BOOK REVIEW: "ILL FARES THE LAND" by Tony Judt

I'll sheepishly admit that I came back and read this book by historian Tony Judt, after once rejecting it after reading ten pages a year or so ago. Why? Well, I've just become more and more open to the way he looked at the world. Maybe I'm becoming a big boy now. What at first read to me like a jeremiad against my general belief in free markets and creative destruction is, in fact, just that. It's me that's coming around to the fact that my political persuasion in 2013 is not really what it was in 2003 nor 1993.

For years I've proudly worn the "libertarian" lapel pin and flown the free minds/free markets flag in things I've written, in how I've voted and in my pontifications to anyone who might want to know what I think about things (not many, let me tell ya). This past year I decided to take the pin off. I'm no libertarian – or if I am, I'm a totally fraudulent one. I'm just a namby-pamby liberal at the end of the day – no different from you, probably. My last bastion of rebelliousness against gutless conformity hath finally been broken.

I blame Tony Judt. Not entirely because of his final book, "ILL FARES THE LAND", though the ideas within it, which he espoused frequently throughout his books "POSTWAR" and "THINKING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY" have been percolating in my conscience for some time. No, it's due to a dawning mistrust of many actors and authority figures who make up life as we know it these days. The government, "the state", had always been my biggest, and sometimes my only, bugaboo. Until and even after the 2008 recession I had almost undying faith in markets, but my rhetoric and past proclamations to the contrary, I can't say that that's completely true anyone. I've always believed myself to be a "social liberal" on most issues, and for the most part I believe in capitalism as the best system of economic and societal organization ever created. Yet Judt's arguments for a return to many aspects the "social democracies" of FDR-era New Deal America and the postwar governments of Europe sound better now to me than they ever have at any time in my life. I'm willing to consider that the safety net could, and possibly should, be enlarged, and that this might in fact be a net positive for America and like-minded countries like the UK. I'm willing to consider that The State might actually be sometimes considered a guarantor of freedoms, rather than a suffocator of liberty.

Essentially, Judt's book, which was dictated to his assistants as he was sadly dying of ALS several years ago, and then published in 2010, is a small distillation of a core theme in all of his writing: that Western society was at its best in the postwar era of 1945-1980, and saw unprecedented advances in opportunity, equality, rights and wealth during these years. Judt believes in no uncertain terms that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan put the brakes on this, and pandered to humanity's more base instincts in the pursuit of profit for some at the expense of the many. This has led to an atomization of society and a painful inequality that we're still reeling under, in his telling, and a shredded safety net that leaves society's most vulnerable scared, sick and unable to advance in their own lifetimes. I'm not being unfair in stating his positions as being this starkly black and white, because that's exactly what they are. Pre-1980 = good; Post-1980 = bad.

There are many things I find preposterous and wrong in the way Judt writes about the post-social democracy years. This is a guy who is more reactionary than any 1980s conservative, except he's looking nostalgically backward at the State-managed utopias of the 50s and 60s, rather than at the "family morals" of that era. Judt overreaches greatly, and celebrates a made-up world in which we all had a unity of purpose and enjoyed being under the benevolent hand of the US or UK or Swedish government, up to and including a call for a return to a pre-automobile era in which we all crowded together on buses. Judt fails to recognize that capitalism and how people define themselves vis-a-vis The State are always evolving and changing, and that what worked in 1955 needs to also be informed by the knowledge of what worked in 1980, 1994 and in 2013 – and that knowledge includes why the people of England elected Thatcher three times and the people of the US elected Ronald Reagan twice (three times as well, if you count the first George Bush). We didn't just become stupefied and lame in 1980 – Judt's social democracies, as currently constituted, were choking under the economic dead weight of what they had wrought.

