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The Feminist Mistake

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

The end of this interminable Democratic primary was to be inevitably followed by a week of incoherent postmortems detailing the real reasons for the demise of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.). How could it be that Mrs. Clinton—a woman of significant experience, possessing that Clintonian political acumen—flamed out so dramatically?

Recall that back in 2005, Dick Morris, the prostitute-loving former adviser to President Clinton, prophesied that "as of this moment, there is no doubt that Hillary Clinton is on a virtually uncontested trajectory to win the Democratic nomination and, very likely, the 2008 election." But Republicans need not despair, Morris wrote, because "her victory is not inevitable. There is one, and only one, figure in America who can stop Hillary Clinton: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice."

The following year, conservative columnist John Podhoretz played the dangerous game of premature political prognostication as well, with the release of his book Can She Be Stopped? Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States...Unless. In fairness, it would have demanded Nostradamus-like powers of prediction to imagine Clinton upended by a junior senator from Illinois, peddling a particularly audacious brand of hope.

But for many obituarists it wasn't the finely-tuned campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) that dashed Clinton's plans of resettling into the White House. Nor was it her deeply unpopular vote to authorize the Iraq War. Instead, the answer was more obvious: An electorate—and pundit class—imbued with sexism, both conscious and unconscious, conspired to keep a women out of the Oval Office.

In the wake of her defeat, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof lamented that, like Obama's effusively praised speech on race, Clinton failed to start a similar conversation about gender. Indeed, "In polls, more Americans say they would be willing to vote for a black candidate for president than for a female candidate." This is true, but Kristof fails to note that the differences are slight. According to a recent poll conducted for The Washington Post and ABC News, 88 percent of respondents said that they were either "entirely" or "somewhat" comfortable with an African-American president. When asked about is they were comfortable with the prospect of a female president, the number dipped slightly to 84 percent.

As political commentator George Will recently observed, Americans would quite assuredly vote for a woman, it's just they weren't particularly interested in voting for that woman. But the modern woman-hater, Kristof explains, is a rather different breed: "The catch is that abundant psychology research shows that we are often shaped by stereotypes that we are unaware of." In other words, many might think they were rejecting Clinton based on a set of political criteria, but Democratic primary voters might, in fact, be struggling with a seething sexist subconscious. (Kristof's subconscious, of course, is more Betty Friedan than Harvey Mansfield.)

Over at The Nation, it was the back-slapping cable news fraternity that was activating our subconscious sexism. "Hillary Clinton's loss has renewed critiques that American political media is slanted, sexist and dominated by men," wrote Ari Melber, the magazine's "Net movement correspondent." "While Clinton and Obama broke barriers in the Democratic primary, swiftly dispatching white male senators with more government experience," Melber huffed, "the race was still refereed, scored and narrated by white male commentators," because "the elite opinion media continues to employ, groom and promote a commentators corps that is disproportionately white and male." (As one commenter on The Nation's website dryly noted, Melber's own magazine, a 180,000-plus circulation purveyor of elite opinion, is also disproportionately staffed by sinister white men.)

The Nation's Katha Pollitt went one further, arguing that "Clinton drew out the nation's misogyny in all its jeering glory and put it where we could all get a good look at it." Yes, the entire nation's misogyny. Pollitt called out MSNBC's left-wing host Keith Olbermann as the Archie Bunker of the punditocracy, citing his hyperventilating attacks on Clinton as an example of "men's terror of women." And those members of the sisterhood, such as Washington Post style writer Robin Givhan, who made snide comments about Clinton's sartorial deficiencies, were engaged in rank "female sexism."

And it was only a matter of time until former Clinton's campaign manager Mark Penn raised the specter of sexism. As Clinton forged ahead, all but eliminated from the race, Obamaphilic pundits and members of the Democratic party beseeched her, for the sake of unity, to accept the inevitable. "No male candidate," Penn told GQ, "has ever been told to drop out. Ever."

