Politics: National

As a true son of Scotland*, let me offer some opinions about the vote for independence sure to offend everyone.

In another Great Britain, independence vote leader Alex Salmond would have met a very different fate from the Blair-Cameron meek acquiescence. King James, the Scot who gained the throne of more powerful and richer Britain (and added the name "Great"), would have beheaded him. Churchill would have had him shot. During the high Empire, he would have been shipped off to the Raj or some other posting to work off his energies. Even during the height of the Cold War, when the U.S. Navy operated nuclear subs from Holy Loch, Salmond's vote would have never made it out of Parliament.

He strikes me as a bit of a scoundrel, a hustler politician making impossible promises. The economic risks are serious — pointing this out seems to have increased the "Yes" vote — but there will be unintended consequences, many unfortunate. And peaceful "Scottish Independence" seems like the kind of boutique hobby that is only possible in a place that is placidly, but unsustainably, divorced from the real world.

Present at the Creation: Chiang Kai-shek, FDR and Churchill at the Cairo Conference during World War II.

President Romney wants a "mighty" military. President Putin might be willing to fight a nuclear war to take down American "hegemony." President Xi is asserting a Chinese regional hegemony that writes its own international law. The brutality of ISIS is making Presidents Assad and Saddam Hussein look like pillars of stability by comparison. Americans, or at least the D.C. elites, claiming to value straight talk recoiled — quelle horreur! quelle gaffe! — when President Obama said "We don't have a strategy yet" regarding ISIS.

Better, I suppose they are saying, to further wreck the country with more of the Bush/Cheney fire, aim, ready. As the tour d'horizon above shows, these are unquiet times, made more so for those who know what happened 100 years ago.

As social critic Jim Kunstler says, we're not the world's hall monitor. On the other hand, Pax America, for all its fumbles and stains, has ensured the longest period without a general war since the 19th century. This was no accident.

Most American leaders of the 1940s, Franklin Roosevelt foremost among them, believed Hitler rose to unleash the most destructive war in history because of American isolationism. Both in idealism and realpolitik, FDR hoped that a United Nations anchored by the five victorious allied powers would prevent a recurrence. (He had the foresight to insist that China be included in the Security Council). But it would be anchored by American power.

Stalin wrecked the hopes for the former, but the latter prevented a hot World War III. Our might was always based foremost on having the world's top economy, its gains widely shared, the greatest middle class in history, the commons…and relatively high tax rates.

This is the 45th anniversary of Apollo 11, the first manned moon landing. It marked the greatest achievement yet of a burst of federal funding of science begun under President Dwight Eisenhower. The 50th year since college students from the north went to Mississippi for Freedom Summer. Fifty years ago the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. President Lyndon Johnson fought a war in Vietnam, misbegotten though it was, while declaring war in poverty. Soon, we will mark the half century since passage of the Voting Rights Act. In 1963, the Clean Air Act was approved, followed in 1972 by the Clean Water Act. In 1970, President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce these laws.

What was the nation that did these things?

A few things stand out. It was a nation with the greatest middle class in history, the greatest industrial base the world had ever known, which made things — often with union hands, and even when not benefiting from the advances for working people ensured by organized labor. That nation believed in science and progress. It was run by two mass political parties encompassing conservatives, liberals and centrists. Taxes were high on the rich and progressive. Productivity was widely shared.

That nation is gone.

The Douaumont Ossuary at the Verdun battlefield. Inside are the remains of at least 130,000 unidentified French and German soldiers, a fraction of those killed in the battle.

Our world was made by the Great War. In big ways, with the creation of the Soviet Union, the bitter peace at Versailles that laid the foundation of World War II and the partition of the Ottoman Empire that recklessly established the multi-sectarian Iraq. In small ways: "No man's land," the trench coat, "shell shock," the tank. In France and Flanders (where "the poppies blow"),  farmers still regularly call out demolition crews to dispose of unexploded ordinance. The Great War destroyed four empires and killed the Western idea of progress that had endured since at least the Enlightenment.

When my grandmother spoke of "the war," she meant the one that began in August 1914, when she was 25. She never forgave "Kaiser Bill" for, by her lights, starting it. Or, for that matter, Woodrow Wilson. At least 20 million soldiers and civilians were killed. The 1918 flu pandemic, which followed the war like a judgment from the almighty, claimed as many as 100 million.

And yet, a century ago right now, hardly anyone expected the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to lead to apocalypse. Royals were murdered with some regularity. At worst, Austria-Hungary would punish Serbia. It had been a century since the last general European war and nations were tightly connected in the first great era of globalization. Monarchies were bound by blood. In 1910, Norman Angell wrote The Great Illusion, arguing that economic integration was so total that war was impossible (n.b. Washington and Beijing today). Most people agreed with him. And yet, as the month progressed, a war beyond anything the world had ever seen was inevitable.

The long summer of 1914 was said to have been especially beautiful. That's the way my grandmother remembered it. "The old world in its sunset was fair to see," wrote Winston Churchill.

Don't let the door hit you…

I hate to run with the herd but the election loss of Rep. Eric Cantor was historic, the first time a majority leader has ever been defeated in a primary. The most moronic headline in the mainstream press goes to the New York Times: "Bad Omen for Moderates." And Cantor was moderate, how?

Time Wounds All Heels. The revolution devours its children. The GOP is no longer a mass American political party but an extremist reactionary/theocratic party. And, as I recently wrote, the narrative of a civil war between the "establishment" and "tea party" is nonsense. A race to ever-more-crazy, sure.

One observation I found interesting in Big Sort America: Did Cantor lose because he was Jewish in a redistricted even-more red seat? He had hoped to become the first Jewish Speaker of the House.

After the jump, I give you some of the best stories Front Page Editor Dick Silc has assembled (and will add more as they develop):

A mass political party: Conservative Ronald Reagan, centrist Gerald Ford and liberal Nelson Rockefeller after a real intra-party battle in 1976.

Sorry, I don't buy it. Pretending that there is a titanic battle for "the soul of the party" between the "tea party" and the "establishment" provides much material for 24/7 media, which must always be fed. But there is little real disagreement. Where there is, it shows how the lunatic fringe that was once kept in the closet is now part of the GOP mainstream.

The Republicans, like the Democrats, was once a mass political party. That's the way politics have long been structured in these United States. We didn't have the plethora of parties that made up the polity of many European countries during much of the 20th century.

This conferred advantages. With conservative, liberal and "moderate" wings, each party could scoop up the maximum amount of voters and co-opt the emergence of third parties. Thus, for example, the liberal Democratic Party of FDR was also the home of Southern segregationists until Lyndon Johnson championed civil rights.