User:John Z/drafts/Walter Karp

Walter Karp (1934-1989): War Critic and Republican Theorist

WALTER KARP AS REPUBLICAN CRITIC
Walter Karp viewed American history and politics through republican lenses. He was interested in the specifically American form of republicanism. He did not think that republicanism meant that the people never get what they want. On the contrary, he believed that modern "democracy," which neglected republican forms, came down to the disguised supremacy of two ruling oligarchies. We call this the two-party system. Heeding republican forms was actually the key to popular self- government.

Karp was for ten years a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine2 and wrote two important books on American history – I begin with The Politics of War because it deals with war and intervention, specifically with the origins of two wars, "which forever altered the political life of the American republic" (title page): the Spanish-American War and World War I.3

‘A SPLENDID LITTLE WAR’
Karp denied that one can usefully separate the history of domestic and foreign policy. Already in the 1880s, he writes, James G. Blaine (R- Maine), "who never thought beyond the interests of party" (p. 8), clamored for an activist foreign policy which would redound to the benefit of the GOP. The Democrats, who weren’t stupid, saw what was up, hence Cleveland’s unnecessary and risky posturing against Britain in 1895 over the Anglo-Venezuelan border dispute (pp. 39-48). The British, fortunately were distracted by other matters – the Kaiser’s supportive telegram to Transvaal President Kruger, for one – but both parties had seen the light of an activist foreign policy which could shape a new order allowing them to bypass both people and constitution at will. The looked-for "large policy" (as TR, Lodge, and Brooks Adams called it) was thus aimed as much at the American people as at the wider world.

Coming into office in early 1897, self-effacing President William McKinley (R-Ohio) was determined to find an occasion for the "large policy." Cuban rebels duly provided one and McKinley spent months explaining to Spain how it should conduct itself in its last important American colony. McKinley’s campaign outlived all possible Spanish compromises and concessions, suggesting – says Karp – that the "negotiations" were intended to fail (and compare George Bush’s negotiations in the run-up to the Gulf War). Much of Wall Street had been opposed to war (pp. 74-75), by the way, suggesting that those who held with outright war for foreign markets were not a cross-section of American business. For Karp, the President – supposedly pushed into war by reporters, noisy journalists, Congressmen, and do-gooders – was firmly in charge the whole way.

It was an easy war and we got Hawaii by the same unconstitutional dodge that got us Texas and NAFTA: the joint resolution). Then we got the Philippines, a great coaling station and jumping-off point to future Asian commerce and an indefensible strategic anti-asset if we ever had disagreements with an Asian power. (We really needed an "India.") We got a war to suppress Filipino "insurrectionists," our first overseas counterinsurgency. We got closer relations with the British Empire. We got protectorates, or informal colonies, Cuba, for example.  Not bad for such an allegedly "reluctant" President.

WOODROW WILSON: FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM EVERYWHERE EXCEPT AT HOME
Karp was even unhappier about Wilson’s crusade for overseas "democracy" and perpetual peace, the latter to be achieved by immediate catastrophic war. He shows nothing but contempt for conventional historians’ emphasis on Wilson’s "idealism" and peaceful "intentions." If Wilson did not want US entry in the European bloodbath, he should not have followed policies that made involvement inevitable. This might be called Karp’s methodological rule #1: look at what they do, not what they say. To people who see Wilson’s actions as reflecting his Presbyterianism, Karp retorts that it was precisely the unchristian sin of "vainglory" that drove the President on (p. 146).

Karp believed that from the outbreak of war in Europe, Wilson had harbored the vision of settling the war himself and building a great new order of perpetual peace. His unfortunate invasion of Mexico – to teach Mexicans good government – ought to have been a clue as to his methods. To settle the European war, America would have to be in it, and Wilson accepted that logic, but with a great display of public reluctance and much peaceful blather. Karp also notes Wilson’s strong Anglophile leanings as another reason for his conduct. Critics "accused him openly of putting British interests ahead of American interests," which "had the misfortune of being true" (p 228). Wilson’s policy was peaceful "only in the Wilsonian sense that entering the war meant ending war" (p. 274), but his rhetoric allowed Republican oligarchs, who had their own reasons for war fever, to attack him for terrible weakness and professorial ineptitude.