It's the sort of government-knows-best moralism that I can't stand. Judt also seems to forget that humanity is made up of widely varying levels of intelligence, and that, unfortunately, there really is and will always be a natural stratification of humanity along intelligence lines. That said – moralism is the main reason I recommend this book. Judt is at his best when he encourages readers to consider political views as having an intensely moral component. Not, "Will this proposed policy fit my political views?", but "Is this policy the right and moral thing to do for the most number of people?". Health care is a perfect example. The social democracies, with the exception of the US, enacted state-controlled policies of health care that certainly have their flaws, but that also ensure that health care is a "right" that is effectively free and inalienable, provided in exchange for consent to a higher rate of taxation. Was this the right thing to do? Talk to a Canadian, or a Brit, or a Swede. Ask them if they'd like to switch to the United States' model of health care. I've yet to find one that would.

There is a moral dimension in extolling the profit motive above all else, and I'm getting tired of defending the latter (to myself, especially). I'm a guy who went and got an MBA in the 1990s (instead of the poverty-making Masters in English Literature that I really wanted), and one that finds much to admire about American business. Even back then, though, I had my doubts about many aspects of modern capitalism as practiced. I think that the way public companies are run in the United States is a big problem (short-term profits and stock market gains driving short-term, profit-above-all-else behavior – which is not healthy for a company long-term, nor for the society it sits in). I'm fed up with the complicated ties between government and banks and Wall Street; for instance, I would greatly prefer a simple set of well-understood rules for, say, mortgages – like, "all borrowers need to put 20% down before they can buy a house" - and Fannie & Freddie and the complicated hedge schemes and derivatives can die out. I, like Judt, would like to see a safety net that successfully eliminates poverty, squalor and need in the richest country on earth. I even can see some sense in the arguments for publicly-funded broadcasting, where I saw only stupidity before. His book, along with my observations of the world since 2008, has me adjusting my first principles a bit, and I think that's a good thing.

If anything, I'll work to incorporate a more moral dimension into how I think about spending, regulation and taxation issues. I was already a libertarian apostate on guns (I hate 'em) and on some criminal justice issues (I'm actually a bit of a right-wing nut when it comes to locking up violent criminals). I think the mark of a healthy society is one that looks at what's worked in the past, what's working now and what's broken, and continually readjusts to fit present realities. If that means that we address certain aspects of modern life with state-run solutions that private enterprise isn't effectively tackling, then so be it. (I also still very much believe in the opposite – like, say, the post office). I may not pine for a pure State-run social democracy a la Sweden in the 60s, but I'm willing to consider that there's a reason it worked for the Swedish people at the time, and that they've retained elements of it fifty years later out of choice and because it works. This, for me, is progress, if you want to call it that. Thanks to Tony Judt and his infuriating little book for helping me along the path.

“AMERICAN TEACHER”

I went to a special screening of this praise-the-teachers documentary at my kid’s school the other night, and a friend mentioned to me beforehand that he’d hoped that “it would be the antidote to ‘Waiting For Superman’”. I told him I hoped not, at which point he gasped and the lights dimmed. Afterward, he incredulously asked me, “You actually liked ‘Waiting For Superman’??!? It was totally anti-teacher!”, at which point I threw up. Then I corrected him: “Not anti-teacher in the least. Anti-teachers' union. Big, big difference”. This failed to calm him, and it dawned upon me, as it often has before, that a very easy way to arrive at a point of view is to completely dismiss logic, common sense and facts in order to serve a preordained opinion that will be readily accepted by your peers. Except when it's not.

If you actually watched the pro-child, pro-parent, pro-teacher 2010 documentaries “Waiting For Superman” or “The Lottery” with your eyes and ears open, both of which are devastatingly straightforward in their diagnoses of the problems facing American public education today, you know that they were anything but anti-teacher. Both explicitly made the argument, as “American Teacher” does ad nauseum, that the most important factor in determining whether a child learns or not is the quality of his or her teacher in the classroom. No ifs, ands or buts from anyone here. Study after study has proven that a great, highly-motivated teacher who loves children and works hard to ensure their success is infinitely more valuable in an individual child’s life than an army of tenured, battle axe, just-waiting-for-my-pension teachers who can’t be disciplined, coached nor fired. Having good genetics certainly helps a kid, as do parents at home committed to a child’s education – but it’s that lone teacher at the front of the class that really makes the difference, particularly for kids “on the bubble”, who might  otherwise have some innate smarts but no ability to apply them without patient and enthusiastic guidance.

