RUTHFULLY YOURS

A new biography explores the long-running rivalry between the Federalist chief justice John Marshall and his Democratic–Republican second cousin, President Thomas Jefferson.

In the American republic’s early days, a seat on the United States Supreme Court was not the coveted plum that it is today. The first three chief justices each served for an average of less than four years, and associate justices were also likely to leave the Court while still in the prime of their working lives. The reason? The Court had limited jurisdiction, heard few cases, and did not pay particularly well. For a talented lawyer, private practice or political office was usually preferable to a judicial backwater convened in an unused committee room in the basement of the Capitol.

In Without Precedent, law professor Joel Richard Paul tells the story of John Marshall, the man who changed all that. Appointed to the court by the last Federalist president in the waning days of his administration, Marshall was seated at a time of his Jeffersonian opponents’ ascendance. He would spend the next 34 years leading a Court that became much closer to a co-equal branch of government than any of the Founders had anticipated. In doing so, Marshall imposed a Federalist vision on often-reluctant Democratic–Republican political branches, cementing his own vision of what the United States should become: one nation, rather than a confederation of disparate sovereignties.

* * *

Paul frames his story as a long-running battle between Marshall and Thomas Jefferson. Both men were Virginians of the founding generation, and both were great-grandsons of William Randolph I, but there the similarities end. While Jefferson grew up rich, surrounded by slaves and powerful family members, Marshall grew up on the frontier, one of 15 children of a father who was a poor farmer, rather than a planter. (Marshall would also come to own slaves, which Paul attempts, without much success, to downplay in comparing him to Jefferson.)

Russia votes on March 18 in a presidential election that is, let’s agree, lacking in any competitive tension. In fact, says Stephen Kotkin, Vladimir Putin’s re-election is “preordained, a superfluous, if vivid, additional signal of Russia’s debilitating stagnation.”

Few Americans understand Russia better than Mr. Kotkin, who late last year published “ Stalin : Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941,” the second of an intended three-volume biography of the Soviet dictator Mr. Kotkin describes as “the person in world history who accumulated more power than anyone else.”

President Putin, by comparison, is a dictatorial lightweight. “We wouldn’t want to equate Putin with Stalin,” Mr. Kotkin says. The Soviet Union—which Stalin ruled for three hair-raising decades, until his death in 1953—had “one-sixth of the world’s land mass under its control, plus satellites in Eastern Europe and Northeast Asia.” There were also communist parties in scores of countries, which did Russia’s bidding. “We talk about how Russia interferes in our elections today,” says Mr. Kotkin, “but Stalin had a substantial Communist Party in France, and in Italy, inside the Parliament. And when Stalin gave instructions to them, they followed his orders.”

The Soviet economy, at its peak in the 1980s, reached about a third of the size of the U.S. economy. Russia’s economy today, Mr. Kotkin points out, “is one-15th the size of America’s. Russia is very weak, and getting weaker.” Not long ago, Russia was the eighth-largest economy in the world. Today, Mr. Kotkin says, “you’re lucky to get it at 12th or 13th, depending on how you measure things. Another two terms of Putin, and Russia will be out of the top 20.”

But don’t be reassured by Russia’s feebleness. Mr. Kotkin says this weakness is what makes Mr. Putin such a threat to the West. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Victorian age, if we knew it and its ideas better, would help us understand our own world, as the debates of that era remain the essence of today’s political discussions. In her major works and invaluable essays, Himmelfarb brings the Victorians back to life.

Past and Present: The Challenges of Modernity, from the Pre-Victorians to the Post-Modernists
by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Encounter Books, 2017, 256 pages, US$23.99
_______________________________

That the past lectures us on the present is one of the reasons we read history. Such lectures are often merely whispers, and coded in a language very few of us speak. This is why historians are indispensable translators.

Past and Present presents some of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s (left) shorter and apparently minor essays. The present the title refers to is contemporary America as it has been shaped by political battles in the last fifty years—a period Himmelfarb has witnessed first hand. The past of the title is mainly, though not exclusively, Victorian England, of which Himmelfarb is a foremost historian. Now Professor Emerita at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, she is a scholar’s scholar. Her bibliography includes works on Lord Acton and Mill, and seminal editorship of the latter too; explorations of the “Victorian mind”; and a genuine classic, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (1959). Few historians of ideas have dug deeper in the British nineteenth century, and fewer still have done so from a conservative perspective. Himmelfarb, who married Irving Kristol, often considered the “godfather” of neoconservatism, by and large shared her husband’s views.

Himmelfarb’s conservatism can better be considered a style of arguing, rather than a consistent set of political ideas. Postmodernists have long been ruminating about the subjectivity of historians, making a theory of “a denial of the fixity of the past, of the reality of the past apart from what the historian chooses to make of it, and thus of any objective truth about the past”. Surely any work of history is vulnerable because historical records may be imperfect or imperfectly read by the historian, who is as fallible, conceited and biased as any other human being. But, Himmelfarb maintains, there is no reason to think history “is fatally flawed, that because there is no absolute, total, final truth, there are no relative, partial, contingent truths”.

