Aqueducts’ Defenders Volunteer to Fill Breach in Upkeep of Park

From the New York Times

ROME — In their day, Rome’s aqueducts — 11 elevated pipelines that carried more than 3,400 gallons of water per second to the ancient capital — stood as the height of public administration, providing the “best water service in the ancient world and perhaps of any era,” in the words of one archaeologist, Filippo Coarelli.

Today, what remains of the aqueducts has come to stand for something else: the challenges Italy faces in preserving its past while extensive cutbacks in public funding are eroding the maintenance of Italy’s cultural heritage and parks.

The effect is visible in the Park of the Aqueducts, a site near the Cinecittà film studios in Rome that includes some of the city’s most monumental, if little-known, ruins: the remains of six aqueducts dating to antiquity, and one to the Renaissance.

For years, the public institutions in charge of the park — a jumble of municipal, regional and national entities — were unable to adequately maintain the 590-acre area, which is mostly privately owned. Then, five years ago, a handful of older residents, calling themselves the Volunteers of the Park of the Aqueducts, adopted the park as their retirement hobby.

They spend hours pruning and weeding and clearing garbage to liberate clogged and long-forgotten streams. They plant fruit trees and have created miles of dirt paths for bicycles and joggers.

“We wanted to improve an area that had been left to itself,” said Luciano Di Vico, 67, a former manager with a natural gas company who serves as the group’s leader.

“This is where we found two cars, a boat trailer, a marble Roman sink, several supermarket carts, even a slot machine,” Mr. Di Vico said on a recent fall morning, pointing to a small hollow the group had cleared.

Volunteer groups “are the soul of the park,” said Mario Tozzi, the commissioner of the Regional Park for the Appian Way, an area of around 8,400 acres that extends from the center of Rome to outside the city limits.

“If it weren’t for them, for their fierce defense, the green areas that now comprise the park wouldn’t even exist,” Mr. Tozzi said. The regional park includes the Park of the Aqueducts, as well as estates and areas where other volunteer groups operate.

The regional park was created in 1988 to protect a monument-rich area from the deregulated urban development that spurred Rome’s postwar sprawl. Because of volunteer groups, Mr. Tozzi said, “this slice of ancient Rome managed to escape from modern Rome, which hasn’t behaved all that well, gobbling up what it could.”

Even so, the remains of the aqueducts have gotten little respect. The Volunteers of the Park of the Aqueducts has tried to change that.

Given the few volunteers and the vast size of the park, it is a Sisyphean feat. No sooner do they take their hoes and rakes to one overgrown patch, then another area they had already cleared needs tending.

Their main challenges are the modern marauders who regularly pillage and destroy the results of their labor. Culprits have made off with fruit from trees “when they’re still not ripe, they’re not even tasty,” Mr. Di Vico said.

Vandals have dismantled wooden bicycle racks to use as tinder for barbecues. They have repeatedly broken into the information booth to steal wheelbarrows and have destroyed a vegetable garden created by schoolchildren. They have even dumped garbage from the bins to make off with the garbage bags. “They stole the bag,” Mr. Di Vico said. “How can that even cross one’s mind?”

“It’s a cultural problem to get people to understand what they have,” he said. “They treat the park as something that can be abandoned.”

He and his crew monitor the vandalism through the small army of older parkgoers who take daily walks. “I have my informers,” Mr. Di Vico said, though he admitted that older people “are the worst predators when it comes to flowers.”

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Other volunteer groups have been similarly active. The Associazione Tor Fiscale, named for a 13th-century tower built near two of the aqueducts, began cleaning a different abandoned tract of the Regional Park for the Appian Way in 2000. The association is now managing a restaurant inside the park to subsidize its activities.

“Something abandoned has become precious,” said Gloria Mazzamati, leader of the association. “The city didn’t even know that this possibility existed. Now people are coming from all over the world to see the aqueducts. They are a spectacle to foreign eyes.”

Orchestrating parkwide management is a challenge because the park is mostly private property, largely owned by the heirs of Rome’s noble families — which farm much of the land — and a church foundation, along with a few public institutions, like the region and the city.

Although they are generally well liked, the aqueduct volunteers have at times run afoul of the rules.

Two years ago, they began clearing some of the arches of the Aqua Claudia of the trees and bushes that hid them from view. “People would pass by and thank us,” said Bruno De Giusti, a volunteer, who grumbled that archaeology officials had not been taking better care of the monuments.

But park guards soon stopped them. “You can’t delegate such a delicate task as cleaning to volunteers,” said Rita Paris, who is responsible for the regional park on behalf of the Culture Ministry. “It has to be done under the control of experts.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Ms. Paris said. “Thank goodness these volunteers exist, but the care and maintenance of these sites must be left to public institutions. The committees are active, and they bring forward battles, but they’re not a real solution.”

In a compromise, the volunteers have been permitted to get rid of some types of weedy plants — nettles and reeds, for example — but must get authorization for other, more ambitious projects. The bureaucracy has not deterred Mr. Di Vico and his group, and they have posted handwritten notices to recruit more volunteers.

But, he said, they would not mind a little money to cover their expenses. They have bought dozens of plants, hammers and hoes and a seemingly endless number of wheelbarrows. “The park supports us morally, and with love, but that’s it.”

Asked about money, Mr. Tozzi, the park commissioner, was succinct. “There just isn’t any money,” he said. “Our budget is zero.”

COMMENT

BUSINESS AS USUAL

by George Packer from the New YorkerOCTOBER 28, 201

Jenny Brown started working for the Internal Revenue Service right out of high school, in 1985, typing numbers from tax returns into a computer. Her home town, of Ogden, Utah, has not only a large I.R.S. facility but an Air Force base, Hill Field, where Brown’s father worked as a civilian. Her stepfather and her late sister used to work at the base; a brother, a son, and a nephew work there now. Her other son is with the Army in Afghanistan, and two other nephews are in the Air Force. “We’re really just a government family,” Brown said last week, on the second-to-last day of the shutdown. And Ogden is a government town, with twenty-four thousand federal employees. Brown grew up with the belief that a government job was secure, well-paying, and honorable, but, when she told her new doctor recently that she works for the I.R.S., he replied, in all seriousness, “Do you need a prescription for Xanax, or some kind of stress reducer?”

In fact, a lot of Brown’s colleagues, in Ogden and around the country, are taking pills for stress. They haven’t had a raise in three years. Every I.R.S. employee lost three days of pay last summer, owing to furloughs brought on by the blind budget cutting known as sequestration, and during the shutdown ninety per cent of the agency’s employees were sent home without pay. Many of them now live paycheck to paycheck, and some had to turn to food banks during the sixteen days of the shutdown, while the charity at the Ogden local of the National Treasury Employees Union (Brown is the president of Chapter 67) ran low on supplies. Nationally, the agency’s workforce has been cut by almost twenty-five per cent in the past two decades, while the number of individual tax returns filed has grown by an even larger figure.

