of it in public view and televised on C-SPAN. And that’s not even including all of the unofficial channels at the Republicans’ disposal. Generally speaking, the party of Rush Limbaugh and Fox Television doesn’t struggle to get across its message.

But if President Obama is determined to give Republicans one more public forum for presenting their health care agenda, as he will do when he meets with GOP leaders on Feb. 25, maybe that is just as well. For most of last year, Republicans spent their time attacking Democratic plans for reform, rather than describing their own. But now they’ve put a plan on the table. Showcasing that plan--and comparing it to what the Democrats have proposed--might help clarify a few things.

The Republican health care plan is part of the "Roadmap for America's Future." Its chief architect is Paul Ryan, ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee and a rising star in the party. Republicans boast that the Roadmap is serious plan to get the federal budget under control, which turns out to be a fairly large exaggeration. As Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center has observed, the Roadmap doesn't account for trillions of dollars in lost revenue from its tax cuts. Yes, that's trillions with a "t" at the front and "s" at the back.

The health care portions of the plan, though, really would reduce what the government spends on health care. And they would do so, primarily, by extracting money from Medicare. Instead of continuing to provide coverage directly, the government would issue vouchers that seniors could use to buy private insurance. The value of the vouchers would rise far more slowly than Medicare spending is expected to grow if nothing changes.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, Medicare will soak up more than 14 percent of gross domestic product by 2080. If the Roadmap were to be adopted, CBO says Medicare would take up less than 4 percent. As Ryan explained during an illuminating interview with the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, the hope is that converting Medicare into a voucher scheme would prod seniors to shop around to find the best value--that is, the best insurance policies, the best hospitals, the best doctors--and, in so doing, get health care that is as good if not better than they would have otherwise.

That all sounds perfectly innocuous: Who wouldn’t want seniors taking the initiative and hunting around for the best bargains? But it’s not clear how many seniors really have the ability to navigate the world of health care with the sort of sophistication to really hunt down the most cost-effective care, even if, as Ryan promises, they’d have more information at their disposal. At the very least, you'd want to give seniors ironclad protections when it comes to the design of insurance products--making sure a wide array of services were covered and that out-of-pocket spending were limited.

The Roadmap includes only vague protections along those lines. Combine that with the magnitude of the spending reductions--those cuts are very big--and it's easy to envision a world where seniors simply couldn't afford their medical care. As a preliminary (and still unpublished) analysis of the Roadmap by the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded, “elderly and disabled people with significant medical conditions could encounter serious difficulty securing adequate coverage.”

But wait a minute--don’t the Democratic reform plans also take money out of Medicare? They sure do. But there are several key differences. For starters, the Democrats’ reductions don't appear to be as large as what’s envisioned in the Roadmap. Also, under the Democratic plan, most seniors would still be getting their coverage directly from the government, which has lower overhead than private sector insurers. So every dollar the Democrats spend on seniors would actually go a little further.

No less important, the Democratic plans wouldn't simply slash spending and let the market sort itself out. Instead, the Medicare cuts are part of a broader package of reforms designed to change the way Medicare pays for services. These reforms are designed to reward efficiency (by, for example, paying more to doctors that join integrated group practices) while penalizing inefficiency (by, for example, paying less to hospitals with high rates of infection or, eventually, paying less money for drugs that don’t work that well). They are also designed, quite frankly, to push down the prices that providers charge.

This is a critical difference. If you simply reduce the money flowing into Medicare, relying only on the wits of beneficiaries to figure out how best to spend what’s left, seniors are bound to end up with less care. That's the Republican method. But if you also introduce system-wide changes that reward more efficient care and force down provider prices, the dollars in the program really might go farther--so that spending less doesn't always mean getting less. That's the Democratic approach.

"The slowdown in the Reid [Senate] bill is predicated on specific policies which, according to MedPAC and others, shouldn't reduce beneficiaries' access to care," says Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget. "The Ryan bill just gives every beneficiary a voucher and makes them fend for themselves in a poorly regulated private market."

The irony is that, for much of the last year, Republicans have been scaring the bejeezus out of seniors by telling them that Democrats were out to destroy Medicare. But the Roadmap makes clear that it’s not Democrats who seek massive, disruptive changes to the program. It’s the Republicans. If the coming engagement between the Republicans and President Obama help the public to understand that reality, extending the debate might actually be worth it.

Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor of The New Republic. This column is a collaboration between TNR and Kaiser Health News. KHN is an editorially independent news service and is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization, which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

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The Weekly Standard certainly knows how to attract readers. The magazine's new cover story, written by Charlotte Allen, is accompanied by a cover photo of a big-breasted woman in a red dress being approached from behind by a sleazy looking man. The cover text reads:

"Thousands of years of human mating rituals are vanishing. Cro-Magnons are once again dragging their mates into their caves by their hair--and the women love every minute of it."

Before metaphorically turning the page, I asked myself a question: How will Allen blame this state of affairs on the women's movement? The answer did not take long to reveal itself. But first, witness America in 2010:

Louts who might as well be clad in bearskins and wielding spears trample over every nicety developed over millennia to mark out a ritual of courtship as a prelude to sex: Not just marriage (that went years ago with the sexual revolution and the mass-marketing of the birth-control pill) or formal dating (the hookup culture finished that)—but amorous preliminaries and other civilities once regarded as elementary, at least among the college-educated classes.

