Open Source

Which words and ideas in the definition of exceptional America do you underline? Is is a bit odd for any nation to be deeply divided, witlessly vulgar, religiously orthodox, militarily aggressive, economically savage, and ungenerous to those in need, while maintaining a political stability, a standard of living, and a love of country that are the envy of the world all at the same time. To do all these things at once, America must indeed be unusual. Or even, as Alexis de Tocqueville said a century and a half ago, exceptional. Peter H. Schuck and James Q. Wilson, in their Preface to Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation. Click to listen to Chris conversation with James Q. Wilson (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) James Q. Wilson: Exceptionalist Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation is the book that the Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson said all the presidential candidates had to read. What is unique about America? Patterson asked in the New York Times Book Review this summer. What drives its vitality in economic, cultural and social affairs? Why is it so envied and reviled in the rest of the world? Why are its politics so peculiar? Why is it so culturally fraught? There are giant gaps in this big book, it turns out, starting with the Iraq War as an expression of how Americans think and act outside the neighborhood. Editors James Q. Wilson and Peter H. Schuck decided to duck foreign policy altogether. It s an odd omission especially because the unilateralism inside George Bush s coalition of the willing is so clearly an extension of an exceptionalist premise that old alliances, United Nations rules, even Geneva Conventions do not restrain the United States of America. The mood of the book tends toward the celebratory. Most of the score of contributing scholars seem to agree we re more unlike the rest of the world than like it, and better off for the difference. But counter-indications are also spelled out on the matter of inequality and upward mobility, for example and some gravely worrisome trends. A rising tide lifts all yachts in our economy today. The evidence for increased inequality since the 1970s is overwhelming, write Gary Burtless and Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution. The top of the distribution is pulling away from average and below-average earners, and until the early 1990s there was evidence that the bottom was falling further behind the middle of the distribution. The gift of upward mobility in the U.S. is bestowed mainly on immigrants, the day they get here. People born in the U.S. do not enjoy exceptional opportunities for upward mobility compared with people born in other rich countries. In our conversation, panjandrum James Q. Wilson voices the dismay of his generation at the corruption and commercialization of American culture for export which in another day meant gems like Walt Whitman, Jerome Kern and Gene Kelly. In our own era it s a long way from Louis Armstrong to the knock-offs, far and wide, of American Idol. This is a subject we take up next with the insatiably curious and critical Martha Bayles, a contributor to Understanding America.

