In honor of President Johnson’s birthday we have excerpted from The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power by H.W. Brands. Brands is a Professor of History at Texas A&M University. In the excerpt below he looks at the origins of Johnson’s foreign policy ideals.

…When Kennedy alluded in his inaugural address to the fact that he was the first American president born in the twentieth century, Johnson might have reflected that he too was a child of the present century, only he had seen a good deal more of it than Kennedy. What Johnson saw most distinctly—so distinctly that the view forever colored his outlook on the world—was the decade of the 1930s. Johnson experienced this most formative period in modern American history in a way Kennedy only read about. The 1930s molded Johnson’s understanding of both domestic and foreign affairs. As a junior congressman from a district wrung by the depression, Johnson learned to appreciate the potential of government for ameliorating poverty and restoring hope to communities suffering from too much of the former and too little of the latter. He witnessed the depth and force of the American desire to be left alone by the world, to tend America’s garden unmolested. He observed the failure of the Western democracies to stand up to aggression, especially at Munich in 1938. Once Johnson became president, his domestic program evinced his desire to complete the New Deal and extend the comforting hand of government to those parts of society still suffering. His foreign policy demonstrated his determination to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s and spare humanity a repetition of the horrors of the subsequent world war.

The postwar period did nothing to alter Johnson’s fundamental opinions on world affairs. His rapid rise in the Senate placed him among those regularly briefed on significant issues, first by Truman, then by Eisenhower. Though Johnson paid more attention to domestic developments than to international events, he learned much about global affairs from the front-row seat his position in the Democratic leadership afforded him. John Foster Dulles’s frequent consultations privied Johnson to the diplomatic thinking of the Eisenhower administration, which Johnson broadly shared. With Dulles and Eisenhower, Johnson accounted communism close kin to fascism—fascism with a red face. As fascism had battened on the irresolution of the democracies, so would communism if given a chance. What alone would keep the Cold War from becoming another world war was the fortitude of the Free World…

Beyond reminding him of what he already knew, Johnson’s exposure to the American policy-making process as majority leader and vice president increased his knowledge of world affairs. Johnson never became a student of international relations the way Richard Nixon, for example, did. But Johnson, like Nixon, early developed designs on the presidency, and he understood that anyone who intended to be president needed to keep an eye on happenings abroad. Johnson listened carefully to Dulles and Rusk, and he noted what he saw when he traveled. Besides, a man as smart as Johnson, in his position, would have learned a great deal about the world without even trying. Johnson inspired a variety of feelings in those who knew him, yet all agreed that he possessed daunting mental firepower. Robert Kennedy remarked, “I can’t stand the bastard, but he’s the most formidable human being I’ve ever met.” Eric Goldman, a Princeton historian who worked in the Johnson White House, commented that he had never encountered anyone with more raw intellectual ability than Johnson. Richard Helms remarked upon the president’s “enormously intelligent mind” and his “great capacity to grasp facts.” When Johnson believed an issue merited his attention, he blotted it up. “He mastered the details down to the last riffle,” Helms said. John McCloy depicted Johnson as “much more exacting and penetrating” in his efforts to get at the root of questions than Kennedy had been. “Mr. Johnson always gave me the feeling that he knew a great deal about his subject,” McCloy remembered. “I was always impressed by the depth of his penetration.” Dean Rusk was too. The secretary of state said of Johnson, “He was a man of great intellectual capacity and had an ability to understand the issues that were in front of him clearly and in great depth.”

Allied with Johnson’s intellect was his overwhelming personal presence. David Bruce described the Johnson force field. “I’m not frightened of him,” the ambassador said, “but I must say that when he entered a room, particularly if you were going to be the only person in it, somehow the room seemed to contract—this huge thing, it’s almost like releasing a djinn from one of those Arabian Nights’ bottles. The personality sort of fills the room. Extraordinary thing.” John McCloy related a narrow—and rare (and temporary)—escape from the Johnson treatment. In 1964 the president attempted to persuade the former high commissioner to Germany to replace Henry Cabot Lodge as ambassador in South Vietnam. “Talk about twisting your arm!” McCloy said.

I will never forget it…He went from appealing to my patriotism and shaming me with my lack of it, or lack of willingness to take on a tough job. . . I came out of there limp and feeling a bit ashamed of myself because I hadn’t agreed to it.

(Johnson later nailed McCloy to serve as negotiator in talks with Britain and Germany over troop levels and problems regarding America’s balance of payments.)

Outsiders often assumed that the Johnson treatment did not work with foreigners. Unmodified, it didn’t. But Johnson was clever enough to adapt his approach to changing needs. Eugene Rostow, undersecretary of state for political affairs and Walt Rostow’s brother, found the president “extraordinarily sensitive and adept” in diplomatic conversations. “Simply superb,” the undersecretary summarized. David Bruce conceded that many in Britain considered Johnson a “picturesque character,” yet the ambassador noted that Johnson got on admirably with British prime minister Harold Wilson. George Ball explained that Johnson’s political background stood him well in dealing with that most difficult of foreign leaders, Charles de Gaulle. “I think the president respected de Gaulle as a brilliantly effective politician. He had a sort of high professional respect for him, and at the same time totally distrusted him.” Benjamin Read described how Johnson managed visiting dignitaries at Kennedy’s funeral. Read and others at the State Department prepared index cards for Johnson identifying the scores of guests and suggesting pertinent topics of conversation. Johnson palmed the cards and worked the reception line as if he had known the visitors since birth. “He handled it just extraordinarily skillfully,” Read recounted. “It left us with the greatest feeling of admiration.”