Here is Max’s seduction technique: “ ‘So,’ he asked scooting in next to me. ‘Are you coming back with me tonight?’ ”

Here is how Courtney reacted: “Around 1:30, I told Tucker that I would, in fact, go home with him. ‘Oh, I know,’ he replied. ‘We have a cab waiting, let’s go.’ ” [Italics Mine]

But why, why, why?

It helps, of course, that there’s currently a buyer’s market in women who are up for just about anything with the right kind of cad, what with delayed marriage (the average age for a woman’s first wedding is now 26, compared with 20 in 1960, according to the University of Virginia-based National Marriage Project’s latest report); reliable contraception; and advances in antibiotics (no more worries about what used to be called venereal disease)...On top of it all is the feminist-driven academic and journalistic culture celebrating that yesterday’s “loose” women are today’s “liberated” women, able to proudly “explore their sexuality” without “getting punished for their lust,” as the feminist writer Naomi Wolf put it in the Guardian in December.

The same feminist academics pooh-pooh concerns about the long-term effects of the hookup culture, arguing that it’s essentially just a harmless college folly, akin to swallowing goldfish, which young women will outgrow after graduation with no lasting scars. As long as they take precautions against disease and pregnancy, the current wisdom goes, it might even be good for you...All this takes place to a basso profundo of feminist cheerleading.

Allen never bothers to connect the two strains in her narrative. The first strain is that many women, since the time of the sexual revolution, are more willing to engage in premarital or casual sex. The second strain is that many men act like neanderthals, and still get laid (while, inevitably, nice guys finish last and go home alone). Allen does label Alpha Men as part of a "seduction community," and goes on to claim that this community was created around the time of the women's liberation movement. But that's it.

One of the problems with cultural critics is that they often seem completely removed from the culture they are critiquing. For example, read the passage below, and decide for yourself whether it sounds like it was written by someone who has ever been to a nightclub.

As might be expected, many males would like to help themselves at this overladen buffet. But there’s a problem: While it’s a truism that the main beneficiaries of the sexual revolution are men, it is only some men: the Tucker Maxes, with the good looks, self-confidence, and swagger that enable them to sidle up successfully to a gaggle of well turned-out females in a crowded and anonymous club where the short-statured, the homely, the paunchy, the balding, and the sweater-clad are, if not turned away outside by the bouncer, ignominiously ignored by the busy, beautiful people within.

The howlingly over-the-top final sentence is followed up by a more serious lament, however:

The whole point of the sexual and feminist revolutions was to obliterate the sexual double standard that supposedly stood in the way of ultimate female freedom. The twin revolutions obliterated much more, but the double standard has reemerged in a harsher, crueler form: wreaking havoc on beta men and on beta women, too, who, as the declining marriage rate indicates, have trouble finding and securing long-term mates in a supply-saturated short-term sexual marketplace. Gorgeous alpha women fare fine—for a few years until the younger competition comes of age. But no woman, alpha or beta, seems able to escape the atavistic preference of men both alpha and beta for ladylike and virginal wives (the Darwinist explanation is that those traits are predictors of marital fidelity, assuring men that the offspring that their spouses bear are theirs, too). And every aspect of New Paleolithic mating culture discourages the sexual restraint once imposed on both sexes that constituted a firm foundation for both family life and civilization.

One must admire her use of the word "supposedly" in the first sentence. But notice, again, how Allen switches arguments in the middle of the paragraph. What is the obvious connection between the "saturation" of the "short-term sexual marketplace" and the sexual revolution? If more women are having sex, and having it more often, why are they necessarily having it with obnoxious cads? Allen never bothers to ask this obvious question. And it is a smear against "college-educated" men to say that they are all looking for virginal wives (it's also silly and untrue).

Finally, the piece has a particularly good example of what in Allen's world is considered irony:

In other words, if people call you a whore because you, say, fall into bed with someone whose name you can’t quite remember, that’s their problem. Of course, if a man mistakes a woman being “sexual in any way she chooses” for consent to have sex, it’s still rape.

So, women can be sexual but if they don't consent to sex then you are not allowed to have sex with them. Life is so cruel and unfair.

The sociological interest of this article, however, lies in its window into the socially conservative mind. Men are becoming too feminized? Blame the women's movement. Men are becoming too aggressive? Blame the women's movement. People are having too much sex? Blame the women's movement. Nice guys are not having enough sex? Blame the women's movement. If we are now in an age where America has fallen to such depths that family life and civilization are at risk, we are still in an age where every social problem can be blamed on long-haired weirdos from the 1960s. In this sense, we have not progressed one inch.

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Sunday, February 7, 3:28 p.m. Among the convention’s several last-minute saves—opening the conference to media, replacing one speaker who fell ill and another who dropped last minute—was bringing on Andrew Breitbart. Convention spokesman Mark Skoda knew the conservative media mogul through their mutual friend Mike Flynn, who manages the Breitbart site BigGovernment.com, and when Marsha Blackburn and Michele Bachmann backed out, Breitbart swooped in to help.

At first, Breitbart himself was just supposed to introduce Sarah Palin. But to no one’s surprise, really, his portfolio grew. He addressed the crowd before Friday evening’s screening of the film Generation Zero and made a long speech Saturday morning, earning some of the biggest applause lines of the convention. In addition, he provided boosterish, wall-to-wall coverage on BigGovernment and BreitbartTV, shooting extensive behind-the-scenes interviews that will be broken into clips and distributed to other media outlets. And the tall, white-haired Hollywoodite—surrounded by a flock of bloggers and videographers, joking with organizers—brought a touch of glamour to the decidedly down-home crowd.