Living in a town (San Francisco) where anything that smacks of right-of-center (the center being the left here) is heresy and dare not speak its name, it’s pretty easy to badmouth a film like “Waiting For Superman” and expect 99 out of 100 people to nod their heads in violent agreement. Yet surely the left and the right-of-left can both agree on the teacher findings – and surely we can agree that anything that might undermine children’s ability to have a great education should be looked at intensely and skeptically. That’s one reason why I really liked “AMERICAN TEACHER”. It serves no agenda but that of the, uh, American teacher (beside that of the child, of course) – and making sure that the great teachers are recognized as such, and paid accordingly.

Obviously, they are not today. The profession, as the documentary makes clear, may attract some of our best and brightest right out of college, but it can't and doesn't usually retain them. The salaries simply can't support a family, and right around the time these enthusiastic and energized young teachers start hitting their late 20s and 30s, the reality of the salaries they're paid and the inability to match their peers in other professions makes starting families and supporting children completely untenable without ridiculous personal sacrifice. "American Teacher" shows us the cream of the crop & the salt of the earth in New York, Texas, San Francisco and elsewhere working multiple jobs, struggling hard and often just flat-out quitting the profession just when it's become obvious to them, their students and everyone around them that teaching wasn't just a vocation for them - it was truly a calling.

Often they don't even get that far. In the "last in, first fired" system espoused, promulgated and perputuated by the unions, many of our best teachers can't make it out of their early pre-tenure years without being pink-slipped multiple times, assigned to the worst schools and burning out, when they're not fully laid off. The well-done film is far from a screed. I almost wish it was far more direct in naming names and calling for solutions, yet there's certainly room for the "velvet touch" as well. We have to arrive at reform somehow. Producer Ninive Calegari (who personally screened this for my son's school that night) and director Vanessa Roth make it very clear whose side they're on - the overworked, underpaid teachers and children they're there to teach - but very pointedly don't bring up the unions directly and instead focus solely on salaries and lack of work/life balance.

They very briefly bring out a Washington DC city politician whose name is escaping me right now (not former mayor Adrian Fenty) to talk up the (excellent) reforms Michelle Rhee tried to make there to bend the unions and allow her demonstrably superior teachers to make a competive wage, before being hounded out by the Democratic establishment status quo. His inclusion in the film is quite telling, and tells me that Calegari and Roth have a pretty good idea of what needs to change to get teachers where they need to be. They're just not ready to say it for fear of alienating those who currently advocate a timid, meek "Race to the Top" sort of reform.

So let's talk about those teacher salaries for a second, and ask a few questions about who's being served by a system with rigid hiring, firing and tenure rules almost wholly run and managed by American teachers' unions.

Are American children being served?

Of course not. They are denied access to many of our brightest minds and most motivated teachers, who choose other professions that pay more, and are often stuck with those teachers who managed to stay around long enough to gain tenure. Sometimes these teachers are nonetheless excellent, and sometimes they're not - but it's all about a system that serves the grown-ups and not the kids.

Is American competitiveness being served?

Not if you look at our test scores. This first-world leader, bestriding the world in numerous quote-unquote competitive areas, falls somewhere in the middle of the globe across the board in math, science, reading and other key areas that will make or break this country as its population ages. We have a dynamic 21st-century economy being serviced by a 19th-century education model, with "reform" moving like molasses. The film compares us to South Korea and Finland, in which teachers are revered both in word and in deed, and we're far below these countries in every measurable standard of scholastic achievement.