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Between the ages of 16 and 26, male development often evolves and explodes into such problematic behavior as binge drinking, fraternity hazing, and female-directed abuse—particularly on college campuses.  To better understand these trends, Michael Kimmel, Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University and leading gender scholar, has just published Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. Drawing from hundreds of interviews with 16-to-26-year-olds across the country—and traversing locales from high schools to frat houses to sports bars—Guyland is a riveting look inside the intriguing incubators of modern manhood.

Kimmel is the author of several popular and acclaimed Oxford textbooks, including Manhood in America, Second Edition, which provides an engaging cultural history of masculinity by examining such cultural constructs as advice books, magazine columns, political pamphlets, and popular novels and films. In addition, he is author of the best-selling The Gendered Society, Third Edition; coeditor of The Gendered Society Reader, Third Edition , and Sexualities: Identities Behaviors, and Society; and editor of Classical Sociological Theory, Second Edition .  Below is an excerpt from the epilogue of Manhood in America which put Kimmel on the path to deconstructing Guyland. Be sure to tune in to the Today show (NBC) on Wednesday, August 27th to see Kimmel talk about Guyland.  He will also read from Guyland on Tuesday, September 9th at 7:00 PM at the Borders Store at Columbus Circle.

The presidential election of 2004 revealed a nation deeply divided about politics, war, and economic issues. Red and blue states possess different visions of what America is and what America should be. And it’s equally true that there are two disparate visions of American masculinity. As this new century unfolds, the pace of change accelerates, and the world grows ever more integrated, it remains to be seen what ideals of manhood will prevail both in the short run and in the longer run.

Personally, I believe that in the twenty-first century, we need a different sort of manhood, a “democratic manhood.” The manhood of the future cannot be based on obsessive self-control, defensive exclusion, or frightened escape. We need a new definition of masculinity in this new century: a definition that is more about the character of men’s hearts and the depths of their souls than about the size of their biceps, wallets, or penises; a definition that is capable of embracing differences among men and enabling other men to feel secure and confident rather than marginalized and excluded; a definition that is capable of friendships based on more than common activities (what among toddlers is called “parallel play”) or even common consumer aesthetics; a definition that centers on standing up for justice and equality instead of running away from commitment and engagement.

We need men who truly embody traditional masculine virtues, such as strength, a sense of purpose, a commitment to act ethically regardless of the costs, controlled aggression, self-reliance, dependability, reliability, responsibility—men for whom these are not simply fashion accessories but come from a deeply interior place. But now these will be configured in new and responsive ways. We need men who are secure enough in their convictions to recognize a mistake, courageous enough to be compassionate, fiercely egalitarian, powerful enough to empower others, strong enough to acknowledge that real strength comes from holding others up rather than pushing them down and that real freedom is not to be found in the loneliness of the log cabin but in the daily compromises of life in a community.

Recall again the postscript to that vicious campaign of 1840. Taking the oath of office on one of the most bitterly cold days in the entire nineteenth century, William Henry Harrison refused to wear a topcoat lest he appear weak and unmanly. He caught pneumonia, was immediately bedridden, and died one month later—the shortest term in office of any president in our history. Believing your own hype may be dangerous for your health let alone the health of the nation.

The deep divisions between red and blue America parallel the deep divisions in red and blue gender politics. On the one hand, it appears that about half the country subscribes to older, more traditional notions of masculinity; the other half subscribes to a version that is more protean and responsive to social change. While it’s surely a caricature to suggest that one side swills burgers and beer (not microbrew) while watching NASCAR and the other sips chardonnay and nibble imported brie, every cultural arena does present us with a variety of images from which to choose. The increased polarization of the nation does lead these images to equally become more polarized.

So, for example, where once Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant could capture the same audiences as Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum, today one is unlikely to find many fans of the fey Leonardo di Caprio or the earnest Toby Maguire at a film starring The Rock or Vin Diesel. Yet these new iterations of the last action hero are cartoons of hypermasculine inarticulateness; they make Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis seem positively emotional. And their young male audiences are as likely to laugh at their verbal grunting as they are to marvel at the special effects.

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David Domke is Professor of Communication and Head of Journalism at the University of Washington.  Together with Kevin Coe he wrote The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America. To learn more about the book check out their handy website here, to read more posts by Domke and Coe click here. In the post below Domke examines the role of race in the Presidential election.

The consensus among political journalists and pundits is that if race becomes a salient matter in the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama is in trouble. The thinking goes something like this: if white voters are reminded that Obama is black, or start to think through a racial prism, the nation’s first African American major-party presidential candidate will lose.

In the words of NBC News political director Chuck Todd: “Anytime race is THE topic du jour in the campaign, it’s a bad day for Obama. Period.”

I disagree.

Let’s review the three most racialized moments in the campaign.

First there was the tit-for-tat in late January, as the Democratic Party approached the South Carolina primary. Obama had won the Iowa caucuses, Clinton had won in New Hampshire and Nevada, and in the days before the Palmetto State’s voting, the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns traded accusations that each was bringing up race for political advantage. When Obama won a landslide victory, Bill Clinton dismissed it as Jesse Jackson redux, drawing significant criticism for the comparison. Was Obama damaged by all of this? Not hardly. Bill Clinton, however, has yet to recover.

Next there was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright remix of God bless America, in which Wright presented an image of an angry-at-America, angry-at-whites black man. The political and media punditry quickly sounded the death knell for Obama’s candidacy, and indeed Obama sank in the polls. The Gallup Daily Tracking Poll in mid-March showed him leading Hillary Clinton 50% to 44% before the Wright videos emerged, and five days later it was Clinton up 49% to 42%. But within days Obama was back in the lead, following his profoundly adult speech on race in Philadelphia.

Most recently we had the he said-he said showdown between John McCain’s and Obama’s campaigns, beginning with McCain’s “Celebrity” advertisement linking Obama with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Some say that tying Obama to young, sexualized white women was an attempt to prime racial stereotypes about black men. For his part, Obama said that the McCain campaign was trying to tell everyone that Obama “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.” The Obama side later acknowledged it was a ham-handed attempt to highlight race without saying so explicitly.

