Roundup: Historians' Take

Jim Sleeper: Why conservatives becoming more conservative won't help (them or us)

[Mr. Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York and Liberal Racism.] Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream grows from their 2005 essay in the

Donald Lewis Schaefer: Don't Mess With the Electoral College

[Mr. Schaefer is professor of political science at College of the Holy Cross.] With their appeal to independents, Barack Obama and John McCain may scramble the electoral map in November. Others want to go further and throw out the Electoral College completely, replacing this "complicated" and "undemocratic" system with a direct, nationwide popular vote for the presidency. Despite its democratic allure, it's a bad idea. Backers of the popular vote do

Ronald and Allis Radosh: When the Left Loved Israel

[Ronald Radosh, adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Allis Radosh, are co-authors of a forthcoming book about Harry S. Truman and the creation of Israel.] On the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding, the argument that the Jewish state should cease to exist as a Jewish state may still be found in the pages of the flagship publication of the American left, The Nation. Last year, in a special issue devoted to Israel, the magazine’s editors noted that, although for many years th

Gavan McCormack: Just who's the conservative in Japan is an Alice in Wonderland puzzle

[Gavan McCormack is a coordinator of Japan Focus. His Client State: Japan in the American Embrace, was published in New York and London in 2007, and its publication in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese translation is imminent. This essay is a lightly revised and expanded version of his monthly essay for the vernacular Korean daily, Kyunghyang sinmun, published on 2 June 2008.] Japanese politics are characterized by two related paradoxes: first, that the word “conservative” is usually ap

H. Robert Baker: The Supreme Court Confronts History (Boumediene v. Bush)

[H. Robert Baker is assistant professor of history at Georgia State University and author of the book, The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War.] History matters. Perhaps more to the point, how we craft history matters, whether we are historians or not. The Supreme Court proved this on June 12 when it issued its decision in Boumediene v. Bush. The case concerns habeas corpus, latin for "have the body" (as in a command

Victor Davis Hanson: Barack W. Bush?

Almost everyone is talking about Barack Obama's flip-flops, as the Senate's most liberal member steadily moves to the political center and disowns firebrands like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger. But less noticed is that Obama is not just deflating John McCain's efforts to hold him to his long liberal record, but also embracing much of the present agenda of an unpopular President Bush on a wide variety of fronts. Take social issues. Obama is now a gun-ri

Juan Cole: The FBI's plan to "profile" Muslims

The U.S. Justice Department is considering a change in the grounds on which the FBI can investigate citizens and legal residents of the United States. Till now, DOJ guidelines have required the FBI to have some evidence of wrongdoing before it opens an investigation. The impending new rules, which would be implemented later this summer, allow bureau agents to establish a terrorist profile or pattern of behavior and attributes and, on the basis of that profile, start investigating an individual

John Steele Gordon: 2008 ... A Watershed Election?

[Mr. Gordon is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power" (HarperCollins, 2004).] Exciting as presidential elections can be, they don't often change things fundamentally. Now and then, however, they can remake the American political landscape for years to come, and the country enters into a new era. Will 2008 be one of those watershed elections? Perhaps, but not in the way that many people think. Let's look at a little his

Tom Engelhardt: Why Cheney Won't Take Down Iran

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn't covered, it is an alternative history of the mad B

Ruth Rosen: ‘The Populist Vision’

[Ruth Rosen teaches history at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of “The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America” (Penguin, 2006) and is a frequent contributor to Dissent Magazine and Talking Points Memo.] What do pundits really mean when they describe a politician’s rhetoric as “populist”? Does that candidate recoil from the uncertainties and anxieties caused by globalization? Stand up for the little guy against elite corporate interest

Alan I. Abramowitz: How Bush Turned A Generation Into Liberals

[Alan I. Abramowitz is a professor of political science at Emory University.] Young voters played a crucial role in Barack Obama's successful campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. In state after state, exit polls showed that Obama received his strongest support from voters under the age of 30. Now that he has clinched the Democratic nomination, Obama is counting on strong support from under-thirties to offset John McCain's expected advantage among older white voters,