He’s a hero among the attendees partly because of his support of guerilla videographer James O’Keefe—on Saturday night, radio host Phil Valentine introduced Breitbart as “the man who almost single-handedly brought down ACORN.” Breitbart’s greatest appeal to the tea partiers, however, is his ability to say that while he hangs out with all these big media types, at heart, he’s true to the base.

“They’ll say to me, ‘It’s all an act, Andrew. You’re not really one of them,’” Breitbart told the convention floor. “Well, you better bet your ass I am!” At one point, he directly addressed the media perched on a dais at the back of the room, thanking those who reported “just the news” fairly—prompting the audience, en masse, to spontaneously turn around and applaud the frozen reporters. Then, he had a warning for the rest of the media, which spins and slants.

“I am going to organize a tea party on 6th Avenue in Manhattan and you’re not going to be able to get out to the Hamptons that weekend!”

While bashing the media, Breitbart is a firewall against some of the tea party movement’s more extreme, insular elements. His sites have only occasionally* veered into birtherism, and he defended Generation Zero director Steve Bannon when the crowd instinctively booed the filmmaker’s Harvard-to-Goldman Sachs career track.

Breitbart doesn’t just deal in message—he’s also a master of symbolism. At his last appearance, opening for Sarah Palin, Breitbart brought a musician friend onstage to perform a tea-party-inspired song. The guitarist and singer, “David,” wore dark aviators to hide his identity.

"There is an ideological bias against singers who lean right,” he explained afterwards. “I'm completely tolerant of their politics, but if a lot of them knew I was playing here tonight, they wouldn't work with me."

* Media Matters points out that Breitbart's contributors have made birther arguments at times.
 

Sunday, February 7, 10:56 a.m. Going back through my notebook, I’ll relate a few thoughts that occurred to me over my three days in Nashville. Starting with the race thing.

The tea party movement has long been marked by an extreme defensiveness over the charge of racism, which tea partiers use to argue that the left has no substantive arguments. It’s true, most tea partiers aren’t racist in any way they understand it. And there’s probably not even much tea partiers can do about the fact that their events are completely devoid of skin color other than white—but the dynamic was especially glaring at this convention, where I spotted exactly three black people (and I was looking).

One was Charlotte Bergmann, a small businesswoman running against Democrat Steve Cohen in the Tennessee 9th. Another was Fox News commentator Angela McGlowan, also debuting a congressional campaign: In a barn burner of a speech Friday night, she all but announced her intention to challenge Travis Childers in the Missisippi 1st (“Is she running for something?” someone in the audience asked a neighbor, as she spoke.) With her soft southern accent, and pointed zingers against the political establishment, she utterly charmed the convention floor. As Lewis Drake of Kentucky related to me later, his tablemate during the speech, a large, stolid man who had been very difficult to draw into conversation, leaned over and told him: “I’m sure glad she’s on our side.”

But perhaps the most constant presence was one Bishop E. W. Jackson, of Bishop Jackson Ministries in Chesapeake, Maryland. Jackson has made a habit of showing up at right-wing events—he was also at this pastor’s protest of hate crimes legislation—to absolve the participants of any charges of racism. On the first night of the convention, he almost seized the mic from Rick Scarborough’s hand to do so for this gathering.

“I’ve just got to say this,” he told the convention floor. “I am an American who happens to be black. In the tea party, I have not found racists, I have found Americans! If they were racists, I would not be here! 

“None of us cares that Barack Obama happens to be black! We don’t care if he’s black, we want him to be red, white and blue!” he cried. And, finally: “I pray that the Americans in this country who are black would wake up!” Yeah! an audience member yelled. “Bring them into this movement!” Jackson went on. “Help them not to buy the lie of the mainstream media!”
 

Sunday, February 7, 7:12 a.m. Sarah Palin hit all the right notes for a keynote speech at a tea party convention: Barack Obama protects terrorists, the media hates you, Scott Brown is a warning sign, and Reagan is the man.

But she hit a few discordant ones, too. After a weekend where people adamantly stated their suspicion of both parties and fear that the movement could be coopted by the Republicans, she reiterated her opinion that the GOP should "absorb" the tea party movement. It highlighted the tough line Palin has to walk: attempting to retain establishment conservative support, while tapping into the groundswell of tea party types who could make or break her candidacy.

If those in attendance were as close as you can get to movers and shakers in the tea party movement, though, she looks to be in good shape. While some folks had qualms about her continuing support of John McCain--speakers at the convention repeatedly said that a McCain administration would have been just as bad as an Obama administration, and worse than Bush's—the outpouring of Palin love was enough to bowl you over.

“After having a president who detests democracy and wants to destroy it, seeing someone who actually loves America is really refreshing," said Bettina Viviano, a tall blonde from Los Angeles who is making a documentary about ACORN voter fraud, to be released around the 2010 elections. “The people who are emerging from this, and Sarah Palin, are the only hope we have.”

I asked around to see what people thought about the idea of a Sarah Palin presidential run. Not everyone thought she would run--and in fact, they liked the idea of a candidate that had to be asked to do so, rather than immediately throwing their hat in the ring--but the response was uniformly positive.

"Totally," said Pat McCaskey of Ohio, when I asked whether she'd support Palin for president. Anyone else on your radar screen?

"Not right now," she replied.
 

Saturday, 8:48 p.m. As Sarah Palin speaks at a $349-per-plate dinner, it may be time to recognize those who showed up with no tickets at all. It is by now a common occurrence to see frustrated couples who booked rooms at the Opryland, only to find that the event actually costs money.

