**

In the popular understanding, religious colonists came to the New World for the freedom to worship. But John Winthrop’s Massachusetts colony hardly embraced the individual’s right to worship according to one’s conscience. The Puritans’ issue was that English society was corrupt, and they came to America to escape it. They had no understanding of themselves as pioneers pushing westward. Instead, they saw themselves as builders of a utopian society.

Nearly a century and a half later, Thomas Jefferson and the Founders declared that the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” entitled Americans to a “separate and equal station” to the British subjects of King George, and explained their causes – not out of necessity, but merely out of “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” The power of the individual is recognized, but the Declaration speaks more of a higher ideal.

Later, Jefferson would speak to the ability of government to keep the nation “free and firm.” In his First Inaugural, Jefferson addresses concerns that “man cannot be trusted with the government of himself” by asking how he could, “then, be trusted with the government of others?” This indicates that government has kept us free and firm precisely because it has stood aside to let the individual rule himself. Yet Jefferson also says the U.S. has the only government where “every man, at the call of the laws, would fly to the standard of the law.” Once again, he returns to the theme of a higher order.

These bold expressions of a higher power superceding society’s law would later be mirrored by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Martin Luther King Jr. “Self-Reliance,” “Civil Disobedience,” and “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” all speak equally boldly about the importance of doing what one believes is right. When King argues that “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws” and defining unjust laws as those which codify “difference made legal,” and Thoreau argues that “under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison,” they are regarding the same higher ideal as Jefferson. Emerson speaks very directly to the individual, but even this is motivated in large part by mistrust of society, which he finds “everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”

**

Turning from philosophy to literature, these themes continue. The authors we have studied assign differing degrees of merit to the individual, but all agree that society is, at best, troubled.

A cornerstone of American literature is the hero on the run – from society, from himself, and from responsibility. Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers,” and Richard Wright’s “Almos’ a Man” all feature a childlike protagonist with a need to escape: Rip from his oppressive wife, Nick from a violent world, and Dave from trouble he created. In each case, the reader is left with the impression that the escape was not cowardly or shameful, but in fact necessary and even admirable (the last case is perhaps an exception, but despite the reader’s judgment, it is clear that Dave himself believes he will prove his manhood by leaving town).

Yet in remarking on the similarity of these protagonists, one should not overlook the similarity of their antagonists. Nor should one overlook how the eventual decision of each protagonist to escape is reactive, not proactive. Rip Van Winkle does not fall asleep in the woods for forty years because of his love of exploring or history of adventuring. He is merely a man avoiding his wife who happens to have a drink from the wrong bottle. Nick did nothing to invite two hitmen into his diner. He merely bore witness to the reality of violence in society. And even Dave, who was totally proactive in making trouble, was still reactive in fleeing from it. These individual heroes may choose to make their own destiny – but only after being confronted by a society they cannot abide.

Finally, one must consider the author who is traditionally understood as standing alone against the American myth. There is little doubt that Nathaniel Hawthorne rejects the lionization of the individual. But he does not hold society in much higher regard. The faintest praise he will give it is that it’s as good as it gets.

In “Young Goodman Brown,” Hawthorne concludes that we are all sinners and therefore need one another. On his journey through the woods, Goodman came to realize that all the individuals he had put on pedestals were really no better than he. Is this so different from Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”? With his conclusion – “his dying hour was gloom” – Hawthorne makes clear that the individual cannot escape society without abandoning himself to a miserable and lonely existence, but his vision of society promises little more than a miserable but social existence.

The conclusion of “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” is scarcely more cheery. After proving Robin to be embarrassingly mistaken about his kinsman’s stature, Hawthorne leaves him interested in returning home. But he leaves us with the promise that Robin might instead be persuaded to stay for a while – perhaps even to try and make it on his own, without the help of his kinsman. While it would be far more challenging to draw parallels to “Self-Reliance” from Robin’s experience, it is worth noting that the townsfolk do nothing more than reduce him to their level. Hawthorne tears down Robin’s inflated image of himself and his kinsman, but he does nothing to raise the image of society in its place.
Ultimately, Hawthorne’s storytelling is only anti-myth when the myth is understood as an optimistic sense of the potential of the individual to escape society’s bounds and achieve greatness. He differs much less from the other writers studied in his understanding of society’s flaws. A vision of the American myth that focuses primarily on the rejection of society, then, embraces even Hawthorne.

