By Artur Davis, on Tue Jul 9, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET At the risk of upsetting a popular narrative, that the Supreme Court just dealt a crippling blow to the interests of black voters while handing a decisive win to gays on the future of marriage, I offer a few contrarian points. In random order,
(1) It’s a cheap misread to construe the Court’s rulings on Section 5 and the Defense of Marriage Act as some subversive proof that the Court, or more accurately Anthony Kennedy, the deciding vote in both cases, is more sensitive toward the aspirations of gays than blacks. Whatever you think of Kennedy’s analysis, it is at its core a judgment about the scope of federal v. state authority: put simply, Justice Kennedy’s view is that states should have more leeway to regulate their election practices, as opposed to Washington, and that states ought to determine what is or isn’t a marriage, as opposed to Congress doing so. Those are serious, entirely consistent positions that shouldn’t be dismissed by fixating on the politics or matching the gloom on the face of blacks outside the Court yesterday with the zeal of gays today.
(2) The Court’s complex holding on Prop 8 has a clean result-an explosion of gay weddings in California in the next month-but its winding procedural course had little to do with sweeping claims of autonomy or dignity. To the contrary, a rare coalition of conservative and liberal justices clung to some fairly basic rules of legal standing: You don’t get to file a lawsuit simply because you are rooting for one outcome or another. You have to be an injured party who is contending that either enforcing or violating said law injures you in some way. I am in the camp that thinks that the Court got it wrong here: by denying standing to the plaintiffs, the Supremes effectively let the Governor and Attorney General of California over-turn a majority of their voters by refusing to enforce or even defend Prop 8, their constitutional oaths of fidelity to California’s laws notwithstanding. But resolving Prop 8 with an ordinary technical legal point hardly suggests that the Court is poised to take on North Carolina’s referendum against same sex marriage last year, or any statute in any of the other 37 states that don’t recognize gay marriages.
(3) Combined with the decision to decide another day on affirmative action, this was a week of a cautious court (or again, two cautious jurists in Kennedy and John Roberts) that took pains to minimize the upset to the social and political landscape. Politicians who have linked the Voting Rights Act to the Obama presidency can certainly do so in a thematic, inspirational way, but they should remember that with the exception of Virginia, not one VRA covered state was part of President Obama’s winning coalition in 2012. In not one of these states will a black congressman’s job be imperiled, given that the Republicans who control the legislatures in these states are perfectly happy with heavily racially gerrymandered districts and the free ride they give Republicans in the rest of the state. (It is telling that every single southern redistricting plan in 2011, all but one drawn by a Republican legislature, was pre-cleared by the Holder Justice Department). To be sure, voter ID laws in the VRA states will pass more frequently and with less scrutiny, but in states that are already red and that haven’t been contested at the presidential level since Bill Clinton seemed momentarily capable of winning everything in October 1996. (I will allow for the possibility that Texas is the one state where a rollback of Section 5 confers an edge to Republicans, given the vagaries of drawing districts there and the tension between a heavily Republican legislative majority and a rising minority base that is not as geographically concentrated as in the South).
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Artur Davis: Of Voting Rights and Gay Rights
By Artur Davis, on Thu Jun 27, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET As I argued in these pages over a year ago, a full scale retreat from racially influenced academic admissions would likely have the following impact: it would shrink the African American populations of the most elite private colleges without drying up the substantial market that would still remain for the same students: in blunter terms, fewer blacks at Harvard and Stanford, but plenty of slots for blacks who lose the Ivy League lottery available at, say, the University of Virginia and Cal-Berkeley; and a sizable, high quality pool of suitors for any reasonably strong black applicant, at institutions ranging from the University of Florida to Michigan State, from William and Mary to SMU.
Of course, that mostly rosy scenario would have its share of costs. In a society that is always one celebrity’s comments away from having its racial fissures exposed, and where attitudes on culture and politics have become more and not less racially polarized during the last several years, color-blindness seems more a quixotic than a realistic assessment of America circa the Obama era. In a political world where ten of the last twelve presidential nominees have diplomas from Harvard or Yale, and every single Supreme Court justice has the exact same credentials, it is impossible to dismiss our most elite degrees as just another inconsequential perk. Add to that mix the undeniable evidence of a growing gap between the children of highly educated parents and the rest of the social universe, and it is hard to argue that a major retrenchment on race in the admissions process wouldn’t contribute at least marginally to the level of inequality.
