Anthony Gregory
In Iraq, like everywhere else, if things don’t add up, it is safe to assume that politics is involved. Although the insurgency in recent months has worsened, Gen. George W. Casey, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, astonishingly claims that security in Iraq has improved and that substantial U.S. troop withdrawals are possible by as early as next spring. What gives? The congressional elections in 2006.
Although Bush administration officials have implied that demands by Democrats for a U.S. troop withdrawal timetable are “unpatriotic” and “aid the enemy,” when electoral politics is involved, the administration is all too willing to predict troop reductions during a specified time period. They know that the Democrats will try to make political hay—probably starting around next spring—from the growing unpopularity here at home of the continued occupation of Iraq. By showing some incremental and token progress toward getting out of the quagmire, the administration hopes to contain the damage Democrats could do on this issue at election time.
Anthony Gregory
If we are to have a serious debate about eminent domain, we need to get beyond this ridiculous distinction between public and private use. Government is a racket that rewards itself through plunder and always in the name of public purpose. The truth is that there is no coherent way to separate public and private purpose when it comes to government. Its roads benefit private contractors and serve private interests. It’s true they are"free," but so are the streets in shopping malls, which are private. As for public schools, the teachers unions and hordes of bureaucrats are private interests too. Indeed, there is no such thing as the"public," there are only individuals.
Gene Healy
David T. Beito
When the U.S. Senate voted to approve U.S. membership in the new United Nations on July 28, 1945, faith in world policing was at high tide in the United States. Most Americans still had fond feelings for our wartime ally, the Soviet Union led by Josef Stalin (sometimes affectionately called “Uncle Joe”). The consensus held, and held firmly, that the UN was one of the best hopes of mankind to ensure world peace and harmony. Under these circumstances, it is surprising that even two senators, Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota and William Langer of North Dakota, risked their political careers and reputations by voting"no."
In contrast to some better known non-interventionists, such as Robert Taft, neither Shipstead nor Langer belonged to the Old Right. Both were members of an insurgent western and Midwestern Republican tradition which has once included such independent voices as William Borah, George Norris, and Hiram Johnson. While the insurgents often championed leftist domestic policies, such as heavy regulation of big business, rural electrification, and farm subsidies, they retained a streak of healthy skepticism toward centralized power. During the late 1930s, they increasingly turned against Roosevelt because of his court packing scheme and pro-war policies.
Few members of Congress in American history were more consistent of their opposition to U.S. foreign interventionism than Henrik Shipstead. Shipstead was born on a farm in Kandiyohi County, Minnesota in 1881 to Norwegian immigrant parents. Shortly after the turn of the century, he set up a dental practice and was elected president of the village council of Glenwood in neighboring Pope County. One of his friends and early political supporters was my grandfather, Gudbrand Gudbrandson Beito, a Norwegian-born Lutheran minister from nearby Terrace. What can I say? Like grandfather (at least on foreign policy), like grandson.
Shipstead started as Republican but in 1922 was elected to the U.S. Senate under the banner of the new Farmer-Labor Party. While he generally shared the party’s leftwing agenda, he rejected the extreme anti-capitalism of some members. Although he was the only Farmer-Laborite in the Senate, he won appointment to the powerful Foreign Relations Committee.
Shipstead opposed U.S. entry into the League of Nations and the World Court. He called for the cancellation of German reparations which he regarded as vindictive. Unlike some of his colleagues in the Old Right, he doggedly objected to U.S. intervention in Latin America including the American occupation of Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. He blamed these policies on Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine of 1905 which had turned the United States into an arrogant “policeman of the western continent."
Shipstead did not consider himself an “isolationist," and for good reason. While he favored a policy of political non-intervention overseas, he opposed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 which he charged was “one of the greatest and most vicious isolationist policies this government has ever enacted.” He argued that high tariffs “raise prices to consumers” and make “monopolies richer and people poorer.” Affable and dignified, his adversaries generally liked him on a personal level. In words that should be taken to heart by bloggers everywhere, he concluded that “It doesn’t necessarily follow that a radical has to be a damned fool.”
Shipstead defected from the Farmer-Labor party in the late 1930s charging (accurately) that Communist pro-Stalinist elements were taking control. He won reelection to the Senate in 1940 as a Republican. All the while, few fought more tenaciously against Roosevelt’s efforts to enter the war in Europe. Although Shipstead voted for the declaration of war after Pearl Harbor, he was not about to give Roosevelt a blank check. In October 1942, for example, he took the extremely lonely stand of voting against Selective Service, just as he had in 1940.
Shipstead’s vote against the United Nations was entirely predictable to anyone who had followed his career. It was the capstone of decades of opposition to foreign entanglements. Unlike many modern UN bashers, however, he not only feared that UN would create a world superstate but also that it would be used by the major powers to dominate smaller countries. His dissenting vote was political suicide and he probably knew it. A new breed of “internationalists,” led by Governor Edward Thye and former Governor Harold Stassen, had assumed leadership of the state GOP. In 1946, they mobilized successfully to defeat Shipstead in the Republican primary. He retired to rural western Minnesota, where he died in 1960.
During the same period, by contrast, the voters of North Dakota regularly reelected the highly colorful William “Wild Bill” Langer, who continued to champion a muscular non-interventionism that no other senator could match.
For more on Shipstead’s foreign policy views, see Barbara Stuhler, Ten Men of Minnesota and American Foreign Policy, 1898-1968.
David T. Beito
David T. Beito
A steady drumbeat of conservative criticism continued throughout the 1950s. A 1958 editorial in William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review took former President Truman to task for his then-current explanation of why he had decided to drop an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The editors asked the question that"ought to haunt Harry Truman: 'Was it really necessary?'" Could a demonstration of the bomb and an ultimatum have ended the war? The editors challenged Truman to provide a satisfactory answer. Six weeks later the magazine published an article harshly critical of Truman's atomic bomb decision. Such scathing criticism on the part of leading American conservatives continued well after 1945. A 1947 editorial in the Chicago Tribune, at the time a leading conservative voice, claimed that President Truman and his advisers were guilty of" crimes against humanity" for"the utterly unnecessary killing of uncounted Japanese."....
Hat tip, Ralph Luker.