With the extra workload, face-to-face audits have dropped by half since 1992, as have the odds of being convicted for a tax crime. Frank Clemente, the director of Americans for Tax Fairness, says, “When the I.R.S. doesn’t have the money to do its job, it’s easier for wealthy people and big corporations to cheat the system, especially by hiding profits offshore.” For every dollar added to the I.R.S. budget, the agency is able to collect at least seven dollars in revenue, but in times of austerity that money doesn’t come in—which means that, in recent years, the Treasury has lost billions in taxes, starving government services and increasing the deficit. Another result, Jenny Brown pointed out, is that wait times at the Ogden call center have risen from ten or fifteen minutes a few years ago to an hour or more today. “By the time they get the I.R.S. on the phone, they’re frustrated, and they vent awhile, which takes up more time,” she said.

Worst of all is the hostility that Brown senses toward government employees in general, but especially those at the I.R.S. She’s learned not to mention her job to strangers, sparing herself the rude comebacks. “On Facebook, my colleagues don’t put anything where it asks where you work,” Brown said. Instead, they write, “If you know me, you know where I work”—as if they were employed at a pet crematory, or a strip club. “Morale is horrible. People are looking for a way to get out of the government.” After twenty-eight years on the job, she wouldn’t dream of recommending federal employment to anyone.

The government shutdown is over. National default has been averted, for now. According to an estimate by Standard & Poor’s, the Tea Party’s brinkmanship cost the American economy twenty-four billion dollars—more than half a percentage point of quarterly growth. House Republicans have suffered a huge tactical defeat of their own devising, and their approval ratings are at an all-time low. President Obama and the Democrats in Congress appear strong for refusing to give in to blackmail.

But in a larger sense the Republicans are winning, and have been for the past three years, if not the past thirty. They’re just too blinkered by fantasies of total victory to see it. The shutdown caused havoc for federal workers and the citizens they serve across the country. Parks and museums closed, new cancer patients were locked out of clinical trials, loans to small businesses and rural areas froze, time ran down on implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation law, trade talks had to be postponed. All this chaos only brings the government into greater disrepute, and, as Jenny Brown’s colleagues dig their way out of the backlog, they’ll be fielding calls from many more enraged taxpayers. It would be naïve to think that intransigent Republicans don’t regard these consequences of their actions with indifference, if not outright pleasure. Ever since Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural, pronounced government to be the problem, elected Republicans have been doing everything possible to make it true.

These days, Republicans may be losing politically and resorting to increasingly anti-majoritarian means—gerrymandering, filibuster abuse, voter suppression, activist Supreme Court decisions, legislative terrorism—to nullify election results. But on economic-policy matters they are setting the terms. Senator Ted Cruz can be justly described as a demagogic fool, but lately he’s been on the offensive far more than the White House has. The deficit is in fairly precipitous decline, but job growth is anemic, and millions of Americans remain chronically unemployed. Democrats control the White House and the Senate, and last year they won a larger share of the national vote in the House than Republicans did. And yet the dominant argument in Washington is over spending cuts, not over ways to increase economic growth and address acute problems like inequality, poor schools, and infrastructure decay. “The whole debate over the last couple of weeks is playing against a backdrop of how much to increase austerity, not to invest in the economy,” Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, said last week. “We are living in a time of government withering on the vine.”

While House Republicans go home to sift through the debris of their defeat, the sequester remains in place, with deeper cuts ahead. A hiring freeze at United States Attorneys’ offices will continue and they will have to go on using volunteers. There will be no new agents to fill training classes at the F.B.I. Academy, while the bureau’s concrete headquarters, on Pennsylvania Avenue, crumbles. The loss of government scholarships at the National Health Services Corps will mean fewer doctors in underserved areas. Jenny Brown’s friends and co-workers in Ogden will look for jobs in the private sector. And the talk in Washington will return to deficit reduction. ♦

Radio’s Mark Levin Might Be the Most Powerful Conservative You Never Heard Of

From The Daily Beast

Conservative talk show host Mark Levin might be the most politically influential person you’ve never heard of. David Freedlander makes the introductions.

Last weekend, at a dusty race car track in that part of New Jersey where lacrosse fields slowly give way to farmland before the landscape seems to stop altogether,Sarah Palin rallied a couple of thousand partisans on behalf of Steve Lonegan, a longshot, Tea Party-fueled candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Eva Russo for The Washington Post/Getty

“I just told Todd,” she said to the crowd a moment after they stopped chanting her name. “‘Ooh,’ I said. ‘I can die and go to heaven now: I just shook Mark Levin’s hand.’”

Levin had been out earlier, warming them up. He cuts a figure that is the exact opposite of the Grizzly Mama, with her low cut red shirt and stemwinders about a Revolutionary War fightress “swabbin and loadin, swabbin and loadin” a cannon even as the red coats knocked her bonnet off. Hunched over the podium wearing a blue baseball hat, he is more like the uncle you are reminded not to talk politics with at Thanksgiving.

“Mr. President, open our damn memorials! Mr. President, this country doesn’t belong to you—it belongs to us! Mr. President, this government doesn’t belong to you—it belongs to us!”

The crowd, almost entirely white, in ill-fitting jeans and sweatshirts, and in some cases wearing literal hard hats, as if to culled from a central casting call for “blue collar,” chant Levin’s name and wave copies of his book like holy rollers at a tent revival.

“You shoved Obamacare down our throats, now we intend to shove it down yours! This election is about the Constitution! This election is about restoring this republic! This is about the rights of individuals!”

From the back of the rally, Levin becomes nearly obscured by the host of yellow “Don’t Tread On Me” flags, which wave their approval, and which outnumber the Stars and Stripes. Off the corner of the stage, someone dressed as Thomas Jefferson holds a sign that says, “Where’s The Hope N’ Change? More Like Rope N’ Chains.”

“You are the Paul and Paulette Reveres of this country!” Levin continues, his voice rising, his finger jabbing the audience in the chest. “You are the people who are going to save this country and restore the republic! You are the people who are going to breathe life back into the Constitution!”

It is entirely possible that unless you listen to conservative talk radio or regularly attend Tea Party rallies, that you have never heard of Mark Levin, a conservative talk radio host who reaches 7 million listeners nightly. Not that the genre doesn’t have cross-over stars. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity (both of whom directly proceed Levin on most AM radio stations where his show is carried), Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck—their faces are as famous as their names.

But Levin?