All of the above (and perhaps, a plaintiff’s strategy that was overly cautious) explains why even the conservative wing of the Roberts Court ultimately turned squeamish about a sweeping verdict on affirmative action. The Court’s 7-1 ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas returning a challenge to the college’s admission process to a lower court for a more demanding, but not inevitably fatal, review seems right given the still unsettled state of play around race: short term, most universities will keep doing what they are doing, with some gradual, defensible move toward weighting class distinctions more heavily and eventually, a subtle shift toward more blacks with parents who are teachers and cops rather than state legislators or partners in top 100 law firms.
 There is a cautionary note, though, for critics on the left who feared that Fisher would be a disaster. For liberals, dodging a loss on race in higher education should spare some time for acknowledging an inconvenient set of truths. Roughly two generations of policies strengthening campus diversity have done nothing to close long term student achievement gaps along racial lines: those policies, in spite of their merits, are still the most top-heavy kind of success. They are measures that at their most robust only impact a cohort of talented individuals who will excel by any legitimate standard whether affirmative action lives or dies. The much needier and (numerically larger) set of minority students remains low income kids locked by geography and poverty into poorly performing K-12 schools—to date, improving their prospects attracts scant attention at best from contemporary liberals whose recent campaigns have focused on more redistributionist outcomes on taxes and healthcare, unfettered sexual autonomy, and tougher environmental rules. And when today’s liberals have waded onto the education front, it has either been in the context of expanded daycare or pre-K programs, which by definition offer first-blush, not often sustainable hits, or in the form of fending off conservative alternatives like vouchers and more testing, without offering any specific platform of their own for un-achieving schools.
To be sure, conservatives can seem out of touch when they profess to see no moral cost in wiping out the consideration of diversity by universities who are trying to make their campuses look something like the society around them. But it is the political left that has advanced an agenda that like it or loathe it, has been exceedingly ambitious on the economic, social, and regulatory front, but notably tepid in the arena of failing classrooms and barely literate eighth graders.
By Artur Davis, on Tue Jun 18, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Click here to review & purchase
The Great Recession of 2008-2010 was hell on dreams. For all of the trillions of dollars sunk in the stock market, and the staggering job losses, it is the collapse in confidence and optimism that lingers and that has had the most sustained impact on American life. So argues George Packer’s superb book, “The Unwinding”, which should stand as one of the most compelling narratives of the toll of our near depression.
The heart of this book is a series of extended profiles whose lives exemplify different themes: Tammy Thomas, a black woman in Youngstown Ohio, who makes the transition from an assembly line worker to community organizer; Dean Price, a working class North Carolina boy who makes and loses a fortune building truck stops before refashioning himself as a biodiesel entrepreneur, before he crashes again; Jeff Connaughton (whom I know as a fellow Alabama expatriate), who rides his on again, off again connection to Joe Biden to a backstage role as an influential Washington operator; and a mildly famous Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal who remains a considerable force in the venture capital world. Packer also fashions two places into virtual characters in their own right: the foreclosure wracked city of Tampa, Florida, which experienced some of the worst wreckage of the housing implosion of the last decade, and the confines of Zuccotti Park, the site of the original Occupy Wall Street protests.
Packer weaves back and forth between these subjects to sketch a canvass of what went wrong. The Rust Belt’s manufacturing base stops being a reliable conduit for high school educated men and women to climb into the middle class; hard working people start sliding backwards and become functionally poor while they are grinding themselves into poor health and exhaustion. The rural south stops being idyllic and becomes a hotspot for mental depression and social estrangement. Washington turns its leadership over to a permanent lobbying machine that reduces every policy debate to a transaction. Wall Street slips out from under the grip of regulators and plays by its own devil-may–care rules until it runs itself and the economy into a ditch. All over the country, the work ethic is fitfully rewarded, sometimes even punished; upward mobility operates on steroids at the top brackets of society and all but disappears at the middle and bottom rungs.
