The History News Network is holding it down for those of us who can’t make it. I’ve enjoyed reading their summaries very much. Day Three’s summaries are next on my list. Some of the banter from Day 2′s “Did We Go Wrong? The Past and Prospectus of the History Profession” was fantastic. You can really see the problems that historians of all levels are facing when these types of discussions become so heated.

Take a look, and we’ll be trying to compare the digital experience of this year to the real life experience next year.

Edit - Though it took a couple of weeks, the AHA has posted videos from the 126th anual AHA meeting.

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According to WebsEdge_Edu, AHA Pres. Grafton just noted that History remains the most book based discipline on campus, and that study habits will need to be maintained as History slowly moves into the digital arena. We agree. So, stay tuned to see how this experiment plays out this week and next.

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Well, there you go. A social contract is the origin of government, and the explanation of obligations of subjects. Subjects; that’s you and me. This theory of government organization might not be important to every nation, but it is to the United States. The framers of our nation were quite enamored with the theories of John Locke. They fought a revolution to protect what they viewed as rights implicit in their social contract. They fought for rights that were what might be called the unwritten British Constitution. They even said so in the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution of the United States was an attempt to codify basic tenets of governance into an explicit agreement among the various member states. Clearly over the years, the government and the citizens have strayed from original intent. The book on the right of your screen goes into some detail on how and why we’ve all gone astray. But my question is, just how far can our implicit contract get from our explicit one before we just have to laugh?

The war on terror has given the current political leadership wide berth to write laws and practice governance at complete odds with the Constitution. Take, for example, today’s passage of provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would allow for the use of military personnel on U.S. Soil to arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely without charge. Americans already have a law pertaining to indefinite detention in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution. The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it. There are two legal instances in which what President Bush and President Obama have already done, the Supreme Court has blessed, and which the NDAA would attempt to legally codify, are permissible: rebellion or invasion. That’s it. So long as that provision of the Constitution remains, any other action seems to be antithetical to the social contract. But then, that’s the point.

The American Constitution is often considered to be one of the best ideas, and best protections, for the people. Perhaps a written constitution was actually a pretty poor idea. Times change. People change. Society changes. The demands of one generation are clearly not the demands of the next. A large enough group of Americans simply do not care about habeas corpus, the commerce clause, oaths, or rights. They care about safety. They care about prosperity. The implicit social contract has changed. All Alexander Hamilton and James Madison did by writing down a social contract was to create something malcontents could hold up and say “see, we don’t do it like this anymore.” The protections granted are as flimsy as the political will of the latest gallop poll, just as they would have been if we’d have never had an explicit contract in the first place. The only thing keeping citizen dissenters out of prison is the accepted understanding that it would “look bad.” What happens when we implicitly decide it no longer looks bad to pepper spray protestors, arrest without cause, or shoot citizens in the street for exercising rights supposedly guaranteed? How long until the Tea Party and OWS are not too dangerous to even associate with? A look at the relavent history suggests this: the United States is not the democratic-republic of the Constitution, it is increasingly the fascist plutocracy we all seem to implicitly desire.

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Confidence Men traces the Obama experience from the campaign of 2007/8 through to the early days of 2011 following last November’s midterm elections. The reader sees an Obama who can move people with words, but is generally unable to translate those words into actionable policy. In fact, that’s the most pointed critique. Often times, Suskind blames the Obama team “near insubordination” to the president. For instance, Suskind notes that many of Obama’s policies, especially those dealing with the Treasury Department in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis were “slow walked.” That is, Obama had made a decision (in this case to begin the breakup of CitiGroup), but the Treasury Department under Secretary Tim Geithner simply didn’t take action to implement the policy. This is a charge that Geithner denies in the book (pg. 280). In other cases, whether it was with Wall Street CEOs or the healthcare providers, Obama’s lack of clear policy guidance seems to have allowed him to get rolled by powerful and vested interests. Take the example of his signature issue, healthcare reform. By the time a bill had made it through Congress it amounted to little more than a mandate that all Americans buy health insurance with little regard to what that would cost. It was a major step-back from the earlier attempts at healthcare reform based upon Dartmouth “best care” practices. As Suskind put it, “Health care reform had officially become health insurance reform. The providers were no longer up at nights worrying” (pg. 377). Obama had been beaten by another industry. The policy implications of Suskind’s attack are withering.