In a long New Yorker story over the summer about the efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform, Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin told the magazine’s Ryan Lizza why Florida Senator Marco Rubio has been invaluable to the effort: “He’s willing to go on the most conservative talk shows, television and radio, Rush Limbaugh and the rest … He brings up the names of some of these conservative people I’ve never heard of who everybody in their caucus knows.”

One of them, Lizza said was Levin.

“I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup,” Durbin told the magazine. “Who is Mark Levin?”

“Dick Durbin won’t even be a footnote to a footnote in history. Dick Durbin doesn’t matter to me. Whether or not he knows me is inconsequential,” Levin said in a phone interview.

It was a conversation that he submitted to only after weeks of effort, and my enlisting associates of his to intervene on my behalf, and his likewise doing due diligence on me.

“I don’t get up in the morning and say, ‘Gee what can I do to get noticed by Dick Durbin?’ Or, ‘I wonder what Chuck Schumer thinks about me.’ I could care less.’”

But if you want to know about what is happening in Washington, why the Republican Party seems willing to swallow itself whole as it shuts down the government and drives the nation nearly to default, then pay attention to the 56-year-old Mark Levin. His 2009 book Liberty and Tyranny spent 12 weeks as a New York Times best seller. His latest, The Liberty Amendments, debuted at number one. YouTube is full of videos of the lines outside his book signings; they seem to wrap around the entire suburban Long Island town where they are held.

“He is very influential with members of Congress,” said Rep. Michelle Bachmann. “He helps us understand the issues form a different perspective.”

When Congress was debating Obamacare back in 2009, it was Levin, she said, who led the GOP charge against it, posting articles detailing the dangers of “socialized medicine” on his website and urging his listeners to contact their representative. In the end, not a single Republican voted for the bill.

“He is not a civil disobedience person. He is not crazy,” Bachmann said. “He is not telling people do something that would be negative, but he is very much the motivator and people trust him … Mark understood that once this Obamacare was implemented, dependency is a crack cocaine addiction. Once people get on a form of dependency, is it possible to get off? Yes, but it is very difficult, and it would change the country forever.”

“He is fighting for his country. He believes we are in a very bad spot,” Hannity told me. “He has not moved. He has not changed. He believes the principles that were applied back when worked then, and if applied now to today’s problems would be just as effective. He has an insatiable appetite for learning. He is constantly recommending to me this book or that book. Deep down inside he is a professor. I consider him one of my best friends in the world.”

It was Hannity who helped give Levin his start in radio. Levin had to come to Washington from Philadelphia, where he graduated from Temple University at 19, and Temple Law School a few years later. His parents ran a day camp and a nursery school outside of Philadelphia, in the town of Cheltenham Township, a diverse middle class enclave that serves as the first outpost for families looking to escape Philadelphia. They were conservative, Levin says, if not political. But he caught the bug early, working the precincts in local races, ultimately winning a seat on the Cheltenham school board while still in law school. He started a group called the Committee for Tax Limitation, which, like an early version of the Club for Growth, would bestow its endorsement on candidates who pledged to keep rates low. “It was more conservative than the Republican Party,” he says. “The tax issue really came at birth for me.”

He was involved in Reagan’s ill-fated 1976 effort against Gerald Ford, and signed on again in 1980. When Reagan won, Levin went to the White House, working first for a now defunct agency called ACTION that oversaw VISTA, the Peace Corps, and the like, and later worked for the Department of Education, the Interior Department, the Office of Presidential Personnel, and eventually ended up at the Justice Department as Chief of Staff to Edwin Meese.

“Unlike the other talkers, he had an actual Washington career,” said one top Republican operative. “The others, they don’t have the faintest idea how things get done in Washington.”

After Reagan left office, Levin went on to head the Landmark Legal Foundation, a conservative legal advocacy group that once nominated Rush Limbaugh for the Nobel Prize and that has targeted the National Education Association, the Democratic National Committee, and other left-wing outfits and that is mostly known for supporting Paula Jones’ lawsuit against Bill Clinton in the 90’s. He was a regular talk radio listener, and would write in to Limbaugh when legal matters would come up on the show. “Eventually he appointed me to the fictitious position of ‘legal adviser,’” Levin said.

Limbaugh would invite Levin on occasionally, and as the Lewinsky saga heated up, he would often be called into the then relatively new medium of cable chatter to talk about the legal issues surrounding the case (a debate with Alan Dershowitz is still talked about reverently in conservative circles for the way Levin dismantled his fellow constitutional law professor.) Hannity discovered him then, too, and stuck him with the nickname “The Great One,” which is now used by Palin and nearly everyone who talks about him. He filled in on occasion when Hannity was away, until Phil Boyce, Hannity’s producer, offered him a chance to have his own show on WABC in New York  on Sundays. There was only one catch: there was no money in the budget to pay him.

“I figured he would slam the phone down,” Boyce says. He wanted, he added a “fire-breather” to go against Michael Savage. Levin worked for free for 14 months, routinely beating Savage, when Boyce figured, “it was time for him to go national.”

It was Boyce who came up with the idea for the intro to the Mark Levin Show. It begins with a voice that sounds like something out of a monster truck rally: “He’s here. He’s here. Now broadcasting from the underground command post deep in the bowels of a hidden bunker somewhere under the brick and steel of a nondescript building we have once again made contact with our leader—Maaarkkk Luuuhhhhhvvvvinnn!”

“He does the show in suburban Washington, and so we wanted to create this sense of intrigue. ‘Somewhere under the brick and steel of a nondescript building,’” Boyce says, doing his best radio announcer voice. “It’s a sense of intrigue—like he is the underground leader speaking to his followers and you can only pick him up on a short wave radio.”

On the radio, Levin is less the uncle you want to avoid talking politics with after the second bottle of wine and more like John Belushi on the old “Weekend Update” on “Saturday Night Live,” working himself up to such a lather that his blood vessels practically splatter across the radio dial.

On a typical show, he will begin quietly in his flat, Philadelphia Jewish twang (he is, he says, “a person of deep faith,” but stopped going to temple because “I got tired of the lectures. ‘I am here, Rabbi, to talk about what is in the Torah and so forth, and that is your area of expertise, not politics.’”)

“It’s amazing how sick the media are in this country,” Levin said at the top of a recent show, his voice as dulcet as a pediatrician’s.

It was the start of the government shutdown, and news of kids kept out of cancer trials was dominating the headlines, and for the day at least, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was public enemy number one.

“Two hundred kids who are scheduled for trials at the NIH, when his party won’t fund the NIH, and his president could have made certain that those kids could have participated in those trials and ladies and gentlemen, there are many more trials than trials for cancers out there,” he says, his voice slowly growing louder. “There are trials for heart disease, for diabetes, for all sorts of life threatening diseases going on there.”