Some critics have pointed out that there is, in the wake of the first recession covered in 24 hour news cycles, not much that is deeply original about Packer’s inventory of decline, and that, as David Brooks argues, the storytelling genius does not compensate for the lack of sociological depth or data points in a book that is so openly ambitious to shape the national conversation. But the other chronicles of this period, Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum’s, “That Used to Be Us” and Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men” come to mind, along with a host of other narratives that reconstruct the capital markets crisis, are simultaneously more precise and more bloodless than Packer: they rely, more or less exclusively, on the perspective of insiders who have a lot to reveal or justify but who certainly never missed a meal during the economic storm. Packer puts his emphasis mostly on people who suffered genuine degradation and misery during the Great Recession. And unlike the many accounts of this period who worry that we have too quickly reverted to normalcy, with not enough lessons learned, Packer captures the not so well understood fact that a discernible number of Americans have become permanently radicalized by their suffering: America does not look the same to them as it used to, and they drift into a destabilized zone that is alienated from the moral and social certainties of their youth.
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Artur Davis: What We Lost in the Storm — A Review of “The Unwinding”
By Artur Davis, on Wed Jun 12, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET I follow up my observations about the challenges conservative reformers face with some thoughts about how those issues are playing out in the debate over Common Core educational standards. Stanley Kurtz’s observations on the subject in National Review Online are a pretty fair articulation of the right’s grassroots based activism against the Core. To be sure, he gets lost in his share of rabbit holes—raising the Fifth Amendment-taking IRS bureaucrat Lois Lerner as a bogeyman is about as irrelevant as Arnie Duncan’s comparing opposition to the Core to worrying about black helicopters; and Kurtz’s specter of liberals imposing “fuzzy math” sounds loopy because it is—but he highlights the dilemma rank and file Republican politicians are running into. And his claims raise an important question right of center Republicans ought to be stressing over: is education reform about to become the next subject that Republicans are about to cede to the left?
To be sure, the Core is not the most inspiring kind of fight. Liberals who spent the last decade waging trench war against national accountability standards are playing a hypocritical game by suggesting that resistance to Washington driven reform is now the province of Luddites and primitives. There is no question that curriculum content is being artificially elevated to the point that it is drowning out elements that are far more decisive to student achievement, like the deteriorating quality of entry level teachers, the impediments against parents transferring their kids out of under-performing schools, and the institutional protections that make replacing inept teachers all but impossible in many districts. It is also far from clear that state by state variations in the Core’s focus of math and science teaching are as substantial as some advocates suggest.
But Kurtz and some of the Core’s sharpest critics go too far in their suggestion that education should not even be on the table as a national agenda item, and it’s worth remembering that they hardly represent the only conservative vision on educational policy. In fact, for most of the last decade, the right’s critique of No Child Left Behind was not that it overstepped some constitutional line but that the law wasn’t aggressive enough about incentivizing ideas like vouchers or charter schools. True, a number of conservatives questioned the heavy handedness of the Race to the Top fund; but for much of the first Obama term, the case was made with equal force that it imposed too weak rather than too strong a set of rewards for tenure reform or merit based pay for teachers.
As sanguine as Kurtz is about the decision-making processes of local school boards and state legislatures, the local and state level have been venues where teacher unions have typically been far more effective than reformers in driving their cause. It’s an illusion that a locally driven debate is necessarily one that favors the interests of parents or accountability, and conservatives who think so should be discomfited by the ease with which the teacher unions mimic arguments about local control in their efforts to thwart the most rigorous goals within Race to the Top.
Until recently, the political right also seemed to enjoy a rough consensus that the values that underlay the effort to prod states and districts toward more demanding standards on education were conservative in nature. As much as today’s conservative libertarians denigrate George W. Bush’s forays into rewriting education law at the national level, those efforts deserve to be appreciated as a campaign to inject market driven notions of performance and results into education rather than some weak kneed effort to pander or out-promise Democrats.
To be sure, there are very few conservatives who don’t have a palpable suspicion of the federal government using the leverage of funding to compel states to do much of anything. And it’s not a revolutionary insight that reforms are most politically palatable on the right if they are linked to language and values that ordinary Republicans will embrace. Given those realities, Republican governors who are shortchanging populist initiatives like overhauling tenure and parental choice will probably find that they haven’t stored up enough capital with their base to take on fights like the Core.