In essence, the Obama administration accomplished very little of the promised agenda from the 2008 campaign. Really, what was accomplished might be called mildly conservative. In the wake of disastrous trading policies (well laid out by Suskind), bank managers faced no reform in the ludicrous amounts of money they could be paid for making their firms too-big-too-fail despite Obama’s clear opportunity, and wide public support (pg. 438). Regulatory reforms that could have restored order to the financial industry and limit systemic risk were derailed by Larry Summers’, at the NEC, and Tim Geithner’s Hippocratic “do no harm” policy of continuity of business service (pg. 493). In essence, no substantial changes have bee put in place to avoid another bubble created disaster. As a result of health insurance reform replacing healthcare reform costs will likely continue to rise. Candidate Obama maligned deficits in 2008 but President Obama’s deficits have continued to rise, while the Bush tax cuts continue (pg. 514) as part of an Obama compromise on very limited stimulus policies. Good intentions mark all of the initiatives in the book, but a road could be paved with Obama’s failed good intentions. That road leads only one place. All in all, the policies and compromises that President Obama has managed to enact have been problematic for the middle class at best despite his campaign promises to the contrary.

Suskind appears to have found the real weakness of President Obama. He suggests that the president’s strong desire for compromise causes him to be led. All an opponent had to do to win was “start with an audacious stance, and see if Obama bent toward you, searching for middle ground” (pg. 481). Such goals usually worked, and made both sides seem reasonable in spite of the dangerous negotiation position taken by Obama’s opponent. It’s an astute observation and borne out by any number of negotiations (the summer’s debt ceiling debate for instance). That’s no way to lead. That’s no way to accomplish the goals of the campaign.

Despite push back from the administration upon its release, Confidence Men seems to pain an accurate picture. It was an administration ideologically divided, as Obama has admitted, like that of the president’s hero President Lincoln. Unfortunately, either through personal failings, or the demands of the modern presidency, the outcome of that division was inaction, paralysis, and outmaneuvering by nearly every opponent. By the last chapter, Obama has traded most of his early staff for new players who he felt more comfortable with. In so doing, Suskind, and the president, suggest that the management style would change. Pick up a copy of Confidence Men sometime this year to see if that kind of change is really possible.

Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President
Ron Suskind
Harper Collins, September 2011
$12.99 

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Twenty first-century American society’s biggest problem isn’t a lack of freedom, but a lack of opportunity. Through a combination of government regulation and myopic private greed, opportunity for the next generation is being destroyed at an alarming rate. The wealth gap between the rich and poor is at nearly the same rate as during the Gilded Age, but there is an even more alarming statistic being trotted out in the last few days. The wealth gap between the young and the older generations is the widest it has ever been. According to Business Week, a household headed by someone over 65 years of age is 47 times more wealthy than one headed by someone under 35. That should be an alarming statistic to anyone with any interest in continuing the American experiment. It is proof that there are far fewer opportunities for young Americans than in years past.

You knew that the younger generation of Americans, let alone the global population, was in trouble without hearing this statistic. Any news source of the last few years has given plenty of anecdotal evidence that something was amiss. Childhood poverty rates, a good indicator of opportunity or lack thereof, stands at 1 in 5 nationally. Globally that statistic is 1 in 2, or 1 billion children in a world population of 7 billion. The United States has used education as part of a solution to the opportunity problem since the end of World War II, but costs have risen dramatically. Since 1985 consumer prices (inflation) has grown to 115%, while the costs of education have risen to 498%. It hasn’t helped that state schools are unable to effectively argue their case to the taxpayers, and have seen their funding cut at a time of systemically increased demand. To meet the demand of potential students, education has become a profit driven exercise, helping to drive that massive growth in cost. To pay for this last bastion of opportunity students have taken out relatively massive debts. College graduates have run up an outstanding student loan debt of $1 trillion. By continually graduating into cyclical recessions, many have little way to pay down this debt while also lacking the ability to discharge the debt in bankruptcy court since 2005 financial reforms. The results should be predictable, and are evident in the world around us.

