Coronavirus Diary: Reading in a Pandemic

A lot of people have been in "comfort food" reading mode since the pandemic started, and I can't blame them. On the TV front, I've rewatched COMMUNITY already, as well as -- God help me -- COUGAR TOWN. Which is bad. Really bad. And yet.

On the book front, though, it's a different story. I feel like, suddenly, I am running out of reading time and so I am trying to cram in every great book I've ever wanted to read. I don't have patience for the sci-fi pulp I was reading as recently as January. I want books I suspect will enrich me, challenge me, or teach me something. And I panic at the thought of all the reading I want to do that is, as yet -- and might well forever be -- unfinished.

Right now, I am juggling four books -- trying to get a chapter a day or more out of each.

LETTERS FROM A STOIC, by Seneca

MOBY DICK, by Herman Melville

THE REACTIONARY MIND, by Corey Robin

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: PROPHET OF FREEDOM by David Blight.

I've also, in the last few months, read and finished nonfiction books about Kurt Vonnegut's writing philosophy, American history, Fred Phelps' family, homebuilding and, well, THE JORDAN RULES. (My bit of comfort reading, perhaps.) I've also read Toni Morrison's BELOVED. When I finish MOBY DICK, I hope to turn to THE TIN DRUM, by Gunter Grass.

I do wonder from time to time what the purpose of all this is: If it is true that time is running short, what's the point? All the reading I have done will die with me, right? I can only hope that some of what I am absorbing translates into me writing better, more thoughtfully, and with more perspectives and more information in mind. And hopefully, too, it translates into me acting in real life with some greater empathy and wisdom. 

But who really knows? All I know is that I am a reader. Or, at least, I want to be a reader, because the people I want to be like are readers. I guess that will have to be good enough. 

Hugh Hewitt is wrong about China and right about 'A Prayer for Owen Meany'

Here's Hugh Hewitt in the Washington Post:

The central issue of the current campaign ought to be the nature and ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party — its reckless disregard for the world in the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak, its repression of Hong Kong, what may be genocidal treatment of the Uighurs and its plans to dominate not just the South China Sea but the international order for decades to come. The election of 2020, like that of 1984, ought to turn on which candidate is best equipped to deal with the country’s most significant adversary.

A few thoughts:

* Hewitt is wrong that the CCP should be the "central issue" of the presidential campaign. We should look in our own backyard, first! We've got a raging pandemic to deal with, as well as an incipient Depression. If the United States can't get its own act together, our ability to act effectively on the world stage will be curtailed anyway. China? It's Issue Number Three, at best.

* It's notable that Hewitt raises the issue of the Uighurs without noting John Bolton's report that President Trump sold out the Uighurs to the Chinese in favor of getting a trade deal. It's additionally notable that in a column that purports to compare Joe Biden and Donald Trump on the China issue, he makes no effort at all to defend Trump's handling of China.

* Meanwhile, Hewitt's main attack on Biden is that Biden was wrong about some stuff ... 40 years ago. It's unconvincing. Daniel Larison has made a better case on why to be skeptical of Biden on foreign policy, but it comes from a distinctly less militaristic bent.

* But Hewitt is right about one thing:

The left has long liked to attack conservatives for a supposed lack of intelligence and sophistication, along with alleged warmongering and other crimes. One of my favorite novels, John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” is marred by this twitch. It was published in March 1989, an unfortunate mere eight months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is full of the then-conventional contempt for Reagan that accompanied the nuclear freeze movement, that condemned Reagan’s deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles in Europe, his embrace of strategic nuclear defense — derided as “Star Wars,” first by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and then everywhere on the left — and, of course, opposition to Reagan’s support for the contra rebels of Nicaragua, which reached hyper-pitch as Iran-contra scandal unfolded.

“The White House, that whole criminal mob, those arrogant goons who see themselves as justified to operate above the law — they disgrace democracy by claiming what they do, they do for democracy,” Irving has his narrator rail. “They should be in jail,” he huffs after labeling Reagan an “old geezer” and slamming him with the innuendo of Hollywood stupidity routinely traded in by anti-Reagan newspaper columnists in those days.

OWEN MEANY is a beautiful, funny novel -- I've read it once a decade, at least, since my 20s and find that I get something new out of it each time. But the Reagan hatred portions really are pretty tedious. Hewitt isn't wrong about everything.

The book I'm most thankful for in 2017

Buzzfeed checks in with writers to find out which books they're most thankful for.

First, I'm thankful to be back in the book-reading business in a serious way. I had a nasal reconstruction surgery this year that largely alleviated some sleep deprivation issued I'd had in recent years. I'm able to concentrate on an enjoy long-form reading again.

Second: The book I'm thankful for this year is Alan Jacobs' "How to Think."

Here's what I wrote on Facebook after completing it:

Finished reading Alan Jacobs' "How to Think" after two days. It's that good (and also that slim - about 160 pages). I want to sit with it a couple of days before writing about it more, but it gets at some thoughts I've had since the Trump Election and how I've tried - with varying degrees of success (and by "varying," I mean outright failure at times) - not to write off people with whom I have disagreements. 

Mostly it boils down to: They are human. With different journeys than I have. If I had made their journey, maybe I'd think the way they think. And having made my own journey, I might be blind sometimes - almost assuredly am - to errors in my own thinking. 

This doesn't mean I'm wrong or my Trump Voter friends are right, nor does it mean there is no truth to strive for - no right or wrong - but it does mean we are occasionally limited in our capacity to know it. And knowing those limits, it's good open our ears to people who think differently: We may never change our minds about anything, but to be somewhat open to the possibility is to be alive and self-aware and striving to be bigger and better than you are. 

