The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country by Howard Fineman
Random House, 320 pp.

Americans love to argue. In fact, we would not be Americans if we didn’t.

So says journalist Howard Fineman in his new book, The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates that Define and Inspire Our Country. Arguing, Fineman says, is what we do and who we are. “We are the arguing country, born in and born to debate,” he writes. “We are an endless argument.”

Fineman is Newsweek’s senior Washington correspondent and columnist, and he’s a news analyst for NBC and MSNBC. By his own description, he has covered every presidential campaign and major candidate since 1983.

In The Thirteen American Arguments, Fineman taps into his decades of experience to find perspective on the American experiment. He looks not at petty partisan bickering and political posturing but rather at the larger, fundamental questions Americans have wrestled over since the country’s founding.

“To understand our nature, and to sustain it, we need to appreciate the lucky mix of accident and intention that made us who we are,” he writes. “We have been debating our very identity from the first days of our existence. Was this to be a Christian New Jerusalem, a Dutch speculation, or an English shire?” Those competing views in many ways still jockey for dominance, he says, but the most important thing is the tug-of-war balance that has resulted.

In that same way, America has defined itself through thirteen ongoing arguments that, in various combinations, pit the State, Church, Tribe, Market, and Academy against one another—with individuals caught in the middle. The tug-of-war balance that results from the arguments themselves “define, inspire, and ultimately unite us by bestowing legitimacy on hard-fought deals,” Fineman says. “Arguing keep us moving fitfully forward.”

Fineman arranges his arguments into what he calls “concentric circles” that ripple out from the individual to the world itself and, finally, to the abstract ideal.

For instance, who is a person, who is an American, and what responsibilities do Americans have toward each other? What can Americans be told to believe in matters of faith?

As a country, how do we define money and manage debt? How do we balance centralized versus decentralized government? What is the relative strength of the president “in a federal scheme dedicated to find the midpoint between monarch and mob”?

What is our place in the world and what is out relationship with other countries? What role do trade, diplomacy, and war play in those relationships?

Does the environment belong to the current generation to use and exploit or is the environment something we hold in trust for future generations?

And what does it mean to have—and what do we have to do to achieve—that “more perfect Union” our Founding Fathers envisioned?

Don’t expect to find the arguments articulated in a civics book. As packaged neatly here in a convenient and catchy list of thirteen, they are Fineman’s creations, but the debates themselves are certainly as old and as vital as Fineman suggests.

Fineman explores each question from historical as well as modern perspectives, taking great care to first ground each question by drawing on contemporary events. As he explores “Who is a person,” for instance, he starts on the steps of the Illinois state capital as Barack Obama launched his presidential bid. Fineman draws parallels between Obama and Lincoln, “the Great Emancipator,” and from there examines a number of facets to the question of personhood.

He looks at the old debate over slavery (were slaves people or property), the current debate over abortion (when does a fetus qualify for “personhood”) and the not-too-distant questions that will arise in the future over genetic experimentation.

If Fineman had his way, Americans would argue more. “Rather than argue too much, which is the conventional wisdom’s critique, we in fact do not argue enough about the fundamentals,” he says. The Thirteen American Arguments, he hopes, is one more way to encourage continued dialogue—a dialogue in which everyone has a role. 

“If arguing is our saving grace, everyone must feel they have a voice and a chance to be heard,” he writes. “Do they?”

And the argument goes on.

What you know about Cinco de May is only half the story. It is also known as the great mayonnaise mess.

Most people don’t know that back in 1912, Hellmann’s mayonnaise was manufactured in England. In fact, the Titanic was carrying 12,000 jars of the condiment scheduled for delivery in Vera Cruz, Mexico, which was to be the next port of call for the great ship after its stop in New York. This would have been the largest single shipment of mayonnaise ever delivered to Mexico. But as we know, the great ship did not make it to New York. The ship hit an iceberg and sank, and the cargo was forever lost.

The people of Mexico, who were crazy about mayonnaise and were eagerly awaiting its delivery, were disconsolate at the loss. Their anguish was so great that they declared a National Day of Mourning, which they still observe to this day. The National Day of Mourning occurs each year on May 5th and is known, of course, as Sinko de Mayo. Full Story »

The Bloody Shirt
by Stephen Budiansky

Most Americans don’t realize that a large portion of our country was, once upon a time, overrun by barbarians.

That age of barbarians isn’t covered in most history texts, and when it is, it’s usually called the Era of Reconstruction. And as many Southerners resisted reconstruction, they resorted to acts of barbarism to impose their terrible will over the rule of law.

