[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

The twenty-ninth edition of the Military History Carnival will take place here on December 1.  Please submit the best recent military history (broadly conceived) on the web for consideration for posting.  Deadline is November 28.

Nominations can be submitted here.

Pankaj Mishra, "Watch This Man," LRB, 3 November, reviews Niall Ferguson's Civilisation: The West and the Rest.

Theodore K. Rabb, "Love letter to a painting," TLS, 26 October, reviews Carola Hicks's Girl in a Green Gown: The history and mystery of the Arnolfini portrait.

John Markoff, "How Revolutionary Tools Cracked a 1700s Code," NYT, 24 October: "a team of Swedish and American linguists has applied statistics-based translation techniques to crack one of the most stubborn of codes: the Copiale Cipher, a hand-lettered 105-page manuscript that appears to date from the late 18th century."

Alan Wolfe, "One Right," The Book, 27 October, reviews Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.

Jay Merrick, "Russia's aesthetic revolution: How Soviet building still influences today's architects," Independent, 21 October, reviews "Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-35," an exhibit at London's Royal Academy of Arts.

The NYT's "Room for Debate" asks: "Do Good Debaters Make Good Presidents?" There are answers from H. W. Brands, Robert Dallek, David Gergen, Alonzo Hamby, Joan Hoff, Kathleen Hall Jameson, Jon Meacham, and Richard Reeves.

Roger Atwood, "The real lessons of Easter Island," TLS, 19 October, reviews Terry L. Hunt's and Carl Lipo's The Statues That Walked: Unraveling the mystery of Easter Island.

David S. Reynolds, "An Angry Prophet," WSJ, 22 October, reviews Tony Horwitz's Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War.

Michiko Kakutani, "Two-Sided Man Gets Two New Biographies," NYT, 24 October, reviews Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist and Claire Tomlin's Charles Dickens.

Fred Siegel, "Lyrical Leftist, Dogged Idealist," WSJ, 24 October, reviews Vivian Gornick's Emma Goldman.

On the eve of the opening of Steven Spielberg's new film, The Adventures of Tintin, Simon Kuper's "Tintin and the war," FT Magazine, 21 October, re-examines charges against the Belgian cartoonist/collaborationist, Georges Remi, whose pen name was Hergé.

Fang Lizhi, "The Real Deng," NYRB, 10 November, reviews Ezra F. Vogel's Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.

Jonathan Lopez, "A Stranger to Himself," WSJ, 15 October, Roberta Silman for the Boston Globe, 17 October, and Michiko Kakutani, "The Persona and the Palette," NYT, 20 October, review Steven Naifeh's and Gregory White Smith's Van Gogh: The Life. Ariella Budick, "Portrait of Decline," Slate, 25 September, and Barry Schwabsky, "Vacant, Limpid, Angelic: On Willem de Kooning," Nation, 18 October, review "de Kooning: A Retrospective," an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

Alonzo Hamby, "When Ike Took Charge," WSJ, 20 October, reviews Jim Newton's Eisenhower: The White House Years. Eric A. Posner, "Casual with the Court," The Book, 24 October, reviews Kevin J. McMahon's Nixon's Court: His Challenge to Judicial Liberalism and Its Political Consequences.

David Barboza, "The Man Who Took Modernity to China," NYT, 21 October, reviews Ezra F. Vogel's Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.

Jacob Silverman, "Free Radical," Tablet, 19 October, reviews the new documentary film, Paul Goodman Changed My Life. Matt Labash, "Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride," WSJ, 15 October, reviews Jann Wenner, ed., Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson.

Dwight Garner, "Peering Beyond a Monologist's Stage Presence Into His Uncensored Mind," NYT, 17 October, reviews Nell Casey, ed., The Journals of Spalding Gray. Raymond Beauchemin reviews Robert J Wiersema's Walk Like a Man: Coming of Age with the Music of Bruce Springsteen for The National, 21 October. Janet Maslin, "Making the iBio for Apple's Genius," NYT, 21 October, and WSJ Staff for the WSJ's Speakeasy, 23 October, review Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs.