**

None of this is to say that American thinkers, authors, and (especially) politicians have not traditionally emphasized the paramount role of the individual and the critical importance of personal liberty. There is little question that the American zeitgeist has always tended to glamorize the star. But this glamorization is the end, not the means; the what, not the how. It is not self-evident. When it occurs, it is reactive – the result of a deep and fundamental mistrust of society. The lionization of the individual is so often understood as the American myth because it is the most visible effect of the myth. But the cause – and, therefore, the truth of the myth – is antipathy toward society.

The Myth of the Eastern Front examines just that question, or at least, it sets out to show how much of jerks those fetishists are (the book never uses that term, but let’s not kid ourselves with what’s going on here). The book lays the fetish largely at the feet of the Cold War, which seems pretty logical. After all, who better to turn to for learning how to fight Russian hordes than ze Germans, ja?

Over New Year’s, I stayed at a bed and breakfast in western Virginia. I walked in and found tons and tons of books about England, Germany, and the Second World War — things like the History of the Isles and Goebbels’ diaries. There were also some Jerome Corsi books (that’s the asshole who wrote Obamanation). I nailed down our host as a conservative veteran who served in Germany during either the Second World War or shortly thereafter. Meeting him in the morning, I was dead on.

It’s somewhat amusing that I took this book to that B&B, after realizing that our hosts were exactly the sort of folks that the book was taking to task. In the living room there was a German Christmas village; in the den, as previously mentioned, all those books. On the way out the door, they told us to be careful during the inaugural — one of their friends had been told by a black man at Burger King that he could cut in line because Barack Obama had been elected.

There’s a weird mix of patriotism, conservatism, and racism at work here. I’m sure these folks are deeply mistrustful of liberals because they are in fact communists and they find Germans (and to an extent, perhaps even the Nazis) a bit admirable because they held traditional values of family and honor in high regard. And because they fought communists.

I’ve long thought it weird that Che can be marketed as a symbol of liberation, considering that he was a murderer. This is true of all communist propaganda — the stuff is everywhere in eastern Europe, where it should be reviled. I’ve always thought Nazi kitsch to be taboo, like the neighbor’s Nazi plate in American Beauty. This book is an eye-opener as to how much that’s not true.

What is to be done? Who knows. We are at a time when a majority of Russians believe that Stalin would probably be a pretty decent leader of their nation right now, so the world clearly has greater problems than a few kooks playing war games on the Internet. But as Holocaust revionism becomes more widespread and the long-ignored horrors of the Eastern Front fade further into memory, the dangers of a rehabilitation of National Socialism ought not be taken lightly.

By the way, the reviews of this book on Amazon are hilarious, because many of them are written by the very folks the book takes to task. It’s always amusing to see the reaction of an Internet community to a critical work of old media. This is no exception.

One valid point is raised by one of the commenters, though, and that is that the book tends to come across as very pro-Soviet — enough so that I actually found myself checking to see if it was written by dudes with Slavic names. It seems that there is no such thing as a honest broker.

In some ways, the comparisons are apt. Like Lincoln, Obama reached out to those who he defeated in forming his cabinet. When all was said and done, the only rivals he failed to bring in were either on the fringe (Gravel, Kucinich) or overtaken by scandal (Edwards, and, now, Richardson).

But in a deeper sense, the analogy is cliche. Lincoln united a party created out of the fight against slavery and took it and the nation to war. Obama faces a far simpler task. Though he seeks to bind and heal the wounds of liberalism’s 40 years at low tide, he was never faced with the threat of political irrelevance.

It has become fashionable in recent times to shy away from the ‘great man’ theory of history. Traditionally, historians looked to the giants to tell the stories of a nation — Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy. Today, we look to the individuals that make up the fabric of our country — women or workers, blacks or gays.

Goodwin firmly rejects the shift. Without Lincoln’s gift of “political genius,” as she calls it in the title, the Civil War might have been a losing effort and our nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal may not have endured.

I have long argued that the promise of Obama’s presidency is that he calls not to his own greatness, but to the greatness inherent in the American people. By rejecting our faith in him and asking that we instead have faith in our own ability, he challenges our will and demands our best. This is leadership.