Stephen Budiansky’s new book, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox, explores this age of barbarism—for age of barbarism it was. No other word can suffice to explain the acts of terror and violence committed by large numbers of Southern whites in the decades immediately following the Civil War. Full Story »

I’m Jewish. You don’t hear me blog about this much for a variety of reasons, one of the major ones being that you are then inevitably asked to take a stand on Israel–as if such a thing even needed to be discussed, like Marx’s odious asking of “The Jewish Question.”

My faith influences my thinking in a lot of ways, but it is not the sole arbiter of my thinking, and I don’t feel that I have to travel in lockstep with what any other Jew thinks–certainly not about Israel, which has every right to exist as a sovereign state, yet commits indefensible acts against peoples it (rightly or wrongly) perceives as implacable foes. As such, people like myself stay out of the debate, allowing it to be usurped and dominated by a cabal of crazy ultrahawkish right-wing Zionists who claim that anything short of total annihilation of Palestine will end with, as my father says, “the Jews being driven into the sea.”

Thankfully, there’s an alternative coming around, and it is called J Street. Full Story »

It’s the new conventional wisdom: The news biz is dying. Declining circulation. Abandonment by advertisers. Falling revenues. Cuts in staffing to reduce costs. The news biz needs a new business model, the critical harpies proclaim.

But what should a new business model for an industry whose principal product is journalism look like?

It would have to recognize several new — and old — realities.

• Any new business model must generate profit.

There’s no way around this. Journalism is best sustained within a for-profit frame. A company that engages in newspaper journalism as a product is not supported by government (unlike public television) nor should it be. The same holds for commercial broadcast journalism as well. To provide news, the company must make a profit to attract investors and secure the resources to collect, report and transmit that news. A non-profit model cannot immediately match the breadth and depth of news reporting that a healthy democracy of more than 300 million citizens requires.
Full Story »

When I first heard, I was jubilant.  For a 10-year-old white kid living in a South we all thought was under siege, hearing that Martin Luther King was dead was like hearing that Satan had converted and joined the Southern Methodist Church.  The ogre was dead.

We were safe.

Very quickly, we learned that we needed to fear again.  My county was about 50% black, and seemingly all of them were set to converge on the courthouse square of my little town.  They were then set to march down the main street and US highway that ran right past my house.

My father was away from the area, working, so my mother told me to get all the guns in the house, load them, and be prepared to protect her and my sister if they stormed the house.  I sat by the front door when they marched by.  I sat there, trembling, surrounded by my single-shot .22 rifle with the sawed-off stock to fit my skinny shoulder, the lever-action .30-.30 carbine, and the .38 police special revolver.  The safeties were off.  I didn’t know how quickly I might have to fire.  I didn’t think I could stop them, but I could take a few with me.

All they did was sing and walk.

by Chris Mackowski

Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’s Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress
by Joseph Wheelan
PublicAffairs Publishing

Fewer families in America have had a greater influence on the country than the Adams family of Quincy, Massachusetts. After all, the family spawned two presidents, America’s most influential Founding Mother, a minister to England who helped saved the Union during the Civil War, and a turn-of-the-twentieth-century literary giant.

The family patriarch—America’s second president, John—has received a lot of attention in the past few years since the publication of David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography. Full Story »

by Carol White

The Case of Abraham Lincoln: A Story of Adultery, Murder, and the Making of a Great President
by Julie M. Fenster

Julie Fenster’s new book is not only a fascinating look at a side of Abraham Lincoln—his daily life as an influential Illinois lawyer in the years before he became president—but an illuminating study about how he and his abolitionist associates succeeded in fusing anti-slavery Democrats and Whigs and to create the Republican party. Lincoln’s role as a wartime president tends to overshadow the fact of his crucial involvement not only in exposing his arch rival Stephen Douglas, author of the infamous Kansas-Nebraska act that opened the western territories of the United States to slavery—but in the nitty-gritty, day-to-day politicking that preceded, and was crucial to the party’s victory at the polls in the 1860 presidential election. Full Story »

Welcome to the fifth and final installment of the Scholars & Rogues year-end wrap-up. Today we tackle the dirty, but oddly riveting world of politics. We’ll take a couple shots at the even dirtier world of media that makes it all possible. Let’s start at the top, shall we?

George Walker Bush: I’ve been telling my Republican friends for five years now that Dubya was going to do more damage to their party than an army of Hillarys could dream of doing. And 2007 was the year where I think the truth of this proposition finally started becoming evident. Scandals at the Justice Department and World Bank did him no favors, nor did the conviction of Scooter Libby (which necessitated the most politically debilitating pardon/commutation sequence since Ford saved Nixon). Iraq got worse by the day and we’re not seeing a lot of GOP presidential hopefuls looking to surf that Bush legacy. Full Story »

Welcome back to day 2 of the S&R Year in Review. Today we tackle some of 2007’s big moments in news and current events.