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Artur Davis: Conservatives and the Fight Over the Common Core
By Artur Davis, on Fri Jun 7, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET One pundit I admire, Ross Douthat, and another I admire and count as a friend, Reihan Salam, have waded into the debate over whether reform conservatism amounts to a coherent ideological vanguard, or is only a loose blanket for a set of sensibilities about what the political right should start to sound like. I lean more toward the latter, which is Salam’s take, for a variety of reasons: the splintering of conservative reformers over immigration; their imprecision on the bullet points of the healthcare fight (are they bothered by the “cadillac tax” for high quality insurance plans, or is it the one thing they like about Obamacare); the lack of a defense in conservative intellectual circles for Senator Pat Toomey’s bravery on guns; the fact that the class of reformers is made of columnists and bloggers and not congressmen and presidential aspirants all undercut the idea of even a sort of unified front. But what Salam calls a “tendency” still reminds me of what Democratic reformers were doing 20 years ago. And if history repeated itself, it wouldn’t be a bad thing.
First, the history: for all of the varnished memories of exactly how Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council reframed their party, it was no masterpiece of cohesion around policies or specific goals. To be sure, Clintonian reformers were virtually all free traders and advocates of tougher teacher standards and charter schools. To a person, they thought that welfare was too easy to obtain and even easier to depend upon, which distinguished them from 20 years of liberal rhetoric.
But these were relatively small sized pieces of the conversation at the time. On a much larger array of issues, Democratic reformers were all over the map. Some were ardent social liberals, who even then touted gay rights, others were notably sympathetic to the pro life movement and uncomfortable that liberalism verged on being libertarian. Some were anti-affirmative action, just as many thought anti-quota talk made them sound like mini Pat Moynihans (a Democrat, but a liberal scourge for years for his advice that the subject of racial injustice could use a dose of “benign neglect”). Some thought it a priority to readjust Reagan era tax rates to take a bigger chunk from the wealthy, others were self-consciously pro-business (the DLC’s bills were always heavily footed by industry lobbyists) and promoters of corporate rate cuts. One camp embraced comprehensive healthcare reform, another feared it was too costly and smacked of sixtyish redistribution.
There was, in other words, a consensus on a few second tier agenda items, disarray on the hottest subjects in politics, mixed with a strategic instinct about making Democratic political language more middle class friendly, deemphasizing identity based appeals, and there was a fondness for the word “community” without a lot of common ground on what that meant.
Yet, for all of the ambiguity, Democratic reformers in the gap years between Reagan and Clinton mattered a great deal. They introduced thematic arguments that were foreign to the liberal activists who had controlled the Democratic nominating process since 1972: notions like personal obligation, mutual responsibility and the concept that a downsized government could more efficiently promote progressive values, and that all of these principles were not code words for survival of the fittest. And by driving these arguments, DLC style Democrats showed a side of their party that was more attractive to blue collars and suburbanites than the interest group beholden, socially permissive brand of their intra-party rivals.
It strikes me that today’s right of center reformers are doing something similarly abstract, but potentially just as vital. The reform crowd is injecting into the conservative value stream the ideas that (1) middle class insecurity and stagnant wages are a genuine threat to the national wellbeing, a concept that explicitly rejects the assessment that over-regulation is the only source of trouble; that (2) public policy can and should promote economic upward mobility, although through market oriented means, which diverges from the Tea Party wing’s constitutionalism, and its single-minded desire to whittle government down to no domestic agenda other than protecting economic liberty; and that (3) there is such a thing as entrenched inequality, especially in areas like education and access to healthcare, and that the interest in social cohesion gives conservatives stakes in carving out opportunity based solutions.
If I had my druthers, I would push that reform mindset further than some of my cohorts on the center right would. I line up with the majority of Republicans who believe expanded background checks for buying firearms don’t shatter the rights of any law abiding citizen. I think the “Cadillac plan” tax in Obamacare is as lousy a policy as the individual mandate and is far more likely to break the backs of middle income workers. I am much more dubious than many conservatives that a First Amendment that was designed in a century where campaign contributions barely existed is a spigot for unfettered campaign dollars by businesses or individuals. I would rather see an immigration approach that got tougher in tangible ways, like making illegal entry a felony and making an illegal immigrant’s failure to declare and register a deportable offense, but still provided some form of legal gateway for the undocumented, to either the overly complex bill working its way through the Senate or to an enforcement only approach. And I would trust states to resolve the debate over defining marriage, which separates me from some reform conservatives who would embrace a right of same sex marriage as another extension of limited government.