The McCain camp immediately jumped on it, saying that it was the Obama camp who was playing the “race card.” Sensing an advantage, the McCain campaign has subsequently gone all-in with its advertising strategy, and has now released a web advertisement that declares “Hot chicks love Obama.” ABC News’ Jake Tapper put the count of white women at a minimum of 4. Subtle it ain’t.

Since the McCain-Obama back-and-forth began, the Gallup Daily Tracking poll has shown an interesting pattern. On July 30, when the Celebrity ad was released by the McCain campaign, Obama led McCain 45% to 44%. On each of the following two days the candidates tied at 44%, but nearly every day since Obama has gained ground—and as of Wednesday he led, 48% to 42%. If Obama was hurt by the racial dynamics, these numbers don’t show it.

So how to explain all of this?

I’ll offer two lines of argument.

1. Obama is hurt by race when it is a below-the-radar subtext, but he benefits when it is brought explicitly into the light of day. This is exactly what research in political psychology suggests: that only subtle, implicit racial messages work in today’s U.S. politics. The evidence suggests that most Americans don’t want to act upon their embedded racial prejudices, so when these biases become apparent to them, voters take intentional steps to act differently.

In South Carolina, Bill Clinton’s claims that Obama’s race helps him among black voters and Clinton’s reference to Jesse Jackson made race explicit, and subsequently Obama benefited. With Jeremiah Wright, Obama was hurt in polls when people simply saw Wright’s rants, but then Obama bounced back after his “More Perfect Union” speech directly addressed racial divisions. And in the aftermath of the salvos with the McCain camp two weeks ago, the news media are now giving closer scrutiny to the racial dynamics of the campaign. Such scrutiny, this pattern suggests, will help Obama.

2. There are two political groups that are determined that Obama will not suffer the same fate as Democratic Party nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988, when the George H. W. Bush campaign rode the infamous “Willie Horton” ad to victory.

The first are African American voters, whose support for Obama is at unprecedented levels for a Democrat. In response to the Wright flap, for example, media reports suggested that blacks often rallied to Obama’s side.

Second, the “swiftboat” experiences of John Kerry in 2004 has put the Obama campaign and supporters on high-alert against what it considers unfair criticisms, subtle or otherwise. The Obama campaign launched its site in June, “Fight the Smears,” and on Wednesday Kerry himself launched a site, “Truth Fights Back.” Both of these sites, ironically, draw upon Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign’s war-room approach of instant responses. These kinds of tactics ensure that the Obama campaign will weigh in quickly with its viewpoints, and can go on the offense whenever race comes up. That makes certain that they’re significant players in defining the debate.

These factors have made race a complex factor in this presidential campaign—which is as we might expect, given its deep, embedded, and often-contradictory positioning in American culture at large. The evidence simply doesn’t suggest that Obama is always hurt when race is part of the campaign. In fact, it appears to be exactly the opposite, so far.

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Harm de Blij is the John A. Hannah Professor of Geography at Michigan State University. The author of more than 30 books he is an honorary life member of the National Geographic Society and was for seven years the Geography Editor on ABC’s Good Morning America. His most recent book, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, he reveals the rugged contours of our world that keep all but 3% of “mobals” stationary in the country where they were born. He argues that where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny, and thus with our chances of overcoming obstacles in our way.  In the post below he examines the effect of the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

The collapse of the former Soviet Union generated much satisfaction among many Americans, Europeans, and others who, with justification, saw the evils of that empire as proof of the failures of the Communist system on which it was based. No political system hitherto invented provides protection against the worst instincts of rapacious rulers and their acolytes, and many of those who thought that Karl Marx had done so found themselves contemplating their fate in the gulag, where tens of millions perished while Soviet bigwigs partied in their dachas. The theoretical merits of Communism turned out no better in practice than Nazism or Fascism, whether tested in Russia, China, or Cambodia.

But the world may yet come to appreciate the seven decades of Communist control over the Soviet empire for what it did to constrain the Russian reach for global power. Communism’s end-justifies-the-means produced conditions under which fear, and hence corruption, suppressed initiative and innovation. Communism’s inherent inefficiencies spawned an economic system destined to disintegrate in a globalizing world. The Communist imperialists extended their power over a vast colonial empire reaching from central Asia to central Europe, requiring massive investments in policing as well as armed intervention. Entire populations (for example the Chechens and the Tatars) were exiled to remote desert areas at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, then “pardoned” by more moderate rulers to return to their abandoned abodes where Russians had taken their place. To the wider world, Russia’s Cold-War leaders might threaten “we will bury you,” but the cost of their ruthless rule inhibited their capacity to do so, and the Cold War stayed cold except in proxy settings.

Now Russia is the “free and open” society that might have emerged from the Revolution a century ago, its lost empire a national preoccupation, its former colonies resentful, its Communist-era settlers abandoned to newly sovereign governments, its allies near and far looking to Moscow for succor. In their unconstrained social-spatial engineering, the dominant Russians of the former U.S.S.R. redrew boundaries and awarded territories and peoples to “republics” of which they were not historically a part on the arrogant assumption that all Soviet member states would be Moscow’s vassals in perpetuity. Thus a Soviet dictator in 1954 capriciously transferred the Crimea Peninsula to Ukraine as a reward for Ukraine’s contribution to the Soviet Union’s well-being, not imagining that, before the end of the century, Ukraine would be a sovereign state in fact rather than in Communist mythology. As a result, millions of Russians today find themselves under the government in Kyyiv (Kiev) rather than Moscow.