Yet just the same, where would we be without him? What if the movement never made it past that snowy night in Iowa? What if Hillary Clinton would have run against Rudy Giuliani for the presidency? Where would we be if, instead of a leader with a 68 percent approval rating asking us (in essence) what we can do for our country, we had one of those two in office?

While the challenges our nation faces today are immeasurably smaller, the most apt comparison from Lincoln to Obama is not in leadership or convention management or cabinent assembly. It is in the extent to which each man is the man for his place and time.

On January 3, 2008, I stood behind Barack Obama in the Hy-Vee Convention Center in Des Moines, Iowa, as he spoke of “nights like this, a night that, years from now” we “can look back with pride and say that this was the moment when it all began.” That night, I stood on risers and watched a man who was still a long-shot to win the nomination (let alone the presidency) talk about hope.

On January 20, 2009, I stood behind a mass of people and a grove of trees and squinted at a Jumbotron and listened as “I, Barack Hussein Obama,” took the oath of office to become the 44th President of the United States. A year and a couple weeks later, it’s not so much about hope. It’s about responsibility, and about providence — about unity and renewal.

It’s been one hell of a ride. From a cold winter’s night in Iowa when Obama proved that he could not only win, but win big, to a disappointing nail-biter in New Hampshire, to a blowout in South Carolina that proved once again that first-time voters can deliver an election — to Super Tuesday, to North Carolina and Indiana, and then to Denver.

In Iowa, Obama talked about “the moment when the improbable beat what Washington always said was inevitable.” By Election Day, the improbable had become the inevitable.

**

Though I continue to think of the campaign as a story that began in Iowa (as does every campaign, really), the real story of this election dates back to 1968. This was an election steeped in symbolism and parallel. Rare is it in American history that the analogies drawn and metaphors painted by politicians are as poignant or as rich as those created by Barack Obama.

It was forty years to the day after Martin Luther King, Jr., stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and declared his dream that Barack Obama became the first black man to accept a major party’s nomination to run for President of the United States.

It was forty years exactly after Sirhan Sirhan’s bullet took the life of Robert F. Kennedy, and with it, the life of American liberalism that Ted Kennedy rose to declare that “the work begins anew, the hope rises again, and the dream lives on.”

It was forty years exactly after Richard Daley’s pigs indiscriminately beat peaceniks, hippies, druggies and reporters alike in Grant Park, Chicago that justice at last rolled down like water in a mighty stream, sweeping away 40 years of discord and violence and mistrust.

I have been reading much about 1968 and 1972. From Rick Perlsten’s Nixonland to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the 1972 Campaign Trail to Tim Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus, the story of the 2004 and 2008 campaigns is not so different from those of 1968 and 1972. It is just that the good guys, at last, came out on top. The Democratic party, and the country with it, listened to the better angels of our nature.

**

In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was given a popular mandate to remake the country in his image. By manipulating the meaning of the Commerce Clause, he consolidated an unprecedented amount of power in the federal government. In so doing, he created the machinery that we today take for granted.

In the 40 years from 1932 to 1972, the federal government gave us Social Security, the atom bomb, the Interstate Highway System, the greatest military in the history of the world, desegregation, and the man on the moon. And then it all fell apart. While Roosevelt’s legacy lives on in hundreds of important programs, the liberal idea reached its apogee in the 1960s — and its nadir not long after.

The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement ended liberalism in America. The conflicts of hippies refusing to listen to their parents and blacks rioting in the streets against squares and pigs would so shock the conscience of the American people that they would vote Republican for a generation.

The legacy of Vietnam and Civil Rights would be felt for nearly half a century. The 40 years in the wilderness would be ended at last only by the fruit of the latter opposing a repeat of the former. Bill and Hillary Clinton may have led the way to the promised land, but it was Barack Obama who has taken us there. Liberalism, at last, is back.

**

But this is about more than that. This is not about one man, or one ideology. This is about America. For all the talk about the emptiness of “hope” and “change” — who isn’t for these things, in a time of hopelessness? — they were themes that resonated.

On January 20, 2009, I stood with two million voices chanting for Barack Obama. In a majority-black city, it is easy to understand why, and I don’t hold it against any those chanting. But the far more meaningful experience was on January 3, 2008, when I stood with a few thousand chanting U-S-A.