But even the more slimmed down principles I describe earlier are a way of taking on the political and rhetorical landscape that has dominated the Republican Party of late and articulating a different path. That’s not much of a policy synthesis, per se; as Reihan Salam puts it, it is well short of a movement. But it is, I suspect, as essential as what the center left’s reformers did a generation ago. If only this right-leaning reform impulse is set to have as good a run as its Democratic predecessor.
By Artur Davis, on Tue Jun 4, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET It’s a good time to revisit a point that I made a year or so ago on George Stephanopolous’ “This Week” program. The new health-care law, for all of its moral claims about making medical coverage universal, will end up falling about six million people short of that goal, and the individuals left out of the equation will be the very low income uninsured who are touted as the primary beneficiaries of Obamacare. The New York Times has just summarized the reasons. While the law substantially expands Medicaid eligibility beyond its current focus on children and low wage families, the Supreme Court’s rewrite of the statute last summer has permitted states to opt out of the expansion with no penalty, and to date, 25 states have done just that. Under the new law, there are no provisions to capture the sizable pool of people whose states decline to raise their eligibility standards and who don’t qualify for traditional Medicaid: that is, low income but able bodied adults with no children, and adults with children but whose income is between 32% and 100% of the federal poverty level (which translates to between $6,250 and $19,530 for a family of three). And Obamacare’s insurance subsidies for lower middle income families were allotted exclusively for individuals or families earning above the poverty line.
The political blame has rested primarily with the Republican governors who have not been moved to accept the strings and, post 2018, new financial obligations that come with growing their Medicaid program, despite the large numbers of working, uninsured poor who live in many of their states. But there is nothing unpredictable about cash starved states with a low tax base, or states whose voters are overwhelmingly hostile to the new healthcare law, refusing to assume responsibilities that will be unpopular in the short term and costly in the long term. Nor is there any huge surprise that the component of Obamacare which was supposed to avoid this dilemma, a draconian demand that states accept the expansion or risk their whole federal Medicaid match, would face a severe legal fight. In fact, the same Supreme Court that sharply split over the constitutionality of the insurance mandates in the Affordable Care Act agreed 6-2 that the “take it or risk your whole program” threat was illegal.
Given those realities, one of the centrist criticisms of Obamacare—the argument that it is needlessly ambitious and overshoots the aim of extending insurance to Americans who couldn’t afford healthcare—seems to have been borne out. There were any number of viable ways the White House and congressional architects could have avoided this trap, ranging from taking then Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s advice to shelve broad-based reform for a more targeted version that would have shored up Medicaid and picked up 100% of the tab, to establishing a pool for catastrophic coverage for low wage earners facing medical emergencies. Or, in other words, abandoning the expensive and complex array of reforms in service delivery and doctor reimbursement that have muddled the law without building its popularity, in favor of a straightforward low-income assistance program.
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Artur Davis: Another Thing Obamacare Got Wrong
By Artur Davis, on Thu May 23, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET To no one’s surprise, a few feverish days of the unprecedented—establishment media organizations beating up on Barack Obama’s leadership—are already giving way to a series of smart, nicely reasoned analyses of why the IRS/DOJ/Benghazi revelations are not genuinely scandal-worthy. (See Ezra Klein and Noam Scheiber for some of the best representative samples, and Charles Blow for one of the more in-the-tank ones). And the early revisionists are right, as I acknowledged in my previous posting, that these fiascoes have little in common with the substance of Watergate, and its nest of garden variety obstructions of justice, as well as the obviously critical distinction that Richard Nixon was caught directing those obstructions from his presidential desk, while Obama is by every account a sidelines bystander.
But it’s worth making several rejoinders to the budding “much ado about nothing” narrative. The first is that if the standard for comparison is not the most discredited president in my lifetime, but a random Fortune 500 company, that Obama’s administration struggles mightily with the threshold concept of accountability.
Three examples: (1) how does a Department of Justice with any measure of historical memory sign off on such a sweeping dragnet of reporter phone records, especially with nothing more at stake than ferreting out how the AP learned an obscure detail that compromised no ongoing investigations? Even allowing for the obvious, that Attorney Generals have no business discussing with presidents the content of secret subpoenas, the presidentially selected leadership at DOJ seemed weirdly clueless about the depth of the breach into reportorial work product. In fact, so clueless that it reflected an indifference to the axiom of any investigation that what is on paper will inevitably surface and have to be defended in a public or judicial context.
