"In Our Time..."

"Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time - but it does require us to act in our time."  

-  Barack Obama, January 21, 2013

I didn't vote for Senator Obama in 2008.  Given his résumé, I didn't think he was ready, and the history of his first term largely bore me out.   But in November, I voted for the distinguished gentleman who delivered his second inaugural address on Monday - and I'm increasingly happy about that.

In this, I am one of millions of Americans who do not consider themselves Democrats, but who can embrace many elements of Mr. Obama's agenda.

We want to see immigration reform and movement toward equal pay.

We're impatient for rational laws which ban assault weapons and large ammo clips, and which require background checks and records of all gun sales.

We believe it's time that the Federal government - including the military - recognizes any marriage which is legal in the state where it was celebrated.

And we're ready to fight for policies which move America urgently toward sustainable energy sources and make her a leader in fighting global climate change. 

We have every reason to hope the President will succeed, and we're eager to help.

We just can't do so as Democrats.

Over the past four years, Mr. Obama has grown into his job.  He has learned a good deal about both the power and the limitations of his office.  More important, he has learned that he does not have a partner in the modern - no, wrong word - the present-day Republican Party.

In the months to come, Mr. Obama will need to find - for each item on his agenda - seventeen or more ad hoc partners in the House Republican conference.  Given the "Hastert Rule", that won't be easy.  Mr. Obama will need to be far more ruthless than is his wont - more like Lyndon Johnson, or the Lincoln portrayed in Steven Spielberg's recent film.    

Mr. Obama will also have to start speaking out.  Having spent much of his first term isolated in the West Wing, conferring with this inner circle or attempting to cut closed-door deals with a recalcitrant Republican leadership, the President has largely ignored his personal strong suit. 

Now, he must use the bully pulpit unique to the presidency.  He must speak to us, persuade us, educate us.  And in this, Mr. Obama has one thing going for him.  After four years, we have not tired of his voice

We haven't heard it nearly enough.

From the tone of his Inaugural Address, it seems clear that Mr. Obama intends to do something historically rare - at least, for a President not named Roosevelt.  He means to achieve great things in his second term.  

It's a tough task, but Mr. Obama is clearly a different breed of cat.  Having come to office as a young man, he probably still has the personal energy to lead an aggressive, second-term campaign for his policies. 

Moreover, having won decisively against a very presentable Republican ticket - in a campaign which clearly focused on ideology and issues - he has the most important kind of political capital.

Legitimacy.

We voted for him, and for his ideas, in preference to those of his opponents. 

Indeed, but for the continuing disgrace of gerrymandering, the President would not be facing a Republican majority in the House of Representatives.  Nationwide, Americans voted - by a majority of half a million - for Democratic House candidates.

But facts are stubborn things.  For the next two years, the fact is that Mr. Obama will have to seek allies within this hostile majority - allies willing, in the last resort, to defy their party's leadership, and its rules. 

This will not happen through persuasion alone.  It will happen only through fear - specifically, individual members' fear of losing their seats in 2014.

And that's where we come in.

The President can do his part by speaking out, clearly, forcefully, and often.  He must make the case for his agenda, answering the criticisms of his opponents and their powerful media allies and making his best case to the eternally undecided center. 

He can also organize.   His campaign organization - now restructuring as Organizing for Action - is  already signing up volunteers to go door-to-door, raising support for the President's policies.

But if the President is to prevail on important elements of his agenda, he will need the help of Republican House members in mortal terror of losing their seats to candidates running to their left.

And that's where we come in.  We need to give the President home-field advantage.  We need to provide what football teams speak of as the twelfth man.  We must organize - and, in particular, we must search out viable candidates in to run for  Congress against more-or-less entrenched Republican incumbents.

In some cases, these candidates will be Democrats.  But starting now, we should be looking for alternatives - honorable, intelligent, forceful, determined candidates who belong to neither major party.

Ideally, they should be candidates who occupy the vast open space between an essentially stagnant Democratic Party - addicted to deficit spending and special-interest legislation - and the ever-growing, know-nothing extremism of the Republicans.

It's a vast space, truly - one once occupied by liberal Republicans, who - without that title - remain America's largest disenfranchised minority.

Building an alternative to the two major parties will take hard work, but there's every reason to get started - now.  America's President has apparently found the gumption to fight for a rational, progressive agenda.  He isn't right on everything, but he's right on enough things to merit our support.

Helping Mr. Obama, by threatening or by taking the seats of Republicans who oppose him, is the task set for us, as the man put it so well, "in our time."

