Sunday, March 14, 2010

T. R. Fehrenbach: An Historian's View of the Current Crisis



T. R. Fehrenbach, born Theodore Reed Fehrenbach on January 12, 1925 in San Benito, Texas, is an American author and former head of the Texas Historical Commission. He graduated from Princeton University in 1947, and has published at least 18 non-fiction books, including best seller Lonestar: A History of Texas and Texans and This Kind of War, about the Korean War. Although he served as a combat officer during the Korean War, his own service is not mentioned in the book. Fehrenbach has also written for Esquire, The Atlantic, The Saturday Evening Post, and The New Republic. He is known as an authority on Texas, Mexico and the Comanche people. -- Wikipedia.


T.R. Fehrenbach is one of my favorite historians. Of his dozens of books I have these in my library:

U. S. Marines In Action, 1962, LCCN 62-002205. Republished in 2000, ISBN 158586062X

This Kind of War: A Study In Unpreparedness 1963, LCCN 63-009972. (Republished in 1998 as This Kind Of War: The Classic Korean War History ISBN 1574881612, LCCN 98-027350)

Crossroads in Korea, the Historic Siege of Chipyong-Ni, 1966, LCCN 66-010022

Greatness to Spare: The Heroic Sacrifices of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence, 1968, LCCN 68-030756. Republished in 2000, ISBN 0735101647

The Fight for Korea: from the War of 1950 to the Pueblo Incident, 1969, LCCN 68-029982

Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans, 1968, LCCN 68-025222. (Republished in 2000, ISBN 0306809427, LCCN 00-021771)

Fire And Blood: A History Of Mexico, 1973, LCCN 72-091265. Republished in 1995, ISBN 0306806282, LCCN 94-045811

Comanches: The Destruction of a People, 1974, LCCN 73-020761. (Republished in 2003 as Comanches: The History of a People, ISBN 1400030498, LCCN 2003-267713)

Crossroads in Korea and This Kind of War are two of my all-time favorite books. This Kind of War is a classic study on unpreparedness and should be read by everyone interested in military affairs.

So, when I spotted this op-ed by Fehrenbach on RealClearPolitics, I had to go there and read what the old historian had to say.

I'll have comments on the other side.

Web Posted: 03/14/2010 12:00 CST

The system's fine; politics gum it up

T.R. Fehrenbach

Amid all the genuine bad tidings blasting our sensibilities each news day, we are being subjected to the notion that our system of government isn't working. Something's wrong in Washington. This is mostly coming from the semi-educated media and commentator classes, but apparently it is believed to the extent that Congress has recently received its lowest confidence rating: 10 percent.

The idea that the institutions of the U.S. are fundamentally flawed is arrant nonsense. Washington and the Constitution, as amended, are working pretty much as the Founders intended them to work. I have heard and seen all this before, during the Great Depression and run-up to WWII, when supposedly sensible men argued that free institutions weren't up to the challenges of economic crisis and totalitarian dictatorship. We showed them.

To begin with, we are a republic, not a popular democracy. But we are a democratic republic, which means we elect our representatives. The words “democratic” and “republican,” however, have confused us since 1800, when Thomas Jefferson headed the Democratic-Republicans.

The current administration and majority of Congress were chosen by 53 percent of the electorate, giving them a clear mandate to form a government but not necessarily to push partisan politics. A business that ignores 47 percent of its market is on shaky ground, and so is a government. According to the studies, this result was largely because an unprecedented percentage of first-time voters, blacks and Hispanics turned out, voting 62 percent Democratic.

If this coalition wants to effect real change, it must hold together for more cycles; otherwise, it was a fluke. The evidence to date is that the Obama coalition has already lost cohesion; therefore those it put in office have little right to push agendas. Our institutions are right to resist, meantime.

The Founders, both Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, were mortally fearful of tyranny, whether popular or elitist. This is why they created three independent equal branches, two legislative houses and reserved powers not granted the federal apparatus to the states.

This last has been gutted by every strong president, but the division of powers within the federal branch leaves ample room for stopping popular stampedes. The Senate is supposed to slow down or thwart the House; it was designed that way. So was the fact that a few small states can block the will of the great, imperial states. In fact, cloture — cutting off debate — is a newer rule. Originally a single senator could block action.