If we concede to Penn the broadest possible definition of sexism, and acknowledge that Clinton faced real challenges as the first formidable female presidential candidate in American history, it is nevertheless remarkable how difficult he finds it to cite specific examples of gender discrimination. When asked by GQ "where he saw sexism," Penn upbraided Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) for comments made about Clinton publicly crying in New Hampshire, saying that a "double-standard" was being applied to her because of her gender. While no other candidate wept in front of television cameras on the campaign trail (making it, I suppose, a single-standard), Penn surely remembers that the last candidate who cried during the New Hampshire primary—Democratic candidate Ed Muskie in 1972—never recovered from his supposed display of weakness. Whether or not this is a fair judgment of one's fitness for the presidency, it is difficult to claim that Edwards' comments were sexist. Recognizing that Penn was serving up pretty thin gruel, the GQ interviewer interjected helpfully that the subtle anti-women campaign was perhaps "hard to put into words."

But none of this "sexism" could be counteracted by organized, activist feminist groups, says writer Linda Hirshman. In Sunday's Washington Post, Hirshman mapped the fractious women's movement that failed to coalesce around Clinton's campaign. The absurdities and esoterica of the "millennial feminists" produced internecine warfare and factional fighting not seen since the Spanish Civil War. In the trenches of the gender war, the slights cited by Penn are deemed inconsequential, as is the candidate on the receiving end of them. Hirshman quotes one activist: "I...don't believe that simply putting a womyn's face where a man's face once was is going to solve our problems...by Real Womyn I am talking about womyn of color, incarcerated womyn, migrant womyn, womyn at the border, womyn gripped in violence, rape, and war.'" (For those whose university experience predated the ubiquity of Woman's Studies departments, the misspelling of 'women' is deliberate, a semantic kick in the patriarchy's groin.)

The Democratic primary was a lose-lose proposition for the image of American tolerance: If Senator Obama lost, ours was an irredeemably racist country. Senator Clinton lost, and we are infected by sexism. But whether viewed through the prism of radical gender feminism or a boy's club media conspiracy, the truth is considerably less complicated. The vaunted Clinton machine—devoid of fresh ideas and facing a dynamic, inspirational opponent—simply couldn't compete. Blame the media, blame the patriarchy if you so desire, but the truth is that Americans wouldn't mind a woman as president. Just not that woman.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor at reason.

Market Socialism

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:05:00 EDT

Ken MacLeod has a plan.

Vote for the Socialist Labor Party!

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 13 May 2008 08:00:00 EDT

No, not really. Besides the ideological problems, there's the small fact that it hasn't bothered to nominate a presidential candidate since 1976. But I must admit I admire one plank in its program:

The Socialist Labor platform called for abolishing the presidency, and party electors were instructed to vote "no president" in the comet-striking-earth chance that the SLP carried a state.

That's from Bill Kauffman's thoughtful review of Daniel J. Flynn's A Conservative History of the American Left. There's more to the article than entertaining asides about the presidential platforms of semi-syndicalist sects; read the whole thing here.

Obsolete Communism

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:30:00 EDT

City Journal has published a collection of reflections on the revolutionary month of May 1968. The views on display are more varied than you might expect, given the magazine's neoconservative slant. I particularly enjoyed Guy Sorman's memories of the uprising in France:

Slogans painted on walls and an onslaught of posters with surrealist messages captured widespread attention. The most memorable posters were those asserting that it was FORBIDDEN TO FORBID. Others offered more cryptic slogans like SOUS LES PAVÉS, LA PLAGE ("Under the paving stones, the beach") and COURS CAMARADE, LE VIEUX MONDE EST DERRIÈRE TOI! ("Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!"), an ironic paraphrase of Marxist ideology. Slogans were the only program, and they called for individual freedom, anarchy, nonviolence, and enjoyment of the here and now.

