Matt Yglesias

Lyndon Johnson in New Orleans, October 1964

On October 9, 1964 Lyndon Johnson spoke at the Jung Hotel in New Orleans and tried to explain to his fellow southerners why it was that he was pushing such a strikingly liberal agenda; an agenda that in many ways was at odds with his record:

When Mr. Rayburn came up as a young boy of the House, he went over to see the old Senator, the leader, one evening, who had come from this Southern State, and he was talking about economic problems. He was talking about how we had been at the mercy of certain economic interests, and how they had exploited us. They had worked our women for 5 cents an hour, they had worked our men for a dollar a day, they had exploited our soil, they had let our resources go to waste, they had taken everything out of the ground they could, and they had shipped it to other sections.

He was talking about the economy and what a great future we could have in the South, if we could just meet our economic problems, if we could just take a look at the resources of the South and develop them. And he said, “Sammy, I wish I felt a little better. I would like to go back to old”-and I won’t call the name of the State; it wasn’t Louisiana and it wasn’t Texas–“I would like to go back down there and make them one more Democratic speech. I just feel like I have one in me. The poor old State, they haven’t heard a Democratic speech in 30 years. All they ever hear at election time is Negro, Negro, Negro!”

The story presumably lacks identifying details because it’s apocryphal. But the point speaks to what I was saying about the role of morality in political action. Johnson is saying that while many Southern Democrats may have been hard-bitten white supremacists others knew perfectly well that they were doing the wrong thing and just did it anyway. Johnson argued that it was time to knock it out: “we have a Constitution and we have a Bill of Rights, and we have the law of the land, and two-thirds of the Democrats in the Senate voted for it and three-fourths of the Republicans. I signed it, and I am going to enforce it, and I am going to observe it, and I think any man that is worthy of the high office of President is going to do the same thing.”

It seems convincing to me, but of course it wasn’t convincing to the people of Louisiana or the Deep South, all of whom swung rather suddenly to GOP nominee Barry Goldwater whose libertarian rationale for opposing the Civil Rights Act united the economic and cultural strains of the American right and laid the foundation for the modern conservative movement.

Meanwhile, thinking about LBJ should help put any liberal disgruntlement with Barack Obama in perspective. Very few people in American history (Lincoln, FDR) accomplished more for progressive policy. And yet, Johnson left office despised by an American left that—not incorrectly!—believed his administration had made horrible mistakes and committed terrible crimes in other fields of policy.

The Changing Politics of Israel

Harold Meyerson has an excellent column in today’s Washington Post about Barack Obama’s drive for a two-state solution and the growing gaps between Jewish American public opinion and the policies of the Israeli government. He observes that “American Jews remain intensely committed to liberalism and to universal and minority rights,” ideas that used to accord strongly with support for Israel—a bastion of liberalism, born out of the Holocaust and surrounded by seemingly powerful states bent on its destruction. More recently, however, “42 years of occupation have rendered Israel a state that tests those values more than it affirms them.”

I think this is all correct, as are the things Meyerson says about J Street and everything Henrick Hertzberg says here. But I do think there’s one other dynamic that often gets missed here, namely the extent to which the mainstream “pro-Israel” organizations in the United States found themselves becoming more ideological—and more fundamentally right-wing—in recent years.

I was talking to a student of US foreign policy recently who was telling me that Lyndon Johnson used to complain about Jewish groups’ take on foreign policy. Basically, he characterized them as wanting him to send the 6th Fleet to the Gulf of Aqaba while refusing to send as much as a screwdriver to Vietnam. To Johnson that was incoherent, but it was basically just “Jews are liberal” plus parochial ethnic politics—Israel is full of Jews. What’s emerged in more recent years is a view of what “pro-Israel” politics are that makes more logical sense, but is, in practice, less appealing. But neoconservative intellectuals—many of them Jewish, and several of them hailing from Canada where Jews are traditionally on the political right—helped articulate a coherent worldview in which American support for an aggressive Israel was of a piece with a generally imperial view of America’s role in the world. Bill Kristol, David Frum, and Charles Krauthammer want to send the 6th Fleet to the Gulf of Aqaba and basically always want to send some fleet somewhere to bomb someone. Especially when, post-9/11, issues related to the entire “greater middle east” moved closer to the center of what Americans argue about, this tended to increasingly encourage everyone to adopt a more coherent view of the overall situation. Liberals, Jewish or otherwise, tend to generally take a dovish view of things and as conservatives started to draw explicit links between taking a hawkish view of Israel and a hawkish view of Iraq, North Korea, and all the rest, I think that tended to push liberal Jews toward taking a more skeptical view of Israel hawks’ arguments.

Hey Hey LBJ

Via Petey in comments, a very interesting op-ed by Robert Caro on Lyndon Johnson, the Voting Rights Act, and the remarkable progress we’ve made since the time LBJ threw his weight behind the cause of Civil Rights and the time an African-American could take to the podium to accept a major party presidential nomination. Johnson, of course, came to be despised by the left for Vietnam. But in recent years, I think there’s been a renaissance of appreciation for Johnson, recognizing that whatever his flaws he’s up there with FDR and Abraham Lincoln as the major architects of progressive American domestic policy. Bob Kuttner noted the other day, however, that this rehabilitation unfortunately hasn’t penetrated the halls of the 2008 convention.