That's my hope, anyway.

I'm currently reading Stephen L. Carter's "Civility." It shares some themes with Jacobs' book. I'll share more in the near future.

My passion for "A Prayer for Owen Meany."

Sometimes, things come into your life through serendipity.

How I ended up reading "A Prayer for Owen Meany" was this: After I graduated from college in 1995, I moved to Southeast Kansas to take a job at a small-town daily newspaper. One of my best friends from college, Brent Graber, was taking a gap year before grad school, so he moved in with me.

That probably saved my life. I was so alone, otherwise.

In any case, Brent enjoyed going to estate sales an picking up stuff cheap. And one time he picked up the "Owen" at such a sale.

When we were at home in the evenings, he read passages to me, laughing with delight. So when he finished, I picked it up and read it. And was smitten.

The first time I read "Owen Meany," I loved it because it was hilarious.

The second time I read "Owen Meany," I loved it because it let me know in a keen way that faith and doubt, that sacredness and profanity, often coexist.

The third time I read "Owen Meany," I closed the book, then handed it to the barista in the coffee shop where I was sitting and urged her to read it.

The fourth time I read "Owen Meany," the rage over 1980s politics seemed a bit dated — but I saw more of myself in the middle-aged narrator's disillusionment.

Will there be a fifth time? I don't know. Some books accompany you all the way through life, though. "Owen," for me, is one of them.

Bag O' Books: James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time"

I came to this book after reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me", which a number of reviews suggested followed in Baldwin's footsteps. It's true there are similarities — both relatively short, yet incisive, essays on what it's like to live as a black man in America — but there are differences: Baldwin's book is written when (in 1963) it seems like white supremacy in America might be undone; perhaps as a result, it's a more hopeful book than what Coates delivered. Which is an odd thing to say about a book that remains bracing, angry, and uncompromising after all these years.

A few quotes from the book that seem relevant to our current discussions. These are all taken from the second part of the book, ""Down At The Cross — Letter from a Region of My Mind":

Books I read in 2011

This was a really terrible book-reading year for me. Three surgeries clouded my head enough to make sustained concentration difficult: I started a lot of books, but finished precious few. The only novels I finished were, frankly, pulpy stuff. I hope to get my game back in 2012.

Here are some of the books I read to completion this year:

"Bossypants" by Tina Fey.

"The Conscience of a Liberal" by Paul Krugman.

"Winner-Take-All Politics" by Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker.

"Cooking Solves Everything" by Mark Bittman (Kindle Single).

"The Gated City" by Ryan Avent (Kindle Sngle).

"The Great Stagnation" by Tyler Cowen (Kindle Single).

"Kitchen Confidential" by Anthony Bourdain.

"Star Trek: The Lost Years" by J.M. Dillard.

"Power Wars" by Charlie Savage (Kindle Single).

"The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction" by Alan Jacobs.

"Empire of Illusion" by Chris Hedges.

"The Score" by Richard Stark.

UPDATE: "The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood" by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Surprised I forgot this one, since it unsettled me so.

It's cheating, really, to count the Kindle Singles. Like I said: It was a horrible reading year for me. I have an excuse, but it still feels like I wasted time. Grrr. 2012, excelsior!

UPDATE II: A week later, I've added Kurt Vonnegut's "Mother Night," Justin Blessinger's "The Favorite," and Founding Fathers' "The Federalist Papers" to my list of completed books for 2011. That makes the list a bit less lame.

Bag O' Books: 'Moonlight Mile' by Dennis Lehane

Three thoughts about the novel 'Moonlight Mile' by Dennis Lehane:

• This is Lehane's most recent novel, but the first I've ever read. I'm not so ignorant of culture, though, that I don't know that his books have been adapted into acclaimed movies like "Mystic River" and "Gone Baby Gone," or that Lehane himself was a writer on "The Wire." Since I haven't read those earlier works, all I can say is that I can see how Lehane ended up so loved by Hollywood. His writing is cinematic—lean, funnier than I expected, full of violence. Plenty of internal monologues by the narrator—longtime Lehane hero Patrick Kinzie—that, in your head, you can easily hear as voiceover narration by Robert Downey Jr. It's easy, breezy fun.

• That said, this novel got me thinking about the distinction between genre fiction and literary fiction. "Moonlight Mile" seems a fairly straightforward pulp noir novel to me, yet Lehane seems to have crossed into the seemingly higher-brow literary fiction arena. (The distinction is artificial, but I wonder the same thing about music sometimes. Why is some music considered "pop" and ready for the Top 40 audience and other music, of great listenability, directed more to indie audiences? Sometimes it's quantifiable and sometimes it's not.) As best I can tell, Lehane gets the the more-coveted "literary fiction" label, at least to some extent, because lots of smart people like reading his stuff. Maybe genre distinctions are more about the audience and reader self-identification than about what a writer actually produces.

• Final thought: Lehane lards this novel with so many contemporary references— the band Pela, the TV show "Arrested Development," jokes about P. Diddy—that it's impossible to place this novel in any year besides, roughly, 2010. On one hand, Kinzie's constant name-checking helps us figure out who he is: He's not just a Chandleresque tough guy—he's an aging Gen X hipster with great taste in popular culture. But at times it almost seems to overwhelm the crime story (which has ... plausibility problems) and turn it into an episode of "Community." "Moonlight Mile" is a fun read, but it's also—despite the violence—light as a feather.