One frustrated woman was escorted off the premises by security, who flashed handcuffs. Other unfortunates, however, took their exclusion in stride. "I don't know what we're going to do here! We might bust into a session," said Jim Roesch of Springfield, Illinois. He and his wife Gloria, both retirees, had meant to attend as more of an exploratory venture anyway. "Seems to me that people just want less government," said Jim. "You know more than me."

Some people showed up even though they knew they couldn't get in. "We thought initially that it would be a large outdoor event," said Diane Solberg, who came by with her seven children just to catch a glimpse of the former governor, who she appreciates for "her genuine commitment to the American people, to the Constitution."

 (also: I've been live-tweeting the speech a bit at @lydiadepillis) 

Saturday, February 6, 7:34 p.m. Eleven hundred well-dressed Sarah Palin fans are chowing down now on elegantly plated steaks, around centerpieces of red roses and Chrysanthemums, to constant piped-in trumpet fanfare. As has gradually become routine for this convention--after Judson Phillips got flak for skipping it at the first meal--the meal began with a blessing, this time from Laurie Cardoza-Moore, president of the Christian Zionist group Proclaiming Justice to the Nations.

"If we do not defend the United States, who will defend Israel?" she asked, as if about to cry. "I would like to think that the Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, is watching here tonight. And I want Bibi Netanyahu to know that Tea Party Nation is going to stand strong for Israel."
 
"Despite what our leader says, we are a Judeo-Christian nation," she continued, before closing with an injunction to God. "Be with Sarah Palin. Protect her, Lord."

Saturday, 5:40 p.m.-- It took a couple of days, but Orly Taitz, queen of the birthers, has touched down in Nashville. The California dentist chose all black for the occasion, with a gold pendant necklace. Her trademark eyelashes stretched out like the wings of some gigantic bird. (UPDATE: Dave Weigel was spying).

“I could only come for the day, because I work,” she said in her Eastern bloc accent, already hoarse. “Basically to see my supporters, other people who are working to get the transparency that Barack Obama has promised and not delivered."

And supporters she has. As we spoke, Taitz was flagged down by two passersby who recognized her on sight and whom she greeted warmly. Conventioneers had already been fully briefed on birtherism. Joseph Farah, editor of the extreme right-wing news site WorldNetDaily.com, had given a 20-minute disquisition the previous night before explaining the Biblical nature of his obsession with Obama’s citizenship papers: Could Jesus have gotten away with not having it all written down, when he came to rule the Kingdom of Heaven? Judson Phillips, the impresario of the whole event, praised WorldNetDaily onstage as an “amazing source of information” that he turns to every morning after reading his own site, teapartynation.com.

Birtherism even seems to be working as a platform issue for at least one tea party candidate. Miki Booth, an ebullient Hawaiian-born woman who is challenging Dan Boren in the Oklahoma 2nd, announced her candidacy to the entire floor in such terms. “This piece of junk,” she said, holding up a copy of Obama’s birth certificate, “is what you get when you don’t have one of these,” she finished, holding up her own, to huge applause.

At the break, Booth was surrounded with well-wishers, holding a fistful of cash that people had started giving her as donations. “Why’s he kept it secret?” a man asked indignantly. “He wasn’t born here!”

“Orly Taitz is on the case,” Booth responded reassuringly. Another woman sympathized with Taitz’s campaign. “She’s been through a lot. Boy, she’s just been pummeled.”

Among her newfound supporters, Booth described her closest brush with the president, seeing him fly over the crowd in Washington D.C. on September 12. “He’s not who he says he is!” she said. “I don’t know what happened inside me, but I was like, I’m not gonna let you get away with this!”

Most people here are troubled by the idea of Barack Obama’s supposed unwillingness to procure his citizenship documents. It’s a key data point in their belief that this government is secretive, trying to hide ugly truths from its citizens. But as Dave Weigel documents, the more practical figures in the movement would rather see the issue quietly simmer down.

Julie Dam, who had driven to the event from Indianapolis, was surprised that Obama hadn’t had to document his birth, when the disclosure requirements for most government programs and employment are so strict. But, she said, she doesn’t actually question that Obama was born in Hawaii. 

“It’s actually good comedy,” Dam said. “And I think that’s the spirit everyone took it in. It’s kind of poking fun—"

“At the system,” finished her husband Jim. “We don’t make it an issue.”

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that Orly Taitz is going anywhere.

 

NASHVILLE, Friday, 5:30 p.m..--William Temple, the Revolutionary war re-enactor who led tea partiers down the Mall on 9/12 in his waistcoat and wig, can’t go anywhere at this weekend’s national tea party convention in Nashville without a reporter or two scribbling down his quaint, British-accented phrases. Same goes for a man representing Get Out of Our House, a “non-partisan political party,” at last night’s meet and greet—it’s a useful way of branding, he admitted.

If you’re wearing a tricorn hat, you’ve got the worst of it. But any tea partier at the Opryland hotel could be forgiven for feeling a bit hunted—there are now 200 credentialed media on the premises, or one for every three registered attendees. The lobby is filled with documentary filmmakers, television reporters, and print journalists, standing out in their pressed pants and blocky glasses, buttonholing anyone who looks vaguely tea partyish.

“It’s a bit intimidating,” admitted Beth Stoltzfus, a veterinarian from rural Pennsylvania.