Click to listen to Chris conversation with Godfrey Hodgson (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3) Godfrey Hodgson: now When you ve had enough of the dugout chatter from Denver on the cable networks, try Godfrey Hodgson from Oxford, 5000 miles from the convention scene. I wonder if anybody sees American politics more essentially than the co-author of a reporters masterpiece (up there with Norman Mailer s) on the 1968 campaign, An American Melodrama, and many other rapt studies of us. (Forthcoming: The Myth of American Exceptionalism.) Hodgson volunteers in conversation that what he missed forty years ago was the length and depth of the conservative cycle the US was entering with Richard Nixon s election. Today, forty years later, Hodgson s keynote is that the conservative ascendancy, having fomented the Iraq War and a Gilded Age of inequality, sounds far from broken. The change chord rings to Hodgson more of therapy than political reconstruction. The tune from America these days, he says, still sounds something like the Russophobic ditty sung in England in the 1870s the song that gave Jingo to the lexicon of chip-on-the-shoulder patriotism. We don t want to fight, But by Jingo if we do, We ve got the ships, We ve got the men, And we ve got the money, too. From a popular music-hall song by G. W. Hunt, around 1877. Godfrey Hodgson: then The grandest thematic links between 68 and 08 race and the American imperium are oddly same and different, constant and transformed. Race in the Sixties meant riotous rebellion and a rights revolution; the race issue today refers to the apparently unpollable question whether Americans will vote a black family into their iconic White House. The debacle in Iraq would seem to cry out for some open straight talk about the limits of American power in the world, but this campaign shies from the general question. In 1968, Robert Kennedy, running against Lyndon Johnson s war in Vietnam, wanted us to lay claim nonetheless to the moral leadership of this planet. Eugene McCarthy mocked the idea that somehow we had a great moral mission to control the entire world. He was bolder and steadier than any of the major candidates for 2008 in opposing permanent counterinsurgency as our fighting posture in the world this American assumption for itself of the role of the world s judge and the world s policeman. It is the relatively shy silence on that point that tells Godfrey Hodgson that the 2008 campaign is veiled in the premises of the conservative ascendancy. Meantime Geoffrey Hodgson wonders who could answer the question that drove John Gunther s Inside USA books: John Gunther would send a researcher ahead, book a suite in the big hotel in town, invite all the movers and shakers, give them a cocktail or two and then say, Who runs this place? We can tick off the established powers of 40 years ago that aren t there anymore. Sure, the city machines have gone. In 1972, I made film about the Democratic Convention and there, there were still residual smoke-filled rooms, residual bosses, I remember doing an interview with Pete Camille of Philadelphia, for example a city boss, but that s gone. Detroit is gone. The big three auto makers have just gone cap-in-hand to the administration asking them for, I think it s, 25 billion bucks, because they re broke. The banks are sliding around on the floor. Wall Street; the old foreign policy establishment. I wrote a biography of Colonel Henry L. Stimson; he and his friends, the Bundy brothers, have disappeared If I may say so, the New York Times and the Washington Post are not the powers in the world that they were in 1968 To my mind, Franklin Roosevelt really was the person who figured out how to make the presidency work and I learned from a political scientist called Aaron Wildavsky one thing about how he did it. He had basically four levers or connections that he used. One of which was the Congress, one of which was the Democratic Party, one of which was the bureaucracy or the permanent government, and one of which was the media. I don t think any of those connections are still in good working order The political party has really been utterly transformed by the process that began with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in which the old traditional Democratic party was destroyed and the Republican party became a conservative party. For the first time really you have a European style politics where you have a party of the left and a party of the right. The French say the party of movement and the party of order. It may be that the old political parties just can t work that way. It certainly seems that the media cannot be managed in that way if only because of the internet, and the bloggers, and the multiplicity of people who have access to the bullhorn, as it were Max Weber, who invented the concept of the charismatic leader, always assumed that the destined fate of the charismatic leader was to create a bureaucratic leadership, that there was an almost inevitable progression that you go from the charismatic leader to the organization. This was his example: you go from Jesus Christ to the Apostle Paul, the man who organized the church as a powerful, enduring and efficient institution. I think the Democratic Party is an intensely interesting organization, and if Barack Obama can really reshape, retool the Democratic Party as an instrument of benign political change, in the way that Franklin Roosevelt created the Roosevelt Coalition, which is now completely crumbled, then I think he will be a very great political leader, but it s going to be tough. I don t know whether it s possible to imagine a President Obama recreating a presidency that is as effective as the Roosevelt presidency was. Godfrey Hodgson in conversation with Chris Lydon, August 27, 2008

Click to listen to Chris s conversation with Cass Sunstein (30 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Cass Sunstein of the gentle Nudge Cass Sunstein gives us the half-hour short course here on the most exciting intellectual movement of the last thirty years behavioral economics, that is, of which we had a taste recently with George Lakoff and Dan Ariely. Behavioral economics is the demonstration (by clinical psychology, affirmed by neuroscience) that the rational man of neo-classical economics is in fact, in Dan Ariely s book title, Predictably Irrational that we are eternally kidding ourselves in our choice of credit cards, or of diets and desserts; that we tend to lurch without much reflection from over-optimism to over-anxiety about terrorist threats, war risks, and environmental melt-downs. Cass Sunstein is himself a demonstration of the spread of the new thinking from psychology and economics to law and politics. From the University of Chicago Law School, where he taught alongside Barack Obama for a dozen years, he has just moved permanently to Harvard, where he and Obama seem still to be channeling each other. Sunstein s new book Nudge, with the economist Richard Thaler, is an introduction to a variety of not-quite-coercive strategies for helping people get what they really want: 401k savings plans, for example, that would be automatic for all workers who didn t choose to set some of their wages aside. The general trick, Sunstein says, is recognizing that there s less Immanuel Kant, more Homer Simpson, in each and all us than we ve been taught. This started with psychology. Two Israelis Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky did a bunch of amazing experiments in the 1970 s where they said people use some mental shortcuts in trying to think about risk. If a recent event, for example, is in your head, say it involves a crime or a misfortune or something wonderful happening, then you will think it s really probable that the crime or the misfortune or the wonderful thing will happen. This way of thinking migrated first into economics. There has really been a revolution in economic thinking because economists are trying to do their work with a realistic rather than artificial sense of what human beings are like. The idea is that we can do economics with Homer Simpson as our types rather than doing economics with computers as our types. People just aren t computers. When Homer, in one episode, went to buy a gun, the gun owner told him that him that there is a three day waiting period. And Homer responded: What? Three Days? I m angry now! So that captures people s passion and focus on the short term, and it also captures how law and policy can help a lot. Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein in conversation with Chris Lydon, August 21, 2008.