Les Politiques

Whenever I read about the mess in Washington, or the rather grim business of electing people to become part of that mess, I find myself considering the problem of how to create a third party - and whether a third party might offer a way out of the gridlock.

Of course, those who know a little history are quick to assure me that "third parties never succeed".  Strictly speaking, that's not true.  Certainly, it's not inevitable.  But one must search history for examples of third parties which succeeded.

Some examples may be found in American history.  Today's Republican Party began as a third party, reaching the White House only six years after its founding.  The Populists of the late 19th century enjoyed considerable success at the state level.  The Progressives, for a time in the early 20th century, seemed destined to join the two major parties. 

Indeed, there was a period when the Eugene V. Debs' Socialists seemed to have a shot at national success. 

For some time, though, I've had the nagging feeling that I needed to reach back further.  In 16th century France, a sort of third-party movement arose in response to the bitter and bloody Wars of Religion which convulsed the country in the wake of the Protestant Reformation.

So I dug out my old college textbook - the magisterial (if eurocentric) Third Edition of Palmer and Colton's History of the Modern World - and did a bit of re-reading.

And there it was - a group called les politiques.  Not a modern political party, to be sure; there were few elections under the ancien régime.  But there were two powerful parties in 16th century France - the Calvinist Huguenots, led by King Henry of Navarre, and the ultra Catholic League, led by the Duke of Guise.

To be fair, not every educated American would quickly refer to these long-ago struggles for guidance in the present.  So, in the interests of full disclosure, I taught AP European History for five years in the 1980s- and I've recently done some brushing up on English history in that period.  Sort of an unfair advantage.

To orient the reader, then:

The Protestant Reformation began in 1517, just as Western Europe was beginning to develop monarchies and something like the unified nation-states we are now accustomed to.

In some cases, religious controversies  and their resolutions ended up strengthening the national state.  Sometimes, they had the opposite impact.

In the immediate wake of Martin Luther's Reformation, Germany - then governed as the Holy Roman Empire - tore itself apart over religious differences.  By mid-century, Germany had arrived at a truce based on an uneasy federalism, with the north largely Protestant and the south largely Catholic.  In a few states, the more radical form of Protestantism, Calvinism - in American terms, the camp which included the New England Puritans - prevailed.

But Germany was divided, and would remain so until the 1870s.

Just as Germany settled down, all hell broke loose in France.  For most of the second half of the 16th century - roughly the period when Queen Elizabeth reigned in England, and the ultra-Catholic Philip II of Spain began building his Armada, and William Shakespeare was learning to act and write plays - France was shattered by a series of Wars of Religion.

In the first half of the century, France - blessed by a long-standing arrangement which kept it largely free of papal interference and papal taxation - had proved poor soil for Lutheranism.

But by the time Germany had been pacified, France was beginning to come apart.  If Lutheranism had not succeeded in France, Calvinism had.  A small but determined minority of Calvinists - the Huguenots - found many adherents in the rich trading cities, and among some aristocrats in the south.  Bolstered by confidence in the rightness of their theology, the Huguenots demanded recognition and legal equality.  Devout Catholics wanted the Huguenots suppressed.  

Trapped between these camps, the monarchy - held by three successive weaklings - was effectively controlled by the Queen Mother, Catherine de' Medici, the Machiavellian widow of the last strong king, Henry II.   The dramatic high-point of these wars came early- in 1572 - when, on St. Bartholomew's Day, royalist mobs slaughtered some 2000 Huguenots, including nobles and their retainers who had come to Paris for an important  wedding.

A total of nine internal conflicts shattered in internal peace of France.  The last - the War of the Three Henrys - pitted the royalist supporters of the effeminate Henry III and his domineering mother against Henry, Duke of Guise, the Catholic leader, and Henry of Navarre, a Huguenot.  This war coincided with the English Queen Elizabeth's decision to execute her Catholic rival and cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, who had repeatedly plotted Elizabeth's assassination.  Mary died in 1587.  The next year, Philip II of Spain sent his Armada against England.

Later that year, the Catholic Duke of Guise was assassinated by supporters of King Henry III.  Within months, King Henry was assassinated by supporters of the Guise.  Henry of Navarre, a survivor by nature - he had survived the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre by converting to Catholicism was the last man standing, and he had the best claim to the throne.

Henry, who had re-converted to his Huguenot faith, now had to re-convert to Catholicism in order to be accepted as King.  But Henry actually believed that political unity and social peace were more important than religious conformity - an unusual viewpoint in that time.