The day after announcing his candidacy, Barack obama stood in an auditorium in Ames and told an audience of college students that he was a “flawed and imperfect vessel” for their hopes and dreams. And so he is. He will have his ups and downs. He will make his mistakes. So do we. But what matters is that he stood on the West Steps and told the American people that we are entering an era of responsibility — that it is ultimately up to us, not him.

Will we listen?

Sometimes these revisionist histories are dead on, as in the case of the first dude who figured out that Dwight Eisenhower was not in fact an absentee president, or the first dude that proved that Stalin was directly behind the Korean war. Or those who argued that the much-ballyhooed decision-making process during the Cuban Missle Crisis was manufactured for PR purposes.

Other times they are a figment of a historian’s imagination, such as those that claim that the United States was totally winning the war in Vietnam, if only we had not been undermined by the public. This is standpoint from which the layperson tends to use the word revisionist — as if there is a real history, and revisionist histories are falsehoods.

In Foxbats over Dimona, two Russian Jewish authors argue that the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab countries in 1967 was not a regional conflict, as it is generally understood, but was in fact instigated by the Soviet Union as an attempt to consolidate its position in the Middle East. The USSR immediately began to back away from its role as soon as everything collapsed (Israel bombed the crap out of Egypt’s air force, and ended the war before it began).

Many dismiss their work as fantasy. Given their sources, it is not unreasonable to do so. They have written and oral memoirs from random soldiers and sailors, but then those are easily enough fabricated for money or for attention (or for insanity).

Some of their most convincing arguments involve parsing the language and dates of Soviet releases regarding the war. By reading between the lines, they are able to determine that a release issued after the war began was clearly written in advance. Therefore, the USSR had to know that the war was going to be launched.

While they are very convincing, it is clear that more work will have to be done to prove the conventional wisdom wrong. However, they have not been able to access the full archives of the KGB or the Red Army to determine whether or not their claims are true. Without that evidence, it is challenging to know who is right. Perhaps they are onto something. Perhaps not.

It is under this sort of mystery that most Soviet history has been done for the near-century since the creation of the Soviet Union. But with the collapse of the USSR, much more has become known. With time — perhaps if peace is finally acheived in the Middle East, or perhaps if the Russians get sick of caring about their influence there — all will be revealed.

America Between the Wars examines the foreign policy of the United States between the breaching of the Berlin Wall on 11-9-1989 and the attacks of 9-11-2001. The book’s thesis is that the inability of any scholar to adequately define the era or pinpoint our policy during it is a reflection of the inability of our nation’s leaders to point us in any particular direction or see that we got there.

Under George HW Bush, our policy was realism. We did not boldly go into former Soviet states or, after its collapse, the Soviet Union, and attempt to tell them what to do. Nor did we invade Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein when we had the opportunity. Today, these decisions seem wise. But nature abhors a vacuum, and our reluctance led to our missing opportunities to influence the shape these newly free nations would take.

When Bill Clinton took office, things got even worse. As an economically-minded governor of a nowhere state, Clinton’s focus was at home, not abroad. In this, he reflected America. After 50 years of Cold War, Americans no longer cared about the rest of the world. We had won. It was finally time to come home. The vast majority of Clinton’s “foreign policy” would be focused not on diplomacy, but on economics. Globalization was seen as the panacea for all of the world’s ills. Clinton’s reluctance to get too involved in foreign messes was reinforced by the failures he suffered when he did — the lessons of Somolia, an action leftover from the Bush Administration, were painful.

George W. Bush would bring America’s attentiveness to foreign policy to its nadir. Where Clinton preferred to focus on domestic affairs, Bush did so exclusively. Republican antipathy towards America’s traditional allies and a deep confidence in the so-called “unipolar moment” translated into a go-it-alone philosophy that ignored the very deep and very real hatred for America in the world at large, particularly in the Middle East. And Bush’s complete and total ignorance of the threat of terrorism was even worse than Clinton’s tendency to call off CIA or military strikes on Al Qaeda due to the threat of poor intelligence leading to civilian losses.

America Between the Wars is an exercise in dot-connecting. It is fairly easy to offer a unifying thesis about the Truman Doctrine or even the relatively eclectic Bush Doctrine or the isolationism between the First and Second World Wars. It is far more challenging to do so about the period between 11-9 and 9-11 — and in the end the only way to do so is by offering as a thesis that there is no unifying thread, that the only thing tying our policy together for those twelve years was inconsistency.