By this point, Levin is shouting. As a listener, you are either hooked, and ready to storm the barricade too, or you feel like you are about to watch a fight in a mall parking lot. You know you should intervene, or at the very least look away, but you cannot.

“Obama has no problem evading the Constitution! He has no problem rewriting statues. He no problem issuing waivers, executive fiats, when it helps him politically with illegal aliens, with union bosses, with the environmental movement! But when it comes to 200 kids with cancer, where is Obama?!”

The dials in the control booth push past red.

“WHERE IS HE? HE IS NOWHERE! AND HIS PARTY SEEKS TO EXPLOIT IT WHEN IT IS HIS PARTY THAT WON’T FUND IT. THIS WHY WE CANNOT ALLOW THE FEDERAL LEVIATHAN TO GET BIGGER AND BIGGER AND CONTROL MORE AND MORE OF OUR LIVES. WE RESIST IT, IT SEEKS TO PUNISH US! IT SEEKS TO HURT US! IT SEEKS TO TORMENT US!”

He breaks for a bit, hawks his own books, a project from the right-wing media watchdog group Media Resource Center—a website, called StopTellingMeLies.Com—and adds a plug for an online course on the Constitution he teaches at the Christian school Hillsdale College when he picks up the show again, in high dudgeon mode, this time about the demonstration in front of the World War II memorial planned for the next day.

“I want to say this loud and clear to the people on Capitol Hill who are listening to this, to the administration: You lay one damn hand on one of those World War II vets at that memorial, and I will bring half a million people to that damn memorial. You got that! I am sitting here stewing just thinking about this! Playing these damn games! You will ignite a movement like none you have seen before! We will come out of every town and city in this nation! You have been warned! You! Have! Been! Warned!”

Democrats in Levin’s telling are “Statists.”  “Mark really made popular that term,” David Limbaugh, brother of Rush, said. “Now everybody uses it.” GOP congressmen who don’t toe the Tea Party line are “French Republicans.”

Interviewees get it no easier.

Senator Ron Johnson, a Tea Party lawmaker from Wisconsin, recently went on Levin’s show earlier this month to defend his notion that the Defund Obamacare movement was ill-fated. You can hear the panic in his voice as he is accused by Levin of voting for Walter Mondale. “We are all pretty big fans, Mark,” he says after defending himself from accusations that he is part of the “surrender caucus.” “I certainly wasn’t coming on here expecting an inquisition.”

“Levin says out loud exactly what people yell at the TV,” says Erick Erickson, the blogger behind Red State, and who says that he records Levin’s show every night and listens to it on the ride home from his own radio show, which is broadcast at the same time. “He takes complex subjects and makes them simple and engaging for people to understand, and that is a rare gift.”

“He has a marvelous ability to keep up my level of moral indignation against the left,” agrees Morton Blackwell, the president of the Leadership Institute and a longtime conservative luminary.

Asked to explain his worldview in a nutshell, Levin described a fallen world, one that had gotten worse and worse since 1776 until it was not practically beyond repair.

“I think that what is threatening society is the lack of appreciation for man’s nature. I don’t why when individuals get elected to office or become part of the civil service they become superior to understanding how the world works and go about remaking it. I am not into all of this social engineering. I think it is very problematic, and where do we draw the line? If we are unmoored from the Constitution, then what are we onto? What is the blueprint of the left? I want to read it, see if I like it. It doesn’t exist. Otherwise, we are just like the hamster on the wheel.”

Asked how something like Obamacare would make him more dependent on government, or threaten his own freedom, Levin said, “Do you know how much time I spend with my income taxes? Do you know how much work it takes to straighten that out? This is not productive. Where do you draw the line? Where do you slow this down? This is why we have liberty.

“Not only is the nation established for no other purpose than to promote the individual and free will and self interest and, yes, community, but through the civil society. We have seen societies, we have seen them in Europe and other places where it does not necessarily lead to better lives or the creation of more wealth for more people but to its opposite … The question for me now is, are we on the brink or aren’t we, and I think we are pretty close.”

The difference between Republicans and Democrats, he adds, is that “The Democratic Party has become a very radical institution. The Republican Party has become a status quo institution, and so the Democratic Party drives the agenda and the Republican Party is reactionary, if it reacts at all.”

Unlike other right-wing talkers, Levin doesn’t veer too far from politics. His Facebook page features his dining room table covered with books, and when people are asked what they like about his show, they invariably mention the Constitution, and that Levin brings a level of erudition to his work. His books are full of long passages of Locke or Burke or de Tocqueville, and he was introduced on stage at the Value Voters Summit earlier this month as “one of the top Constitutional lawyers in the nation.”

Needless to say, there is some disagreement about this.

Dahlia Lithwick, the legal correspondent for Slate, wrote of his first book, Men in Black  that it “never gets past the a.m.-radio bile to arrive at cogent analysis. Each of the first three chapters ends with the word ‘tyranny.’ Absent any structure or argument, this book could just have been titled Legal Decisions I Really, Really Hate. Levin follows the lead of lazy pundits everywhere who excoriate ‘activist judges’ without precisely defining what constitutes one.”

The book, she determines, “is silly.”

In the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, a constitutional law scholar from Case Western said the book was incoherent. A critic for The Chronicle of Higher Education called his book Ameritopia  
“disastrously bad from beginning to end” and Levin “a benighted, philosophically illiterate ideologue.” A right-leaning critic for The Atlantic meanwhile said that the best-selling Liberty and Tyranny doesn’t “even present a reasoned argument for a specific point of view, other than that of willful ignorance.”

Is what Levin does a schtick? Yes, of course, as all radio is a schtick. But it is one that Levin has parlayed into being the voice of a movement that has confounded those outside of it. How influential is Levin? Consider that just after Congress ended the budget standoff and the entire nation was calling for his head, Ted Cruz muscled through a gaggle of reporters to call in to Levin’s show.

Levin said to Cruz, “I have heard it said that we should not have fought over Obamacare, and spend all this time on this. And I am thinking to myself, most of the people saying this didn’t fight Obamacare. They were fighting you fighting Obamacare! Number two—Obamacare is a hot knife to the heart of this country! If we are not going to fight over this what are we going to fight over?”

“Mark, you are exactly right,” Cruz responded.

“I am not an entertainer,” Levin told me. “An entertainer dances and sings and puts on a rubber nose and does whatever they do. I am extremely concerned about the times we live in. I consider them very perilous, and I don’t hold much back.”

Cruz, he said, was getting crucified, because “he was not part of the Republican mush machine. Of he course he is not popular among the people he is battling. Neither am I.”

Political operatives in Texas says it is difficult to imagine Cruz now being in the U.S. Senate without Levin’s early and loud support, having him on the air back when Cruz seemed like a longshot against an establishment pick, and urging his listeners to give money.