Thus, the election of 1916 was a choice between two war parties and the Democratic slogan "He kept us out of war" was so much hot air. As for the merits of "freedom of the seas" and other war pretexts, Ralph Raico4 has dealt with them ably – with the skepticism they merit – and I won't pause here to review them. US intervention set up an incredible "great leap forward" in raw government power and interference in Americans' lives,5 enforced by a federal reign of terror against dissenters and suspected "pro-Germans" and, later, "pro-Bolsheviks." Wartime mobilization furthered state economic management ("war socialism"), whose alleged successes inspired the later New Dealers and their alphabetic agencies.

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF TWO-PARTY OLIGARCHISM
Thus, the two wars – 1898 and 1917-1918 – meant tremendous gains for post-constitutional, post-republican ways of governing. This brings us to Karp’s Indispensable Enemies, subtitled "The Politics of Misrule in America."3 Karp’s reading of US history at home and abroad puts the politics back in and puts party-political oligarchies in the driver’s seat. In his view, stable, self-perpetuating party oligarchies had formed by at least the 1890s, and from that time forward, American political reality had been precisely that echo, not a choice, whereof the Goldwater folk spoke, or that dime’s worth of difference (or less), which George Corley Wallace made famous.

Marxist-tinged historians who looked for underlying "economic" causation in everything were wholly unable to explain two-party oligarchic rule except as somehow reflecting the wants of big business and (sometimes) big labor – political power of the politicians, who, after all, were the ones dispensing the favors. (The railroad politics of the 1850s comes to mind.) Historians, by attributing control of the politicians to the public (liberals) or the interests (Marxists), acted as "apologists" and obscured the active role of the more-than-relatively-autonomous politicians and state in bringing about particular outcomes (p. 5).

Each party fielded a "reformist" and an "obstructionist" wing – in a giant ballet meant to convince voters that something was going on besides oligarchic business as usual. "Given the Hobson’s choice between New Deal liberalism and nothing, many voters have preferred nothing" (p. 84). The GOP obligingly promises them nothing, and then fails to deliver even on that. Faced with the results of oligarchic policies, many people decided that there is an "inherent alliance" of corrupt power and great wealth, which led them further to conclude that "the only real alternative to the status quo is taking people’s money away, that is, communism or socialism" (p. 158). Actually, the parties had actively fostered a monopolistic economy in order to shake down interests beholden to them for campaign contributions. In all this, ambition and the love of power had been more important than mere money, which talented people can obtain by other means. The whole structure depended crucially on two-party collusion, since one party dispensing corrupt favors could be called to account by another, genuinely principled party. In practice, oligarchs in either party would rather lose an election than lose control of the party machinery. The Goldwater and McGovern campaigns may be examples of this.

OLIGARCHY AND FOREIGN POLICY AND CHICKENS AND EGGS
Interventionist foreign policy serves the interest of the partyarchs as 1) a distraction from domestic affairs and 2) a source of unconstitutional and corrupt power. I believe that Walter Karp did us a service by focusing on a neglected aspect of corporate-government collusion – neo-mercantilism – at home and abroad. As a republican theorist, Karp zeroed in on important motivations – ambition, lust for power – that transcend mere money and help explain politicians’ interest in both domestic and foreign intervention. Unless we intend to take up Marxist orthodoxy in which all things reduce to economic motives and causation, we must be prepared to give power and ambition their places in the larger picture. As Karp said, paraphrasing Aristotle, "no one aspires to become a tyrant in order to keep warm."6

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Eternal Vigilance and The Duty to Dissent

by David Dieteman

In The Politics of War, Walter Karp describes the oppression which comes with war. Karp, however, describes events of oppression which are unknown to many Americans, specifically, the oppression engineered by Woodrow Wilson, the allegedly "great leader," during World War One, you know, the "Great" War.