The Invasion and Occupation of Iraq Surpasses the American Civil War in Duration: The United States’ involvement in World War I lasted only 19 months and World War II lasted 44 months for the United States, even though the war itself was nearly six years long. The occupation of Iraq (aka the Iraq War) outlasted World War II in November of 2006, making the duration of U.S. involvement in Iraq the third longest foreign occupation in U.S. history. The American Civil War lasted 48 months, and the Iraq occupation surpassed that duration on March 20, 2007. This makes the Iraq occupation the third longest running period of continuous conflict in U.S. history, behind only the Vietnam War and its sister conflict in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Full Story »

Let’s play a little game, just for fun. You have a time machine, a magic wand, a genie or a fairy godmother. And you can go back to any one moment in history to experience an event or perhaps meet a famous (or not so famous) person. Whatever. It has to be selfish - it can’t be about changing history or saving the world or killing Hitler when he was a baby. It has to be something you’d simply have loved to have been around for.

What would you do?

I’ll go first.

Your turn.

Report Summary on First Contact Suitability

Ten stigus ago, the Council commissioned a task force of sociologists, anthropologists, historians, linguists, inter-species ethnologists, and first-contact psychologists to study the newly found sentient species of Bat’algah 3. The task force was given a mandate to make a recommendation regarding contact with this species that calls itself “Homo’sapiens. ”This is the task force’s report.

Background
After many millions of stigus of study, the basic psychology of sentient races is well-known. All successful and surviving sentient races have two characteristics:

1: They have a psychological mechanism that allows them to take action even in the face of conflicting data. Full Story »

The author of this piece requested that we identify her only as “Ann.”

Determined to escape the life of a South Texas dirt farmer, he had taken a job at a petroleum refinery and married by the time he was drafted in 1941. In his wedding photo he bears a noticeable resemblance to Mickey Rooney, minus the cocky leer, and his farm girl bride leans into the frame to disguise how much taller she is. At the age of 20, he became the third of four brothers to serve in WWII. For reasons of personal belief, he could not carry a weapon; for reasons of personal belief, it was impossible for him to refuse to serve. He became a medic, an aid man, armed with sulfa, morphine and bandages. He was about five foot five, stocky and square like his farmer father, and he could hoist an oil barrel or a wounded boy with astonishing ease. Full Story »

In my most recent post, one commenter repeatedly insisted that I offer a solution or an alternative for the problems I was pointing to. As I noted there, I never suggested that there was a problem, and even if there were, it’s hardly my job to be proposing a lot of solutions that aren’t going to be acted on. If you believe there’s the slightest plausibility of change wafting in the wind, you haven’t taken a good look at the likely presidential contenders in your two major parties.

However, for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that I think America’s current condition constitutes a “problem” and that I’m tasked with offering a solution. I would begin with one critical observation about your system of governance: The problem with democracy in America is that too many people are allowed to participate. Full Story »

Thomas Jefferson’s legacy is much admired in the US and beyond, and for good reason. Without his contributions it’s hard to imagine how the American system of “democracy” would have evolved.

I’ve always admired him a great deal, too, although for somewhat different reasons than most. Yes, he was critical to the development of democracy, but what was so brilliant about this is that democracy is arguably the cleverest tool for the oppression of the masses ever devised.

This assertion no doubt comes as something of a shock to The Average American, who tends to get all sniffly about the majesty of his “freedoms” every 4th of July as he sits in his local park watching pretty explosions in the sky and listening to the facile, self-deluded patriotism of Lee Greenwood yowling from the PA. Full Story »

At noon on January 20, 2009, George W. Bush will become a former president of the United States. Assuming they live, he will join former presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and his father in a unique fraternity.

He will be 62. He is a relatively young man in good physical health. He will be capable of a vigorous life as a former president. He is not considered an intellectual.

What will he do for the next three decades?
Full Story »

Six years ago, I learned about the attacks on New York and Washington a day late, on September 12. Ensconced in the Umbrian countryside, intentionally cut off from all electronic contact with the world, I was oblivious for 24 hours to the events that (as everyone insisted) changed the world.

In fact, the world did not change that day. Terrorism—the violent acts of those too weak to do anything else—and war—the violent acts of those too unimaginative to do anything else—have always been part of human history. It was only the United States that changed, driven to fear and frenzy by its lying leaders.

Full Story »