'The Beautiful Struggle,' Occupy Wall Street, and the task of preparing for adulthood

Today I finished Ta-Nehisi Coates' memoir of growing up in West Baltimore in the 1980s, "The Beautiful Struggle," and found myself quite unsettled. Coates is of my generation, but his urban upbringing is about a million miles away from my rural Kansas adolescence. He had aging Black Panthers, the crack epidemic, and Chuck D. I had Friday night high school football games, spinning donuts in the county fairgrounds parking lot, and hair metal. And yet, in some respects, I identified: I too was often lost in a sci-fi fog, not really seeing the world around me clearly, and sometimes I got by on what other people perceived as my potential smarts rather than on clearly and efficiently applying those smarts to the tasks at hand.

Why would that unsettle me? Because, frankly, I'm not sure I've ever emerged from that fog the way Coates seems to by the end of the book. That troubles me for myself, but that also troubles me as I seek to guide my own young son in his growing process. I don't expect that I'll resort to the belt-swinging methods used by Coates' father. But for whatever reasons, the book has me questioning myself: Am I a purposeful adult? Am I setting the right example for my son? Do I know how to give him the tools he'll need to become a purposeful adult? How, frankly, do I raise my son to be a man—and yet to be a feminist man, a wise man, eschewing misogyny and false power and adopting real responsibility? (It occurs to me that a return to the Mennonite church might provide some support on the latter front, believe it or not. Too bad I'm an unbeliever.) I am full of doubt.

The book—and if you're a fan of Coates' blogging, you really should read it—also brought to mind another issue: The kids at Occupy Wall Street.

I call them "kids" even though the ones I've seen on video (or in my own excursion to Occupy Philadelphia) are adults: Folks in their twenties and thirties. And yet it's easy to think of them as "kids." You don't see many people who have children of their own, nor are many of them walking away from 40-hour-a-week professional jobs to join the protest. The relative joblessness is a reason for the protest, yes, but it's also an enabler.

It's easy to cherrypick the loons and and starry-eyed utopians, of course, and conservative web sites have done a fantastic job at that. But a closer look reveals that many of the protesters aren't the radical fringe, exactly: They're scions of privileged middle-class upbringings, people for whom college was a given—and then, at the very least, a reasonably lucrative, reasonably fulfilling career after that. They look at the country that's been left to them on the cusp of adulthood, and see that everything they prepared for—during childhoods in Internet-swaddled, SUV-wrapped formative years—has disappeared, and that what's left is something they're not prepared to handle.

Don't get me wrong: There are very real issues of income inequality and the damage it does to our democracy at stake in these protests, and I'm glad Occupy Wall Street has managed to push those issues to a wider audience. But I can't help but wonder if a necessary and sufficient foundation of the protests is that we, as a society, have failed to be good at producing actual adults. We've gotten good at creating expectations without expecting much in return.

Conservatives, in particular, like to point and laugh at the childishness of protesters who seem to expect something for nothing. I suspect part of the problem here is narcissistic consumerism unleashed by the markets that conservatives love so. But I do wonder if we shouldn't be asking ourselves—again, and some more, ad infinitum—are we preparing our children to be responsible adults? Are we offering them the right examples? Are we teaching them how to roll with the punches, both real and metaphorical? And is this a question left to individuals, or something we need to work out more broadly, as a society?

Ta-Nehisi Coates grew into a man, in part, because the streets of West Baltimore forced him to literally understand how to take responsibility for his very life at a young age. But I don't think we need to plant our kids in crime and poverty in order to engender a sense of seriousness in them.

I am rambling here. These thoughts are half-formed an unfinished, and it may be that I don't give enough credit to the thoughtfulness and responsibility of the protesters. (As I've mentioned previously, I have been impressed by their ability to spontaneously create an orderly community, at least in Philadelphia.) But my sense of things is that the Occupy Wall Street protests have the blessing of forcing us to wrestle with real issues, and the curse of failing to put away childish things. And I wonder about my own role in that dynamic.

Update: I won't claim this as my best-ever post. But Coates' book hit me hard somehow. And I'm struggling to articulate why that is or what it should mean. Sometimes I have to write to work things out. And sometimes that means embarrassing myself publicly.

Bag O' Books: Paul Auster's "City of Glass"

Three thoughts about Paul Auster's "City of Glass":

* This is the first novel - a novella, really - in the so-called "New York Trilogy," and that name is apt. It's a cliche to say that "the city is a character" in the book; it's also, perhaps, imprecise. Instead, it's fair to say this book cannot exist apart from the city. Specific streets and neighborhoods and even Mookie Wilson's early reign with the Mets are all integral to the story.

* Though ostensibly a detective story, "City of Glass" is a meditation on language itself. And Auster brings a nice sense of play to the proceedings -- not just in the meta sense of placing a writer named "Paul Auster" near the center of the action, but in his use of names ("Max Work," "Peter Stillman") and in considering the many ways that individual words can take on multiple meanings. This sounds like heavy, sloglike reading but it's not: It is a pleasure.

* That makes it sound too hoity-toity. What is lovely, also, about Auster's writing is its rootedness in the physical world: Not just New York, but in the smaller crevices of life -- the reality of notebooks and pens and apartments and tables and plastic phones and more. You can almost hold Auster's world in your hands; you can certainly hold it in your mind. And that's a pretty fair accomplishment.

Finally: You should never judge a book by its cover, but the Art Spiegelman cover to my paperback copy of the book -- bound together with the other volumes in the trilogy -- is astounding, and conveys the art and play to be found within.