What I'm getting at is that if you have no consensus, you get no results — nor should you. This doesn't mean the country sinks; it just means you can't implement purely partisan policies. We keep the Army, Navy and Treasury going, you notice. If the American people want reforms and pursue them long enough, not just for the moment, they usually get them. Muddling through, the democratic-republican way, is better than marching off a cliff like morons.

After all, it's worked for more than two centuries.


An historian like Fehrenbach is conditioned to take the long view, and while he is right about the form of the system:

The idea that the institutions of the U.S. are fundamentally flawed is arrant nonsense. Washington and the Constitution, as amended, are working pretty much as the Founders intended them to work.


he is wrong about the people who inhabit it.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” -- John Adams.


Thus what Adams warned us about has come to pass. We are no longer a moral and religious people, and so we find ourselves in this situation.

Two other Adams' quotes bear upon this point:

“Democracy... while it lasts is more bloody than either [aristocracy or monarchy]. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”


and

“That the desires of the majority of the people are often for injustice and inhumanity against the minority, is demonstrated by every page of the history of the whole world”


This is Fehrenbach's major point above, although as a member of the so-called "greatest generation," he expresses a fondness for the Roosevelt era that I think is cognitively dissonant to his thesis.

Fehrenbach's principal error, and after such a long, productive, even heroic and quintessentially AMERICAN life, perhaps he can be forgiven, is that he still thinks that the politics of the Republic as crafted by the Founders yet works to the support of that system, rather than its downfall.

"Democracy," one of the various collectivisms, has in large measure already replaced the rules of the Republic, the Constitution of ordered liberty with its built in inefficiencies and the rule of law.

We are through the looking glass, and the bloody Red Queen and her minions are coming for our heads.

As much as I respect Fehrenbach's body of work and agree with his opinion of the Founders' plan, the old historian has missed the essential thing about this crisis. The old verities no longer hold and will be either completely and utterly destroyed by their declared domestic enemies or restored to their original glory by us -- in either case, by force of arms.

That is what we have come to.

Get ready for the storm, it is almost upon us.

Mike
III

4 comments:

B said...

I too have loved Fehrenbach. I read This Kind of War while I was young buck sergeant in Korea to gain perspective. I still have that book on my shelf. As for his article, what I read in it is an historian's analysis. Historians, but their very nature and training, know little if any about the current state -- let's ask his opinion of how we did in fifteen years and I am fairly convinced we will give us insight about ourselves that we can't see.

B
III

rexxhead said...

"The Senate is supposed to slow down or thwart the House; it was designed that way."

True, but it hasn't worked that way since the 17th amendment.

The form of gov't we now have is NOT what was originally designed. Basically, somebody opened the seacocks and we are now taking water.

All hands, prepare to abandon ship. This is not a drill.

Pat H said...

I haven't read Fehrenbach, but based on your post, he desperately needs to read Hologram of Liberty: The Constitution\'s Shocking Alliance with Big Business by Kenneth Royce, aka Boston T. Party.

The mistake the founders made was in allowing the Hamiltonians; John Jay, George Washington, John Adams, and Hamilton himself, to generate enough interest in a Constitutional Convention so that they could establish the centralizing, leviathan state.

Most of Hamilton's goals were not met at the Convention, he in fact left in disgust just before it ended, but ultimately, victory was his (posthumously).

That task fell to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, a man who voted with the minority on the court about 5% of the time over his 30 years on the court. Meaning that he ran the court as a sort of sole proprietorship, with him the proprietor.

Marshall gave us such gems as Marbury v. Madison, and worse yet,
McColloch v. Maryland.

It was in the latter case that Marshall told a founder, Madison, that he didn't understand what he in fact had written into the Constitution himself, but that he, Marshall, did understand and wrote the decision accordingly. That decision essentially said that the Congress didn't have to remain within the enumerated powers, but could vote into law what ever they thought they wanted to write.

We've been living under that burden since 1819.

The upshot of this is that we don't want to restore the Constitution, doing that accomplishes nothing, we want to restore the Articles of Confederation, suitably amended for functionality.

Dr.D said...

"...we are being subjected to the notion that our system of government isn't working. Something's wrong in Washington."

With all the dirty deals being made in congress to pass bills by use of bribes, payoffs, resolutions to "deem actions taken", etc., I think this conclusion is inescapable. Our system of government IS NOT WORKING. It was never intended to work like this. You have to be blind to overlook this.