Safely on the throne, he issued the Edict of Nantes, essentially granting legal protection to his Huguenot subjects.  From then until his death by assassination, in 1610, Henry ruled a nation in which religious differences were treated as less important than loyalty to the Crown, and to the state.

Henry of Navarre was something of a political genius, but he was also the beneficiary of a political third-party movement.  During the decades of religious war which had threatened to destroy France, a group of prudent men (and a few women) had emerged.  They were called les politiques - the politicals - because they believed that loyalty to the political state was more important than religion.  Henry of Navarre - as witnessed by his frequent conversions and re-conversions - was, at heart, a politique.

More important, for the ultimate greatness of France, was the man who rose to power after Henry's assassination - the Catholic Cardinal Richelieu, who effectively ruled France on behalf of Henry's son, Louis XIII.  During his three decades in power, Richelieu worked to disarm the Huguenots, so that they no longer represented a kind of military state-within-the-state.

However, he did not persecute them.   Though a prince of the Church, Richelieu maintained the Edict of Nantes, allowing the Huguenots to enjoy educational and political opportunity.  As a result, France grew in power on the continent as ultra-Catholic Spain - exhausted by her efforts to restore Catholicism everywhere - began to decline.

Looking at the bipartisan gridlock, it seems to me that one could learn several important things from the politiques.  They rejected the passions which threatened to tear their country apart, but they did so - not by adopting a pale, vanilla moderation between the two sides.  Rather, they offered a different set of priorities - and a different view of France's future.

Les politiques were a true third party.  They challenged both major parties by challenging the assumptions which drove them - including the assumption that religion was a vital issue within the state.  They offered a way out, and - through luck and leadership - they succeeded.

Decades of religious warfare, massacre and assassination were succeeded by a century in which France rose to become the greatest continental power. 

Something to be learned from les  politiques.

The First Gambit in the Assault Weapons Battle

Almost four weeks after the holocaust at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the momentum for legislating sanity in America's weapons laws seems to be slowing.  The issue remains, for the moment, front-burner, but the forces opposed to reasonable weapons laws are expert at delay, and the politicians who have finally found their spines would probably be happy enough if they didn't have to make use of them.

President Obama has been a notable exception, and he has assigned Vice-President Joe Biden - the Administration's designated manly man - to confer with all sides and seek some sort of consensus.

Which, of course, isn't going to happen.  Most American gun owners - even many American gun lovers - are reasonable people, but the gun lobby serves the interests of weapons manufacturers, and it has - for many years - been at pains to recruit its members from segments of the population which are, shall we say, not noted for their erudition or rationality.

In other words, the forces of sanity and public safety are opposed by corporate greed, backed by a solid phalanx of people who see the world through the lenses of bigotry, eschatology, hyper-individualism, and downright paranoia.

Now, if this offends any sane, humane, civic-minded defenders of the Second Amendment out there - I'm  sorry.  But you've got to consider the company you're keeping.  It's that company the weapons industry wants in the vanguard of its manufactured "movement".  You're just along for the ride.

All of this is to say that the forces favoring reasonable weapons laws are beginning to lose momentum - and lose the fight.  If the Administration takes a few months to draft a decent Federal response, Congress will dawdle around until summer, and the whole thing will die a slow and pitiful death.

What's needed is a fight - right now, while the larger weapons policy is being drafted.  And luckily, thanks to the NRA, there's a perfect occasion for such a fight.

For some years now, a special provision in the Federal budget has essentially prohibited the funding of research by the National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, part of the Centers for Disease Control, which used to do considerable research on the role of guns and large-capacity weapons in America's rates of civilian deaths and injuries.  In 1996, Congress stripped funding for this research and added language - which has survived from year to year - essentially banning scientific research on the role of personal weapons in America.

At about the same time, the Justice Department's Institute for Justice also found its research funding cut.

In other words, the NRA  and its allies quietly, but deliberately, cut off funding for research which seemed likely to establish a scientific basis for rational weapons laws. 

Because, like Big Tobacco before them - like Big Coal and Big Oil and Detroit on the issue of climate change - they know that the facts will do them no good.

So here's the opportunity.  If the Obama administration wants to move the ball down the field, right now, the President should demand the restoration of funding for research by the CDC and the DoJ.  He should openly challenge the weapons lobby to oppose the search for scientific evidence.  He should force them to fight him on losing ground - or to retreat.

It's a no-lose proposition.  The country wants action, but isn't sure what that action should be.  What could be simpler, or more appropriate, than to re-start the search for relevant evidence?

Why not demand the facts?