My students and I had fun discussing political geography today.  For instance, take a look at these two maps side by side.  First, we have the presidential electoral map from 1860, from the National Atlas of the United States:

Then we have this recent study, from Open Left, depicting how white men (the only ones eligible to vote in 1860) voted in 2008:

Now, obviously it would be very easy to overdraw an analysis from these two maps.  And indeed, I think Open Left is a bit too Whiggish (despite trying not to be Whiggish) about the links between the expansion of voting rights and the election of Progressive presidential candidates–after all, the expanded electorate has certainly elected its share of conservative Presidents.

But it’s still pretty interesting.

Reader BMC insists that I post on this clip from the Rachel Maddow show.  (If you want to know what all the snickering is about, I’d suggest consulting an online slang dictionary, and I’m not responsible for what you find.)

I think the easiest thing to do would be to start picking out all the bad historical analogies and use it as an excuse to guffaw at the “Tea Party” movement that’s scheduled to demonstrate on April 15, 2009 (tax filing day).  But I’m not going to do that–instead I’m going to try and be even-handed about this, and see if there’s anything to this grassroots conservative invocation of the Boston Tea Party.

Unfortunately, the ideology behind all of this seems rather vague.  For instance, here’s what the website TaxDayTeaParty.com says on its front page:

The Tea Party effort is just a small piece of a much larger movement aimed at restoring the basic free-market principles our country was built on. The Constitution, for the most part, is being ignored by our current government and we intend on working together to correct the problem.

The Tea Party effort is a grassroots, collaborative volunteer organization made up of every day American citizens from across the country. We take pride in the fact that we’ve built a 50 state network of leaders and activists using nothing more than the internet, a few websites and a burning desire to restore freedom.

There’s not much there: the protesters are in favor of “basic free-market principles” and “freedom.”  (Well, me too!)  The site doesn’t say how the government is ignoring the Constitution, exactly–and if you dig a little further, it all goes back to Rick Santelli’s displeasure with the stimulus plan and the budget.

To the extent that the 2009 tax protests are part of a grass-roots movement, I think it’s fine to invoke the Boston Tea Party as your inspiration–although many suspect that corporate lobbyists and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News have a lot to do with organizing and promoting this protest, and even Santelli himself apears to have been the frontman for a rightwing foundation.  Still, if people are responding to the movement and even organizing local “tea parties” on their own, then that does accord with the local tea protests that sprang up in 1773-1774 in the wake of (and even immediately before) the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773.

One historical analogy that fails, however, is the idea that the Bostonians aboard the tea ships in 1773 were protesting higher taxes under the Tea Act.  This is just wrong.

• First, the British Parliament first passed the tax on tea in 1767, and Bostonians had in fact purchased plenty of tea bearing the threepenny-per-pound duty during the intervening years.  New Yorkers and Philadelphians, who smuggled almost all of their tea from Holland and elsewhere, were in fact outraged at how little the New Englanders were able to stick to their “anti-tax” principles.  In this respect, the Boston Tea Party was almost an apology.
• Second, the Tea Act would in fact have lowered the price of tea for Americans–so the idea of invoking the “Tea Party” every time you think your taxes are too high is incorrect.  Instead, the Tea Party protesters were energized by a series of principles: the government was propping up a monopoly company (the East India Company), the government was perpetuating an unjust tax (the 1767 tax on tea which had been confirmed in 1770), and the government was using the revenue from that tax to pay the salaries of judges and executive officials, thus rendering them independent of local legislatures.
• Third, and most importantly: I’ve been extremely dismayed at how many of the protesters say, “Taxation WITH representation ain’t so hot either.“  (I’m not just cherry-picking a random blog comment here–this phrase is everywhere.)

Well, no, no one LIKES paying taxes, but most people recognize that you need some form of taxation in order to pay firemen and astronauts, defend the country’s borders, try to ensure that our food isn’t poisoned, etc.  The point of protest against the Stamp Act, Townshend Acts, and Tea Act in 1765-1774 was that “taxation WITHOUT representation” would lead to slavery–in other words, the colonists believed that the British ministry was arbitrarily levying taxes on Americans when those Americans had no say in electing members of Parliament.  In a democratic republican government, if you don’t like the level of your taxes or you don’t like how your tax money is spent, you have the power to peaceably “throw the bums out.”  And you certainly have the First Amendment right to protest and rail against the stimulus and bailout.  But the point is, the people of the Revolutionary Era had to fight for those rights to get rid of a constitutional monarchy–it’s hardly the case that paying taxes from a colony to a (partially hereditary) government that you don’t elect is the same as paying taxes to a government consisting of representatives and an executive that you DO have the power to elect.

On the other hand, to the extent that the tax protesters believe that their government doesn’t adequately represent them anymore, they’re arguing something more interesting.  If we stipulate that the current execution of the United States Constitution has failed, and that reform of the Constitution is needed (which many on both the left and the right have argued), then legislation and executive policy under George W. Bush or Barack Obama (or whoever) really is the product of a flawed system, and therefore (perhaps) as unjust as anything passed by King George III and the British Parliament. Still, before making this argument, I’d recommend picking up (for instance) Edmund Morgan’s Inventing the People, on how Americans came to believe that a representative government DID have the legitimate right to make laws in a way that a king did not.