“Levin is willing to put his reputation on the line for conservative candidates he believes in,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Texas-based political consultant. “He is really a rarity in ‘the vast right wing conspiracy.’ He has enough knowledge to know how government works, enough courage to say what he thinks and not care what anybody says, and he has a microphone that is powerful enough that it can make an enormous difference in leading conservatives in a direction he wants to lead them.”

In an email, Cruz agreed, calling Levin “a friend and true patriot” who “speaks fearlessly for the people. I’ll always be grateful for his early support for my campaign, which was immeasurably helpful for building support with conservative voters and grassroots activists.”

When Bachmann was running for re-election for her congressional seat, Levin came to believe that the Republican National Committee was insufficiently supportive. Soon, phone lines at RNC headquarters in Washington lit up with complaints.

“He has a direct line into the base,” said a top aide to one Tea Party aligned lawmaker. “It’s as if every Republican office on Capitol Hill has to have a copy of his book.”

None of this endears him much to the Republican leadership, of whom Levin holds a special kind of contempt. He has regularly called for the ouster of House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and thinks that anyone who doesn’t agree has been corrupted.

“It’s the grassroots establishment” laments one GOP operative close to the leadership. “There is in our party a growing group of people who frame themselves as outsiders but are rally just leaders of their own movement, and among them, Levin carrried a lot of weight. When he goes on a rant everybody hears about it.”

What makes Levin remarkable is that his audience is a fraction of that of his better-known colleagues like Hannity and Limbaugh. He speaks, one former Bush administration official said, “To the door-knockers and the envelope stuffers.” In other words, if you wonder how come little known fringe right-wingers are able to knock off establishment Republicans again and again, it has a lot to do with the fact that Levin sends them there. To this crowd, Hannity touts the GOP line too religiously, and Limbaugh is too much of a global celebrity whose radio show is as likely to veer into pop culture and news of the weird as it is to talk about the political situation. Levin is single-minded and relentless.

Asked about the famous 11th commandment as articulated by his old boss and current hero, Ronald Reagan, that “Thou shall not criticize a fellow Republican,” Levin counters, “I believe in the Ten Commandments. They were good enough for God, they are good enough for me.”

“The Democrats aren’t surrendering. They have victory after victory and the Republicans—well, have you ever heard of a party attacking its base. I have never of such a thing. Does the Democratic Party attack its base? They don’t always agree, but they try to accommodate them. We have a Republican Party whose consultants and donors despise the grassroots, and they are not going to win elections if they keep this up. Of course, they don’t win elections any way. We were told McCain was the only one who could win and he lost. We were told Romney was the only one who could win and he lost. George Bush did not win the popular vote. So the guy that ran that campaign is all over television telling us how to win elections. Meanwhile the candidate who won two massive electoral college victories is essentially disregarded, and we are told that the era of Reagan is over.”

“He has the pulse of grassroots, conservative activists,” Erickson says. “He expresses their anger and enthusiasm in way few people out there do. He uses their language. He calls out Republican leaders by name. He is one of the who is really driven by the cause.”

“There are very few institutions of the federal government less responsive to its members than the Republican Party,” Levin says. “I personally have had it with the leadership of the Republican Party, and I have made it abundantly clear. They lack knowledge, confidence, the ability to articulate a principle, and for the life of me I don’t know why they are there. I can’t tell you what the Republican Party today stands for. I know what they say, but what do they do?”

He is also, friends say, incredibly shy, and doesn’t like to travel much. Levin said that he stopped doing much TV after his first burst on the air in the 90s, and that he doesn’t like it all that much.

“When you are on TV more than radio there is a price.You give up privacy.You go to a restaurant and there are five people staring at you. I don’t think he wanted to give that up,” said Hannity, dropping into a raspy Levin impression: “How! Do! You! Put! Up? With! That!?!”

When asked why he wasn’t as well known as his counterparts, Levin cackled. “How do I know? I could care less. Did you see the [Lonegan] rally. Did you see the book signing? Those are the people I want to be with. I can’t control or influence Dick …” He cut himself off. “Well, hell, I do want to actually. But the Dick Durbins of the world and the Chuck Schumers of the world, whether they know me or not doesn’t matter to me. I want my ideas to get out there. I want more and more people to wake up to the fact that where we are headed in this country. And to say that my views are gloomy and bleak is to ignore reality.”

At the race car track, after the rally, most of the crowd stuck around by the stage. Many were there for Palin, but a lot were there for Levin, too, clutching multiple copies of his book.

“He’s honest. He says it the way it is. And he knows a lot about American history. That is what we need to get back to. We need to get back to the Constitution,” said one man, who said he was working two jobs since his wife was laid off, and was in the military reserves, and he tuned into Levin every day when he knocked off work.

“He has informed me about constitutional issues, things like that. He is a roots-based guy. He understand why our country was founded, and where our strength comes from,” said Jim Bukowiec, a graphic designer who drove an hour and a half with his grandson for the rally.

Levin, he said, “is a little deeper. Hannity is like the cherry on top of the ice cream, and Rush is all over the place.”

Palin stayed for nearly an hour afterwards, signing books, taking pictures with Todd and fans. Afterwards, she went to a private reception behind the bus. Levin’s fans never left though. They stayed behind the rope line, waiting for him to come out, but he stayed on the bus, and never did.

Medical Experiments Conducted on Bowery Alcoholics in 1950s

The New York Times

Gina Kolata

A medical researcher from Columbia University, Dr. Perry Hudson, made the skid row alcoholics in Lower Manhattan an offer: If they agreed to surgical biopsies of their prostates, they would get a clean bed and three square meals for a few days, plus free medical care and treatment if they had prostate cancer.

It was the 1950s, and Dr. Hudson was trying to prove that prostate cancer could be caught early and cured. But he did not warn the men he was recruiting that the biopsies to search for cancer could cause impotence and rectal tears. Or that the treatment should cancer be found — surgery to remove their prostates and, often, their testicles — had not been proven to prolong life. But he said in a recent telephone interview that he believed the treatments did prolong life. “I told them the cure rate is extremely high,” he said.

As more than 1,200 men living in flophouses on the Bowery signed up for Dr. Hudson’s study in the 1950s and ’60s, neither his academic peers nor the federal officials overseeing his grants criticized his ethics, but times have changed. Two papers published on Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health and theBulletin of the History of Medicine prompted medical historians to denounce this largely forgotten chapter in the history of government-financed medical research on vulnerable populations.

They said the Bowery study was unethical, because of both the powerlessness of the people who participated in it and of the things done to them.

“The invasiveness of this particular research was really horrendous,” said Alan Brandt, a Harvard medical historian who has written about the Tuskegee experiment, in which hundreds of poor black men with syphilis were left untreated to observe the natural course of the disease, a study that began in 1932 and was not halted by the United States Public Health Service until 1972.