The media themselves could be forgiven a little surprise—three weeks ago, the event was to be completely closed to press, except for five conservative news organizations, ranging in legitimacy from World Net Daily to the Wall Street Journal.  It was a “working convention,” organizer Judson Phillips explained, where participants could learn unmolested. And it came with a weird kind of paranoia: When I identified myself as a reporter to an organizer through the Tea Party Nation social network, my membership was immediately revoked.

Around that time, two things happened: Memphis businessman Mark Skoda came on as media director, and Scott Brown beat Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, which sent media interest skyrocketing. Since Skoda took over, all the major networks were allowed to cover keynote speaker Sarah Palin’s speech live, convention proceedings are now being streamed online by Pajamas TV, and Tea Party Nation has started acting like Chuck Schumer’s press office on budget day.

“Trying to get some sugar, I’m dying! I’ve interviewed my ass off today,” said Skoda last night, munching on a fig Newton before turning to a line of business cards to approve for credentials. He peered closely at them, including one for a woman from the Huffington Post, but then waved them on through.

“So many people were interested, we just wanted to get the word out that we’re serious, we’re not a fly-by-night operation,” the volunteer in charge of the press table told me. At his opening speech, Phillips explained to convention-goers that a lot of people would be wanting to interview them, and even had some advice.

“Be careful what you say to the media, because sometimes you think something is funny, and you look back later and say hm, maybe that wasn’t so funny,” he said. “It will be recorded for posterity.”

Media curiosity, once something to be shut out, is now touted evidence of the event’s significance—especially the international press.

“I think every media outlet in Germany has asked if they can come,” Phillips told conventioneers, ticking off Luxembourg, France, Australia, Switzerland, Croatia, Russia—even Al Jazeera English, which generated some jeers. (Reporters closer to home are having a tougher time getting access: The Tennessean newspaper was denied credentials, and Nashville news station affiliates were kept outside the main convention area, which Phillips explained was for space reasons.)

By and large, the tea partiers seem undisturbed by the intense media interest, even when five cameras pile into the back of a breakout session, clacking tripods and speaking into headsets. The fascination is a change, they say, from how media outlets ignored and belittled protests last year.

“All of a sudden, we’re overwhelmed," said Peggy Marshall, a retired nurse from San Antonio. "They dissed us for so long, it’s amazing that they’re coming here.”

Often, though, the tea partiers themselves are just a backdrop. When Fox's Chris Wallace arrived to interview Skoda, the pudgy, black-turtlenecked media director cleared a path through the crowd through which the two could walk and talk. “We’re trying to make this look like life,” he told curious onlookers. “Kind of talk to each other, mingle!”

And the biggest press event, at which Skoda and Phillips announced their new tea-party-spirited PAC, wasn’t really about the conventioneers at all—while Andrew Breitbart rubbed shoulders with Angela McGlowan in front of reporters from the world over, the 600 tea partiers lunched on chicken pasta in the main banquet hall, listening to Judge Roy Moore talk about putting the Bible back in politics.

Lydia DePillis is a reporter-researcher for The New Republic.

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The Oscar nominations rolled on out this week, but with a difference: In a rather explicit admission that it does not trust its own judgment, the Academy has upped the number of Best Picture nominees from the usual five to ten. Let’s begin there.

Best Picture

Last year, there was widespread disgruntlement that critical and popular hits Wall-E and The Dark Knight missed the cut for this award. So the Academy decided, in essence, to protect itself from its own ineptitude by nominating more pictures. On the surface, it worked, with the extra nominees offering a little added variety to the presumed field-of-five nominees (Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Up in the Air, Inglourious Basterds, and Precious). This year’s Pixar gem, Up, got a nod that would have been unlikely otherwise, as did the closest thing last year saw to The Dark Knight, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9. An Education was a good movie, though among the more over-praised of the year (I’d have preferred that Bright Star sneak in here); A Serious Man displayed the Coens’ serious talents (even if I wished they’d been directed toward different ends); and there have probably been worse nominees than The Blind Side, though its beating out Invictus for what Vulture called the “drama in which racism is fixed by sports” slot was a surprise, and clear evidence that the Academy, for good or ill, has fallen out of love with Clint Eastwood.

There were, of course, plenty of films that I think were more worthy than many of those nominated, including Where the Wild Things Are, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Funny People, The Informant!, Sin Nombre, and In the Loop. But none ever really came close to gathering the critical or financial momentum it would have needed to get a nod, and it seems ungenerous to fault the Academy for overlooking films that were overlooked so widely. So, in all, an acceptable list, if not a particularly good one.

I do have two complaints about the new ten-nominee format, however, one global and one circumstantial. The first is that, in expanding the field of nominees, the Academy let itself off too easily. If the problem was that it nominated the wrong films, the solution is not to expand the number of films so that it can’t help but nominate some of the right ones, too. (By that logic they should nominate every film released each year: Perfection, every time!) The solution is to nominate better films. It is a notable irony of awards season that the Oscars, though by far the most prestigious honors bestowed, are also among the most unreliable--the most complacent and haphazard, the most easily swayed by momentum or politics or behind-the-scenes lobbying. I don’t know whether the Academy could be improved by expansion or contraction or some more fundamental reorganization. But if it doesn’t find a way to have more confidence in its own judgment, eventually we’ll be treated to 20 nominees in every category and the ceremony itself will last into April.

My second, more particular, gripe is this: Pretty much any chance that another movie would steal the prize away from Avatar has been erased by the ten-nominee format. With five contenders, it might have been possible for The Hurt Locker, or even Up in the Air, to stage an upset. But with the anti-Avatar vote stretched so thin, James Cameron’s interstellar opus should win easily. (At another time, I’ll weigh in on why this will be among the Worst Things Ever.)