By all means, let’s have a civil debate about Obama’s policies in the midst of the economic crisis.  And by all means, if we think that the problems we’re facing are due to underlying constitutional problems rather than the current legislative/executive solutions, then let’s talk about constitutional reform.  But (although I realize it’s too late now) please don’t abuse the analogy to the Boston Tea Party, even if such abuse (again, from both the right and left) is almost as much of an American tradition as the Tea Party itself.

P.S.  Also?  Why even mention tea bags?  In 1773 they were dumping loose tea into the harbor–the tea bag wasn’t invented until later–and you can still buy loose tea.

You just can’t make this stuff up. I have long thought of the Iraq Wars and the GWOT as Cold War phantom pains, the result of Cold War institutions and Cold War thought carrying forward without an appropriate object like a competing superpower. (This is why the U.S. spends so much more time and effort going after “state sponsors of terror” than actual terrorists.) But now we discover that the military literally brought out the Cold War playbook, the Red Chinese Cold War playbook, for interrogating prisoners at Gitmo. From the New York Times:

“An Expert Reveals Chinese Origins of Interrogation Techniques at Guantánamo“

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency. [Read the rest]

While it was astonishingly moronic to deploy techniques designed to produce false confessions in an effort to ferret out real terrorist plots, the strategy was unfortunately quite consistent with the long-time predilections of the American Right and the U.S. government. There seems to be a part of the right-wing brain that is deeply attracted to the sort of “brutalitarian” (Joe McCarthy’s word) excesses it likes to detect and denounce in its enemies. During the Cold War, U.S. officials across the political spectrum repeatedly concluded that they needed to “fight fire with fire” and employ tactics as or nearly as harsh and devious as a Communist enemy that was seen as colossally evil. satanically ruthless, and unnaturally effective.

The article correctly relates the Air Force study to the “brainwashing” controversy of the 1950s, during which the government and the larger culture gave itself a panic attack over the apparent conversion of captive Korean War soldiers to Communism. In true fire with fire spirit, the CIA and other entities paid for both propaganda about the horrors of Communist brainwashing techniques and also for secret research that tried to duplicate those techniques for American use. The nature of the techniques was a subject regarding which a host of pulpy mind-control fantasies were spun and researched, involving hypnotism, telepathy, and most of all drugs. [Click the images at the bottom for an example of the propaganda. The brainwashing expert whose speeches are being advertised, Edward Hunter, worked for the CIA.] It was in pursuit of such a magic elixir that the CIA did things like try to corner the world market on LSD and then hand out supplies of it to secretly-funded university laboratories. You can read all about it in John Marks’s jaw-dropping book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate.” What I was most shocked by was how little actually came of the CIA’s mind-control research. According to Marks, they never figured out how to make anybody do anything other than by sheer coercion or blackmail. Truth serum and zombie-like sleeper agents and hypnotic programming are such well-developed concepts that people tend to believe there must be something to them that the movies just exaggerate, but it seems that vampires and werewolves might actually be on about the same level of factuality.

What the NYT article does not quite explain is that the Albert Biderman study the Gitmo trainers drew on came from a more level-headed social scientific approach to the “brainwashing” issue that essentially debunked it, explaining that the confessions and conversions that the Chinese and Soviets got were achieved not through drugs or hypnotism but good old-fashioned police brutality and bureaucratic manipulation. I guess this lesson must have hung around in some military intelligence and right-wing circles ever since. Biderman also may have supplied the idea that, while brutal and deplorable, the methods he described were used by Communist governments specifically as alternatives to more traditional forms of torture. So, when today’s lefties and libertarians complain about the Bush administration creating its own gulag, we now know that that it is almost literally true.

Readers of my book, The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic, may be interested in a much more lavishly illustrated rendition of some of the book’s points that has been just been published in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s magazine Pennsylvania Legacies. The article, “Popular Constitutionalism in Philadelphia: How Freedom of Expression Was Secured by Two Fearless Newspaper Editors,” is part of a special issue on “Defining Civil Liberties in Pennsylvania.” Naturally, the two editors are Benjamin Franklin Bache and William Duane of the Philadelphia Aurora. It looks like you have to join HSP to actually read the whole thing, but there is a preview available here.

(I love the cartoon of a lightning-swathed printing press that the HSP has posted with the preview, which I am borrowing for this post. It looks like it should be the chest emblem of a printing-themed superhero, if there ever were to be such a thing.)

As usual with small assignments covering old ground, I tortured myself to put something new into this piece, only to have most of the extra material not make it into the final version. In this case, I tried to go a little further than the book did with the idea of popular constitutionalism — constitutional interpretation as worked out and enforced in the arena of popular politics rather than the courts — as the driving force behind what Americans came to see their constitutional rights. In the case at hand, the expansive American version of press freedom was worked out in the political battle of 1798-1801. Constitutional law and elite political thought only caught up many decades later. At any rate, I have posted a “director’s cut” of the article here. (Having an outlet for my long versions was a good chunk for my motivation for starting a website in the first place.) It is still unfootnoted and pitched to a relatively popular audience, like the Pennsylvania Legacies version, but it will be a starting point for an argument I hope to be making at greater length and with more scholarly rigor in the future.