(2) When the hierarchy of the IRS learned that lower level bureaucrats were mixing political criteria with scrutiny of tax returns, what is it about the culture of this executive branch that kept that information from filtering up to Congress or to more senior officials at the Treasury Department or the White House? Why didn’t evidence of political censorship by tax officials stand out as the kind of thing Obama, or at least his senior staff or his Attorney General, might want to know?
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Artur Davis: Obama’s Weak “I’m No Nixon” Defense
By Artur Davis, on Tue May 21, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET No, the Obama Administration’s disaster of a week is not Watergate. Not unless Barack Obama is found scheming with his aides about how to pay “hush money” to witnesses. Not unless the foraging of journalists’ phone logs included eavesdropping with wiretaps. No unless revelations surface that Obama ordered a federal agency to shut down a criminal investigation, or that he skimmed campaign funds to build his own private network of thieves and vandals.
But this appalling seven days need not be Watergate to be something lethal and destructive of the public trust, a cascade of events that has hardened and validated the worst characterizations of this White House. The axiom on the political right that Obama’s presidency threatens constitutional freedom could seem overwrought when it was confined to insurance mandates and gun background checks. But from now on, the brief has just gotten appallingly straightforward: it sweeps in elements that are at the core of the First Amendment, in the form of the IRS digging into filers with the wrong politics, and into groups with an unapproved ideological agenda. The case that liberties are being violated—pirating the links between certain reporters and their sources for over two months, and in such an indiscriminate manner that close to a 100 working reporters might have been compromised—no longer seems to the media the stuff of right-wing paranoia.
The supposedly partisan charge that the Obama Administration was covering up details in the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi takes on more plausible colors when a diplomat describes the way he was beaten down by political appointees for asking hard questions. And the vague but toxic insinuation that high level negligence contributed to their deaths now has chilling specific details: one official’s account of a special operations rescue team being bluntly shut down when it was poised to strike, another’s description of an inter-office climate that minimized safety concerns about the American consulate as unseemly griping.
Obama has maddened his adversaries by only repeating his routine for handling public storms: indignation that his White House’s motives are questioned, and an implication that parts of the executive branch, in this case the IRS, are an island beyond his ability to influence. For his political acolytes, the effect is good righteous theater. Never mind the inconvenience that the IRS’ presidentially appointed leadership knew of political targeting, failed to stop it, and may have implicitly blessed it. Forget that the ugliness of his subordinates’ response to Benghazi is a picture supplied by members of his own government, not by his opponents but by professionals, people who until these events were trusted comrades of the appointees who ended up sacking or maligning them.
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Artur Davis: Obama’s Scandalous Seven Days in May
By Artur Davis, on Thu May 16, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET It may be a middle aged man’s perspective, but I recall the 80s as much more vivid and alluring than Joe Weisberg, the creator of FX’s “The Americans” suggests. In this drama about a pair of Russian KGB operatives who masquerade as married American travel agents in the early Reagan years, (Keri Russell as Elizabeth Jennings, Matthew Rhys as Phillip Jennings) the decade is not so much MTV slick as gray in the stolid pattern of, say, the late fifties. And it is not just the deliberate pace, or the square personas of the FBI agents, or the fact that the show’s obligatory generational gap between parents and children is so sanitized that it seems to predate the furies of the seventies and sixties: the real source of drabness here is deeper, and rests on Weisberg’s characterization of the penultimate years of the Cold War as a sluggish collision between two exhausted warriors, who are stumbling around each other in a fog of confusion and blunder.
This imagining of the early 80s as one long slog without purpose works its way through every layer of the “Americans”. The Jennings are laboring through a marriage that was conceived as a cover, has run hot and cold over the years, and is complicated by the fact that ensnaring espionage targets in sex traps is part of their modus operandi. Noah Emmerich’s Stan Beeman, an FBI agent who strains a metaphor by living next door to the Jennings, is fumbling his way through mid-life angst: his own marriage is collapsing from too many years spent chasing criminals during irregular hours, and the affair he falls into with his Soviet informant (Annet Mahendru) seems born out of opportunism and the fatigue from keeping ambiguous moral lines straight. Both the Jennings and Beeman are true believers but they also resemble thrill-seekers, who chose daredevil careers to supply the vibrancy that would have been missing in their lives.
