Month: October 2003

A new one is up, I just noticed. Now I’ll read it, and you can too.

I am still in a the mood to suggest books. Having read Roy Jenkins’ biography of Winston Churchill last year, I have gone a bit of a Churchill jag. I bought a bunch of his books, and have been picking around in them. One thing I’ve noticed is that you can drop some serious coin buying his out of print books. He is one of the greatest writers I have ever encountered, and there is almost literally not a single page that doesn’t have something good in it. One I picked up is the seven volumes of his collected war speeches, which is simply awesome. If you already have a basic familiarity with World War II, you will find many good things in there. In particular, Churchill’s reports to the House of Commons on the status of the war are tremendous — Lengthy, detailed, blunt about setbacks and disasters, respectful of his audience. We have no equivalent in the United States. One small item I found this evening, just flipping around was entitled “A speech to American troops during a visit to a southern army camp in the United States, June, 1942” and reads in its entirety thus:

I am enormously impressed by the thoroughness and precision with which the formation of the great war-time army of the United States is proceeding. The day will come when the British and American armies will march into countries, not as invaders, but as liberators, helping the people there who have been under the barbarian yoke. That day may seem long to those whose period of training spreads across the weeks and months. But when it comes, it will make amends for all the toil and discipline that has been undergone. Also, it will open the world to larger freedom and to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as the grand words of your Declaration of Independence put it.

This passage reminds me of Iraq, for obvious reasons. Even in the very dark times of the early months of World War II Churchill was already looking at the Anglospheric armies as liberators.

Fortunately, instead of having to throw together an enormous army on the fly, as we were doing in 1942, for Iraq we were able to employ a very powerful military already in existence. Money well frigging spent. We went into Iraq with the best military equipment the world has ever seen. We went into World War II with a tank, the Sherman, which was basically a rolling coffin when it encountered the high-velocity guns on the German tanks. (See Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II.) Never again.

After I recently put up a post about third parties, I ran across this excellent passage by Samuel Eliot Morison, from his Oxford History of the American People. The book is a staple at used book stores, and is frequently available for very little money. Morison is an old-time historian, basically a New Deal liberal in outlook. Anyway, Morison is basically patriotic and sensible, and tells the tale clearly and fairly, especially by contemporary standards.

Morison is here talking about Martin van Buren’s political machine in New York in the 1820s:

The Albany Regency’s political system in New York spread throughout the Union, although issues differed from state to state. Party organization in the Jackson era settled into a pattern that has changed little since. In contrast to its British prototype, which exists normally on the one level for electing members to Parliament, the American party existed in three layers, federal, state and municipal. Analysis of the Whig and Democratic parties and their successors reveals a bundle of local, sectional and class interests. Their cross sections, instead of displaying a few simple colors, were a jigsaw puzzle of radicalism and conservatism, nationalism and state’s rights, personal loyalties and local issues. Party strategy was directed toward accumulating as many bundles as possible, and statesmanship was the art of finding some person or principle common to all factions that would make them sink their differences and in union find strength.

And, I’d add, to be perfectly clear, “… and win elections.” This is the way it works and has pretty much always worked. And the question that ought to occur to anyone paying attention is this – how the heck else can you govern a continent-sized country composed of hundreds of millions of people?. I am heartened by the responses I got to the earlier post, which suggests that our ChicagoBoyz backbenchers are not attracted by the siren song of futile and counterproductive third party politics.

Don’t mess with Karlo.