TPM drew my attention to an ABC news story [Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation'] that reveals some new depths to the Bush administration’s unique mix of malevolence, incompetence, and bureaucratic tomfoolery. I can certainly agree that if the government discovers some real evidence of some real and imminent threat, rare as they tend to be, certain bounds may have to be temporarily overstepped. There may be a need to get a little tough or vicious occasionally in some desperate situation. That’s a risk people in positions of leadership and officer on the front lines of wars have to take, and there have been few cases in history where necessary desperate action in a truly good cause was seriously questioned later. (I think that’s true.) It is unnecessary acts and questionable causes that get people in trouble later.

The CheneyCorp version of being tough, on the other hand, involves adopting vicious tactics on principle and permanently moving the boundaries away from historic democratic ideals. Yet for tough guys the administration is not very good at actual toughness, except in domestic and bureaucratic politics. What kind of tough guys write get-out-of-jail free cards for themselves in advance — The Golden Shield they called it — and then hold regular meetings where they decide just how many cans of whup-ass are going to be used on a particular suspect, what degree of the business was to be given, when a good thrashing was in order, and how many simulated drownings a week should be allowed. There seems to have been no talk about what actual information they would be expecting to get out of those interrogations, nor about any concrete plots that were foiled. It was the worst of both worlds: they were not catching or scaring off any terrorists, but they were making the United States look nasty and foolish and hypocritical, and getting it down on paper!

It seems more likely that everyone in those meetings except Dick Cheney understood that what was happening was likely to be deemed illegal some day, and was unlikely to work, so the CIA’s main focus was establishing their defenses for later on. Even the agents who had their Golden Shields still asked for and got a paper trail leading all the way to the top. You know things are off the rails when John Ashcroft had to be the man providing the reality checks. “According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: ‘Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.’ ” No, not kindly, but perhaps with a little black humor.

The second half of the article, including this quite, I have pasted below the jump:

(more…)

This made me sick to my stomach:

It is hard to keep finding new ways to express one’s outrage at stuff like this, but what the Murat Kurnaz case brought to my mind was the thought that the Bush administration has finally made the U.S. a real life perpetrator of the sort of totalitarian nightmare that “western” culture spent so much energy imagining during the Cold War. I mean the sort of high and low popular culture I grew up with: 1984, The Prisoner, any number of Twilight Zone and Mission: Impossible and Star Trek episodes and World War II films. I even remember seeing an episode of Gunsmoke along these lines.I am not talking about the torture aspect, at least not entirely. The crux of the nightmare was a person facing the coercive power of the state or analogous entity without the expected Anglo-American legal protections: no rights to outside help or information, to know the charges against one, to defend oneself, to be tried fairly and promptly based on factual evidence. Capt. Kirk or Number 6 or some other stalwart white male hero would find himself in the hands of all-powerful beings with a mysterious agenda and unanswerable demands, face some preposterous mockery of a trial, get tortured or otherwise mistreated, pontificate heroically about his rights as a free man, and finally, escape or not depending on the pretentiousness of the drama.

The tradition actually goes back further than the Cold War, to certain of the captivity narratives and the journalistic melodramas that were made of real and imagined cases of British or Federalist or Catholic tyranny. (The tyrant varied according to time and the writer.) The Democratic Republican newspapers of the late 1790s made such stories out of the Sedition Act trials. They also raised a huge cry over the case of a man who called himself Jonathan Robbins, a professed American accused of being an Irish deserter by the British and eventually turned over to the British, for trial and execution, by the Adams administration.

A German citizen, Murat Kurnaz was pulled off a bus in Pakistan (the U.S. was paying bounties for “suspicious” foreigners), held incommunicado and without charges for years, and put through a constant round of “enhanced” interrogations in which he was repeatedly asked where Osama bin Laden was and similar questions he had no way to answer. Flailing to justify to Kurnaz’s “enemy combatant” status, “Military prosecutors said one of Kurnaz’s friends was a suicide bomber, but the friend turned up alive and well in Germany. ” When that gambit failed, according to the transcript on the CBS web site:

They kept him, Kurnaz says, by inventing new charges. In a makeshift courthouse, Kurnaz claims that a military judge charged that Kurnaz had been picked up near Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban. Ironic, since it was the U.S. that flew him to Afghanistan to begin with.

The break in Kurnaz’s case came when the German chancellor asked President Bush for his release. In August 2006, a plane came to take Kurnaz home. On the way out he was asked to sign a confession his captors had written for him saying he’d been al Qaeda all along. He refused. On the plane he was chained and surrounded by soldiers. But by the end of the flight, he was free.

Vintage science fiction TV fans who saw the Kurnaz story on 60 Minutes or read the whole transcript will note that Captain Kirk and Number 6 were usually held in much nicer conditions.