The Slavic diaspora in what Russians still call their “near-abroad” continue to arouse nationalist emotions in the new Russia. Millions of Russians have returned to their ancestral home, but many more remain beyond the border, from Kazakhstan to Estonia. And others – Slavs as well as non-Slavs – who allied themselves with the Communist cause during the Soviet period also have Moscow’s attention. Indeed, while the current crisis in Georgia has been simmering for years, its escalation relates directly to the last convulsions of another Communist collapse, that of Yugoslavia, and its largest fragment, Serbia.

The devolution of the former Yugoslavia initially yielded five states, of which Serbia was the largest and in many ways the most complex, with Hungarian, Montenegrin, and Kosovar (Albanian) minorities under Belgrade’s government. The Hungarian minority in the north did not agitate for secession, but coastal Montenegro left the Serbian fold in 2006 without serious problems and became another of Europe’s ministates, with a population below 700,000. The Muslim majority of Kosovo, landlocked leftover of the Ottoman period and numbering about 1.8 million, victims of Serbian subjugation during the devolutionary period and inalterably opposed to further Serbian domination, attained independence in 2008 with the support of the United States and a majority of (but not all) European states. Russia vociferously objected to Kosovo’s independence, supporting the Serbian position that Kosovo is a historic part of the former kingdom and vowing to veto any application it might make to join the United Nations.

While the international community’s attention was focused on the Kosovo issue, the simmering trouble between Russia and Georgia worsened, and it was no coincidence. Even as Moscow continued to object to Kosovo’s recognition, Russian military equipment and troops began to converge on two stretches of Russia’s international border: those of Abkhazia, a corner of Georgia on the Black Sea coast, and of South Ossetia, in the Caucasus Mountains. While Georgia was one of the 15 Socialist Soviet “republics,” these two pockets of Georgia – as well as a third, Ajaria, also on the Black Sea coast – were simply administrative acknowledgments of ethnic-minority realities. Indeed, the Ossetians straddled the border between Russia and Georgia: North Ossetia lies one small entity removed from Chechnya, and South Ossetians make up just 3 percent of Georgia’s population. Russians and Russian military “peacekeepers” strengthen Moscow’s presence in this enclave of Russian loyalty, and in Abkhazia, too, the Russian presence outnumbers the 2 percent Abkhazians. Even before the intervention of August 8, 2008, the government of Georgia had little control over either piece of the “near abroad.”

It has been the stated objective of the Tbilisi government to assert its jurisdiction over the three minority territories on its margins, but Moscow has obstructed this initiative in various ways, ranging from the closure of transport routes (and thus commercial traffic) between Georgia and Russia to the award of Russian passports to residents of Abkhazia and North Ossetia. Newspapers and other media commentary in Russia ask why, if Kosovo can be wrested from Serbia because locals there want independence, the same rights cannot be accorded to North Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russian commentators are arguing that Georgia’s suppression of Ossetians and Abkhazians is no less ruthless than that of Kosovars by Serbia.

But by militarily intervening as the Russians have, including the bombing of targets in Georgia itself, Moscow appears intent on creating a crisis that will demonstrate its capacity and willingness to wage war for its interests in the “near abroad” despite serious risk of potentially uncontrollable escalation. Kosovo may have been part of the kindling, but Russia resented NATO encroachment toward its borders, American-planned construction of missile-defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, EU involvement in Ukraine’s long-range plans (Georgia has also proclaimed its hope to join the EU, and you will see the EU flag, beside the flag of Georgia, stand behind President Saakashvili’s desk during interviews) and other slights. One question is whether Russian bombers will target the Georgian section of the oil pipeline linking the Caspian Sea reserves to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another is whether, should Russia impose a naval blockade on Georgia, Ukraine will deny it the use of its Crimean naval bases, potentially drawing Kyyiv into the conflict and creating a motive for Russian action there as well.

A belligerent Russia has already choked off the flow of natural gas to Europe during a dispute over payments, has allowed a murder case (allegedly by a Russian agent in London) to damage relations with the United Kingdom, has turned a blind eye to criminal activity in Moldova, has obstructed efforts to persuade Iran to alter its nuclear practices, has imprisoned business leaders deemed politically inconvenient in ways chillingly reminiscent of gulag times, and has sent bombers flying into airspace in the Cold-War mode. The brutality of its post-Soviet campaigns against Muslim Chechens was seen in context of the wider “war against terror”, but the destruction now being visited on Georgia suggests that a new page has been turned.

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Harm de Blij is the John A. Hannah Professor of Geography at Michigan State University. The author of more than 30 books he is an honorary life member of the National Geographic Society and was for seven years the Geography Editor on ABC’s Good Morning America. His most recent book, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, he reveals the rugged contours of our world that keep all but 3% of “mobals” stationary in the country where they were born. He argues that where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny, and thus with our chances of overcoming obstacles in our way.  In the post below he examines the recent events in Belgium.

Once again, Belgium – that is, Belgium’s future as a country – is in the news. It is in a way the ultimate irony that the European Union (EU) member whose capital serves as the headquarters of the world’s foremost experiment in supranationalism teeters on the brink of disintegration. Sophisticated, bureaucratic Brussels, Francophone island in Belgium’s Flemish-speaking north, represents multicultural cooperation to EU enthusiasts across Europe, but foreign intrusion to Flemish nationalists in its immediate hinterland. The collapse of one of the EU’s founding members, a key participant in the Benelux union that preceded the EU itself, would signify a failure that could have serious ramifications for the entire project.