Are great teachers being served?

No way. They get pension benefits and often lock in collective bargaining gains that help their marginal standard of living move up (no matter what the economy), but in so doing, are constantly subject to pink slips in their early vulnerable years, and never get to reap a salary that is actually in line with their worth to the children, and the society, they serve. The ones who stay often do so out of a great altruistic love for teaching children, and we're all the better for it. It's heartbreaking that so many of them don't.

Are mediocre or bad teachers being served?

Absolutely. They're the only real winners in the union game. They get those benefits and the lifetime job security that comes with the union card, and are rarely if ever held accountable for being depressingly mediocre in their ability to motivate and inspire children. Only in government and union work - often the same thing these days, right? - is this the case.

The film doesn't make this clear, but I'll try to: the reform starts when we name the problem. Let competive and creative destruction loose on the American system of education, let teachers compete to be the best at what they do, and let parents have a choice of which public schools to send their children to. The mantra should always be, "the money follows the child". That's who matters here, not the adults.

If our society is committed to spending tax dollars on educating our populace, then let parents take their portion of the per-child cut and spend it at the schools that will best educate their children in the manner that they see fit. Reform, growth and evolution follows naturally and organically, just as it does in all other spheres of life. Then let the teachers at those best-performing schools be rewarded for what they did to get their students prepared for life, and be comfortable with different standards for different schools (as opposed to a one-size-fits-all "No Child Left Behind" federal mandate). That's not anti-teacher at all in my book. That's pro-teacher to the extreme, just like this film.

"THE LOTTERY"

2010 was the year that "my side" of the debate over how best to educate America's children began to be articulated in places beyond libertarian and conservative echo chambers, and strangely enough, it was a series of movies that seemed to move the debate the furthest. I still have not seen the much-heralded "WAITING FOR SUPERMAN", made by the same folks behind the Al Gore global warming scare film "An Inconvenient Truth", but it was the topic du jour among many of the liberal parents we know well & whose kids our son goes to public school with. All of a sudden it became OK in 2010 for Democrats, "normal folks" and the like, to say questioning, skeptical and even disparaging things about teachers' unions and the stranglehold they have over the declining state of American government-run schools. That film, along with the unceremonious forced resignation of DC School superintendent Michelle Rhee, a hero to many across the political spectrum for her no-nonsense stand against educational bureaucracy business-as-usual, seemed to have helped push many former agnostics into the school choice/radical school reform camp. It's about friggin' time.

For the small number of people who saw "THE LOTTERY", which I enthusiastically watched several weeks ago along with a lesser school-choice documentary called "THE CARTEL", the sides are obviously very clearly drawn. This is a masterful documentary that focuses on the school enterprise zones that have been tentatively set up inside of Harlem, New York City, as well as the desperate parents looking for any kind of alternative to the dead-end public schools their children are "zoned" to attend school in. Every one of these parents is African-American, and they are strivers, several of whom had zero opportunities of their own growing up in the same exact neighborhoods, and they see wasted lives of crime, illiteracy and menial work for their children without an alternative to the stultifying schools that the educrats would otherwise choose to force their kids into.

Thanks to forward-looking programs pursued by Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg, and through the efforts of educational choice superstars like Geoffrey Canada and Eva Moskowitz, Harlem has a series of charter schools that emphasize educational rigor and straight-up results. They don't emphasize tenure, teacher grievances and the bloating of administrative staff - these are for-profit schools that must demonstrate results for a long-neglected, very poor student body, or they will unceremoniously lose their charters. Parents, naturally - but perhaps surprisingly to white liberals who once thought that school reform efforts was being run by greedy Wall Street Republicans and their fat cat friends - are desperate to get in, but they must undergo a lottery, since the demand for the few slots is so small.