Best Actor

No real surprises here, and a solid bunch of nominees, though I think Matt Damon should have gotten a nod for conversing with himself in The Informant! and, in a better world, Michael Sheen would also have been rewarded for his brilliant turn in The Damned United. Jeff Bridges is the apparent frontrunner for Crazy Heart, though he shouldn’t be: This is the kind of performance that demands less of an actor than it appears to. A Single Man’s Colin Firth would be my choice here, followed by The Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner, but the betting money says it will be Bridges or George Clooney for Up in the Air.

Best Actress

Just as I would have chosen Bright Star over An Education for Best Picture, I’d have nominated the former’s star, Abbie Cornish, over the latter’s, Carey Mulligan. But then, I’d have nominated Cornish over any of the other nominees but Meryl Streep, who gave the wittiest, most charming performance of her storied career in Julie & Julia. There was some early momentum for Mulligan and Precious’s Gaboury Sidibe, but it seems to have abated, and it now looks like a race between Streep and The Blind Side’s Sandra Bullock--or, put another way, between hope and despair. Let us pray the Academy remembers that Streep last won an Oscar 28 years (and a dozen nominations) ago, or, at least, that it recognizes the televisual self-interest of having her receive the award at a ceremony co-hosted by her It’s Complicated paramours Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.

Best Supporting Actor

As we have known with reasonable certainty for six months now, Inglourious Basterds’Christoph Waltz will win this award; the greater suspense is in which language he will choose to receive it. I’m sorry that Alfred Molina has never been nominated for an Oscar, but I’m glad he wasn’t nominated for his turn in An Education, one of the flabbier performances of his exceptional career. Woody Harrelson’s nomination for The Messenger was well-deserved, and Matt Damon’s for Invictus, though a little odd, is admirable as well. Christopher Plummer didn’t really merit a nod for his scene-chewing in The Last Station (neither did Helen Mirren), but given that the Academy stiffed him altogether for his magnificent supporting turn as Mike Wallace in The Insider way back when, it’s fine with me if they continue making it up to him for the rest of his life. A final word: Anyone--anyone--who believes that Stanley Tucci delivered a better performance in The Lovely Bones than in Julie & Julia should be forced to watch both films back to back, over and over, until he sees the error of his ways. It’s as if the same form of mass insanity that led the Academy to reward Kate Winslet for The Reader rather than Revolutionary Road has struck again--and this time it can’t even be blamed on the Invisible Hand of Weinstein.

Best Supporting Actress

As with Waltz, so with Precious’s Mo’Nique, though in this case the suspense is whether the famously cranky nominee will bother to show up to receive her inevitable award. I’m pleased by Maggie Gyllenhaal’s nomination--I found her performance subtler than Bridge’s in Crazy Heart--though I’m sorry that neither of the martyr-heroines of Inglourious Basterds (Melanie Laurent and Diane Kruger) could displace a not-particularly-deserving Anna Kendrick from Up in the Air. And anyone who believes that Penelope Cruz was better than Marion Cotillard in Nine evidently saw a different movie than I did.

Adapted Screenplay

The Academy’s utter snub of Where the Wild Things Are is most egregious here. I mean seriously, guys. That’s the kind of imaginative adaptation this award should be for, the opening of a beloved classic into the possibilities of a new medium. Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Informant! could’ve used a little love here as well, but at least the caustic wit of In the Loop was rewarded.

Original Screenplay

A very solid list--The Hurt Locker, Up, Inglourious Basterds, The Messenger, A Serious Man--but by far its greatest boast is that Avatar isn’t on it.

Best Director

Please, ye gods, let The Hurt Locker’s Kathryn Bigelow steal this away from ex-hubby (and Avatar impresario) James Cameron. Even amid cosmic injustice we must be afforded glimmers of hope.

Christopher Orr is a senior editor of The New Republic.

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Our political debates, our public discourse—on current economic and domestic issues—too often bear little or no relation to the actual problems the United States faces. 

What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion, but the practical management of a modern economy. What we need is not labels and clichés but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead.

The national interest lies in high employment and steady expansion of output, in stable prices and a strong dollar. The declaration of such an objective is easy; their attainment in an intricate and interdependent economy and world is a little more difficult. To attain them, we require not some automatic response but hard thought.

--John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11, 1962 

We deliberate, not about ends, but about means.

--Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III. iii

Harvey Mansfield, the well-known conservative professor of political philosophy (and—full disclosure—a longtime friend) has penned a serious and civil critique of what he takes to be the animating impulse of the Obama administration. The nub of his argument is that Obama is a “progressive” whose purported non- (or post-) partisanship is designed to put certain issues “beyond political dispute” so that arguments are about means, not ends. And once the argument is about means, the door is opened wide to “rational administration” and the rule of experts.

Take health care. Mansfield interprets Obama’s statement that "I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last" as an effort to take the issue out of politics once and for all—to decide, by side-stepping, the fundamental issue of principle. In his view, that issue is: “Should the government take over health care or should it be left to the private sphere?” The question precedes, and trumps, the myriad technical issues that transform the reform impulse into impenetrable, trust-destroying 2,000-page bills. By pursuing reform without dwelling on that question, he writes, Obama's worldview “wants to put an end to politics. It considers its measures to be progressive, and progress to be irreversible.” The problem with progress, so understood, is that it is at war with political liberty, rightly understood. One cannot seek to place matters of principle beyond politics without wanting “an imposed political solution.” Some human beings—and by implication, political parties—love progress more than they love liberty; others reverse the hierarchy. Mansfield stands with the party of liberty, the republican principle, against the party of progress, the party of rational administration, which is “more suited to monarchy than to republics.”