Dr. Robert Aronowitz, an internist and medical historian who wrote the new papers, stumbled upon the Bowery study — which was led by Dr. Hudson, a urologist trained at Johns Hopkins, and paid for by the National Institutes of Health, among others — and was so troubled by it that he became consumed with documenting what had happened.

“Hudson used Bowery men because only desperate, poor, and unknowing men would participate,” Dr. Aronowitz wrote. “It was unimaginable that the average American man would volunteer.”

Dr. Hudson’s colleagues did not question his use of down-and-out men with alcoholism, some of them mentally ill, or his failure to carefully inform them of the potential risks of his research, said Dr. William Parry, a urologist at the University of Rochester at the time.

In the 1950s, prostate cancer was usually discovered late after it had spread and was almost always fatal.

“It was an entirely different era,” said Dr. Parry, now 89 and an emeritus professor at the University of Oklahoma.

In fact, as Dr. Hudson pursued his research, his work was widely cited in urological journals and textbooks and admiringly featured in a 1957 photography spread in Life magazine.

Dr. Aronowitz cites a popular history, “The Bowery Man,” published in 1961, in which the author, Elmer Bendiner, reported that staff members at a city-run lodging house where study participants stayed helped Dr. Hudson ensure their participation.

“Once a man chosen for the study was persuaded to volunteer, the authorities lifted his meal ticket and returned it only when he had kept his appointment,” Mr. Bendiner wrote.

Dr. Hudson himself makes no apologies for recruiting impoverished alcoholics. Now 96 and living in South Pasadena, Fla., he said in recent interviews that the men volunteered, they were not paid and they got “the best care in New York.”

Doctors in private practice would never have allowed their patients to get biopsies since they assumed the disease was fatal, he said.

Dr. Hudson was 33 and had just taken a position as head of urology at the Francis Delafield Hospital, a public cancer hospital in New York, when he and his colleagues began recruiting homeless men in 1951. He got the idea of going to the Bowery when he was caring for a man who had been a Princeton history professor but ended up a homeless alcoholic living there.

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At first, Dr. Hudson said, the Bowery men resisted his offers. He recalled speaking at one of the flophouses just before bedtime. “I had a lot of old vegetables thrown at me,” he said. “I was talking about making a small incision in a very interesting part of their anatomy.” But many eventually agreed to participate.

Unlike modern prostate biopsies, which involve the use of a thin needle, the biopsies done in the Bowery study involved cutting a small slice out of the men’s prostates. Dr. Hudson said he told the men they might get a local infection from the biopsy, but a man who worked as a urology resident on the project told Dr. Aronowitz that he saw many other complications in the Bowery men.

Dr. Aronowitz got the approval of his university’s ethics committee to speak to the former resident, who had just read “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” the best-selling book about a black woman whose cancer cells were cultured without her permission in 1951.

Worried about the ethics of the Bowery study, the former resident declined to be named in the paper, but told Dr. Aronowitz in a recorded interview that the biggest fear among the doctors doing the biopsies was that they would cause rectal perforations, and he regretted not telling the men in writing about that risk.

Aware of Dr. Hudson’s contention that the biopsy would not cause serious injuries, two urologists published case reports in 1957 on the experiences of 24 men who had biopsies that found no cancer. Many of them had serious complications, including rectal lacerations. A third of them became impotent and another third had diminished sexual function.

About 100 of the men who participated in the Bowery study were found to have cancer and aggressively treated for it with surgery and, for many, estrogen — a combination of therapies that was far from the standard of care at the time.

The men had their prostates removed and faced likely impotence and incontinence. And those who were also surgically castrated and given a powerful estrogen had well-known side effects from these treatments. Having their testicles removed caused a loss of sexual desire, muscle tone and stamina, and estrogen caused a heightened risk for heart attacks and strokes.

Dr. Parry said that a later study found estrogen therapy offered no advantages over a placebo in prolonging life in patients with prostate cancer.

“The fact that these people, a convenient population, were used in the name of science is abhorrent,” said Jason Schwartz, a historian of medicine who served on a presidential commission that investigated human experiments in which prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala were intentionally infected with syphilis in the 1940s to test penicillin.

Those experiments were approved by the highest medical officials in the United States government. In 2010, President Obama apologized to the president of Guatemala for the experiments.

Though the Bowery study had a laudable goal — to prove that prostate cancer could be caught early and cured — it yielded little credible data.

Dr. Hudson did not set up a control group of Bowery men who did not get the biopsies and treatment. As a result, he had no way of comparing the men who got the interventions with those who did not or of documenting whether the men he treated lived longer.

But Dr. Aronowitz cautions that people today should not feel an easy moral superiority to those who worked on the Bowery study. Millions of American men now get screened for prostate cancer every year, and more than 200,000 of them get biopsies. Tens of thousands have their prostates removed because the biopsies showed cancer cells, even though the men showed no symptoms of cancer.

“As the efficacy of the screen-and-treat paradigm was never established, the practices of the past few decades can be understood as a mass experiment conducted on ill-informed men,” he wrote.

A federal panel of experts recommended in 2011 that men no longer get the P.S.A. blood test to screen for prostate cancer because clinical trials had found that the test’s benefits are uncertain and its risks — treatments that needlessly cause incontinence and impotence — are severe.

But many urologists believe screening saves lives, and the American Urological Association recommends that men consider starting it at age 55.

“Ethical tragedies are difficult to recognize in the present,” Dr. Aronowitz wrote. “Future observers may view the massive evidence-based expansion of our screen-and-treat paradigm in prostate cancer in the same way as we now view the Bowery series practices.”

A Donkey in Fox’s Clothing?

Slate

Megyn Kelly's new Fox nightly news program, The Kelly File, premiered last week.

Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly was the biggest winner of election night 2012 who was not running for public office. That evening, after Fox analysts had called Ohio and the election for President Obama, Karl Rove infamously began to express doubts about the results. In what is the only bit of television theater from that night anyone will ever remember, Kelly, who was co-anchoring Fox’s coverage, was tapped to question the decision desk directly, and she gamely stalked the halls of Fox News to authoritatively question the stat wonks who had made the call. (A Fox insider told New York’s Gabe Sherman about Kelly’s walk, “This is Fox News, so anytime there’s a chance to show off Megyn Kelly’s legs they’ll go for it.”) “We are actually quite comfortable with the call in Ohio,” one of the analysts told Kelly. This was not sufficient to convince Rove, who attempted a sort of one-man filibuster on the election results, such a blatant flouting of fact that it made Kelly’s earlier question to Rove seem prescient. “Is this just math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better,” she had asked, “or is it real?”