"Winged words," Economist, 15 October, reviews The Iliad of Homer, trans. by Richmond Lattimore, The Iliad, trans. by Anthony Verity, The Iliad, trans. by Stephen Mitchell, and Alice Oswald's Memorial. Alec Ash interviews "Norman Stone on Turkish History," The Browser, 20 October, for his recommendation of five essential books about it.

Alex Knapp, "Yes, Shakespeare Really Did Write Shakespeare," Forbes, 19 October, attempts to settle the issue.

Frank Viviano, "The Eunuch Admiral," California, Fall, about Zheng He, a 15th-century Chinese admiral; and Sterling Lord, "When Kerouac Met Kesey," American Scholar, Autumn, by their literary agent, are The Browser's leading candidates for favorite article of the month. You can vote among the top 10 here.

The new Common-Place is up, with new work in ante-bellum American history by Jennifer Brady, Kevin Butterfield, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and others. Every generation seems to discover Herman Melville's Moby Dick anew for itself. For this one, see, for example: Matt Kish's One Drawing for Every Page of Moby Dick, Jamie L. Jones, "Blogging Moby Dick," Common-Place, October, Todd Gitlin, "The Grand Programme," The Book, 19 October, a review of Nathaniel Philbrick's Why Read Moby-Dick?, and Philbrick, "The Road to Melville," Vanity Fair, November, an adaptation from the book.

Michael Bernhard, "The Leadership Secrets of Bismarck: Imperial Germany and Competative Authoritarianism," Foreign Affairs, 16 October, reviews Jonathan Steinberg's Bismarck: A Life.

Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith, "Who Killed Che?" Guernica, October, draws on documents published in Ratner's and Smith's Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away with Murder to illuminate the question.

"Liberalism and Occupy Wall Street," TNR, 17 October, is an on-going TNR symposium, featuring Paul Berman, Todd Gitlin, David Greenberg, Michael Kazin, and others.

Finally, farewell to John Morton Blum, a distinguished American political historian. See also: Allan M. Winkler, "A Tribute to John Morton Blum," HNN, 18 October.

Jill Lepore in the New York Times, wrong as always:

"Lately, Mr. Cain has risen in the polls, buoyed by Tea Party populism, which is curious because when the word 'populism' was coined, in 1890, it meant opposition to a monopoly on wealth held by businessmen and bankers."

No, no, no, no, no, and wrong on both ends. A Harvard historian and the editors of the New York Times op-ed pages don't know any history between them? The Populists weren't simply opposed to wealth, or to a monopoly on wealth, or to businessmen, or to bankers. You can read the Omaha Platform yourself. You have to read all the way to the second sentence of the preamble for this: "Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench." Weird that people who just hated rich people used their first formal political statement to talk about political corruption, yeah? It's almost like they were angry at the government, which, you know, hold on a minute, I'm sensing the presence of a theme that I've heard somewhere else.

The Populists didn't simply hate wealth; they hated their (accurate) sense that the fix was in, that private wealth was derived from, and served by, public corruption. They hated crony capitalism. Agrarian populism wasn't proletarian -- it was substantially a movement of the rural petit bourgeoisie, smallholders who wanted to thrive as profit-seeking property owners. Here's the last sentence of the first paragraph of the preamble: "From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires."

The Populists were concerned with "governmental injustice" and the wealth it produced, not with wealth itself. Keep going through the Omaha Platform (emphasis added):

"The national power to create money is appropriated to enrich bondholders; a vast public debt payable in legal tender currency has been funded into gold-bearing bonds, thereby adding millions to the burdens of the people....the supply of currency is purposely abridged to fatten usurers, bankrupt enterprise, and enslave industry....We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither do they now promise us any substantial reform. They have agreed together to ignore, in the coming campaign, every issue but one. They propose to drown the outcries of a plundered people with the uproar of a sham battle over the tariff, so that capitalists, corporations, national banks, rings, trusts, watered stock, the demonetization of silver and the oppressions of the usurers may all be lost sight of. They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires."