Where to begin? Mansfield offers an elaborate argument in defense of the proposition that Obamacare represents a government takeover. I disagree and could offer an equally elaborate rebuttal. I could argue, as well, that Obama’s appeal to transcend the division between red and blue America reflects not a desire to end partisan argument, but rather most Americans’ disgust with the contemporary hyper-partisanship that thwarts effective governance and allows problems to fester indefinitely. These are hardly trivial matters. But because they would divert us from the questions Mansfield raises, I shall pursue them no farther.  

As Mansfield knows very well, he does Democrats no favor by framing current disputes as conflicts between progress and liberty. In American politics, the defenders of liberty always occupy the rhetorical high ground. If there really were a contradiction between progress and liberty, progress would surely lose—and so would the party of progress. So there are two questions. First, is there such a contradiction? And second, if there isn’t—if what we really have is a dispute between two competing understandings of liberty—which should we prefer?

I can dispose of the first question quickly: There is no inherent contradiction between progress and liberty. Simply put, removing issues from the political agenda—placing them beyond dispute—often promotes liberty. After political contestation and a bloody war, we decided that slavery was impermissible, and we reordered our laws and institutions accordingly. A century later, we made a parallel decision about racial discrimination, with similar consequences.  

I suppose we could view these questions as permanently open to debate. But we don’t, and rightly so. In that sense, there is a “progressive” component to our political history: While some questions remain open, others don’t. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Settling questions neither ends politics nor denies liberty.

Mansfield might reply that, while some disputes raise such fundamental issues, most don’t, and it disserves political liberty to place the latter beyond the bounds of ordinary political contestation. Fair enough. So what is Obama actually saying—about health care, for example?

As I understand the president’s argument, it goes something like this: Our current health care system’s costs are rising at an unsustainable rate, threatening businesses, households, and our public finances. At the same time, nearly 50 million people go without health insurance—some by choice, to be sure, but most out of necessity. The only way to deal with all these problems effectively is to get nearly everyone into the insurance system, with a mix of subsidies and mandates, while creating a more competitive market among insurance plans. He may be right about this, or he may be wrong. But the key point for my purposes is that he is putting forth his plan as the means to an ensemble of ends—universal insurance coverage in a system that reduces the rate of cost increases—that he takes to be both desirable and essential to the long-term common good.

This is a political argument, pure and simple. The president never intended to side-step politics, and he certainly did not succeed in doing so. He hoped that his articulation of the good to be achieved through his plan would outweigh the objections—such as cost and complexity—that he knew would be arrayed against it.

There are several ways to disagree with the president’s proposal. One is to say that while his ends are defensible, his means are defective. This is the line that Representative Paul Ryan takes, as the president has acknowledged. But note that this debate lies squarely within the arena of deliberation as Aristotle defines it. Nothing apolitical or liberty-denying about that--unless deliberation itself suffers from these defects, which would be an odd contention.

Another way of disagreeing with the president is to say that his ends are less important than he thinks—otherwise put, that we can better serve the public interest by giving priority to competing ends. In this vein, many Republicans contend that because even people without insurance get care when they need it, through emergency rooms or charitable organizations, it is unnecessary to use either legal coercion or public funds to universalize insurance coverage. And many fiscal hawks argue that the mechanisms the president uses to fund his proposal—tax increases and Medicare cuts—should be used instead to reduce the long-term federal budget deficit, which is projected to soar unsustainably. Again, a classic political debate, of the sort Aristotle analyzed in the Rhetoric, and the president has done nothing to short-circuit it.

Mansfield gives short shrift to both these sorts of disagreements, focusing instead on a third, which is (to repeat) whether government or the private sphere should take the lead. He describes this as a question of “principle.” Is it? No doubt this question frames a major disagreement between the two political parties, and among Americans. And, as I’ve argued repeatedly, public mistrust of government has done more than anything else to weaken the president’s health reform effort.

The deeper question concerns not public sentiment, but, rather, the basis on which government may legitimately act under the Constitution. In 1933, FDR argued that that only the powers of government could be adequate to the exigencies of the moment. If so, he said, it could not be the case that our Constitution had disabled us from meeting a grave threat to the general welfare, and potentially to constitutional government itself. He won that argument: We live today in the legacy of his victory, and (I say this at the risk of sounding “progressive”), we’re not going back.

The alternative formulation of the dispute--Mansfield’s, I think--is that the issue isn’t the relation of means and ends, but rather the right of government to act in certain ways. If government doesn’t have the right, then considerations of efficacy are irrelevant. Even if government could bring about a good result by acting ultra vires, doing so would be an invasion of liberty, which is the most fundamental good. Rather than invade liberty, we should be prepared to live with the consequences of government forbearance. (I note for the record that if Abraham Lincoln had accepted this view, we’d probably be presenting passports at the Virginia/Maryland border.)

This brings me to the second question: If the issue is liberty, what is the nature of liberty, rightly understood? And does the Obama health care plan invade liberty, so understood?