And thus, the dueling legends of Megyn Kelly were born: Kelly the unflappable, impeccable Fox News star, and Kelly the unflappable, impeccable Fox News star who maybe knows Fox News is crazy. While nearly everyone around her lost their senses, Kelly remained the perfectly poised adult: gracefully navigating a contentious situation, upholding the integrity of Fox News without alienating conservative powerhouses, and making captivating television all the while.

That night, Fox saw an anchor they should commit to. The Kelly File, her new nightly news program, started last week and makes her Fox’s first new host since 2003. It airs directly following The O'Reilly Factor, and after just two episodes, it’s become the most watched show in the demo on cable news.

That night last fall, liberals also saw someone to admire. Kelly’s assured handling of Rove’s temper tantrum solidified her burgeoning reputation as the Fox News anchor who, when push came to Karl Rove’s shoving, would behave like a member of the reality-based community. If she was not quite a donkey in Fox’s clothing, maybe she wasn’t a party-line ideologue in one either.

Kelly has set herself apart by doing things Fox News personalities don’t usually do: She had issued a skillful and fast correction to Fox’s missed call on the Affordable Care Act, she “destroyed” a conservative who had called her maternity leave “a racket,” and she had taken her colleagues to task for disparaging families in which women are the primary breadwinner. Writing about that last incident on The New Yorker’s website, Amy Davidson—while complimentarily calling Kelly “the brains of the Fox News operation”—noted that Kelly “does not describe herself as a feminist, which may be why it’s all the more fascinating when, every now and then, she decides to act like what others might describe as one.” Kelly, to put a spin on an old cliché, is the Fox News host liberal women would most like to have a glass of sav blanc with.

That is, until they watch an episode of The Kelly File. One week into the show’s run, it is clear that to understand Kelly as anything other than a dedicated Fox News shill is a deluded fantasy. It is, to paraphrase Kelly herself, just wishful thinking you do as a Democrat to make yourself feel better. The skills that Kelly displayed on election night are real: She really is smarter, more appealing, and more polished than any other Fox News personality—none of which obviates her totally pernicious dedication to keeping Fox viewers within the Fox bubble, facts be damned.

For instance, watching The Kelly File, you would think the Republicans were more popular than the president. Since her new show has been on air, Kelly has never willingly shared the terrible approval ratings of Republicans in Congress, though she has vociferously supplied Obama’s low approval ratings and the low approval ratings of Congress as a whole.  In its first week, The Kelly Files has been fixated on how the shutdown was briefly keeping death benefits from soldiers who have died since the government closed. In the post-Benghazi era, this means determining “when” Barack Obama “knew” that families were being denied benefits, and when he decided to “do something” about it, even though the problem was brought up and addressed in a matter of days. Kelly aired a “gotcha” clip of Fox’s Ed Henry grilling Press Secretary Jay Carney that is downright Rorschachian: It looks to me like the White House dealt with the issue as quickly as possible, but looks to Fox News like a White House cover-up.

Nearly all the stories on The Kelly File turn on wedge social issues. A segment about a teenager who was returned to a house with a sex offender in it made it to air because the girl was allegedly being forced to have an abortion. There was a piece about the war on Christmas. A sequence about the 1980s killing of a DEA agent got play because the Obama administration has not protested the release of his killer from Mexican prison strongly enough. Kelly, her head, as usual, cocked slightly to the left to indicate deep listening, calmly took in a guest explaining that the Democrats don’t want to talk with Republicans because you “never have a real conversation with your adversary, it humanizes them,” before, seconds later, quoting Lenin: “Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.”

But then there are moments when Kelly exhibits her no-nonsense charm. In a segment on Las Vegas union workers hurling insults at tourists, a panelist said that Obama and Harry Reid have called people worse names in just the last few days, suggesting that such abuse and violence was typical of the left. At this, Kelly intervened, a little sarcastically. “You have maybe overstated your case. I don’t think we want to dismiss the entire left in the country as violent,” she said. Then she added, “I will say in [the union’s] defense that one time one guy parked me in and I could not get out of my car on either side, and I put a little note on his car and all I wrote on it was ‘Loser!’ And it made me feel so much better. And maybe they are experiencing the same thing. It was very cathartic for me. I cop to it.”

This may be a silly story, but I found it charming—and also terrifyingly savvy. Kelly dropped this anecdote into one of the least contentious stories she aired last week. (Even the Democrat on the panel thought cursing at tourists wasn’t a great strategy.) It burnishes her reputation as something other than a Fox automaton, without alienating any Fox partisans (it’s a cute story). Megyn Kelly has convinced both the right and the left that she’s a bold truth-teller because of her willingness to call bullshit one out of the 100 times bullshit should actually could be called.

Kelly is, in a way, like Laura Bush, a likeable woman who once evinced a leftish streak—voting Democrat before her marriage—that allowed liberals to project upon her a more palatable politics, a flight of fancy that inspired an entire novel.  Every single day, Kelly demonstrates her devotion to Fox News ideology. But because the only tidbits that regularly reach non-Fox News watchers are viral videos of Kelly doing something rare for a Fox News anchor—pointing out that all liberals are notviolent, say, or arguing maternity leave is good—liberals can harbor the fantasy that Megyn Kelly might be that mythical being: A Fox News anchor to disagree with only some of the time. It’s not true, but it’s a very comforting to believe, because Megyn Kelly is going to be with us for a very long while.

Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Political Parties

The daily beast

Republicans have lost three major fights since 2009. They seem likely soon to lose a fourth—and all in the same way.

The three previous losses (in case you’re feeling forgetful) were, in order:

Chris O'Meara/AP

(1) The fight over Obamacare. Result: the most ambitious new social insurance program since Medicare, financed—unlike Medicare—by redistributive new taxes on investment and high incomes.

(2) The 2012 election. Result: Despite the worst economy since the Great Depression, the reelection of President Obama, Democratic retention of the Senate, and 1.4 million more votes cast for House Democrats than for House Republicans.

(3) The fight over the “fiscal cliff” at the end of 2012. Result: In order to preserve some of the Bush tax cuts, Republicans for the first time since 1991 left their finger prints on a tax increase for upper income groups.

Now comes fight (4), the fight over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling. This one isn’t lost yet. But unless Republicans are prepared to push the country into the catastrophe of national bankruptcy sometime around October 17, it’s hard to see how this one does not end in a Republican retreat, clutching whatever forlorn fig leaf they can negotiate from President Obama.

Behind all four defeats can be seen the same seven mistakes: what you might call the seven habits of highly ineffective political parties. Let’s call the roll:

Habit 1: Maximalist goals.