And if the characters are drifting through a moral haze, so are their respective superpowers. In Weisberg’s account, the Cold War is less ideological zeal than bureaucratized routine. The shadow boxing between the FBI and the KGB’s domestic American operations is driven by miscalculations and measured retributions for offenses that themselves were often accidental or hastily improvised. It is noticeable that almost all of the killing is either retaliatory or unplanned, and in its own way, brutal but strategically incompetent. The show is hardly clueless about Soviet cruelty, but in this narrative, it is less the dark soul of totalitarianism, more the emptiness of an amoral enterprise that runs on autopilot.
In other words, the 80s of the “Americans” is far from the idealized political landscape that most conservatives remember. Is Weisberg’s revisionism a sub rosa commentary that the dying throes of the Cold War were just histrionics between adversaries who needed the polarity of the east-west struggle to sustain their fix? To be sure, at moments, the series dabbles with a liberal-leaning perspective: when Elizabeth tries steering their adolescent, and blissfully apolitical, kids toward a leftist view of current events, Phillip later rebuffs her with a tart “This country doesn’t create socialists”, a hard to miss jab at the far right’s insinuations about a certain early 21st century president. The depiction of a black KGB operative named Gregory (Derek Luke) is provocative: he is a disillusioned American, a former 60s civil rights activist who dons a cover as a drug dealer, and in his tortured relationship with his country, there is a hint of a meme that regularly surfaces on the left—the insinuation that the 80s drug war was just the establishment’s counter-insurgency at misunderstood young black men.
Or, Weisberg may only be doing what the best television drama has been honing into a style since, well, the 80s: protagonists who struggle to resolve their ethical dilemmas, good deeds for the wrong reasons and vice versa, and the disconcerting appeal of corrupt figures who are simultaneously charming. Perhaps this familiar enough take only seems jarring when it is exported to the context of the epic global fight of the post WWII era. (and it is fair to conclude that Weisberg’s Russians are more nuanced than “Homeland’s” jihadists or the shadowy right wing conspirators lurking in “24″ or “Scandal”, or any given “NCIS” episode.)
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Artur Davis: “The Americans” — Bad History, Great TV?
By Artur Davis, on Tue May 14, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET It is not news that affluent families extend their advantage of wealth and connections to the next generation in ways more tangible than trust funds: their kids invariably compile better grades and test scores, accomplish more in extracurricular and leadership activities, and win admission to better ranked colleges with the best rates of placing their alumni in well paying jobs.
A recent essay in the New York Times by a Stanford academic, Sean Reardon, (“No Rich Child Left Behind”) has won a lot of praise for its dissection of those trends and its collection of data showing that the gap between children born in affluent homes and their middle and lower income peers is growing. But Reardon’s analysis is also worth examining for a blind spot it reveals in the left’s critique of educational inequality: despite a laundry list of mostly proposals to grow government services, Reardon never mentions two words, vouchers and parental choice. Not even in passing, not even for the purpose of debunking them. It’s as if Reardon is wholly oblivious to the idea that what plagues many parents is not so much an absence of more social welfare, but a lack of capital to buy mobility into better educational options for their children.
And while Reardon captures the extent to which affluent parents are gaining an edge for their kids by pouring cash into extracurricular programs and by devoting more of their own time and knowledge to their child’s life after school hours, he oddly gives no consideration to the most vital thumb these parents place on the scale: they cut the check necessary to enroll their child in the most elite private school they can find, or they buy a home in a neighborhood with a track record of sustaining top flight schools.
Reardon is perceptive in his suggestion that fixating on school quality can shortchange other decisive factors like parental involvement. But that insight does not challenge the obvious: parental support can still be undermined by weak or poorly run schools, and what the most engaged parents bring to the table can be augmented by schools that are exemplary. For those reasons, liberals and conservatives have spent a lot of energy attacking the problem of failing schools, with the right tending to focus on more accountability from teachers and principals, and the left embracing challenges to state funding formulas that disadvantage low income districts in various ways, typically by leaving them too dependent on inadequate local property tax bases.
To be sure, conservatives have sometimes been guilty of seeming more enthusiastic about reining in teachers unions than they are about the plight of under-served minority and low income youngsters. But most left-leaning critics are guilty of a blatant contradiction: they spend enormous energy worrying about the deficit between richer and poorer school districts while seeming unengaged in the even more prevalent reality that richer parents have a considerable edge in maneuvering the menu of school options.
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Artur Davis: Education and the Power of Choice
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