Federalist 39: James Madison's Confusing Sales Job

Read all entries in my series on The Federalist Papers here.

Well. No wonder we're so confused.

My writing partner Ben Boychuk and I had the pleasure of interviewing author Ron Chernow this week. He wrote the acclaimed new biography of George Washington, along with an earlier bio of Alexander Hamilton -- he knows something, in other words, about the founding of this country. In our discussion, Chernow repeated his assertion (first made in a New York Times op-ed) that today's Tea Partiers are wrong to claim an exclusive ideological heritage descended from the Founders. In truth, Chernow said, the Constitution was a compromise between competing visions of government -- powerful or limited? Instead of actually settling the question, the Founders fudged it a bit, so that the arguments of the 21st century aren't so different from the 18th.

Nowhere is that tension more evident, perhaps, than in James Madison's authorship of Federalist 39. Madison's intent here is to fend off criticism of the proposed new government as insufficiently federal -- that is, he's arguing against the proposition that the Constitution takes away too much power away from the states and deposits it in the national government.

Wait: That's kind of what the Constitution was created to do. The Articles of Confederation, which gave pride of power to the states, had already proved unworkable as a means of national government. But yesterday's antifederalists, like today's Tea Partiers, wanted to see more power left to the states -- and they were ruthless in suggesting that advocates of the Constitution were lying in their efforts to convince Americans that states still retained considerable power. Here's "A Farmer" writing in Antifederalist No. 3:

There are but two modes by which men are connected in society, the one which operates on individuals, this always has been, and ought still to be called, national government; the other which binds States and governments together (not corporations, for there is no considerable nation on earth, despotic, monarchical, or republican, that does not contain many subordinate corporations with various constitutions) this last has heretofore been denominated a league or confederacy. The term federalists is therefore improperly applied to themselves, by the friends and supporters of the proposed constitution. This abuse of language does not help the cause; every degree of imposition serves only to irritate, but can never convince. They are national men, and their opponents, or at least a great majority of them, are federal, in the only true and strict sense of the word.

Madison has tricky political ground to cover here, then, and he treads cautiously and confusingly. Let's jump to the final paragraph of 39 for a picture of the ambiguity.

The proposed Constitution, therefore is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both. In its foundation it is federal, not national; in the sources from which the ordinary powers of the government are drawn, it is partly federal and partly national; in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal; in the extent of them, again, it is federal, not national; and, finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal nor wholly national.

Got that?

Now it's true that something can be partly one thing and partly another. But this paragraph -- and the whole paper -- makes me wonder if the effort to sell the Constitution as a document of "limited" government is more a political sales job than a substantive description.

The new government, after all, will have unlimited power of taxation. It will be the arbiter of disputes between the states. It alone has the power to raise a standing army. The one power the states seem to retain over the national government at this stage is whether or not to opt-in to the system. After that, they can shape it somewhat -- through electoral votes and appointments to the Senate -- but there are no real veto points once the national government has made up its mind about a course of action. The states can give legitimacy to the national government; there's no real mechanism for them to withdraw it.

That's not to say the national government has unlimited power overall. It has its spheres of influence, and the states have theirs.

In this relation, then, the proposed government cannot be deemed a national one; since its jurisdiction extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several States a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.

But the national government's spheres of action are biggies. That's why the antifederalists fought the Constitution.

I'm not arguing for all this as a brief for unlimited central government, incidentally. I'm rather haphazardly trying to make sense of this as a pitch at the time, and looking at it in light of what actually happened in America's history. And what I'm seeing here is this: James Madison, whether he wanted to or not, left the door open to a bigger government than what today's Tea Partiers want -- or perhaps he himself envisioned.

How wide? I suspect we'll find that out in the coming papers.

Bag O' Books: Steven Hayward Critiques the Book Peter Beinart Didn't Write

So I've finished Peter Beinart's "The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris." It's part of a series of books that have been released in the last year or so -- many of which I've read (this, apparently, being the year George Kennan) -- examining American foreign policy in the 20th century. Some of those books have merely had the goal of appraising the Cold War now that it is firmly in history's mirror; others, like Beinart's, are looking back to see what lessons we might learn to apply in the aftermath of America's post-9/11 irrational exuberance for foreign adventurism.

If I could construct my takeaway from all these books -- including Beinart's -- I'd come up with something like this:

* It's insanity for America to think it can be the world's dominant power. A superpower, yes, and perhaps the most powerful one. But the only one? No. We can't afford it. And other nations -- particularly, at this moment, China -- have a vote.

* We tend to believe in our collective good intentions when we go abroad. The people abroad who feel the pressure of our projected power may be less convinced; we need to do a better job contemplating how they'll see our actions.

* America is best served when its military is just one tool in the foreign policy toolbox. We cannot eliminate every adversary upon the planet; we can contain them, use economic carrots and sticks to pressure them, even throw some money at democratic movements in those countries. Otherwise, we should only pull our sword from its scabbard in response to attack or actual imminent threat. A rival country (say, Iran) that obtains nuclear weapons is cause for alarm but is not, on its own, an imminent threat.

* Accordingly, America might be best served if it pulled back from the goal of being able to project power anywhere on the planet and refocused its resources -- in terms of money and national spirit -- on rebuilding our economy and strengthening our democratic institutions.

I am very interested, after all this, in Steven Hayward's critique of Beinart's book. I've chatted with Hayward and like him, but his review of Beinart strikes me as a not-very-elegant attempt to change the subject. Where Beinart makes the case that America has been badly served by ill-fated attempts to remake other countries and regions to suit our country's likes, Hayward's response is, essentially: But ObamaCare!