The craft of the historian entails a struggle with her own subjectivity, a careful search for bits of truths whenever possible, a passion for making sense of them with the best of our analytical tools. Sure, history can never do without imagination, for no historian can do without putting himself in other people’s shoes. Macaulay thought that:

A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque. Yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own.

Such a description fits Himmelfarb’s own works, where the inspired writer never shines at the expense of the careful researcher.

Jordan Peterson, Canadian academic and scourge of the politically correct, begins his Australian tour this month. Here, liberated from the paywall of our latest issue, is Steve Kates’ review of his book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos”. Please subscribe and make sure there are more.

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
by Jordan B. Peterson
Allen Lane, 2018, 448 pages, $35
______________________________

Jordan Peterson may well be the deepest, clearest voice of conservative thought in the world today. In the space of less than a year he has risen from being a relatively obscure professor of psychology at the University of Toronto to becoming perhaps the most articulate defender of the values of the West to have arisen in the last fifty years. I can think of no one in recent times who has been able to reach such depths of understanding, but with such an extraordinary ability to make plain his meaning to such large numbers of people. You should, of course, read his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, but you should also watch as many of his online presentations as you can if you are interested in understanding, and preserving, the values of our Western civilisation.
This review appears in the latest Quadrant.
Click here to subscribe

He came to my attention in three stages. The first was through a battle he fought with the government of Canada over amendments to its Human Rights Act. What drew my attention were only in part the issues themselves, but probably more important for me was that he is a professor at my own alma mater in the city where I was born and grew up. The issue that made him newsworthy was that the Canadian government had made it illegal not to use the specific pronouns an individual wished to have applied to them in conversation. As Peterson put it as part of his testimony to the Canadian Parliament, the issue was that “refusing to refer to a person by their self-identified name and proper personal pronoun” constitutes gender-based harassment which could get you fined, and if you refused to pay the fine, could land you in jail. This is from his testimony:

I don’t think the people who initiated this legislation ever expected that there would be an absolute explosion of identities, first of all, and also of so-called personal pronouns, as there has been. I think Facebook now recognizes something like 71 separate gender identity categories, each of which in principle is associated with its own set of pronouns. So linguistically, it has become a parody. It has become linguistically unmanageable. Words can’t be introduced into the language by fiat. I can’t think of a time when that actually worked. We are not sure how words enter the common parlance, but it’s certainly not that way. So the legislation devolves into a kind of absurdity.

He then goes beyond the issue of personal pronouns into a full-scale attack on the cultural Marxism that is now standard in universities across the globe:

I’ve been following the battle of ideologies on campus for a long period of time. I suppose I have some expertise in that. There is an ideological war that is ripping the campuses apart. It’s essentially between an ideological variant that is rooted in what has come to be known as post-modernism, with a neo-Marxist base, and modernism, I would say. That’s accounting for all the turmoil on the campuses. I see this as an extension of this campus turmoil into the broader world …

I said that I believe that this is a vanguard issue in a kind of ideological war and that I’m not going to participate on the side of the people whose ideological stance I find unforgivable and reprehensible, especially the Marxist element of it. I announced that I wasn’t going to use these words because I don’t believe they are instantiated to protect anyone’s rights. I believe the ideologues who are pushing this movement are using unsuspecting and sometimes complicit members of the so-called transgender community to push their ideological vanguard forward.

One of the more feverish accusations in the early years of the Cold War, the late 1940s, early 1950s, concerned Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his performance at the Yalta Accords in February 1945, which occurred as World War II was winding down and Soviet imperialism was becoming more apparent.

The GOP, and even a young Democratic senator named John Kennedy, regarded Roosevelt as selling out Eastern Europe to Stalin. The reasons supplied for this “treachery” were either that FDR was “soft on Communism” (the view of Joseph McCarthy, and even moderate Republicans who attacked McCarthy) and that an obviously dying Roosevelt was taken advantage of by a more robust Joseph Stalin.

In his book The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and Peace, David Woolner contests both interpretations, but devotes the most energy to the health issue. His starting point is that FDR was extremely competent and canny even though it was apparent he was dying—a month after Yalta, FDR broke precedent by appearing before Congress in a wheelchair. Woolner’s portrait of Roosevelt is heroic, with the president summoning his last bit of energy to push back at Stalin and secure the creation of the United Nations. Roosevelt’s effort was thus a noble self-sacrifice, as Woolner admits that these efforts led to his death at the age of 63.
Complicating Facts

However, Woolner’s argument that Roosevelt was fully alert contradicts the president’s own doctors, who advised him not to run for a second term and believed that by Yalta, February 1945, Roosevelt was fading daily and would be dead within the year. Instead, Woolner gauges the president’s competency based on how FDR saw himself: as a canny political operator.