The rise of Flemish nationalism and the default of Belgian federalism are not, however, unique to this small, prosperous country whose very survival is linked to the EU experiment. Europe’s growing integration is animating nationalist sentiments among locals in many of the EU’s 27 member states, and central governments try in various ways to defuse the associated political pressures. The European map is replete with cultural minorities that see themselves threatened with a loss of identity in Europe’s economic and political homogenization, and some of these minorities have national aspirations, viewing the EU’s still-formative period as an opportunity to strengthen their autonomy. The partition of

Czechoslovakia created two states for such cultural majorities and is often cited by others (in Catalonia, Scotland, Corsica, the Basque country as well as in both Belgian Flanders and Wallonia) as the prototype for their own aspirations. Separatists may be aware of the ultimate futility of their campaigns, but some of them nevertheless punctuate their activities with violence. The European political scene is anything but placid.

Thus the fate of Belgium will be of particular significance for the EU. Overcoming devolutionary forces by demonstrating the economic and social advantages of representative membership is the whole idea, and in general it has worked. The list of states aspiring to join the EU, including not only Turkey but also Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, Macedonia, Ukraine and even Georgia, is longer than that rejecting the option (Norway, Iceland and Switzerland), and only one entity has left the EU when the opportunity arose, namely Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). But if a state at the very heart of the EU, and one of its greatest beneficiaries, fails to accommodate its centrifugal forces, it will constitute a setback that will raise doubts among members and would-be members alike.

Flemish-Walloon negotiations having failed, should the EU seek to intervene? Might an EU transitional administration give the parties time and space to renew their efforts? The prospects appear dim: Flemish nationalism is again on the rise, with visions of independence and, ironically, eventual full membership in the EU. Resentment of French-speaking Belgians runs deep; xenophobia is rife. The Flemish flag waves over public buildings and town squares in the northern provinces; advertisements promoting the economic advantages of Wallonia in commercial publications barely mention Belgium at all. That two cultural communities with so much in common could find themselves at this impasse casts doubt on the whole EU enterprise.

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Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry, and will be published in August. In the article below he looks a Beatles’ revolution.

On 21 August 1940, Winston Churchill famously declared, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” The RAF had been dominating the Luftwaffe in the air and Churchill saw an opportunity to bolster British morale amid the fire, smoke, and death on the ground. In Liverpool less than two months later and during the Blitz, a mother would celebrate the Prime Minister’s resolve by naming her son John Winston Lennon, someone else to whom many would owe much and no less so than for what he contributed in another turbulent August.

On 11 August 1968, the Beatles announced “National Apple Week” and launched their own label, Apple Records, as a declaration of independence from corporate media. In many respects, they were babes in the woods with the wolves of the industry at their heels, but during a summer of increasingly violent riots and protests, Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr defied expectations of their demise. In August 1967, their manager and friend Brian Epstein had died after naïvely mixing drugs and alcohol, leaving the band and their finances in shock and disarray. Almost immediately, the Beatles went into a brilliantly destructive tailspin, launching one ill-fated venture after another: a divisive retreat to India with the Maharishi, a clothing store on Baker Street renowned for shoplifting, and the Boxing Day disaster of their film, Magical Mystery Tour. A year after Epstein’s death, they returned to what they knew best: making records.

Apple released three charting records on 30 August 1968: Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days” (produced by Paul McCartney), Jackie Lomax’s “Sour Milk Sea” (produced by George Harrison), and the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and “Revolution.” Both the Hopkin and Beatles disks would climb to the top of British charts, but where the former simply updated a nostalgic Russian ditty, the latter broke new ground in more ways that we can discuss here. In particular, Lennon’s “Revolution” challenged the violence that the Rolling Stones seemed to be embracing in “Street Fighting Man.” Although a master of obfuscation (consider “I Am the Walrus”), Lennon openly and plainly questions politicos of every stripe while striking down a path he would follow for most of his short life, his most poignant articulation coming with “Imagine” (1971).

Released a little over a week after soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia quashing the Prague Spring democracy and only days after Chicago police rioted against war protesters, “Revolution” scathingly chastised the chattering of authority, right and left. Rather than the catalyst for revolution that Richard Nixon had imagined Lennon to be, the Liverpudlian born in a milieu of bombs and death called upon a generation to stop and to consider the consequences of violence and demagoguery. Evoking his stature as a Beatle, he essentially asked everyone to step back and take a deep breath. He succeeded in taunting both conservatives and radicals, but he also gave voice to reason. In that summer of human conflict, his cynicism rang true.

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Below we have excerpted part of the introduction from the 40th anniversary edition of Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Reassessment.  This book, the definitive work on Stalin’s purges, provides an eloquent chronicle of one of humanity’s most tragic events.  Robert Conquest is the author of some thirty books of history, biography, poetry, fiction, and criticism.  He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Art and Sciences. He is at present a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

The Great Terror of 1936 to 1938 did not come out of the blue.  Like any other historical phenomenon, it had its roots in the past.  It would no doubt be misleading to argue that it followed inevitably from the nature of Soviet society and of the Communist Party.  It was itself a means of enforcing violent change upon that society and that party.  But all the same, it could not have been launched excpet against the extraordinarily idiosyncratic background of Bolshevik rule; and its special characteristics, some of them hardly credible to foreign minds, derive from a specific tradition.  The dominating ideas of the Stalin period, the evolution of the oppostionists, the very confession in the great show trials, can hardly be followed without considering not so mch the whole Soviet past as the development of the Party, the consolidation of the dictatorship, the movements of faction, the rise of individuals, and the emergence of extreme economic politics.

After his first stroke on 26 May 1922, Lenin, cut off to a certain degree from the immediacies of political life, contemplated the unexpected defects which had arisen in the revolution he had made.

He had already remarked, to he delegates to the Party’s Xth Congress in March 1921, “We have failed to convince the broad masses.”  He had felt obliged to excuse the low quality of many Party members: ‘No profound and popular movement in all history has taken place without its share of filth, without adventurers and rogues, without boastful and noisy elements…A ruling party inevitably attracts careerists.”  He had noted that the Soviet State had “many bureaucratic deformities,” speaking of “that same Russian apparatus…borrowed from Tsardom and only just covered with a Soviet veneer.”  And just before his stroke he had noted “the prevalence of personal spite and malice” in the committees charged with purging the Party.