The longterm effect of '68, Sorman argues, was that "an individualistic society replaced the hierarchical one." The results could be seen everywhere from sexuality ("May '68 was the moment when sexual liberation coincided with the availability of the birth-control pill") to business ("Many '68 leaders became entrepreneurs and contributed to the new managerial style") to the left:

In the ideological world, Marxism was the most obvious victim. The May '68 leaders were anti-Communist. Those who claimed to be Maoist, as some did (without any understanding of Maoism's true nature), were, above all, anti-Stalinist. The revolts in Eastern Europe rendered Marxism comatose, both as an ideology and as a mode of governance. While another 20 years would pass before the Communist Party gave up power in Eastern Europe, the seeds of its demise were sown in '68. True, there were a few deviations: the Red Brigade in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, and the guerrillas in Latin America. But these were ideological last gasps.

That isn't, of course, the only political legacy of '68. Sol Stern's contribution to the forum describes Tom Hayden's naive support for the Viet Cong, and Christopher Hitchens' essay reveals the many ideological paths a soixante-huitard could take. But Sorman is right: A revolt against Communism was brewing, sometimes even among people who considered themselves Marxists. What looked like a month of triumph for the left wound up advancing something that is beyond left and right.

Footnote: How did free-market libertarians react to the rebellion in France? Many wrote it off as another spasm of collectivism, but not everyone. Here is Murray Rothbard's brief review of Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit's book about the uprising:

The story of the almost-victorious French revolution of May, 1968 by its heroic young anarchist leader. The case for an anarchist rather than a Bolshevik revolution.

By the way: This is also the anniversary of May 1958, another month of turmoil in France. Where are the cinquante-huitards?

Now Playing at Reason.tv: What We Saw at the Mortgage Bailout Demonstration

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:30:00 EDT

On April 16 in Washington, D.C., the Ad Hoc National Network to Stop Evictions & Foreclosures organized a demonstration outside a meeting of the Mortgage Bankers Associaton at the Washington Court Hotel.

reason.tv's Dan Hayes and Michael C. Moynihan checked out the demonstration and talked with some of the activists, who quickly changed the subject from home loans to Castro's Cuban paradise, the need to free Mumia Abu Jamal, forgiving student loans, the Rothschilds (!), Haitians eating a mixture of dirt and oil (!?!?), and much, much more. Approximately six minutes.

To view the video, click on the image below.

For the full song used in the intro and outro, go here.

Ten Years of Running and They Put You on the Woods Fund Board

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:59:00 EDT

Had enough of the Bill Ayers pseudo-scandal? Me too, but it just sparked an exchange between Cass Sunstein and David Frum that is too jaw-droppingly silly not to mention.

First -- this isn't the silly part -- Sunstein wrote in The New Republic:

Ayers is one of numerous people, in the Chicago area, whom Barack Obama has run across. Obama has much closer relationships with numerous conservatives on the University of Chicago faculty, many of whom have given money to Obama's campaign, and many of whom have talked to him at length and been at social occasions with him.

I know for a fact that Obama has actually played basketball with Richard Epstein, a libertarian on the law school faculty who has written some pretty controversial things on property rights and government regulation. I also know that Obama has had a number of conversations with former law school dean Daniel Fischel, a Reagan Republican who has written some pretty controversial things on corporations and government regulation.

Sounds like a reasonable point to make. But not to Frum:

Obama himself has equated Ayers' record of treason and violence to the intemperate talk of Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn. Now Cass Sunstein goes further still - and compares unrepentant domestic terrorism to libertarian theorizing!

The point of Sunstein's comments, obviously, is not to "equate" Epstein with Ayers, just as the point of Obama's earlier comments, obviously, was not to "equate" Ayers with Coburn. The point is that Obama associates with a lot of very different people and that it's foolish to assume his loose connections to one of them define his politics. Serving on the same board as Bill Ayers doesn't make Obama sympathetic to Marxist terrorism any more than shooting hoops with Epstein makes him a libertarian.