What do we see from educated population that is not only poor, but saddled with a heavy debt burden? We see uprisings from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Their grandparents may have been sharecroppers devastated by the Great Depression, their parents were factory workers, and today’s young person sees their own future as that of wage slavery.

This isn’t the first time Americans have faced a crisis of opportunity. The whole American scheme is based upon finding increasing opportunity from the very first settlers’ tobacco plantation, through the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” to the struggles of the twentieth century. It isn’t enough to see the problems that we have, but we have to look for answers that we can implement.

Some historical models are more instructive than others. Britons facing economic and religious persecution in the 17^th and 18^th centuries struck out for the United States. Setting up the colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts Bay, they struggled to carve out a new order, a novus ordo seclorum. Barring more rapid success of Virgin Galactic, I don’t know that we are going to be able to carve out such a world. As the United States developed, striking out farther and farther west became the escape valve that reinvigorated the country. Fredrick Jackson Turner called the American west a series of expanding frontiers, each with new opportunities for Americans to reinvent the individual, and the republic as a whole. Again, there is no new physical frontier through which to escape to new opportunities. But, there was an American statesman who saw these same problems as we see them. He faced a nation that had lost its frontier, and where entrenched interests had used the market to their advantage to create a country where opportunity was no longer available to the average citizen.

Theodore Roosevelt was a crusader for what he called the “Square Deal.” By this he meant that every American deserved an opportunity to succeed. America was more than a home for railroad monopolies, and a place where market giants could use their clout to ignore the basic tenets of the American constitution. In 1903 the Elkins Act protected small farmers from railroad price manipulation that destroyed their access to markets. In 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act gave the government the right to regulate food production to protect average Americans. In theory market mechanisms would bankrupt a firm that produced tainted food since survivors would be scared off that firm’s products. But why should Americans have to wait, to die, in order for a corporation to put its moral duty before quarterly profits? The stakeholders had to be protected just as the shareholders were. Roosevelt’s vision was a level playing field of opportunity.

Free markets, forced to perform for the benefit of the public, produce opportunity. A command economy cannot envision the next breakthrough, but neither can profit alone protect life. A balance must be struck that favors people first, and the opportunity of those people to do great things if they are able to achieve. A square deal doesn’t protect all people, or guarantee a successful life. It would merely give people the opportunity to succeed without being guaranteed a life of wage slavery and a life less well off than their parents. The alternative is simply the civil strife Roosevelt’s square deal quieted; a strife being seen on the streets of American cities today.

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Where have unintended consequences hurt us in the past? Prohibition springs to mind (probably because of Ken Burn’s work once again). The Anti Saloon League wanted to clean up American cities and restore the strength of the family in American life. What they produced instead was the criminalization of a key human vice, the growth of violent trafficking organizations, and the destabilization of the family through the social changes associated with the speakeasy. Ooops. But this isn’t an American problem. In 1789, liking the same ideas that put the United States on the path to independence, the French deposed their monarch. The leaders of the French Revolution intended to bring equality, primarily economic and legal, to the French state. A difficult task to say the least. Their revolution, born out of the desire to represent the interests of the Third Estate (the people), descended into the tyranny of demagogues and the guillotine. By 1804, in an effort to restore the stability in the poverty stricken 1780s, the French acquiesced to Napoleon Bonaparte crowning himself Emperor of France. Again, Ooops. Rarely does a political movement begin without ending in a sea of unintended consequences.

For this reason, it might be wise to really consider the Occupy Wall Street movement. OWS represents a real anger in the country. It is the effect of all the problems that these protestors are complaining about. It’s the effect of oppressive student loans, massive debt, lost jobs, and lost hope. OWS couldn’t have been the intended effect when businesses tried to find more profit. These businesses couldn’t have intended to rile people up enough to move them into the streets. That’s just bad business. OWS is itself an unintended effect.