Alan Schroeder: It's too bad McCain and Obama didn't agree to a July 4th debate

[Alan Schroeder is the author of the recently published Presidential Debates: Fifty Years of High-Risk TV.] To the chagrin of political junkies everywhere, the Fourth of July holiday weekend passed without a precedent-setting summer presidential debate b

Victor Davis Hanson: Election 2008 ... Steady vs. Changeable

One way to envision the McCain-Obama presidential race is as a boxing match — particularly like the famous Muhammed Ali championship fights. The deliberate John McCain is like a Sonny Liston or George Foreman trying to cut the ring in half and force his lighter-footed opponent onto the ropes. For Mr. McCain, this comes in the form of numerous proposed town-hall debates, where he hopes that face-to-face questions and answers will fall on his less-seasoned opponent like sudden haymakers.

Martin E. Marty: On patriotism

Ninety years ago this Fourth of July weekend, the City Council of West Point, Nebraska passed a resolution that citizens were not to hold "assemblages not in sympathy with the war" or to distribute literature "out of harmony with the war," that is, World War I. On April 19, 1918 the local paper reported that three Catholic priests and one Lutheran minister "were not permitted to preach last Sunday," because they violated Nebraska's Sedition Law. "No alien ene

Will Bagley: Similarities between 1929 and 2008 terrifying

[WILL BAGLEY is an author, publisher and historian. Utah State University Press released his"Always a Cowboy: Judge Wilson McCarthy and the Rescue of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad."] Watching Wall Street and the American real-estate market crumble over the past 10 months has not inspired great confidence in our wonderful free-market economy or the land pirates who run it. As someone who recently wrestled with the causes and consequences of the Great Depression, I find the curre

Jeffrey Wasserstrom & Kate Merkel-Hess: Ten Things Worth Knowing about the Chinese Internet

[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. He is co-founder and regular contributer to The China Beat: Blogging How the East is Red. His books include China's Brave New World (2007) and the forthcoming Global Shanghai, 1850-2010. Kate Merkel-Hess is a graduate student in modern Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine. She is the Editor of The China Beat, and a contributor to the TLS.] Thanks largely to the Olympics, 20

Ted Widmer: When Democrats court evangelicals, they have history on their side

[Ted Widmer is the author of “Ark of the Liberties: America and the World,” which was published last month.] We all know that politics makes strange bedfellows, but how odd it must have been to have sat in on the recent meeting between Barack Obama and evangelical leaders, including Franklin Graham, the conservative minister who once called Islam “a very evil and wicked religion.” Yet there they were, Obama and the evangelicals in Chicago on June 10, searching for — and apparently f

David I. Steinberg: Elections in the Republic of Korea ... Foreign Policy Alternatives Under New Leadership

[David I. Steinberg is Professor of Asian Studies, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. This essay is based on his presentation at the FPRI Asia Program’s conference on Elections, Political Transitions and Foreign Policy in East Asia held in Philadelphia on April 14, 2008. For conference videotapes and reports, see www.fpri.org/research/asia/electionseastasia.] The December 2007 presidential election in K

Carolyn Eisenberg: Another $162,000,000,000?

With the president's signature now affixed to the bill, the clever deal is done. In exchange for another "blank check" for a year of war, the Democrats have wrested from their Republican colleagues and the White House a host of domestic benefits - tens of billions of dollars in educational funding for returning GIs, a thirteen-week extension of unemployment insurance, millions for Midwest flood relief and other laudable projects. "This shows that even in an election year, Republic

Rick Elgendy: Who's right ... Obama or Dobson (or neither?)

[Rick Elgendy is a Ph.D. student in Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School.] Last week, Focus on the Family's James Dobson took issue with a 2006 speech made by Senator Barack Obama at a meeting of "Call to Renewal," a movement of politically activist Christians. A religious figure criticizing a presidential candidate is nothing new, but an important exchange about the place of religion in the life of a democratic society ought not to be lost amidst the pre