Though one can point to a couple significant foreign policy failures during that time (Somolia, Rwanda), it is easy to point to successes (Desert Storm, Bosnia, Kosovo) and that makes it hard to say that the period’s individual actions were mostly failures. But the period’s broader focus was non-existent, and that is a failure in and of itself.

To borrow a phrase, America’s chickens came home to roost. This sort of thinking is often blindly flailed against as blame-America-first by right-wingers, but the reality is that leaders from both parties missed opportunities after the Cold War, and those missed opportunities contributed to several of the disasters we find ourselves in today.

First, there is the former Communist bloc. By working with Europe, we were fairly succesful at integrating Eastern Europe into the EU and NATO and other Western institutions. But it is clear that Europe, not America, was the prime mover there. In areas where America was left to take the lead — with Russia and the Asian Soviet republics, our legacy is failure. By pushing Russia recklessly towards globalization without helping ease it over the bumps, we created the oligarchs and the mistrust that led to Putin’s consolidation of power. By ignoring the central Asian republics (or worse, rewarding the worst of them with military bases out of perceived military necessity), we have aided in the creation of a series of brutal dictatorships in one of the world’s most strategically important regions. Perhaps there was no way around these mistakes. But we did not try.

Next, and more obvious, there is the rise of terrorism. In the 1990s, we focused on retaliation rather than prevention. While it’s unfair to argue that Clinton just lobbed cruise missiles at tents without paying any attention to the real threat, it’s fair to say that the political climate and a broad lack of a sense of urgency prohibited any serious action against Osama bin Laden. The CIA led the Air Force to bomb the Chinese embassy in Kosovo. Little wonder that Clinton was reluctant to follow its intelligence reports in a region where it could start a regional war. Still, more could and, in hindsight, obviously should, have been done to make the point.

Works of recent history are always a bit interesting. Unlike books about the Civil War or even the Cold War, they do not benefit from the reams of classified and sealed documents held in Presidential and military archives. But they are nonetheless critical to understanding the situation we find ourselves in today — and in working to chart a course out of it. America Between the Wars strikes a very good balance between story-telling, lesson-teaching, and looking forward.

In Law and the Long War, left-leaning legal scholar Benjamin Wittes attempts to do just that. By arguing that many of the fundamental goals of the Bush Administration are justifiable but its methods are not, Wittes sketches an outline of what an Obama administration’s approach to creating a legal framework for what we will hopefully not have to call “the Global War on Terror” much longer.

The fundamental focuses of Law and the Long War are enemy detention and electronic surveillence. For the former, Wittes sees a new system of national security courts allowing many of the accomodations of military tribunals but requiring many of the protections of civilian courts. For the latter, his proposal is not dissimilar to the compromises passed by the Democratic 110th Congress.

In many ways, his concepts are not new. There have been a wealth of solutions proposed to many of these issues, particularly those of detention. But they rarely get much of a hearing in a debate where all the oxygen is consumed by white-hot partisan passions.

The odds are slim that those passions will cool in the next four years. The President-elect will be operating in an environment where any centrist action will be decried by leftists as fascist and any leftward movement will be attacked by Republican hacks as dangerous. The two sides have a point, at least about each other’s views.

There is no question that warrantless wiretapping as practiced by this administration prior to the new FISA bill was, in a word, illegal. Similarly, the Supreme Court has found that the United States does not have the right to hold prisioners at Guantanamo indefinitely without charge. More than seven years after September 11, the two biggest efforts of the Bush Administration to keep us safer operate still on fundamnentally shaky legal ground. To simply try and legalize these methods without question would indeed be pretty fascist.

On the other hand, there is equally no question that some degree of electronic surveillence and some detention of those suspected of seeking to harm America is useful, even critical, to the protection of this country. To stretch a metaphor to the breaking point, it is not acceptable to throw the baby out with the bathwater — even if the baby is a bit of a Trig Palin. Electronic survillence and national security courts are not pretty, idealistic solutions. But we are a country in need, and it is time that we have an intelligent and responsible debate about how to meet these needs.