There’s a lot about Obamacare for a Republican not to like. But to demand Obamacare’s outright repeal (which is what “defunding” amounts to) barely 10 months after decisively losing an election in which Obamacare occupied a central place—well, that’s shooting for the moon. we’ve seen equivalent moon shots again and again since 2009. During the original Obamacare legislation, Republicans took the position: no, no, not one inch. During the election of 2012, Republicans were not content merely to replace one president with another. They also campaigned on the most radical platform the party since 1964. They wanted the biggest possible mandate. Instead they got whomped.

Habit 2: Apocalyptic visions.

Republicans have insisted on maximal goals because they fear they face a truly apocalyptic moment: an irrevocable fork in the road, with one path leading to socialist tyranny, the other to the restoration of the constitutional republic. There sometimes are such moments in history of nations. This is not one. If the United States has remained a constitutional republic despite a government guarantee of health care for people over 65, it will remain a constitutional republic with a government guarantee of health care for people under 65. Obamacare will cost money the country doesn’t have, and that poses a serious fiscal problem. But it’s not as serious a fiscal problem as is posed by the existing programs, Medicare and Medicaid, which cover the people it costs most to cover. It’s not a problem so serious as to justify panic.

Yet panic has gripped the Republican rank-and-file since 2009—and instead of allaying panic, Republican leaders have aggravated and exploited it, to the point where the leaders are compelled to behave in ways they know to be irrational. In his speech to the “Bull Moose” convention of 1912, Teddy Roosevelt declared, “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord!” It’s a great line, but it’s not a mindset that leads to successful legislative outcomes.

Habit 3: Irrational animus.

Barack Obama was never likely to be popular with the Republican base. It's not just that he's black. He’s first president in 76 years with a foreign parent—and unlike Hulda Hoover, Barack Obama Sr. never even naturalized. While Obama is not the first president to hold two degrees from elite universities—Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did as well—his Ivy predecessors at least disguised their education with a down-home style of speech. Join this cultural inheritance to liberal politics, and of course you have a formula for conflict. But effective parties make conflict work for them. Hate leads to rage, and rage makes you stupid. Republicans have convinced themselves both that President Obama is a revolutionary radical hell-bent upon destroying America as we know it and that he's so feckless and weak-willed that he'll always yield to pressure. It's that contradictory, angry assessment that has brought the GOP to a place where it must either abjectly surrender or force a national default. Calmer analysis would have achieved better results.

Habit 4: Collapse of leadership.

The Republicans have always been the more disciplined of America’s two political parities, and today they still are. But whereas before, discipline used to flow from elected leadership down, today it flows from factional leadership up. An aide to Sen. Mike Lee told the National Review: “The minority of the minority is going to run things until our leadership gets some backbone.” The Lee aide was specifically referring to the Republican minority in the Senate, but the language has broader implication. According to Robert LaCosta, a well-sourced reporter at NRO: “What we’re seeing is the collapse of institutional Republican power ... The outside groups don’t always move votes directly but they create an atmosphere of fear among the members [of Congress].” Large organizations are inherently vulnerable to capture by tightly organized militant tendencies. This is how a great political party was impelled to base a presidential campaign on the Ryan plan—a plan that has now replaced the 1983 manifesto of the British Labour Party as “the longest suicide note in history.” It’s the job of leadership to remember, in the words of Edmund Burke, “Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.” That job is tragically going undone in today’s GOP.

Habit 5: Self-reinforcing media.

The actor Hugh Grant once bitterly characterized his PR team as “the people I pay to lie to me.” Politicians do not always need to tell the truth, but they always need to hear it. Yet hearing the truth has become harder and harder for Republicans. It takes a very unusual spin artist to remember that what he or she is saying isn’t actually true. Non-politicians say what they believe. Politicians sooner or later arrive at the point where they believe what they say. They have become prisoners of their own artificial reality, with no easy access to the larger truths outside. This entombment in their own artificial reality was revealed to the entire TV-watching world in Karl Rove’s Fox News election night outburst against the Ohio 2012 ballot results. It was the same entombment that blinded Republicans to the most likely outcome of their no-compromise stance on Obamacare—and now again today to the most likely outcome of the government shutdown/debt ceiling fight they started.

Habit 6: Politics as war.

The business of America is business, as Calvin Coolidge said. American politics has been businesslike too. They understand that the business of the nation is ultimately settled by a small roomful of tired people negotiating their differences in the small hours of the morning: everybody gets something, nobody gets everything. It’s a grubby business, unavoidably, and most of the time, Americans understand that. They build statues to Martin Luther King. They elect Lyndon Johnson.

From time to time in American politics, differences arise that are too wide to negotiate. Slavery versus no slavery. Prohibition versus drink. Pro-life versus pro-choice. Professional politicians usually keep their distance from absolutist movements. As George Washington Plunkitt observed, “The politicians have got to stand together this way or there wouldn’t be any political parties in a short time.” That line was meant as a joke, but it contains truth. Professional politicians are disagreement managers. Since 2009, however, the GOP has given unprecedented scope to those who for their own ideological, financial, or psychological reasons refuse to allow disagreements to be managed—and instead relentlessly push toward the kind of ultimate crises the country so nearly escaped in 2011 and teeters again on the verge of today.

The great British conservative historian Hugh Trevor Roper scoffed at the Marxist claim that history runs in one direction only. “When radicals scream that victory is indubitably theirs, sensible conservatives knock them on the nose. It is only very feeble conservatives who take such words as true and run round crying for the last sacraments.” The great conservative poet T.S. Eliot explained that there are no lost causes, because there are no won causes. How many ways can one express that idea? So long as there is life, there is hope; everything old is new again; etc. etc. etc.

The trouble with these assurances, however, is that they contain an implicit moral that politics is very hard work. Free-market economics—so discredited in the 1940s—returned to favor in the 1970s because of tireless research by brilliant economists. The excesses of the 2000s have undone that success, and now it will take serious thinking, and some necessary reforms, to repair the damage. It’s a tempting shortcut to throw up one’s hands and say, “I’ve seen the best of it. The future holds only darkness.” It’s especially tempting for a party that disproportionately draws its support from older voters. The fact is that for those of us over 50, the future offers us as individuals only decline leading to extinction. It’s natural to believe that what happens to us must happen to the world around us. Who wants to hear that things will become much, much better for humanity shortly after we ourselves shuffle off the scene? Yet of all mental errors, despair is the most dangerous to a democracy. The “politics of cultural despair” lead to authoritarianism and worse, as the German historian Fritz Stern warned in his history of that same title.

The man who has no hope will make the most irrevocable errors—and unnecessarily plunging the United States into the first national bankruptcy since the 1780s would be about as irrevocable as an error as history contains.

Recently, GOP lawmakers have been pointing fingers at Democrats for a supposed unwillingness to compromise.