If there's a legitimate story here, it isn't that Obama is one of the many Chicago politicians (even the mayor!) who have interacted with Ayers. It's that Ayers, after playing revolutionary for a spell, has managed to find a place in the Chicago establishment. The Weather Underground was made up of the children of the elite, and after all the shouting of the '60s and '70s died down those Weathermen who managed to avoid prison or self-immolation have often been able to return to high-status professional positions. I'd love to see a Marxist analysis of that class dynamic.

Same As It Ever Was

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

On March 28, the United Nations Human Rights Council elected, by unanimous vote, a special rapporteur on the "situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967." The nominee, Richard Falk, a veteran political activist and emeritus professor of law at Princeton University, was opposed by Israel for, among other statements, equating the situation in the Palestinian territories with the Nazi Holocaust. According to a spokesman for Israeli's foreign ministry, Falk will not be allowed through passport control in Tel Aviv.

"This is a very outrageous statement to us and a personal insult to every Israeli," said spokesman Arye Mekel. "How could he then come up with an objective conclusion about what Israel does or doesn't do in Gaza?"

To the Israelis, Falk's appointment is but another indication that the Human Rights Council (UN-HRC), which replaced the corrupt United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) in 2006, amounts to little more than a new acronym obscuring old anti-Israel bias. When the UNCHR was disbanded, The New York Times called the organization a "disgrace," conceding that, on this one point, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton was undeniably "right." In assembling the replacement body, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the new council would provide the "United Nations the chance—a much-needed chance—to make a new beginning in its work for human rights around the world." The UN-HRC, he claimed, "will breathe new life into all our work for human rights."

So has the UN-HRC purged itself of its political biases? Has it, at long last, expelled human rights violators from its ranks? Writing in the International Herald Tribune, Human Rights Watch's Peggy Hicks surveyed the recent record of the revamped council with dismay: "In its first year, the council shied away from taking action on most human rights crises, dropped its scrutiny of Iran and Uzbekistan, and managed to condemn Israel's human rights record without addressing violations by Hezbollah and Palestinian armed groups."

The nomination of Richard Falk is further evidence of UN backsliding in its commitment to fairly scrutinizing human rights. Not only has Falk served in a similar role in the past—he was on a 2001 special panel investigating Israeli human rights violations, suggesting that UN-HRC is recruiting from the old UNCHR pool—but his record is considerably worse than the recent news reports would suggest.

For instance, in 1979, not long after the inauguration of Iran's totalitarian and theocratic "revolution," Falk, then chairman of something called U.S. Citizens Concerned about Freedom in Iran, was granted space on The New York Times opinion page to shill for the incoming government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A month prior, Falk had flown to Paris with his comrade Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general and inveterate friend of dictators, to discuss "social justice" (Clark's phrase) with the then-exiled religious leader. Upon returning, Clark told The Washington Post that he was "deeply impressed by the nature and depth and purpose of the movement in Iran that has established the opportunity for a new freedom."

By the time Falk published his impressions of the Paris pilgrimage, the Ayatollah's gang of fundamentalist squadristi—officially known as "secret revolutionary tribunals"—was already meting out executions with little concern for due process. Nevertheless, in his Times opinion piece, Falk upbraided President Jimmy Carter for "associating [Khomeini] with religious fanaticism," and declared that "the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude religious prejudices seems certainly and happily false." Indeed, "his entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals."

This was too much for the Times' preeminent liberal columnist, Anthony Lewis, who ripped Falk's column as "outstandingly silly." It was clear to those not blinded by ideology, Lewis wrote, that the "Ayatollah has set out, without equivocation or disguise, to turn the clock back and give Iran a theocratic regime." With hindsight, it is perhaps tempting to see Lewis's column as prescient, and Falk as merely a naïve, anti-Shah activist duped by the regime's unsophisticated propaganda apparatus. But as contemporaneous news accounts make clear, the theocratic and dictatorial character of the Khomeini clique was widely acknowledged by Middle East observers well before the hostage crisis.