As Karp writes, "Nothing was to be said or read in America that Wilson himself might find disagreeable...Americans rotted in prison for advocating heavier taxation rather than the issuance of war bonds, for stating that conscription was unconstitutional, for saying that sinking armed merchantmen had not been illegal, for criticizing the Red Cross and the YMCA." (pp 325; 326)

Karp adds that a woman who wrote to the newspaper that "I am for the people and the government is for the profiteers" received a 10-year prison sentence. (p 326) Federal agents went so far as to seize a motion picture, The Spirit of ‘76, because the "portrayal of the American Revolution had cast British redcoats in an unfavorable light." (p 327). Like the woman who wrote to the newspaper, the film producer received 10 years in prison. Mel Gibson may face life in prison for The Patriot, if the Thought Police have their way.

Karp again: "Wilson and the war party were determined to corrupt the entire body of the American people, to root out the old habits of freedom and to teach it new habits of obedience." (p 329)

Wilson's party line is the same line we hear today: "Dissent is disloyalty, disloyalty a crime; loyalty is servility, and servility is true patriotism."

"The official repression drove millions of independent-minded Americans deep into private life and political solitude. Isolated, they nursed in private their bitterness and contempt." (Karp, p 329)

As Karp notes, the logic of Wilson and the neo-cons is "the perennial logic of every tyranny that ever was."

It is high time for Wilson's undeserved reputation to be stripped from him. Similarly, it is high time for Americans to cease living in fear, as they did under Wilson (who, by the way, fired all blacks in federal employment shortly after taking office; you hadn't heard that either? It's as if history is censored, isn't it?).

At the dawn of the 21st century, America has yet to recover from the horrible changes wrought by Woodrow Wilson. As Karp argues, "The triumph of Wilson and the war party struck the American Republic a blow from which it has never recovered. If the mainspring of a republican commonwealth – its "active principle" in Jefferson's words – is the perpetual struggle against oligarchy and privilege, against private monopoly and arbitrary power, then that mainspring was snapped and deliberately snapped by the victors in the civil war over war." (p 324)

It gets worse. Consider the details of the death of republican liberty: those who were smothered by Wilson turned their rage not on the professional politicians, but upon scapegoats. The 1920s saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and of populist movements. The long-term effects of Wilson's repression remain with us today:

What the war generation ceased to care about, its children were to forget almost entirely. Who was left to remind them? Over the long years since 1917 the "despotism of professional politicians" has suffered its own ups and downs [Karp wrote in 1979], but it has never been menaced – as it was menaced for so long – by free men struggling to protect their own freedom and regain a voice in their own affairs. From the ruins of the war, the republican cause has never revived to rally free men. It has ceased to make a difference in our politics...who can measure the cost of that loss, both to ourselves and to humanity, in whose name both wars had been fought. (Karp, pp 343-44)

American Heritiage interview of WK by his daughter Jane Karp
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1989/7/1989_7_158.shtml

Walter Karp, 1934-1989 An Interview by Jane Karp

When Walter Karp died suddenly last July after surgery, this magazine lost a

delightful and challenging contributor. Readers will remember most recently his series “A Heritage Preserved,” in which he brought his powerful wit and insight to bear on various efforts by museums across the country to retrieve the American past. But Walter’s primary interest was American politics; he was a passionate defender of the Republic as it had been engineered by the Founding Fathers, and he often used their grand and sonorous vocabulary to warn of danger—danger from “usurpers” who would seize powers that rightfully belonged to the people, danger from “oligarchs” willing to scuttle their own party’s candidate rather than upset a status quo that allowed them the use of those purloined powers. He never forgot Madison’s words, “Men love power.” In the wake of the controversy surrounding his most recent book, Liberty under Siege, his daughter, Jane, then a high school senior, interviewed her father. The result suggests the gallantry and the relish with which Walter battled to make himself heard, as well as the love of the American past and its republican wellsprings that animated him all his adult life.

—The Editors

You began writing in the 1950s, but you did not initially write about politics. When and how did you begin?

When the whole country became political, I became political—which is to say, around the time of the civil rights movement. It broke up a lot of foolish notions people had in their heads that everything was wonderful in the country. Then came the Vietnam War, which many people found unbearable, and so did I.