And so on. The Populists liked industry and enterprise -- see the statement above about the enslavement of those positive things. They hated dishonest enterprise, industry that made money as clients of state power. They hated the way that a "vast public debt" served the interests of private wealth. This should all be sounding familiar, and please do notice what organization's logo appears on the website where you log in to manage your foodstamp benefits. All your base are belong to us -- more poverty makes more wealth for Wall Street.

Going back to the Omaha Platform, move past the preamble and look at the platform: "Second.—Wealth belongs to him who creates it, and every dollar taken from industry without an equivalent is robbery. “If any will not work, neither shall he eat.” The interests of rural and civic labor are the same; their enemies are identical."

So here we have people who thought that "wealth belongs to him who creates it," and who were horrified by the enslavement of industry and enterprise. And Jill Lepore tells you that "populism" meant "opposition to a monopoly on wealth held by businessmen." No it didn't, and in many ways, the Tea Party expresses the populist sentiment of the actual Populists.

This is most certainly not to say that the Tea Party are the Populists reborn. Again, from the preamble to the Omaha Platform: "We believe that the power of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded (as in the case of the postal service) as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land."

That's not Tea party politics. But the Tea Party's sense that the fix is in, that dirty government serves private wealth, is entirely comparable to Populist views of the relationship between corrupt political parties and private wealth. It's not even slightly "curious" to use the term "populist" to describe people who oppose government bailouts of private corporations.

The reductive coding of political movements as "left" or "right" overdetermines our conclusions about them. Try to notice what people are saying, then analyze it on its own terms, without the weight of a facile label.

The Giant's Shoulders #40, the history of science carnival, is up at Gurdur's Stranger In An Even Stranger Land.

Dan Ephron, "Blood in the Holy City," Daily Beast, 17 October, reviews Simon Sebag Montefiori's Jerusalem: The Biography.

Michael Maiello, "The Optimistic Science," Daily Beast, 14 October, reviews Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius.

Steven Sherwood, "Science controversies past and present," Physics Today, October, argues that controversy over global warming follows a course similar to those of other "inconvenient truths" from physics.

Adam Kirsch, "Seeing Double," Tablet, 11 October, reviews Samantha Baskind's and Larry Silver's Jewish Art: A Modern History.

Jordan Smith, "The Philosopher of the Post-9/11 Era," Slate, 17 October, reviews John Patrick Diggins's Why Niebuhr Now?

Haleh Esfandiari, "The End of Illusion," The Book, 17 October, reviews Arash Hejazi's The Gaze of the Gazelle: The Story of a Generation, the story of the Iranian regime's failure to convince a new generation of its people.

Finally, over on Tumblr, you may have missed "Presidential Pickup Lines".

In the November issue of Vanity Fair -- the magazine that was the Huffington Post before the Huffington Post was the Huffington Post -- James Kwak and Simon Johnson ("K+J") build a case against the Tea Party as anti-Hamiltonian, and therefore as an enemy of order and progress. William Hogeland does a nice job with the mess of K+J's narrative, so I won't spend much time discussing the foolishness of their premise and the lazy dishonesty of their technique. What interests me is the why.

Johnson and Kwak make a case for government debt as the foundation of stability, order, and progress; when governments borrow and spend, nations grow. Government borrowing and spending is progressive; opposition to government borrowing and spending is regressive. End of story.

So here's James Kwak at K+J's blog, just two weeks ago: "There was a time when the main purpose of this blog was to explain just how some government policy or other official action was designed to benefit some large bank under the cover of the public interest. In a bit of nostalgia, I wrote this week’s Atlantic column on the Freddie Mac–Bank of America story reported on by Gretchen Morgenson. It’s clear that Bank of America got a sweetheart deal from Freddie. The question is why...It’s amazing that after three full years of our government trying to give Bank of America money at every possible opportunity, it’s still a basket case."