Falk's conception of human rights—remember, this is what he is tasked to monitor for the UN—is also colored by his warm feelings toward Tehran. Ann Elizabeth Mayer, an associate professor of legal studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics, noted in 2000 that "The international law scholar Richard Falk, who sympathizes with the Islamic Republic and who opines that ‘Islam' is entitled to have its own 'civilizational approach' to human rights, embodies the tendency to imagine that Iranians need more Islamic culture, not the human rights protections valued by people in the West."

But this is small beer compared to Falk's latest intellectual pursuit. In 2004, Falk wrote the introduction to The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin, a book arguing that the American government was behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. Of the vast trove of 9/11 "truth" material available in print and online, it was Griffin, Falk wrote in his foreword, who "has had the patience, the fortitude, the courage, and the intelligence to put the pieces together in a single coherent account." For Griffin's latest book, Debunking the 9/11 Debunkers, Falk provided a dust jacket endorsement: "David Ray Griffin has established himself—alongside Seymour Hersh—as America's number one bearer of unpleasant, yet necessary, public truths."

As media coverage of Falk's nomination has metastasized, it has unfortunately obscured news of UN-HRC's nomination of the Swiss socialist Jean Ziegler to the UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee. A brief recapitulation of Ziegler's qualifications: In 1996, he defended Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy not only on free speech grounds—an admirable position, after all—but further celebrated his supposed scholarship. "All your work as a writer and philosopher," Ziegler wrote, "attests to the rigor of your analysis and the unwavering honesty of your intentions. It makes you one of the leading thinkers of our time." He lauded the Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe, a leader who "has history and morality with him." He offered his "total support for the Cuban revolution." He recently told a Lebanese newspaper the he "refuse[d] to describe Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. It is a national movement of resistance."

Then there's Ziegler's friendship with Libyan dictator Moammar Kaddafi. In 1989, according to a report in Neue Zurcher Zeitung (one that confirms research done by UN Watch), Ziegler helped establish the Kaddafi Prize for Human Rights. In 2002, Ziegler himself received the prize, which he shared with, among others, Roger Garaudy. Previous recipients include Fidel Castro, Louis Farrakhan, and Hugo Chavez.

Outside Turtle Bay, it is obvious that those who believe the 9/11 attacks were a government sponsored "false flag" operation and who believe in the moral probity of Kaddafi bequeathing cash prizes to serial human rights abusers have no business adjudicating human rights violations at the United Nations. In 2006, the current administration was widely criticized for opposing the establishment of the UN-HRC; the United States was the only industrialized country, besides Israel, to oppose its creation. In light of the appointment of Richard Falk and Jean Ziegler, it is similarly obvious that this was the correct decision.

While it is gratifying that the commission that long provided political cover for vile and undemocratic regimes such as Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Libya was publicly disgraced and dismantled, it is a disheartening, though utterly predictable, that its replacement is following in its footsteps.

Michael C. Moynihan is a reason associate editor.

The Ho Chi Minh City Statement

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:42:00 EST

I knew it couldn't last. After being pleasantly surprised by last week's Chavez cover story in The Nation, I see (via Arts & Letters Daily) that Katrina and Co. have published a Vietnam travelogue from ex-student radical, ex-husband of Jane Fonda and ex-state senator Tom Hayden. Hayden's nostalgia trip—during which he casually refers to the brutal communist takeover of South Vietnam as a "liberation"—is what one would expect: a full-throated denunciation of the economic liberalization undertaken by the "still-undefeated Communist Party." (Well, they don't have free elections, so they can't be defeated that way.)

Hayden is as slippery as ever, writing that it is hardly his business "to question the desire of Vietnamese to share our globalized consumer culture like everyone else"...and then procedes to question the desire of the Vietnamese to share our globalized culture like everyone else.

Long one of the world's poorest nations, Vietnam is now the fastest growing economy in Asia, with annual growth of 7 percent in 2007. Despite this, The Wall Street Journal's 2008 Index of Economic Freedom ranks Vietnam 25th out of 30 countries in the region—and 135th overall. (Hong Kong, by contrast, ranks number one.) It's fairly obvious to everyone but Hayden that what Vietnam needs is not more government intervention in the economy but significantly less.