To begin, experience gives us no reason to conclude that government is the only, or always the gravest, threat to freedom; clerical institutions and concentrations of unchecked economic power have often vied for that dubious honor. The unchecked market, moreover, regularly produces social outcomes at odds with the moral conditions of a free society. Capitalism does not reliably produce, or reward, the good character a free society needs: Perceptive observers from Charles Dickens to Tom Wolfe have given us ample evidence to the contrary. And, while it may be that long-term dependence on government saps the spirit of self-reliance that liberty requires, there are other forms of dependence---economic, social, and even familial---that often damage character in much the same way.

At the heart of the conservative misunderstanding of liberty is the presumption that government and individual freedom are fundamentally at odds. At the heart of any liberal understanding of freedom is the proposition that public power can advance freedom as well as undermine it.

In the real world, there is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There are only specific freedoms, which differ in their conditions and consequences. FDR famously enumerated four such freedoms, dividing them into two pairs: freedom of speech and worship; freedom from want and fear. The first pair had long been recognized and enshrined in the Constitution. The second were a new formulation, and Roosevelt made them concrete when he signed Social Security into law, justifying it as a way of promoting freedom from want: "We have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family ... against poverty-ridden old age." Three years later, he declared that Social Security payments will "furnish that minimum necessary to keep a foothold; and that is the kind of protection Americans want."

The conservatives of his day dismissed the second pair as "New Deal freedoms" rather than "American freedoms." But those who have experienced the freedoms made possible by the New Deal are not so dismissive. It is often observed, rightly, that Social Security has virtually eliminated poverty among the elderly. But this noble achievement has an equally profound flip side. Throughout human history, those who reached the age where they could no longer work have typically depended on their children or on charity for their basic subsistence. Social Security broke this age-old dependency by giving the elderly a minimum degree of economic self-sufficiency, expanding their range of effective control over the conditions of their post-retirement years.

"Freedom of" and "freedom from" have distinctly different structures and implications. "Freedom of" points toward spheres of action in which individuals make choices--for example, which faith to embrace, or whether to endorse any faith at all. The task of government is in part to secure those spheres against interference by individuals, groups, or government itself.

It is also to police the boundary between actions that principally affect individual agents and actions that impose costs and restrict the liberties of others. Suppose a healthy young man making a good living chooses to go without health insurance and then, while speeding helmetless on his motorcycle, incurs a severe injury that is treated at vast public expense. Because his choice imposes costs on others and restricts their liberty to use their resources as they choose, government has the right—and in some circumstances the duty—to intervene.

So when the Tea Partiers complain that a government health insurance mandate invades their liberty, they reveal a defective understanding of the logic of liberty in a modern society. Individuals who choose to go without health insurance could try to resolve the contradiction by signing a document foreswearing all reliance on health care they didn’t pay for themselves. But, because our medical norms don’t permit us to leave injured accident victims at the side of the road, such a document couldn’t be enforced. To be a citizen of the United States today is to live in a community where individual health care choices can have social consequences, a fact to which government can legitimately respond.

The other face of freedom--"freedom from"--points toward circumstances that (it is presumed) we all wish to avoid. In such instances, the task of government is, so far as possible, to immunize individuals against undesired circumstances. Here, government acts to protect not individual agency and choice, but rather an individual's life circumstances against outcomes that no one would choose, or willingly endure.

It follows that the "right to choose" is but a part of freedom in the fuller sense. As a motorist, I am rightly free to choose my own route and destination. But government correctly infers that I also wish to be protected from smashing into other cars, and so restricts which side of the road I and others can drive on. My desire to avoid an accident is no less real than my desire to drive where I please. Similarly, the desire to avoid want and fear is no less real than the desire to speak and worship without interference. The point is that any society that takes freedom from want and fear seriously has made collective decisions: Certain conditions are objectively bad; its citizens should not have to endure them if the means of their abatement are in hand; and individual choice is not a necessary component of, and may be a hindrance to attaining, these freedoms. The current debate over health care only underscores these truths.

None of this is to deny that government can, and often does, overstep its bounds. And when it does, the friends of liberty must resist. Nor is it to deny that the progressive impulse Mansfield criticizes can go too far. In his June 11 commencement speech at Yale, JFK was surely wrong to claim that government’s role in a modern economy reduces to “management” based on “technical” issues. It is that, but it is more than that. No wonder that the end of ideology Kennedy reflected and celebrated quickly gave way to a rebirth of deeper disagreement. To the extent that the managerial ethos evades or suppresses these disagreements, it does a disservice to politics in a free country.

Still, when Kennedy declared in 1962 that “the national interest lies in high employment and steady expansion of output, in stable prices and a strong dollar,” he elicited little disagreement. Nor would anyone making that statement today. Modern politics is in part technical, a matter of fitting means to undisputed ends. When Democrats assert, and Republicans deny, that last year’s stimulus package is boosting output and employment, they are not arguing about goals. They are arguing about means and about facts. And, more than that, they are arguing about competing understandings of how the world works. Liberals are more apt to focus on the good government can do and to fasten on the inadequacies of markets. For Republicans, it is just the reverse.

The debate over health care reform reflects this competition. How could it not? But to say, as Mansfield does, that the president’s belief in the ability of government to improve our health care system reflects a preference for progress over liberty only obscures what is really at stake. The president’s stance threatens neither political liberty nor individual liberty. His argument does not remove—and was not intended to remove—the issue of health policy beyond the bounds of political argument. It seeks, rather, to ground his proposals in considerations that most citizens would regard as weighty if not dispositive.  And his proposals reflect an understanding of individual liberty in the modern state that has far more to commend it than does the understanding to which Mansfield appeals.

William Galston is a former policy advisor to Bill Clinton and current senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

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