Soon after his recovery from this first stroke, he was remarking, “We are living in a sea of ilegality,” and observing, “The Communist kernal lacks general culture”, the culture of the middle classes in Russia was “inconsiderable, wretched, but in any case greater than that of our responsible Communists.”  In the autumn he was criticizing carelessness and parasitism, and invented special phrases for the boasts and lies of the Communists: “Com-boasts and Com-lies.”

In his absence, his subordinates were acting more unacceptably than ever.  His criticisms had hithero been occasional reservations uttered in the intervals of busy political and governmental activity.  Now they became his main preoccupation.  He found that Stalin, to whom as General Secretary he had entrusted the Party machine in 1921, was hounding the Party in Georgia.  Stalin’s emissary, Ordzhonkidze, had even struck the Georgian Communist leader Kabanidze.  Lenin favored a policy of concilation in Georgia, where the population was solidy anti-Bolshevik and had only just lost its independence to a Red Army assault.  He took strong issue with Stalin.

It was at this time that he wrote his “Testament.”  In it he made it clear that in his view Stalin was, after Trotsky, “the most able” leader of the Central Committee; and he criticized him, not as he did Trotsky (for “too far-reaching self-confidence and a disposition to be too much attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs”), but only for having “concentrated an enormous power in his hands” which he was uncertain Stalin would always know how to use with “sufficient caution.”  A few days later, after Stalin had used obscene language and made threats to Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, in connection with Lenin’s intervention in the Georgian affair, Lenin added a postscript to the Testament recommending Stalin’s removal from the General Secretaryship on the gournds of his rudeness and capriciousness- as being incompatible, however, only with that particular office.  On the whole, the reservations made about Trotsky must seem more serious when it comes to politics proper, and his “ability” to be an administrative executant rather more than a potential leader in his own right.  It is only fair to add that it was to Trotsky that Lenin turned in support in his last attempts to influence policy; but Trotsky failed to carry out Lenin’s wishes.

The Testament was concerned to avoid a split between Trotsky and Stalin.  The solution proposed- an increase in the size of the Central Committee- was futile.  In his last articles Lenin went on attack “bureaucratic misrule and willfulness,” spole of the condition of the State machine as “repugnant,” and concluded gloomily, “We lack sufficienct civilization to enable us to pass straight on to Socialism although we have the political requisities.”

“The political requisities…”- but these were precisely the activity of the Party and governmental leadership which he was condemming in practice.  Over the past years he had personally launched the system of rule by a centralized Party against- if necessary- all other social forces.  He had creaded the Bolsheviks, the new type of party, centralized and discilpline, in the first palce. He had preserved its identity in 1917, when before his arrival from exile the Bolshevik leaders had aligned themselves on a course of conciliation with the rest of the Revolution.  There seems little doubt that without him, the Social Democrats would have reunited and would have taken the normal position of such a movement in the State.  Instead, he had kept the Bolsheviks intact, and then sought and won sole power- again against much resistance from his own followers…

…In destroying the Deomcratic tendency within the Communist Party, Lenin in effect threw the game to the manipulators of the Party machine.  Henceforward, the appartus was to be first the most powerful and later the only force within the Party.  The answer to the question “Who will rule Russia?” became simply “Who will win a faction fight confined to a narrow section of the leadership?” Candidates for power had already shown their hands.  As Lenin lay in the twilight of the long decline from his last stroke, striving to correct all this, they were already at grips in the first round of the struggle which was to culminate in the Great Purge.

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Paul M. Collins, Jr. is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas. He is author of Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making. In this article, Collins discusses interest group participation in the recently decided U.S. Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller and the future of Second Amendment litigation.

It is fair to say that one or two cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court stand out each term. I think it is evident that this term’s most salient case is District of Columbia v. Heller. In that 5-4 decision, the Court struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on the possession of privately owned handguns within District limits. In so doing, the Court clarified the meaning of the Second Amendment for the first time in almost 70 years by endorsing an individual right to keep and bear arms.

Aside from its significance in partially resolving the meaning of the Second Amendment, this case is notable as a means to illustrate the role of interest groups in the courts. Like many seminal constitutional decisions, such as Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade, the Heller decision originated as a test case. Test cases operate as a type of quid-pro-quo. An interest group uses the case in an attempt to etch its policy preferences into law. In exchange, the group finances the case for the litigant named in the suit by providing that litigant with attorneys, performing legal research, and paying court fees. Robert Levy of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, began the case in an attempt to get the Supreme Court to clarify the meaning of the Second Amendment. Dick Heller was handpicked by Levy as an ideal litigant: Heller was a security guard who carried a gun at work, but could not possess his handgun at home as a means of self defense. The idea was that Heller, as a law abiding citizen with a connection to the law enforcement community, would be a sympathetic figure in the eyes of the courts. Evidently, this was a good choice as the Court ruled in favor of Heller in nullifying the District of Columbia’s ban on the private possession of handguns.

In addition to providing an excellent example of a test case, the Heller decision is also significant for understanding the primary method of interest group litigation: the amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief. These briefs provide a means for organized interests to furnish the courts with legal argumentation in an attempt to persuade the justices to accept their interpretations of the law. A total of 67 amicus briefs were filed from a wide variety of interests, ranging from academics to civil rights and liberties organizations to gun advocacy groups. These amici illustrated the reality that the Supreme Court is a public policy battleground in which organized interests clash in their attempts to manipulate the law to further their own agendas. The interest groups highlighted to the justices the broad policy significance of the case, discussing a wide assortment of issues, including matters of children’s safety, racial discrimination, and federalism, in addition to their primary focus on the Second Amendment. While most of the amicus briefs focused on the legal and historical interpretation of the right to keep and bear arms, several amicus briefs provided the Court with social scientific evidence, reading more like statistical analyses than standard legal briefs.

