If you look here you will see me proposing a hundred-or-so-year interpretive scheme for American political history at op-ed size. As I tell my graduate students roughly once a week, all interpretive schemes must fail to account for everything; the question of their success is necessarily therefore one of degree. And interpretive schemes put at a length of 1000 words will by that fact alone be more likely to account for less. Still, they take less time to read. So there it is to poke holes in, if it pleases you to do so.
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The Edge of the American West 
22 comments
January 31, 2008 at 11:45 am
teofilo
Subject-verb agreement problem in the first sentence.
January 31, 2008 at 12:58 pm
eric
That, I’m blaming on the editors.
January 31, 2008 at 6:08 pm
eric
So there it is to poke holes in, if it pleases you to do so.
Or don’t, you know, if it doesn’t.
January 31, 2008 at 7:42 pm
teofilo
I did my part.
January 31, 2008 at 9:33 pm
urbino
You’re certainly getting some interesting comments over there. I don’t read TNR (print or website); is the reaction to your essay typical of reader comments on their site?
January 31, 2008 at 9:41 pm
ari
Eric, wisely, doesn’t read the comments. But that’s pretty typical. They’re a rabid lot over there: bad craziness (all due respect to Hunter Thompson).
January 31, 2008 at 9:45 pm
urbino
Damn shame.
The last commenter did ask an interesting question, though. Is the GOP’s problem really repeated failures at governing competently, or is it just that they’re trying to hold together too many too disparate interests?
(NB: That may not be the TNR commenter’s actual question, but it’s a question.)
January 31, 2008 at 9:57 pm
ari
I won’t speak for him. I’m too busy reading what I think is a Danish newspaper that just linked to this site. The Internets is Magic!
January 31, 2008 at 9:59 pm
eric
Their problem is, the constituency to actually, really roll back the size of government is nearly nonexistent, because nobody wants to make the hard choices. And the constituency for pure conservatism — i.e., everything is fine, do nothing — is too small to elect a president except in relatively flush times (like, I’m tempted to say, 2000). So they have to promise either that they’ll do something they won’t do — which will eventually annoy people — or that they’ll do nothing — which will eventually annoy people.
Contrast the Democrats, who are always promising something and should, if they have a majority, deliver something that looks like what they promised. They only lose when they go too far down that path.
January 31, 2008 at 10:00 pm
eric
My Danish is a
cheese onelittle rusty. Can you translate, svp?January 31, 2008 at 10:03 pm
ari
I’m pretty sure one of the articles contains no words save for some variant of, “heeeeeeliummm.” But I can’t say for sure.
January 31, 2008 at 10:03 pm
ari
Also: don’t eat rusty cheese danishes. Mom always said.
January 31, 2008 at 10:06 pm
ari
And one more thing: the Danish columnist/blogger who linked to us looks a lot like me. Which also means that he looks like Terry Francona. Eerie.
January 31, 2008 at 10:24 pm
urbino
So they have to promise either that they’ll do something they won’t do — which will eventually annoy people — or that they’ll do nothing — which will eventually annoy people.
Either, though, is a different thing from what they’ve done recently, right? I mean, the problem with the Bush/Cheney/DeLay era GOP isn’t either of those things, really; it’s that they’re colossally incompetent, not to mention corrupt. Bush pretty much ran on doing stuff (“compassionate conservative” and whatnot), and then tried doing stuff. He’s just unbelievably bad at it.
January 31, 2008 at 10:34 pm
eric
See, but I regard compassionate conservatism as a variant on traditional communitarian conservatism. There’s not a lot of daylight between it and, say, Grant’s idea of turning over Indian policy to the churches, or Hoover’s notion that non-governmental associations were sufficient to meet crises.
January 31, 2008 at 10:34 pm
eric
And the GOP has no historic monopoly on corruption.
January 31, 2008 at 10:43 pm
urbino
Certainly not. Didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. Just that that was one of the current GOP’s governing problems, as opposed to either making promises and not following through, or not even bothering to promise.
I also didn’t mean to say there was anything terribly knew about Bush’s campaign promises. My only point was that the current GOP’s governance failure — incompetence and corruption — strikes me as a different kind of failure than either of the 2 you described.
January 31, 2008 at 10:44 pm
urbino
“new” — not “knew”
It’s late.
January 31, 2008 at 10:47 pm
eric
Well, we’re on — or back on — to the question of whether the Bush administration really represents a historic low. I expect one can readily make the case that it does in degree; I don’t know that it does in kind.
And with that, yes: late. Tomorrow is another one.
February 1, 2008 at 5:56 am
eric
A comment I’m thinking about.
February 1, 2008 at 6:23 am
Ben Alpers
That is an interesting comment, Eric (and it’s a very interesting TNR piece, too).
One thing seems to me to be missing from this point in the comment in question:
I think 1896 was absolutely crucial in consolidating this image of the GOP.
February 1, 2008 at 11:35 am
eric
I think 1896 was absolutely crucial in consolidating this image of the GOP
I’m not sure 1920 wasn’t even more important.