You don’t think about politics until something goes wrong. Unfortunately, political thought begins with disaster.

What did your first political articles deal with?

I used to like Thomas Jefferson—I still do—but without any real comprehension, in a sort of sentimental way. Nevertheless, the idea that people should govern themselves, that they ought to be independent, that they ought to have a voice in their community affairs, always seemed to be a good thing. So the first things I wrote were in that vein. I had no idea at the time that I was dealing with the most radical ideas known to the country.

Aside from Jefferson, what writers and thinkers most influenced you?

The other person was the great German-Jewish writer Hannah Arendt. She wrote about politics in a way that was unlike anything I had ever read. Nothing that she wrote made sense. Oddly enough, that is why 1 liked her. Because I hated everything that made sense.

I didn’t like liberals because they sounded as if they weren’t liberating anything. I didn’t like the conservatives because they seemed just spiteful and mean.

The real reason I never thought about politics is because I had no place to rest my thoughts. Arendt’s great contribution was to lead the reader back to ancient Greece and from Greece to America’s founders—that is, to people who talked about politics as if it really mattered.

What are the ideas that someone must accept to understand your writing?

That’s very simple. All my political principles are contained in one sentence by Abraham Lincoln. He said, “Give all of the governed a voice in their own government and that and that alone is self-government.” That is all you need to know or understand.

How does looking to the Founding Fathers make you controversial?

That’s the most difficult question of all. I’ll rephrase your question. How could it be that if you stand up for the principles of this country, if you believe in self-government, if you are the enemy of everything that impedes self-government—that blinds people, that makes people dependent on power, that frightens them—you are perceived to be a troublemaker? How can a country that universally professes certain principles —that sees itself as a country in which to discuss these principles, to take them seriously and to use them as a measure for judging what happens —makes someone like me something of an outsider? That is a question I’ve been brooding over for twenty years.

Liberty under Siege was described in a New York Times review as “cranky speculation.” A Washington Post reviewer wrote, “Liberty under Siege is an extraordinary book.” How do you account for these two widely differing reviews?

Sometimes one of my readers catches on to what I’m saying and thinks, “This guy, who doesn’t sound like anyone else sounds, is speaking to something I learned as a youngster, something I cherished, something I was taught to admire but that got lost.” When I make a connection like that, it turns out to be a powerful one.

But when you suggest to ordinary political writers that the American people have more virtue than they normally are given credit for, and when you point out that the powers that be are trying to nullify those virtues, they get very upset. They’ve been hanging around the rulers all the time. A book like mine is a red flag to people who think like that. This was particularly the case with the New York Times review. I got lucky with the Washington Post. I got a reviewer who takes me extremely seriously and probably praised the book more than it deserved.

How would you typify your enemies?

In one form or another, my enemies believe that the few should rule the many and that the many should shut their traps.

You would say that power, and not money, is the driving force behind politicians?

Absolutely. The idea that people are interested in nothing but money is the great contemporary principle of understanding. This is a principle dearly beloved by the radicals on the left; it’s dearly beloved by conservatives on the right; it is dearly beloved by centrists; it is dearly beloved by everyone that matters in this country. It is the belief that political power is of no interest to those in power. And yet the hardest way to make a million dollars is to become a senator. There are an endless number of better ways for a vicious, impudent, brazen, shrewd, gifted person to become rich than to become a crooked politician. People don’t become politicians to make money. If you want to make money, you go to where the money is, in the stock market.

Has your career been difficult?

It hasn’t been difficult, but it hasn’t been easy. Not easy means that when you do something, people don’t call you up and ask you to do more of the same. People don’t give you money. People don’t invite you to attend seminars.

At your age, Jane, you don’t realize that a tremendous amount of the good things in the world—fame, wealth, consequence—are all part of a vast machine; I call it a “preferment machine.” If you stand outside the realm of powerful and privileged people, that machine doesn’t work for you. It doesn’t produce goodies for you.