There are at least somewhat more promising odds that we at least have elected a leader with an interest in cooling rather than superheating the passions surrounding these issues. By working to investgate and prosecute members of the Bush Administration who authorized and executed these illegal orders even while working to create a legal framework to legalize them in the future, the President-elect has an opportunity to prove himself to the vital center by angering partisans on both sides.

Not a moment too soon.

At this point, writing another 500 words harping on the sheer magnitude of the errors surrounding the war in Iraq is a complete and total waste of time. That is not to short-change the value of this book, or other books like Tom Ricks’ Fiasco, but it is to explain why there is little to no point in going into the uselessness of the war or the incompetence of its execution here. The long and short of it is that every American should read either this book or Fiasco or both. Without them, it will be easy to do what is already being done — see Bush policy as something approaching success.

As we enter 2009, we are approaching the sixth year of war in Iraq. World War II, from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, lasted half as long. In time, we are approaching Vietnam territory. In deaths, we are far behind; in money, we are far ahead. Yet, on balance, since we appear to have “won,” it is easy to figure that it has gone okay and all is well that ends well, and therefore the Bush legacy is more or less a good one, all things considered.

Bullshit.

Whether or not Iraq ends up as a stable, peaceful democracy — and, in the face of all odds, it may — the war was a tragic mistake and a waste of what will likely end up being around 5,000 lives and 3,000,000,000,000 dollars (that’s trillion, so you don’t have to count).

Salvaging something out of the wreckage of five years of failed war does not absolve the administration of that fact. We never should have gone to war. Allowing that mistake, we never should have allowed the looting or disbanded the army or ignored the insurgency. Allowing those mistakes, we never should have…this can go on and on.

It is easy to get caught up in the minutae of the war in Iraq. What it comes down to is this: the war was a bad idea, and it was poorly executed for half a decade — the vast majority of the Bush presidency. The decision to go to war and the decisions of execution, mostly the result of blind ideology trumping logic time and again, must be laid at the feet of George W. Bush. There is no other responsible way.

It is easy to believe that we are in a new, post-partisan, happy time, where all that remains to be done is to look forward and grin and shape a new tomorrow. The reality is not so simple. Countless lies were told in the past eight years. Countless crimes were committed. We can count the lives lost and the dollars spent as a result. We must make a conscious effort to do so in order to make sure that the lessons we say we have learned are not forgotten.

“If you’re not angry, you haven’t been paying attention.”

If you’re not angry, read this book.

Named after the idea that Stalin’s Russia was a society of whisperers, afraid of their own voices, The Whisperers examines the personal lives of dozens of families from the 1920s through the 1950s, with a focus naturally occuring around the periods of greatest brutality: Collectivization, the Great Purge, and the Great Patriotic War.

It is a great contribution. Generally, when reading about the horrors of Stalinism, it is easy for the mind to begin to gloss over the statistics. 10 or 20 million Ukranians dead in a famine; a similarly sized GULAG population; and another 22 million dead in the war — these are just numbers, until names and faces are put to them.

For the superficial student of Soviet Russia, it is hard to understand how people could be so complacent as to allow their society to become so corrupted, so evil. The Whisperers answers the question, individual by individual. It provides a forgiveable list of excuses for those who did nothing, and even an understandable list of motives for those who participated.

Begin with the revolutionaries themselves. Many of these men began with the Bolsheviks; others came from other socialist parties and joined the cause during or after the Civil War. All of them shared a view that they were doing what was right — that they were fighting for Communism, an ideal that Marx and Lenin and, yes, Stalin, reasoned required the breaking of a few eggs. These folks were on board because they believed.

Next, there were careerists. Though these were often the first to go when a Party purge was initiated, the reality is that success in many fields in the Soviet Union required Communist Party membership. To maintain that membership, certain unfortunate acts were sometimes required.

Then, there were the class enemies who wanted to be part of society. If your parents owned a farm and had hired a farmland, you were an enemy of the people, and you were never going to get into university or get a good job — unless you hid your origins by acting as an orphan and a model citizen in the Komosol youth organization and other party organs.

From 2008, and even from 1980, it is easy to look back on 1935 and judge those who went along with Stalin. But in 1935 the Communist ideal was not yet a bankrupt one. In this country, as in every industrialized country in the world, the Communist party was a serious political organization taken seriously by serious people. It is hard to imagine. But it is so. That does not excuse the behavior of those who were complicit in this kind of evil — it only allows a bit of explaination.