His criticisms of pure reason and of naïve faith in human nature's goodness and plasticity questions, implicitly, modern liberalism's central pillar. The eclipse of prudence by scientific, idealistic politics was a defining feature of Progressive statecraft, and it remains so for modern liberalism today—at least on the domestic scene. In making an elegant call for greater circumspection about government's mastery over all things, Beinart's skepticism stops at the water's edge. Why not apply the lessons of hubris—of overreaching and presuming a greater command of flawed human nature than is realistically possible—to, say, health care reform, or social policy generally?

Hayward persists in this mode, wondering why Beinart doesn't spend more time in his book writing about the domestic overreach of liberal government programs. The easy answer to this is: Because it's a book about foreign policy. But Hayward seems to acknowledge that the United States has often overreached its foreign policy -- though Iraq is doing better than we once thought; he doesn't offer a counterargument to Beinart's thesis, and spends enough time reflecting on the Vietnam War to kind of confirm it. Pinning the problem of overreach mostly on liberals, then, requires bringing domestic politics into the picture.

Fine. But it thus becomes worth asking Hayward's fellow conservatives a similar question: If you doubt government's ability to make society better at home, why would you think it would work beyond our borders, in places with unfamiliar cultures and languages we don't really speak? Hayward writes of Beinart's "blind spot," but Beinart isn't the only person who has one.

UPDATE: A conservative friend of mine, a friend of Mr. Hayward's, writes with the following critique.

By and large, Steve Hayward's conservative friends (esp. of the Claremont variety) never suggested that we COULD spread happiness abroad. Our critique of Bush sort of boiled down to a kind of over-exuberant, childlike faith he has in human goodness.

Fair point! I was trying to be precise by not specifically attributing such beliefs to Hayward himself, but I ended up being a different kind of sloppy. My apologies to him.

To be more precise, though, I'll note that Mr. Hayward is part of a broader conservative movement that, for all its variety, did help put Mr. Bush in office and that, to outsiders at least, seems remarkably able to unite behind particular politicians and agendas. There are a few conservatives -- of the seemingly influential Bill Kristol variety -- who do urge restraint at home and adventurism abroad. Hayward critiques liberalism's lack of domestic restraint while countering Beinart; if that's the angle he wants to take, then a more overt critique of his more adventurous fellow conservatives (if, indeed, he believes that) would probably be in order.

Bag O' Books: 'Cloud Atlas' by David Mitchell

I'm not sure how I missed "Cloud Atlas" when it came out in 2004: I was reading lots of novels at that point and was trying to stay current with all the best stuff. But I missed it, only to find out about it when David Mitchell's newest book resulted in a bit of hype.

Is "Cloud Atlas" a work of genius? I'm not sure. It's certainly a work of talent. It's as though Mitchell wrote a half-dozen novellas -- a South Sea adventure; a Jazz Age cautionary tale; a pulpy '70s mystery; a dystopian "Blade Runner"-meets-Asimov near-future sci-fi tale; and a post-apocalyptic story of the Last Humans On Earth -- and stacks those novellas on top of each other, weaving enough commonalities and references to the other stories to give it the sheen of a holistic artistic vision. Does that work? Maybe just barely; we begin and end in the same place -- the death of civilizations, redeemed only by the hope offered by one or two good people.

That's not to detract from Mitchell's accomplishment. The South Sea tale -- "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" -- sounds remarkably like something written in its era. Same for each of the stories; Mitchell's voice morphs to match his subject matter, cleanly and convincingly in a way few writers can match. Some critics have complained, apparently, that we don't know what Mitchell's voice sounds like in all of this. But that's a silly, forced complaint in the face of his virtuosity. Mitchell and "Cloud Atlas" might be the topic for debate within the "literary fiction" universe, but he just might be the best genre fiction writer alive -- in a number of genres, and all in the same book. The result? More than a little reading pleasure.

Bag O' Books: "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War" by Andrew Bacevich

I'm trying to imagine what the world would look like if Andrew Bacevich ran the United States.

Every couple of years, Bacevich -- a retired Army colonel who is now a history professor at Boston U -- releases a new book that goes something like this: America is overextended and entirely too militarized. We need to live within our means, bring the troops home and start practicing a citizenship where all of us (and not just the one-half of one percent of us) serve as citizen soldiers, devoted to the common defense of our nation instead of power projection around the world. "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War" is another one of these books; Bacevich is a bit of a one-note Johnny -- but it's an interesting, angry, erudite note, and so I keep returning to him.

Instead of rooting him on, though, it might be good to ponder how things change if anybody in power took Bacevich's views seriously.

So what does the world look like if America took Bacevich's advice? Different. There would've been no Iraq War, nor a Vietnam War, nor Korea. (Bacevich is a Vietnam veteran.) We wouldn't have troops in Europe or the Middle East or Asia. I'm guessing that Hawaii and Alaska might not even have statehood status. We wouldn't be importing oil -- our standard of living, as a result, would look quite a bit different -- and we might not be enmeshed in Afghanistan right now, in part, because America's meddling in the rest of the world wouldn't have invited the "blowback" of 9/11.

We'd look a lot more like Switzerland, in other words.

All well and good, I suppose. But there's more than that. In Bacevich's world, maybe the United States doesn't get involved in World War I. That doesn't seem like such a bad deal -- what did Americans get out of that war, exactly? -- but maybe we wouldn't have entered World War II either. Or if we had, we wouldn't have kept troops in Europe during the Cold War, and maybe we would've left Communism ascendant in places that were relatively free during the postwar period.