All of this growth, Hayden writes, "has come at the price of rising inequalities." Rather than the whole country living in grinding poverty, now only some do. (See the graph below, created using the indispensible website Gapminder). Poverty has been significantly reduced as a result of Vietnam's partial embrace of markets and introduction of mild economic reforms. But behind every silver lining, Hayden finds a dark cloud: "[G]rowth has created catastrophic problems of infrastructure, traffic congestion and pollution." Traffic congestion? Recall that in 1979 Joan Baez, supported by concerned antiwar activists like Allen Ginsberg and Norman Lear, took out full-page advertisements in five major American papers appealing to the government of Vietnam to stop brutalizing, torturing and "reeducating" its citizens. Hayden and Fonda refused to sign the document. And now he's bitching about traffic congestion and pollution.

There are those, Hayden writes, who "must take pleasure at seeing that country in the camp of corporate neoliberalism," like, one could imagine, the long-suffering Vietnamese people. But, he adds, there are "Some in Hanoi are dismayed by all this. An American expatriate, Gerry Herman, a former antiwar activist turned businessman and film distributor who has lived in Vietnam for fifteen years..." Indeed, the only people Hayden can find who are "dismayed" by rising standards of living are—surprise—a grizzled veteran of the anti-war movement who relocted to Vietnam and, cited later in the article, a handful of doddering dead-enders from the Vietnamese Communist Party.

There might be restrictions on Internet usage and private newspapers are censored, he writes, but "institutional controls have been steadily relaxed since the 1970s, with none of the uprisings that accompanied the fall of Soviet or Eastern European Communism." Hayden, who, as far as I can tell, doesn't speak Vietnamese, says that "In an observation I shared, [American expatriate Lady] Borton described Vietnam as ‘a place of constant talk, all the time, and they talk freely.'" This is, by any objective measure, a gross oversimplification. An hour or so after reading Hayden's piece, while trawling the Scandinavian news websites, I noticed this story about a Norwegian parliamentarian expelled from Vietnam for meeting with a dissident journalist. The latest dossier on Vietnam from Reporters without Borders, for instance, remarks that "The political police continued in 2007 what it had begun at the end of 2006: a relentless battle against opposition movements and dissident publications." Nor do the other section headings in the report inspire confidence: "Stalinist trials against dissidents"; "Return of the ‘popular courts'"; "A French journalist detained for ‘terrorism'"; "A press under supervision."

Hayden seems to have his finger on the pulse of modern Vietnam, making a number of sweeping generalizations that, if he doesn't speak Vietnamese, would be impossible to quantify: "Not many Vietnamese today think of the war with America with [writer] Bao Ninh's profound cynicism...the American war is perceived as a necessity forced on Vietnam by invading powers...Vietnamese take pride in having defeated so many great powers and feel deeply about their losses. There is a suppressed anger that they were willing to join the search for American MIAs while the United States and Monsanto refuse to take responsibility for Agent Orange." It is likely that some (or perhaps even all) of these statements are true. But Hayden doesn't entertain the possibility that the Vietnamese want more globalization, faster. He doesn't, after all, speak to any ordinary members of the "Vietnamese working class" (his phrase), choosing instead to blather about a betrayed revolution with aging apparatchiks.

While Hayden has largely abandoned the hard radicalism of his youth, he doesn't consider that a majority of Vietnamese were born after the war ended--and they are clearly embracing the "consumer culture" he finds so loathsome.

(Bonus quote: During those heady days of "revolution" and internecine ideological warfare on the left, the socialist critic Irving Howe expressed disgust at Hayden's fanaticism, writing that "if [Hayden] had the power and believed it necessary, he wouldn't hesitate to put me up against the wall and have me shot. That done, he might shed a tear for my miscreant social democratic soul.")