Now OWS is a new cause. The movmement looks to be an unfocused anger because it truly seems to be an anger directed at the leadership of the nation. The political class, the Wall Street class, the pundit class, and the media class all share in the state of affairs so problematic to this movement. They all shared in the problems so pressing to the Tea Party movement as well. But what do any of these movements offer? They promise change, but change to what? Historians love to try and predict the future, but that’s impossible. It still informs us to understand that when people try and effect change, they can effect change. But what kind of change? Is it the change you want to see? That’s the point. Embracing any of these movements is a gamble on a cause with an unknowable effect. Just be ready for the inevitable unintended consequences. The harder one looks at any of these processes shows part of what they’re made of. Does the General Assembly of the local Occupy movement represent you or your goals? These are questions that have to be asked before anyone ought to embrace a movement; or, before any city sends in its militarized police forces to destroy it.

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Ottis was right. Ain’t nothing gonna change, at least not the way things are going. The local, national, and international news organizations keep telling me that we’re in one crisis or another. It could be the housing crisis, or the debt crisis, or an ongoing fiscal crisis. Faith in the dollar and euro are decreasing right along with faith in nearly every other institution around. Outright disapproval of Congress has gone from the mid 40% range to over 80% of Americans disapproving of the legislature. The Tea Party argued that a looming debt crisis needed to be addressed immediately, but little has actually been done. A nascent Occupy Wall Street movement camps out in various cities across America arguing that something needs to be done about something. But, I don’t think we’re really in a crisis.

A crisis is “a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger.” Does that apply to our current situation? You wouldn’t know it by looking at the responses being offered up. One school of thought says that we ought to reduce or eliminate taxes and regulation. But that wing of thought rallies one half, of one third of the U.S. Government. Of course, they’re trying to win over more voters for the next election, and any solutions can wait until they take office in 2013. So, no real sense of urgency there. That wing of the government is dominated by the wealthy and, historically speaking, these policies would benefit the wealthy first. So they can afford to wait. What about the other side of the debate?

What are Senate Democrats and President Obama doing in the face of this crisis? They’ve tacitly moved toward reelection mode as well, putting off any substantive solutions until they win in 2013. Again, no sense of urgency. If the administration was serious about doing something about the “jobs crisis,” President Obama would be using the powers of the presidency to win the debate and convince Americans that they really needed to do something about the problem. He’s not doing that. He’s campaigning under the guise of a barnstorming tour to support an omnibus jobs package that will never pass the house. So again, are we in a crisis? All signs point to no.

But here’s how I really know we’re in trouble. When I turn on my HD television at the end of a day of job searching do you know what I see? I see everything is normal. Snookie’s on MTV, and House Hunters International continues to showcase insanely priced vacation homes. The Simpsons may be in trouble because of financial talks, but thank goodness Monday Night Football is on (without Hank II, because that solved a lot). CBS is telling me that 20 of the top 30 shows are on “America’s Most Watched Network.” So, what I see is that all is well. People love to bring up FDR and his famous Fireside Chats. Where is the president if he believes that more could be done? The federal government owns the network airwaves, and if we were in a crisis I’d expect to see the president on TV every night explaining the problem in detail, as if citizens were adults and not statistics or terrorists. I don’t see that, I see a campaign on “both” sides of this debate, as if there were only two sides.

TV tells me now and again that billionaires support the “Buffet Rule” for taxation, but I don’t buy it. Remember when Ross Perot was running for president in the 1992 election? He bought half hour TV spots to lay out his view of the problem. You may not have agreed with his solution, but he put in his own money to solve what he thought was the problem. Why don’t I see Buffet, Gates, or any of the other mega rich purchasing airtime to lay out America’s problem? Either they don’t believe there is a problem, and it serves them to do exactly what they’re doing now, or, they don’t view Americans as capable players in solving the problem. Perhaps Buffet thinks he can do more behind the scenes, but what I see him doing is buying special shares of Bank of America where he’ll make a nice profit. I don’t see him buying ads. So let’s not call him a hero.