Those who may be excused are those who failed to speak up. It is said that it was the banality of evil that allowed the Holocaust to go on more or less unmolested by the German people for nearly half a decade. There are rarely that many heroes in fascist societies. Stalinist Russia was no exception.

First, there are those who truly believed that the purges are catching enemies of the people. In many cases, even the arrest of a family member was not always enough to convince these folks that something was wrong. Russia is filled with 1930s family photos with one face scratched out. Just such a photo graces the cover of The Whisperers.

Equally naive as that group are those who were well aware that mistakes are being made, but think that the blame should be laid of the feet of mid-level apparatchniks — the “if Stalin only knew” folks. Some even sent letters to Stalin to inform him of the abuses going on in their region. In a rare display of humanity in the system, the authors of such letters did not generally find themselves any worse off, at least.

Such is the social situation that allowed the horrific stories related in The Whisperers to take place. Though none are shared here, all are worth reading. The broader themes discussed above are the lessons of the book, but they are not the point. It cannot be highly recommended enough.

In the summer of 2007, I was confidently telling people that Obama was going to be the next President of the United States. By the fall, I had more than $100 riding on it. And by the winter, I went door to door in my hometown to help make it happen. I’d be lying if I said I did much. But just the same, I’m pretty damn proud of it.

This whole plan started in the summer. I was going to get on board with Edwards or Biden or someone who could help me figure out how to campaign for something I believed in, meet people that mattered in Iowa politics, and, with little promise for going past Iowa, had no prayer of tempting me to keep campaigning. But then I read Obama’s essay in Foreign Relations.

After realizing that the man had policy heft (whether it was his own or his staff’s was irrelevant; what mattered is that he could bullshit it) to mate with his charisma and post-partisan message, I realized that the inevitable result of the election cycle was victory. In hindsight, it was a lot harder than it seemed then — any of a million missed opportunities by Clinton could have destroyed him. But ignoring that is one luxury of victory.

One year ago today, I was marching through the streets of this town knocking on doors. I heard from a woman who spoke of the impossibilty of getting health insurance that would cover her cancer, a pre-existing condition. She looked about 35. She was going to go to California to “shut down,” an unmistakable eumphamism that will haunt me forever. She was staying only to caucus for Barack. This is the kind of thing that makes up boilerplate stump speech. But it is also the kind of thing that haunts a person forever.

The healthcare system in this country is, in a word, fucked. The odds of fixing it in eight years are slim to none. It took thirty years for Johnson to realize the dreams of Roosevelt — and at the end of it, the coalition FDR built lay in ashes. Surely, the same will be true of this cycle. Conservatism is dead. Liberalism is in its ascendascy. General Petreaus may run as a Republican, and if he does, he will win. But General Eisenhower governored when the highest marginal income tax rate was over 90%. And Bill Clinton axed welfare. So goes leading from the opposition.

Here we are, then, facing not just eight years, but perhaps twenty — forty — of victory. The concept of the rich getting richer and the wealth trickling down is a joke, now, instead of an article of faith. We are beginning to realize that military force, while critical to our nation’s strength, cannot be the sole guarantor of it. The wheels are turning. The pendulum has shifted.

One year ago, all of this was a dream. The door hanger from last winter looks crude now, almost vulgar. “Caucus for Barack!” it cries, in all caps. In Impact. There’s whtie and yellow, an image of a crowd, some red — nothing of the classy white-on-blue, standardized-font of summer 2008. Obama hadn’t won yet. He had only raised a few million a month, not the $10, $25, $50 million that would come.

It was a time of hope and faith. It was a time before we declared that would “hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess,” before we knew that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” even before we declared confidently that “yes, we can.” It was a time when we were pissing into the wind.

One year ago, two days before Christmas, many polls of Iowa voters still showed Obama losing. Certainly no one thought he would win 365 electoral votes — Florida, North Carolina, Indiana. He was a flash in the pan. He had drawn 30,000, but only with Oprah’s help.

And now, one year later, he is the President-elect of the United States. It mists the eyes.

In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

By the way, for what it’s worth — there’s a Biden ‘08 sticker on the back of that doorhanger. Sometimes it’s almost painful being so right.

Here’s to the liberal ascendancy.

Here’s to twenty more Democratic Congresses.

And here’s to the night where it all began.