The Brecht-Weill opera masterpiece from 1930 -- "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahoganny" -- plays like a raucous contemporary tragedy at Tanglewood.

The Obama world tour renews old questions about America. Historian Ted Widmer mulls the exceptional nation, and the global nation?

John Maeda, the graphic artist and computer programmer who has just become president of the Rhode Island School of Design, embarks on a free-form conversational series with Chris Lydon

Brain scientist George Lakoff is watching Barack Obama's body language and messaging skill as he maneuvers under pressure.

What would Roger Say? Williams, that is... the founder of the Rhode Island colony is one old measure of religious freedom and the menace of theocratic meddling in America.

Tony Schwartz -- who made "the Daisy Spot," the most famous TV commercial in American politics -- built a career on the supremacy of sound, and the ear, in selling.

How Barack Obama became the world's candidate for president of the US: by tuning the meaning of "American exceptionalism."

Dan Ariely shows how often we don't know what we're choosing and don't get what we want -- because we are predictably irrational creatures.

A great American novelist, Russell Banks, thinks out loud about the real historical and emotional context of the United States at decision point.

Bob Marley and Barack Obama are the absent giants at Jamaica's Calabash festival of writers and readers -- Obama because he, too, seems a monument to imagination.

Writers in Jamaica at the Calabash literary festival sound notes of lyricism, multiplicity and what feels like a second surge of post-imperial feeling.

Alpha Males of the Caribbean: Derek Walcott goes to war with the only other West Indian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, V. S. Naipaul.

The Scottish world-traveler Ben Haggarty tells "open source" stories -- from as far back as the Stone Age. He says it's the human content, not the cultural variations, that hold our hearts.

Black economist and polymath Glenn Loury says that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's 15 minutes of fame are not over, and shouldn't be.

Kevin Phillips foresees the collapse of the American Empire, "almost before it started," with high style and deep seriousness.

Oscar-winner Errol Morris says his Abu Ghraib movie is built on "a graphic representation of American foreign policy, pure and simple."

The neo-formalist poet Mary Jo Salter teaches and talks about the lessons of beauty, womanhood, artistic and family life

The Israeli fiction writer (and now filmmaker) Etgar Keret unveils forbidden states of mind in his society: confusion, doubt, fear.

David Amram learned his "many musics" from Dizzy Gillespie, Jack Kerouac and Bach. His spirit is neither "multicultural" nor eclectic, but "lovingly trying to learn the fundamentals... of beautiful things that touch your heart."

Slavery in the American South ended only a generation or two ago, not with the Emancipation Proclamation -- in Douglas Blackmon's re-visioning of the race story in our country.

Christopher Hill, talking North Korea out of its nuclear program, has also to talk the Bush Administration into a deal.

Nicholson Baker, the meta-novelist, recounts his hyper-linked history, "Human Smoke," that judges World War 2 to be "the end of civilization."

Patrick Cockburn's account of the Iraqi Army's flight from battle is that the US is trying to foment a civil war among the Shia majority that the Baghdad government cannot win.

Brazil's statesman ex-president Cardoso says: think of today's crisis and opportunity as a "post-Napoleonic moment" between disaster and renewal.

Pico Iyer draws on a 40-year friendship with the Dalai Lama in a meditation on globalism and the Tibet crisis in China's Olympic year.

Artist Bill Flynn talks about the drawing project -- of an old parlor chair -- that became his personal battle (500 images over 5 years) with the war in Iraq

Jay Rosen, the media critic at PressThink, listens for the death rattle of the newspaper industry.