47 amicus briefs were filed supporting Heller, representing a wide assortment of organizations, including the Congress of Racial Equality, Disabled Veterans for Self Defense, the Foundation for Free Expression, and the National Rifle Association. 20 amicus briefs supported the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Bar Association, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and National Network to End Domestic Violence. These amicus briefs appeared to influence the justices’ decision making. Indeed, the Court’s majority and dissenting opinions cited more than 15 separate amicus briefs and Justice Breyer was particularly attentive to the arguments raised by the amici. Although the number of amicus briefs supporting a particular litigant is not necessarily determinative of the outcome of cases, the Court nonetheless tends to side with the litigant supported by the largest number of briefs, consistent with the Heller decision.

A particularly important point is what the Supreme Court did not do in the case. That is, the Court did not address the issue of incorporation: whether the Second Amendment applies to the states. While the Bill of Rights was originally intended to protect individuals from the actions of the federal government, over time the Supreme Court has extended most, but not all, provisions in the Bill of Rights to the states. However, in Heller, the court did not extend the Second Amendment to the states. What this means in practice is that we will see a surge of Second Amendment cases percolate throughout the federal court system for decades to come. To be sure, most of these cases will be brought by interest groups seeking to both incorporate the Second Amendment and have the courts clarify exactly what restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms are permissible under the Constitution. Thus, Heller should be viewed as a starting point for the contemporary understanding of the Second Amendment, rather than the final word on the subject.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.  In the article below he reflects on the Presidential candidates.  See his previous OUPblogs here.

We like to think that we are agents of our will, autonomous individuals with the power to make our mark on and even write history. Political campaigns operate under the assumption that strategy matters. A wrong word, a lapel pin, a mole on the face, a former pastor, a wife’s comment, even the use of a laptop - any of of these can make or break a candidate.

And so, looking at the polls today, we might conclude that Obama has run a near-flawless campaign, and McCain has made one one mistake after another and has had the worst luck.

But elections are about fundamentals, and the life cycles of political regimes. Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter could have been consummate politicos in 1932 and 1980, but voters were just not prepared to give these men and the parties they represented a second chance.

The truth is not everything has gone Obama’s way this year. He had to deal with Jeremiah Wright’s, Michelle Obama’s, and Jesse Jackson’s poorly worded comments, for instance. Right now, he is still working on finding a cogent equivocation for how the “surge” in Iraq worked but that he opposed it when it was first proposed. But the point is that he nevertheless appears to have cruised through these problems.

I don’t think the fact that Obama is probably a more artful politician than McCain explains the striking contrast in their fortunes as they now stand. It almost seems like McCain stumbles at every turn, and Obama can do no wrong. Even when it comes to justifying his initial opposition to the “surge,” it seems like Obama’s anti-war supporters have already decided that the good news came too little and too late. (As was Herbert Hoover’s decision only in 1931 to provide direct government assistance to thousands of Americans without work; as was Carter’s anti-inflation program in 1978. Incidentally, both Hoover and Carter,
like McCain, were characterized as having been really unlucky too.)

In every election in which the electorate collectively sighs, “too little, too late,” and the standard bearer of the incumbent party keeps running into what appears to be a string of bad luck, then his / their time is up. The question is, will 2008 be the last hurrah of the conservative regime founded by Ronald Reagan that is rapidly losing its legitimacy (as were the election years of 1928 and 1976 were for the regimes respectively founded by Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt), or is the country unequivocably ready to move on? Every political regime, liberal or conservative, like every empire, has its rise, its crest, and its demise. The relevant question is where does 2008 fit in the life cycle of the current conservative regime.

Strategic blunders may not have as much explanatory power as we think. After all, we are usually more forgiving of the boy who cried “wolf” once than when he did it thrice - the political impact of a blunder depends on whether or not our patience has been worn thin. Luck is the error term we put in an equation to explain what will and actions fail to explain. What precedes both will and luck are electoral fundamentals and the life cycle of political regimes.

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Today on OUPblog we’re celebrating the 90th birthday of Nelson Mandela. Elleke Boehmer, author of Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction, is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford.. In the piece below Professor Boehmer recounts moments spent observing ‘on the ground’ the symbolic legacies of Mandela during a research trip to South Africa at the end of 2006 and in 2008 – legacies at once durable yet intangible.

November 2006, the new Johannesburg. South Africa’s largest city is a capital of crime, as always, but it is also more exuberantly on the move than ever before. The security walls are higher than during the apartheid years but the inner-city malls are vibrant with cultural confidence, heightened today by the luminous purple of the blooming jacaranda trees. And Mandela, the name, the international image, forms an indelible part of this atmosphere, even now, years after he stood down as president.

It’s not only because I’m sensitized by writing about Mandela that I’m picking up on the widely broadcast references. Madiba seems to be the universal emblem for all that is celebratory in this country still struggling to shake off its legacy of social and economic division. Much that is edgy, far-sighted, and integrative about these racing streets, like the new steel Mandela bridge sweeping from the university district into the inner-city, feels like a tribute to him.

P.W. Botha died yesterday and the newspaper billboards wired up on lampposts in amongst the jacaranda flowers announce Mandela’s words of tribute to his old rival. In a leafy suburb my friend and I visit the Nelson Mandela Children’s Foundation, a fine house set in a manicured garden, which also houses the Oprah Winfrey Foundation: two transnational black icons nestled side-by-side. Downtown in Kort Street, a row of shops so short it does not appear on the city map, is Kapitan’s Indian restaurant, where Mandela once acquired his taste for prawn curry. Kapitan’s is the only venue from the cosmopolitan 1950s that has survived, though today it is closed, the shuttered shop-front unwelcoming.