The film follows these four families as they try to wend their way through the process of getting into Moskowitz' Harlem Success Academy, along with hundreds of other families who'd love to find a way out of Harlem poverty for their children. This school and others like it in the district are profiled, and it's dumbfounding for me and for many of the parents to see the schools' own ambitious charter writ so clearly, and in such marked contrast to that of most government-run schools - To get every child in the school into college. Period. Whatever it takes. In low-income, African-American Harlem this is a big deal, and you desperately root for each family as you learn more about the schools and families themselves.

Of course, the neighborhood activists and the teacher's unions are none too pleased. Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, mouths the usual do-nothing status quo platitudes, and various protesters-for-hire from Acorn (Acorn!) are bussed in from other parts of the east coast to do her and her cronies' bidding. The director of this film, Madeleine Sackler, is obviously trying to shine a light on just how obstructionist the keepers of the status quo can be to helping ambitious families from getting a quality education for their children. After all, one chink in the armor of the government-educational complex and that might be enough for the whole thing to come tumbling down. It might actually (gasp) introduce competition, experimentation, the profit motive, the ability to fire bad teachers, the ability to shut down bad schools, the ability to do away with one-size-fits all "teaching to the test", and so on. This is anathema to those holding the keys to the complex, and it's one big reason why more than half of the African-American boys in the United States aren't graduating from high school.

Not all of the families in "THE LOTTERY" actually win the lottery. It's heartbreaking for the ones that don't. I thought this was a terrifically-paced documentary that should pick up thousands of new converts to the good fight, and as well it should.

BOOK REVIEW: “REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN EUROPE” by Christopher Caldwell

Earth’s last decade has been primarily defined geopolitically by what’s now commonly referred to as “The Clash of Civilizations”, East vs. West, Muslims vs. Judeo-Christians, and so on. Depending on how this stretch of history plays out, the years 2001 to the present will likely be held up by historians as a time when the descendents of the Ottoman Empire attempted, successfully and with stealth, to reassemble the empire in the West. It may be a quiet and unplanned revolution, but it’s a revolution nonetheless, and how Europe (and to a lesser extent, the US) responds to it is a story that’s only growing in magnitude every year. Burqa bans, headscarf bans, minaret bans and increasingly loud disdain for Muslim ways have been on the rise in Europe the past few years. The terror threat from the East continues to be a real fact of life on the ground in Europe, as elsewhere. I was glad to see a book that tried to make sense of it all, how Europe very quickly became a continent of immigrants from outside of Europe, and what it will mean for the 21st century.

And I suppose I should make my prejudices clear before I go further: I’m a huge champion of American immigration in all its forms. My philosophy is that people follow the jobs, and if the jobs are there, let the people come to fill them, whether legal or illegal. If the people abide by the norms and rules of the “host culture”, and don’t expect taxpayer subsidization, then they’ll have no bigger champion than myself. I can envision a time in the future where national borders cease to be meaningful, and I like the sound of a world in which that’s the case. Oh, and I’m also a raging atheist. I also, uh, dislike terrorism very much, and am willing to go out on a limb and culturally profile the perpetrators of 21st-century terrorism as overwhelmingly Muslim. I sympathize with a Europe that sees its liberal traditions and even its physical well-being as being under assault by Muslim immigration, while being bemused and even a little alarmed at the simultaneous withering of those liberal traditions in response to it.

So cutting to the chase, Christopher Caldwell’s recent book, “REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN EUROPE – Immigration, Islam and The West” is a fascinating, if flawed read. If you’d like to get a sense of how Europe got to its current quandary around immigration – a combination of loose rules, half-truths, religious decline, demographic decline, general apathy and a surfeit of political correctness – this is great book to tackle. Caldwell nails the well-meaning approach to immigration in Europe over the past 40 years, and how it rapidly accelerated and started violently confronting European norms about 15 years ago. His best writing regards how Europe slowly woke up to the key differences between Muslim immigration to Europe, and quick-assimilating immigrants to the United States:

The marital behavior of immigrants and their children (not to mention the entire history of colonization) shows that you can migrate to a place while being hostile to it, or at least while holding it in no special regard. Yes, immigrants “just want a better life”, as the cliché goes. But they don’t necessarily want a European life. They may want a Third World life at a European standard of living. They may want to use the cosmopolitanism made possible by Western rule of law to secure citizenship for their nonfeminist brides and their pre-Enlightenment ways.