Still Stuck on Castro

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

In a country where major news developments rarely precipitate anything but deeper misery, Cuba awoke Tuesday to the news that el jefe maximo, Fidel Castro, had formally ceded power to his younger brother Raul. Cuba has grown accustomed to a seemingly endless and ageless set of images of the revolutionary father delivering a stultifying oration on Yanqui this-or-that, reposing in a monogrammed track suit, mumbling incoherently about his days in the Sierra Maestra. But to Cuba watchers and exiles, his official ceding of power was unexpected.

The 81-year-old Castro tendered his resignation in column form, carried in Cuba's national newspaper (there is, excluding a flimsy "youth publication," just one). Lifting language from Lyndon Johnson (one of the many presidents that, the deeply serious pundit is required to mention, he has "outlived"), Fidel declared, "I will neither aspire to nor accept—I repeat, I will neither aspire to nor accept—the positions of President of the State Council and Commander in Chief." Delusional until the end, Castro presumes that his indentured subjects demand eternal revolution, forcing him to repeat that, no, it will be little Raul, 76, who will guide the Cuban people towards a classless and cashless utopia. MSNBC's Chris Matthews apparently believes this too, asking Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), co-sponsor of the monumentally stupid, embargo-expanding Helms-Burton Act, why "Cubans on the island still support the Castro brothers."

The preceding days have demonstrated that information peddled by Castro's legion of academic and celebrity apologists has deeply penetrated the mainstream media consciousness, with credulous reporting sundry revolutionary "successes" of the regime: not so good on free speech, but oh-so-enviable on health care and education.

In an email to staffers, with the nudging subject line "Castro guidance," CNN producer Allison Flexner advised reporters to be fair and not to focus solely on the regime's repressiveness. "Please note Fidel did bring social reforms to Cuba," writes Flexner, "namely free education and universal health care, and racial integration in addition to being criticized for oppressing human rights and freedom of speech."

Well, wrong on all three counts, but more on that later. That evening, CNN's ubiquitous foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour appeared on a panel to hail the end of Castro's rule while managing to mention that he was "a leader in many things such as education, health care." Message received, Atlanta!

In Europe, The Guardian's Latin American correspondent Rory Carroll admonished Cuba for its human rights violations while praising "the government's success in offering all its citizens free access to education and healthcare, resulting in western levels of literacy and life expectancy." That's at best a dubious achievement, considering that Cuba is situated in the West. "Compared with other Latin American countries," Carroll gushed, "Cuba is notable for its absence of beggars, violent crime and extreme inequality," because everyone is equally poor. The average monthly salary in Cuba is 330 pesos—about $13.75.

Thirteen measly bucks and there aren't any beggars in Cuba? Well, not really. As one Miami Herald reporter observed in December 2006, "Anyone strolling through Cuba's tourist spots like Old Havana is likely to encounter a number of panhandlers, from the disabled like Avila and the elderly like Cecilia in the Plaza de Armas, to those struggling with mental illness such as Irma Castillo at the Parque Central." The British left-wing magazine The New Internationalist reported, "On the streets of Havana there are two relatively common sights that wouldn't have been seen 20 years ago: cellphones and beggars." (Cell phone use is, naturally, heavily regulated by the government, ensuring that Cuba ranks second to last in a recent United Nations table of cell phones per person. For those scoring at home, only Papua New Guinea ranks lower.)

The British news agency Reuters tells us that Castro came to power by overthrowing "U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista." And Batista was a dictator—one alternately supported, tolerated, and disliked by Washington. As historian Hugh Thomas, author the magisterial book Cuba or the Pursuit of Freedom, wrote, "American assistance to Batista was never explicitly forthcoming." By 1958, a year before Castro's seizure of power, the U.S. had instituted an arms embargo against Batista, and elements within the CIA and State Department were actively agitating for a Castro victory. Indeed, it was the British government that agreed to sell Batista military hardware—15 fighter planes—when the Eisenhower administration refused.