Much of this is conjecture on my part. But Bacevich's basic idea is that the United States shouldn't be trying to dominate and shape the rest of the world to its liking -- that we should be looking inward, trying to create and perfect our own democracy as an example to the world, rather than a model that we try to push. We should be trying to fix Cleveland and Detroit, he repeatedly says, instead of Baghdad or Kabul.

This sounds isolationist, though Bacevich swears it isn't. And though it's a challenge to the worldview put forward by the Bill Kristol wing of the GOP -- which, in foreign affairs, is actually the only wing that matters -- it also strikes me as profoundly conservative. (Bacevich, despite the Amy Goodman blurb on this book, seems to identify as a conservative of the Ron Paulish variety; he has written for National Review and remains a contributor to American Conservative magazine.)

Conservatives have one pretty nifty insight: That government can't control all the outcomes of its actions, and so the bigger it gets and the more it does, the more problems it is likely to make -- and the more likely it is to infringe on the liberty of people to make their own way in the world. I don't completely buy into the argument, which at its most extreme would eliminate a safety net for many Americans, but I can't disregard it. The problem is that -- for many conservatives -- that insight ends at the shoreline. Many of the folks who root on the Tea Party marchers would say it's not up to the federal government to fix Cleveland or Detroit; somehow, though, many of them are sold on the ability of that same government to fix -- or, at least, repair to a reasonable enough state -- Kabul or Baghdad. They would fly the Gadsden Flag at home, but the American flag over foreign capitals. It's not just inconsistent; it's incomprehensible. At least Americans understand the language and culture and religion and politics of Detroit. We've made a lot of mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan because we didn't know the landscape like we should.

So what does America look like if Bacevich runs it? We're a smaller, probably less-rich place. (America's economic might being both the result and the foundation of our power projection around the world.) We're still rife with conflict -- because, hey, that's what happens in democracies. But maybe we're more civic-minded, more bonded to our neighbors -- and, maybe, a bit less vulnerable to the horrors of the world beyond. (How often to terrorists try to attack Switzerland, after all?) There's something simple and pure, and thus seductive, about this vision. And maybe we'll find out what it looks like in reality sooner than later. We can't afford to be the world's policeman anymore. It would be nicer if we could choose, wisely, that sort of future for ourselves. It looks like we'll have to bankrupt ourselves to it, instead. The result is likely to be unpleasant and wrenching. The good old days are probably over.

Federalist 37-38: Making Government Is Hard! (A Two-Part Blog That Includes Supreme Court Musings)

James Madison is sure a whiny sonofabitch.

Sorry. That's crass and vulgar, not at all in keeping with the high-minded aspirations of this project of reading all the way through The Federalist Papers, which is the Founding Fathers' gift to us, the best explanation we have on hand of why they did what they did in crafting the Constitution of the United States.

But in Federalist 37 and 38, we're reminded that the Founders weren't actually demigods who met at a modern Mount Olympus and received the text as a gift from some even higher power. (Not that Madison and others weren't interested in promoting that storyline: "It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it a finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.") They were politicians, really, and very human. And like all humans who have worked really hard on a project, they got irritated at the challenges put forth to the work they'd done.

Federalist 30-36: This Government Was Made For Taxin'. And That's Just What It'll Do.

The farther I read into the Federalist Papers, the more I'm convinced the Tea Partiers only know about half their history.

Back up: I didn't start reading the Federalists with the aim of debunking the Tea Partiers. But it's impossible to read historical documents about the nature of governance in America when there's a coalition of folks out there who so strongly identify with those historical personages.

Their narrative, I believe, goes something like this: America was born, essentially, in a tax rebellion. And the Founding Fathers then created a limited government in order to avoid oppressing the people either with burdensome taxes or directly tyrannical rule. And maybe, just maybe, if the tax burden gets too large -- well, maybe, Americans have the right to resort to rebellion again.

Like I said: I think that's only partly right. Because the Federalist Papers -- the documents we most use, aside from the Constitution itself, for insight into the Founders' thinking -- seem to favor a rather more expansive vision of government than the Tea Party narrative would suggest.

I already mentioned this theory back in Federalist 15. But it's' greatly reinforced by reading Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 30 through 36.

Why? Because those chapters are about the topic nearest and dearest to the hearts of Tea Partiers: Taxation.

And get this: Hamilton was arguing that the power to tax was a central reason -- maybe the central reason -- the Constitution needed to be passed. And not just any power to tax: Unlimited power to tax.

This kind of goes against the narrative we hear lately, but there it is in Hamilton's own words: Without unlimited power to tax, the government will be a weak and ineffective thing.

How is it possible that a government half supplied and always necessitous, can fulfill the purposes of its institution, can provide for the security, advance the prosperity, or support the reputation of the commonwealth? How can it ever possess either energy or stability, dignity or credit, confidence at home or respectability abroad? How can its administration be any thing else than a succession of expedients temporizing, impotent, disgraceful? How will it be able to avoid a frequent sacrifice of its engagements to immediate necessity? How can it undertake or execute any liberal or enlarged plans of public good?

Now, Hamilton was speaking from some experience here: A reason the Articles of Confederation were considered to have failed was that the Congress under the articles couldn't raise its own money -- it had to ask the states, essentially. And the states weren't always forthcoming. That left the United States unable to expeditiously pay its debts from the Revolutionary War.