So, 1.) people who oppose the metastasization of debt-funded federal spending are foolish atavists who hate America and oppose progress, and 2.) many federal policies and actions are designed to benefit private corporations "under the cover of the public interest." You cannot believe both of those things without performing extraordinary gymnastics to trick your own mind. James Kwak sees the corporatist oligarchy, knows what it is, and thinks you're unpatriotic and dumb if you want to take away its credit card. Oh, that thing is there to rip you off -- wait, why are you trying to stop it?

In a similar feat of narrative dissonance, Barack Obama tells a story about America in which we must reduce wealth inequality, restore fairness for the middle class, and restrain the rapid expansion of exceptional private wealth. One way to do that, he argues, is to use federal borrowing to fund infrastructure programs that will put people to work. In recent speeches, Obama has revealed his model for this restoration of income equality through redistributive federal spending: the Transcontinental Railroad. if that juxtaposition doesn't make you burst into laughter, read this and try again.

My growing sense is that this failure of perception -- building an idea of government as an agent of order and fairness on a foundation of a reality in which government serves and has always served the creation and maintenance of great private wealth and class privilege -- emerges from the need of a status group to display symbols of it own identity. What's the matter with Kansas? Oh, reader, it's not like us. Backwards red state morons are against progress, and thank goodness we're smarter than that. See also.

The fundamental political premise of liberal intellectuals is that greater federal intervention in the economy will produce greater order and decency; a greater centralization of economic power will produce a broader diffusion of fairness. This is like believing that gasoline will extinguish fire. It is, simply, crazy. And they know it, on some level: James Kwak tells you that the federal government serves private interest under the cover of public interest, and Barack Obama tells you that his model for redistributive infrastructure spending is a nineteenth century boondoggle that poured endless slop into the trough of private wealth. He should give his next "pass this jobs bill" speech at Leland Stanford's mansion.

How do smart people convince themselves to believe deeply and incontrovertibly insane things? I think they do it by a need to define themselves, particularly in the context of institutional decline and personal status anxiety. Academia is imploding; an army of young scholars marches toward a future of corporatized multiversities that measure the effectiveness of their growing pool of adjunct lecturers by comparing their cost to their output. The need to become distinguished, smarter than, grows with the collapse of the model at the center of intellectual life. James Kloppenberg told a roomful of historians than Barack Obama is a towering intellectual figure of great sophistication, and therefore a great deal like us; the room burst into applause.

The emergence of a distinct status group of intellectuals in the twentieth century United States, Christopher Lasch wrote, was "part of a much more general development: the decline of the sense of community, the tendency of the mass society to break down into its component parts, each having its own autonomous culture and maintaining only the most tenuous connections with the general life of the society -- which as a consequence has almost ceased to exist."

The performance of intellectual status -- the setting off, the ostentatious performance of horror at the Tea Party, the laughable Vanity Fair essay about how concern about growing debt and four trillion dollars a year in federal spending is an anti-American assault on the Founding Fathers -- feeds its own origins and causes. Intellectuals are isolated from the larger society, and so more urgently signal their isolation from the larger society, and so are more isolated from the larger society.

Lasch again: "Once you reject the view of historical progress that means so much to people on the left, their sense of themselves as the party of the future, together with their fear of being overwhelmed by America's backward culture, becomes an object of historical curiosity, not the axiomatic premise from which political understanding necessarily proceeds."

There is no intellectual class, and no fundamental conflict between it and a middle American habit of anti-intellectualism. History is not a story of a struggle between the forces of progress and the forces of regression. Intellectuals are not uniquely the forces of progress. People on both sides of that purported divide recognize that our federal government is a deeply corrupt oligarchy. James Kwak sees what the Tea Party sees. And he should let himself realize it.

ADDED LATER: Precisely on time, here comes Robert Reich. You cannot find a more crude and facile argument about historical progress than this one.