Come to think of it, though the marks of Mandela are pervasive they are at the same time strangely elusive. Like a presiding genie, Madiba feels to be all around, an eminence about to be perceived just round every corner, and yet he is nowhere to be pinpointed. What does Mandela mean to the city’s citizens today? We travel to the Constitutional Court, where Johannesburg’s infamous Fort prison once stood, through which Mandela and Gandhi passed. The ‘permanent’ installation showing Mandela’s cell, complete with prison blanket, has been temporarily shut down for refurbishment. Beyond a dismantled archive, will we be able to find the palpable presence of Nelson somewhere, under this perfect blue African sky?

We drive to my friend’s favourite shop, in an upmarket shopping centre, which sells a variety of expensive retro-chic t-shirts bearing the image of Steve Biko and Drum magazine covers. However Mandela’s image, now too clichéed, too establishment, decorates no cap or t-shirt. Only outside on the pavement a street-trader sells clay fridge-magnets of Nelson in his trademark Madiba shirts, alongside other tourist trinkets.

We continue on to the Nelson Mandela Square nestled within the even more upmarket conurbation of Sandton City. Here a bronze statue of a gormlessly smiling Madiba in jive-step, paid for by public subscription, towers over a series of smart restaurants catering for an upwardly mobile clientele. Among the shoppers strolling by, few other than the tourists bother to squint up at the strangely uninspiring figure blocked against the sun.

The question arises, has Mandela the commercial trademark of the Rainbow Nation come to overshadow his other points of cultural reference in the showcase of the new South Africa—his significance as an HIV/AIDS champion, a unifying national myth? Is he now at once too popular and too predictable to be acknowledged as the cornerstone of the country’s self-perception, especially from the insecure perspective of the current ANC government? Forty-four years ago, when he was arrested on the main road from Durban to Johannesburg only miles from where my best friend once lived, he was as a man-on-the-run at once more distant and yet ubiquitous to his people than he is as one-time leader now.

A mark of the many roles Mandela played in his life-time—from Creon in a production of Antigone to Black Pimpernel—is that he is cited as a logo and heroic image within so many areas of cultural reference in this country whose story of moral triumph he authored. Yet it is in the nature of a symbol to be partial, not to encapsulate the whole story—especially remembering that its actual referent is here in this city today, walking about perhaps in his Houghton garden. The new South Africa both equates to the Old Man’s creation and yet, populous twenty-first-century country that it is, multiply exceeds it. Sandile Dikeni reminds us: ‘My people are this many and more and their collective name is bigger than that of Nelson Mandela’.

In Lewis Nkosi’s 2006 Bildungsroman Mandela’s Ego, the boy Dumisa grows up in Zululand with the sense of Mandela as his life-mentor—the invisible household-spirit shaping the different stages of his life. Most South Africans could be described in the same terms as Dumisa. Mandela is the myth that they have lived and in some cases died by. Once again, his legacy extends everywhere through their lives, like a quiet music, yet he is nowhere to be precisely located.

Outside the Houses of Parliament in Cape Town where Mandela once presided, another street-trader has a stall under the historic oak trees. He is among tens of other street-traders here in the one-time Dutch East India Company gardens. A short way off, as the ironies of historical proximity have it, stands a statue of Cecil Rhodes pointing north into Africa, at the base of the statue, Behold Your Hinterland. The stall is more or less within the direct line of Rhodes’s imperial gesture. The other stalls here on the oak avenue sell the usual fare: painted clay elephants, tin-can insects. This is why the street-trader in question stands out. His wares compared to these others are unique. No, this isn’t batik, he explains, but cloth cured in varying densities of rooibos tea. The subject of these painted cloths, none affordable to locals, is African wildlife. The only human subject is Nelson Mandela, full-face, once again smiling, hopeful, staring out into South Africa along the sight-lines marked by Rhodes.

The ironies of historical proximity. Mandela and Rhodes. Botha and Mandela. Mandela, one journalist observes, is the icon who outgrew his country. Much as did Rhodes one hundred years ago. Already the world’s politicians are lining up to pay tribute to Mandela on his 90th birthday. Yet I am told that he himself would prefer to spend the day in quiet, perhaps in his garden, which, even in prison, has been his preferred refuge in times of trouble across the great length of his life.

–

June 2008, a jaded Johannesburg. Only two weeks ago South Africans desperate for jobs and opportunities launched xenophobic attacks on Zimbabweans and other African migrants. The Rainbow nation’s bright colours are faded almost to invisibility. I arrive in the city to discuss my book and everywhere two strong responses confront me. Yes, people say, Madiba is still our national success story. But, at the same time, we feel we are running out of hope, running out of myth, unless the great elderly man once again makes himself heard.

Throughout I have been struck by the number of times people have asked whether I have met Mandela. Have I been touched by him, in the flesh? Across his career Mandela has persuaded people through the tangible force of his personality. But now, it is clear, his fellow South Africans are in need of his presence as never before. They want feel his guidance but they sense that he is withdrawing from them, not into myth, but into deep old age. They see that his message of hope for the future based in hospitality, in getting on together, has never been as pertinent as now, but they know, too, that his message requires his presence.

South Africans today are as hungry as they ever were for the Mandela myth, yet the future will have to find innovative new ways of making that myth real in their lives.

Elleke Boehmer’s Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction publishes in the UK today. Her previous books for OUP include the anthology Empire Writing, and she edited Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys. She also published her latest novel, Nile Baby, in June with Ayebia Clarke Publishing.

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