Here's where honesty compels me to note, though, that Hamilton's call for unlimited power of taxation -- and I'm serious here: he wanted it to be unlimited -- didn't seem to be in the service of creating a welfare state, but rather to pay for the common defense. (Federalist 34: "The expenses arising from those institutions which are relative to the mere domestic police of a state, to the support of its legislative, executive, and judicial departments, with their different appendages, and to the encouragement of agriculture and manufactures (which will comprehend almost all the objects of state expenditure), are insignificant in comparison with those which relate to the national defense.")

But unlimited power is, of course, unlimited power. And that's what Hamilton was arguing for. Here he is in Federalist 31:

As the duties of superintending the national defense and of securing the public peace against foreign or domestic violence involve a provision for casualties and dangers to which no possible limits can be assigned, the power of making that provision ought to know no other bounds than the exigencies of the nation and the resources of the community.

As revenue is the essential engine by which the means of answering the national exigencies must be procured, the power of procuring that article in its full extent must necessarily be comprehended in that of providing for those exigencies.

As theory and practice conspire to prove that the power of procuring revenue is unavailing when exercised over the States in their collective capacities, the federal government must of necessity be invested with an unqualified power of taxation in the ordinary modes.

This, of course, was horrifying to the antifederalists. And -- not to drive the point home with too much earnestness -- it was horrifying to them in a way that today's Tea Partiers would find very familiar. Here's "Brutus" writing in Antifederalist 32:

We may say then that this clause commits to the hands of the general legislature every conceivable source of revenue within the United States, Not only are these terms very comprehensive, and extend to a vast number of objects, but the power to lay and collect has great latitude; it will lead to the passing a vast number of laws, which may affect the personal rights of the citizens of the states, expose their property to fines and confiscation, and put their lives in jeopardy. It opens a door to the appointment of a swarm of revenue and excise collectors to prey upon the honest and industrious part of the community, [and] eat up their substance. . . .

If you're a Tea Partier, that sounds like a fairly accurate description of what happened, I suppose.

But the antifederalists were wrong, to some extent. They were concerned, it seems, with preserving a fair measure of state sovereignty -- "state's rights" you might say -- and their biggest worry about the Constitution's grant of unlimited power to tax was that it would, over time, deprive the states of their power to tax. It hasn't really worked out that way.

In the end, Hamilton rejected every suggested limitation to restrict Congress' power to tax. The only real check, he suggested, was the voters themselves -- and their ability to send to Congress wise people who would understand how to balance the needs of government against the income of its citizens.

There is no part of the administration of government that requires extensive information and a thorough knowledge of the principles of political economy, so much as the business of taxation. The man who understands those principles best will be least likely to resort to oppressive expedients, or sacrifice any particular class of citizens to the procurement of revenue. It might be demonstrated that the most productive system of finance will always be the least burdensome. There can be no doubt that in order to a judicious exercise of the power of taxation, it is necessary that the person in whose hands it should be acquainted with the general genius, habits, and modes of thinking of the people at large, and with the resources of the country. And this is all that can be reasonably meant by a knowledge of the interests and feelings of the people. In any other sense the proposition has either no meaning, or an absurd one. And in that sense let every considerate citizen judge for himself where the requisite qualification is most likely to be found.

Two-hundred years later, the only question I can ask is: How's that working out for ya?

Federalist 23-29: Freedom, and the national security state

Find all my Federalist Papers blog posts here.

There's a conservative narrative of the last 100 years or so that goes something like this: America started to become a little less free -- a little less tethered to its Constitution -- about the time that Franklin D. Roosevelt took power during the Great Depression and started creating the welfare state. Every new entitlement -- "ObamaCare," say -- and every slight tax increase represents a near-tyrannical intrusion of the state into realms that should be private. Every time a Medicare check goes out, then, freedom dies a little more and somewhere in the great beyond, Friedrich Hayek sheds a tear. Or maybe Ayn Rand.

There's an alternative narrative -- one that doesn't get as much attention -- and in the last year it's been most famously advanced by onetime conservative author Garry Wills. In this reading of history, it was indeed Franklin D. Roosevelt who expanded the state at the expense of the individual -- but it wasn't Social Security that represented tyranny: It was the explosive growth of the national security state, which since World War II has granted the president ever greater -- and, seemingly, ever-more-uncheckable -- power, all in the name of protecting America from her enemies.

Which brings us back to 200 years ago, and the adoption of the Constitution. Its passage, it seems, was no sure thing, and the central issue in the debate between Federalists and Antifederalists, it seems, was freedom: What form of government would be effective, yet still allow men -- and it was men who had the freedom -- the latitude to live their lives as they pleased?

There's not much in either the Federalist or the Antifederalist papers to suggest that the welfare state was a concern in the debate over freedom. To be fair, partisans on both sides probably hadn't conceived of it. Instead, they clashed over a controversial power of the new goverment: The power to raise a standing army.

"Brutus" writing in Antifederalist 24, made the case plain:

. . . . Standing armies are dangerous to the liberties of a people. . . . [If] necessary, the truth of the position might be confirmed by the history of almost every nation in the world. A cloud of the most illustrious patriots of every age and country, where freedom has been enjoyed, might be adduced as witnesses in support of the sentiment. But I presume it would be useless, to enter into a labored argument, to prove to the people of America, a position which has so long and so generally been received by them as a kind of axiom.