This is what Europeans are waking up to in all sorts of funny and sometimes even enlightened ways. The Muslim immigrants, by and large, are replicating their home countries’ ways of life, just on European soil, and often at European taxpayers’ expense. Caldwell blames Europeans’ abandonment of their traditional culture, and of Christianity, in favor of the very liberal social consensus that rules the continent now as being part & parcel of why it was so easy for, say, Algerian or Turkish culture to gain such a strong foothold in, say, France and Germany. He loses me when he puts too fine a point on this thread – particularly the religious part. One can admire the values that are attributed to Judeo-Christian traditions, without fully buying into them being divinely inspired (I certainly don’t). If only Europeans got some religion again, he seems to say in various spots, Europe would have an effective bulwark against its centuries-long foe, Islam. I don’t buy it. I think Europe’s secular evolution is one of its post-WWII strengths, and I tend to agree with the assassinated Dutch politician Pym Fortuyn and his protégés, who argued that Europe had created a culture of liberal tolerance, enlightenment and intellectualism that was very much worth fighting for and defending.

Islam has the upper hand as things stand today, at least as portrayed by this book. It knows what it stands for, and it knows what it stands against. It is rapidly gaining in numbers both in Europe and around the globe as European population declines. Caldwell believes, as I do, that “moderate Islam”, while being something that exists for millions of people, is a red herring for cultural relativists who prefer to see peace and harmony where there is actually war, fear and religious antagonism. This will continue to be a signature issue for years to come, and while I found Caldwell’s old-school religious conservatism a little hard to stomach at times, I applaud him still for laying out the boundaries of the problem so clearly.

THE BIZARRE TERRORLAND OF NORTH KOREA

No, this is not a rehash of why North Korea’s the most terrifying totalitarian nightmare-state since Stalin’s Soviet Union – though it is a topic I’m perversely interested in, since we’ll all likely witness the eruption (and hopefully the liberation) of the North Korean people within our lifetimes. It will be a major event, full of grim revelations that will blow the lid off the most tightly-controlled society of our time. I recently read BR Myers’ North Korea book “THE CLEANEST RACE”, which attempts to understand juche and racial theory, and why The State acts as it does, and how it chooses to willingly portray itself to the outside world. The book is OK – I can’t say I fully recommend it, if only because it’s more of a polemic that I found it hard to learn from. Yet I, and probably all of us, want to know more about the lost, only-sometimes-lamented people of North Korea and the horrific deprivations they suffer on a daily basis.

These two recent podcasts, both very short, are helpful. One comes from the NEW YORKER OUT LOUD podcast, and it’s an interview with Barbara Demick, who wrote a book high on my must-read list called “NOTHING TO ENVY: REAL LIVES IN NORTH KOREA”. In this podcast she recounts her interviews with refugees who slipped across the Chinese border, and the lives they chose to leave back home. The other is from the Cato Institute, and it’s a bit of a polemic itself, about a hideous, punitive currency devaluation that was undertaken by the regime last November that’s having catastrophic effects on the long-suffering people of the DPRK. I listened to them back to back earlier this week, and thought they were devastating enough to share them with you today.

Listen to The New Yorker Out Loud – Barbara Demick on North Korean Refugees


Listen to The Cato Daily Podcast – A Fresh North Korean Tragedy

Download The New Yorker Out Loud – Barbara Demick on North Korean Refugees
Download The Cato Daily Podcast – A Fresh North Korean Tragedy