And how does Reuters describe Castro? After 50 years of brutal one-party rule, to apply the appellation "dictator" seems a rather contentious issue: "Vilified by opponents as a totalitarian dictator, Castro is admired in many Third World nations for standing up to the United States and providing free education and health care." And again, we return to education and health care.

The AP, retracing the history of modern Cuba, explains that Castro's "revolutionaries opened 10,000 new schools, erased illiteracy, and built a universal health care system." And what kind of schools, what kind of education system, did they inaugurate? As Georgetown University professor Eusebio Mujal-Leon has observed, "The [rewritten Cuban] Constitution made the furtherance of Marxism-Leninism the purpose of education, and through its Article 38 made the latter a function of the state." What good is universal literacy if one can be arrested for possession of an Orwell book? What good is "free" education if honest academic inquiry is forbidden?

In fairness to fourth-estaters, it wasn't just journalists that cribbed from the party script. The ridiculous Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.) was the only American politician to debase himself by issuing a Granma-worthy press release actually praising Castro. This week's events prove, Serrano wrote, "that Castro sees clearly the long-term interests of the Cuban people," including the selfless decision to hand power to his brother, thus saving the Cuban people from the indignity of electoral choice. "I would like to congratulate both Fidel Castro and the Cuban people for this smooth transition of power," continued, "Few leaders, having been on the front lines of history so long, would be able to voluntarily step aside in favor of a new, younger generation." The absurdities of that sentence are too many to catalog, though note that the "younger generation" is represented by Fidel's septuagenarian brother Raul.

Writing in The New Statesman, British parliamentarian John McDonnell, the Right Honorable Gentleman from 1968, offers high praise for Cuban communism and demonstrates a level of credulity not seen since John Reed vacationed in Moscow. But don't mention Moscow, because, as McDonnell bizarrely writes, "unlike Stalin's Russia there have never been any Cuban gulags." What's not to like, he asks, about a country that provides "free prescriptions, free care for the elderly, free university education."

So again, the health and education canard returns. What all of these pols and pundits lazily presume is that if the state of Cuban health care and education have markedly improved on Castro's watch, surely the situation was dire during the final years of the Batista dictatorship.

Well, not exactly. In 1959 Cuba had 128.6 doctors and dentists per 100,000 inhabitants, placing it 22nd globally—that is, ahead of France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland. In infant mortality tables, Cuba ranked one of the best in the world, with 5.8 deaths per 100,000 babies, compared to 9.5 per 100,000 in the United States. In 1958 Cuba's adult literacy rate was 80 percent, higher than that of its colonial grandfather in Spain, and the country possessed one of the most highly-regarded university systems in the Western hemisphere.

Cuba improved, as have most countries, on some of these indices in the years since the revolution. As reason Contributing Editor Glenn Garvin points out, "countries like Costa Rica, Panama, and Brazil have posted equal gains in literacy during the same time period without resorting to totalitarian governments." (For more reason coverage over the years on Cuba and Castro, go here.)

This is precisely the point: Punctual trains and spiffy highway networks hardly mitigate the horror of dictatorship. Such "advances," like the illusory gains of the Cuban Revolution, are best achieved through policies that promote economic and political freedom. You would think, almost 20 yeas after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that journalists would understand that.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

Where's Carey McWilliams When You Need Him?

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:16:00 EST

You may have already seen this Nation story about libertarians and the Ron Paul campaign. I just want to highlight one sentence in it:

When Lindsey says that Paul "comes from a different part of the libertarian universe than I do," he's referring to the libertarian version of the Trotsky/Lenin split, which opened up in the early 1980s and continues to echo through libertarianism today.

The Trotsky/Lenin split? Yes, we all have our little brain farts, but come on. When you can't even count on The Nation to get this stuff straight, you know Marxism is dead.

Beware the Leesburg Garden Club!

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:24:00 EDT

This is the first presidential election since 1972 in which the fascist crank Lyndon LaRouche is not running for the White House. Writing in The Washington Monthly, Avi Klein reviews LaRouche's political career and the declining fortunes of the cult he created.