Crisis? I don’t think so. Life goes on as comfortably as ever for too many people for there to really be a crisis. So long as Occupy Wall Street allows itself to be so easily dismissed and marginalized nothing will change. So long as the Tea Party allows itself to be co-opted by monied Republicans nothing will change. A crisis can be solved, but it will take more then a few illegal campers and tri-cornered hats to do it. It takes strikes; real strikes. It takes not playing the game by the rules that led to the problem in the first place. It takes removing your money from the mega banks that are too big to fail, but somehow too small to survive without your tax dollars. But most importantly it takes a leader creating a crisis that can’t be ignored as easily as all of current “crises” are being ignored.

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There’s more to take away from Roosevelt’s 1912 campaign than meets the eye. On the surface there is actually much to dislike about Roosevelt’s goals. He was seeking a third term in office which broke precedent (not in the way his cousin would though). He was a bit of a demagogue who’s success rested mostly on his personality. A quick tour around the Natural History Museum in Washington D.C. illustrates his prowess with rifle on the defenseless creatures of the earth. So, you don’t necessarily have to like the man. But it was Roosevelt’s 1912 campaign that gave full life to the progressive movement by forcing the Democratic party to take up the mantle from the Roosevelt Republicans.

Roosevelt’s Progressive “Bull Moose” party championed the downtrodden, those attacked by the industrial might of American business. He argued strenuously against the oil trusts, and wanted to use the power of government to break them up into competitive industries. He told the voters there where he was shot that voting for one of the two parties was “reactionary.” Party bosses had stolen the Republican party from the people, from the very idea that moving forward was a good idea. Roosevelt wanted “social and industrial justice” for the men and women of America. Progress was the key to American success. Of course Roosevelt lost the 1912 election, but the lessons of 100 years ago ring so loudly in our ears that we would need to be deaf to miss them.

Justice plain and simple. The gilded age of American business and politics followed the Civil War and brought unbelievable wealth to a few industrial robber barons. The term is no mere turn of phrase. Through the unfair use monopoly, oligopoly, and money, these men robbed the American people blind, and convinced the victims to be complicit in their own demise through rhetorical social darwinism. In 1883 William Graham Sumner told Americans that the social classes owed each other nothing, and that if you failed to win their rigged game, you had no one to blame but yourself. We hope this should sound familiar. Roosevelt rejected that idea by the time he ascended the presidency in 1901, and formed the Progressive Party by 1912. Where is the progressive ideal one century later?

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“Holders of doctorates in history occupy, or have recently occupied, a dizzying array of positions outside of academe: historical adviser to the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, speaker of the House of Representatives, the chief of staff to the speaker of the House of Representatives, museum curators, archivists, historians in national parks, investment bankers, international-business consultants, high-school teachers, community-college teachers, foundation officers, editors, journalists, policy analysts at think tanks (yes, an entry-level position).” – Anthony T. Grafton, Chronicle.com, 10/10/2011

Super. If you’ve gotten a degree in history, just sign up for one of those jobs. You could be Speaker of the House or an investment banker! I wonder if Grafton realizes just how hollow his words ring. With but few exceptions, the PhD in history is not a qualifier for gainful employment in those fields. They either require connections, luck, or additional schooling. In that case, the historians skills are useless. Name one undergradate history program that doesn’t teach students to do “research; conceptualizing relationships between structure, agency, and culture; combining research and analysis to present arguments with clarity and economy.” If you went to one that didn’t, you should try and get your money back. If the history BA means anything, it means learning those skills. If it doesn’t mean that, then it really is just the course of study that has caused so much trouble in the first place: a list of rote memorization of dates and places.

The academy has trouble finding jobs for historians at every level because the academy does such a poor job of selling the discipline. The business school can show the society what it does for the larger world. The sciences can do likewise. No one questions the need for a nursing program, or a medical school. What do historians do? They do what Grafton suggets, and these are valuable skills, but the ivory tower of academia has walled itself off so successfully that there is no value in the degree to the larger community leading to ever decreasing funding, and ever decreasing positions. In short, the academy’s woes are the academy’s fault

Historians, and the AHA in particular, need to protect the discipline. Leading books in the field should not routinely be written by those with no formal training at all. The AMA wouldn’t stand for that, so why does the AHA? Until the discipline is protected, nurtured, and promoted, even Grafton’s Plan B won’t be enough to save the history discipline or the careers of any history graduates.

http://chronicle.com/article/No-More-Plan-B/129293/

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