It doesn’t have to do with virtue or merit at all. It has to do with the fact that you are not saying the same things that a great many important people want to have said. The principle is very simple. The thing that is so shocking to discover when you become middle-aged is that there is such a thing as a machine of preferment. A nineteenthcentury English writer named Walter Bagehot said, “The world is given to those who the world can trust.” And believe me, in America, if you stand up for democracy, the world (that is, the powerful) doesn’t trust you.

Why do you persevere?

Because it’s fun. It’s fun to stand up and speak your mind. It’s fun to feel yourself independent. It’s a joy to cleave to the principles of a great country. I confess, there is a certain sweet martyrdom to feel that you are standing with the truly great men of the country and that the people who ignore and despise you are the people who are diminishing the country. It can make you very conceited. The great danger of being an outsider is of becoming self-satisfied. As for persevering, nothing could be easier. I don’t know anything else to do!

If you could not write about politics, would you write at all?

That would be difficult. If I no longer had an outlet for writing about politics, I would find that devastating. I’ve had a year or so here and there when I felt that that black cloud was over my head—of being condemned to write about everything but what I cared about most. But so far, every time the black cloud gathered, it always managed to break up. America is not as free as it should be, by far; but it is not so unfree that a voice like mine can’t be heard.

Walter Karp wrote about his political convictions in three books: Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America (Saturday Review Press, 1973); The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic (Harper & Row, 1979); and Liberty under Siege: American Politics, 1976-1988 (Henry Holt & Company, 1988).

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"theorist of republicanism"

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0684818868/ref=sib_books_pg/104-3473588-1478337?ie=UTF8&keywords=walter%20karp&p=S00Q&checkSum=Endy4P%252Be1nXu4g8CNsKRmkOGbxjyfoeAPSXxvrIrxbg%253D

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Walter Karp (1934-1989) was an American journalist, writer and historian. For 10 years, until his sudden death after surgery on July 19, 1989, he worked as a contributing editor for Harper's magazine, edited by his friend Lewis H. Lapham which in 2003 reissued some of his political books. Earlier he wrote for American Heritage magazine. He started his writing career in the 1950's but did not focus on politics. He became political after the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. A chain-smoker, he was passionate about politics and against war. His books emphasized the interplay between domestic and international politics, and the shallowness of the modern American two-party system. His writings emphasize power and militarism rather than money as a corrupting influence on the politics. He claimed Thomas Jefferson and Hannah Arendt as the two greatest influences on his thinking. He was inspired by the United States' Founding Fathers both politically and in his literary style reminiscent of late 18th century prose, and has been called a modern Tom Paine.

His The Politics of War is a history of how the US got into the Spanish-American War and the First World War, and of the emergence of the US as a world power. Lapham has compared it to the works of Henry Adams and underlines its continuing relevance, writing in 2003 that "Karp offers a clearer understanding of our current political circumstance than can be found in any two or twenty of the volumes published over the last ten years by the herd of Washington journalists grazing on the White House lawn." Karp's position was that both McKinley and Wilson were far from being reluctant, or forced to enter these wars, as many historians contend. He felt that each President was in definitely in charge and strongly desired and engineered the war. He was also particularly critical of Wilson's domestic repression of civil liberties against critics of the war. Comparing the wartime behavior of Lincoln, who he admired, to Wilson's he wrote: "Americans under Lincoln enjoyed every liberty that could possibly be spared; in a war safely fought 3,000 miles from our own shores, Americans under Wilson lost every liberty they could possibly be deprived of."

His Liberty under Siege was variously received “cranky speculation.” (New York Times) "an extraordinary book”(Washington Post) A highly idiosyncratic writer, he is now remembered by libertarians across the political spectrum, both left and right.

Quotes
“The left and right wings of the party establishment--two great pinions of an ancient bird of prey.” (Liberty under Siege, p.100)

“The public school system: ‘Usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority.’”

“The most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the ‘best’ sources.”(Harper's Magazine, July 1989)

"Professors of American history erect Gothic cathedrals of erudition on political axioms acquired from their fifth-grade "social studies" readers" (Buried Alive, p.63)

"In one form or another, my enemies believe that the few should rule the many and that the many should shut their traps." (American Heritage Interview)

Politics