This, it seems, was an argument the Federalists took seriously. Alexander Hamilton spent all of Federalist 23 through 29 defending the government's prerogative to raise a standing army. And he made some decent arguments -- pointing out, not unreasonably, that most state governments at the time were empowered to raise armies, and that furthermore the "Western frontier" of the United States, still confined to those early 13 coast-hugging colonies, was in need of defense. If an invasion came,it would already be too late to form an army to repel the attack. And in Federalist 25, he even makes the odd argument that it's safe to let the federal government raise a standing army precisely because Americans would be suspicious of infringement on their liberties:

As far as an army may be considered as a dangerous weapon of power, it had better be in those hands of which the people are most likely to be jealous than in those of which they are least likely to be jealous. For it is a truth, which the experience of ages has attested, that the people are always most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion.

Hamilton's strongest argument against a standing army being used to usurp American liberties, though, comes from the structure of the government itself. The chief executive might be willing to use the army for nefarious purposes, he says, but then he'd have to contend with Congress!

Federalist 24:

the whole power of raising armies was lodged in the legislature, not in the executive; that this legislature was to be a popular body, consisting of the representatives of the people periodically elected; and that instead of the provision he had supposed in favor of standing armies, there was to be found, in respect to this object, an important qualification even of the legislative discretion, in that clause which forbids the appropriation of money for the support of an army for any longer period than two years a precaution which, upon a nearer view of it, will appear to be a great and real security against the keeping up of troops without evident necessity.

From this, we can gather a few things:

* That Hamilton didn't really forsee that the executive branch -- despite the division of powers enumerated in the Constitution -- would claim for itself practically unlimited and unilateral power over national security.

* Nor did he forsee that Congress would generally defer to the executive's assertion of authority.

* Then again, none of the folks involved really foresaw the explosive growth of a national security state that involves hundreds of thousands of people collecting snooping and spying on, well, pretty much all electronic communication on Planet Earth. Concerns about a "standing army" seem almost quaint, don't they.

One wonders what Brutus or Alexander Hamilton would've made of today's lead story in the Washington Post, and these findings:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

There are reasons for all of this, of course. We want to be kept safe from the threats the world aims at us. The result is that we have a huge -- and, because it is so huge, virtually unchecked -- national security establishment that operates in the shadows, out of the public's sight. Alexander Hamilton promised us that Congress would keep the leviathan in check. It hasn't. Do you feel any more free?

Bag O' Books: "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman

Despite being very, very, very nerdy, I've never been much of a reader of fantasy books. I've got friends who are all up in Robert Jordan's house, and I feel like I should be there with them. But I'm not.

I occasionally -- thanks to the influence of my wife -- make an exception for the books of Terry Pratchett. He's an English fantasy writer, creator of the "Discworld" series of books that tell fantasy stories filtered through the lens of British humor. It works for me. And a few years ago, I greatly enjoyed "Good Omens," a novelistic collaboration about the Apocalypse from Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, who's probably better-known for his graphic novel work.

Which is why I picked up Gaiman's "American Gods" a few weeks ago. And I wish I'd enjoyed it more than I did. Which, ok, I did enjoy it a little bit. But it wasn't really absorbing. Without Pratchett's collaboration, Gaiman comes across as a very, very smart guy who's more interested in ideas than in storytelling. The end result is something cool, a bit didactic, somewhat entertaining, but never fully gripping.

Short synopsis: Our protagonist, Shadow, finishes a stint in prison only to go to work for a mysterious figure named "Wednesday." Wednesday, it turns out, is the American version of the Norse god Odin, who is rounding up all the other ancient gods brought to these shores by ancient cultures from around the world to mount a final all-consuming battle against the new gods who are displacing them in American culture -- the gods of debt, technology, credit cards and cable TV, among others.

Which gives you a taste of where "American Gods" is coming from -- a wry critique on the culture, which creates its gods in living, breathing form through the act of worship. The end battle, when it comes, doesn't really offer us insight about the critique -- it's there to round the story out. The result is a "novel of ideas" -- a term that usually describes books that are overly preachy -- that doesn't really commit to being a novel or to its own ideas.

But maybe I'm expecting too much. "American Gods" is reasonably diverting, so long as Neil Gaiman's reputation hasn't been oversold to you. And better an novel of incomplete ideas than no ideas at all.

The Nook and Kindle drop below $200

So sayeth the New York Times. And that sounds like great news -- I have the Kindle and Nook apps for both my iPhone and my netbook; I'd really love to own a dedicated e-reader. On the other hand: If the price is coming down this much, this quickly, does that mean dedicated e-readers are about to become extinct? Choices, choices.

Federalist No. 22: Why the U.S. Senate and Jimmy Stewart both suck

Let's talk about the filibuster.

Back up: There's no discussion of the U.S. Senate or the filibuster by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 22. Hamilton's wrapping up a long discussion of why the Article of Confederation are a bad way to run the United States -- and while he touches on a few topics here, he spends most of this essay talking about one particular evil: Under the Articles, it's all too easy for a minority of states with a minority of the U.S. population to obstruct the will of the majority.

And what becomes clear is this: If the pre-Constitution U.S. government was unworkable because of such problems, well then: Today's U.S. government is unworkable.

Under the Articles, see, each state -- no matter how thickly or thinly populated -- had an equal voice in the national governance. What's more, it took the consent of two-thirds of the states to pass major legislation: In an era where the United States comprised just 13 states, that meant that five states could block action.

And that, Hamilton huffed, was no way to run a republic.

Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America;3 and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third.

He adds later:

The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching towards it, has been founded upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority. ... When the concurrence of a large number is required by the Constitution to the doing of any national act, we are apt to rest satisfied that all is safe, because nothing improper will be likely to be done, but we forget how much good may be prevented, and how much ill may be produced, by the power of hindering the doing what may be necessary, and of keeping affairs in the same unfavorable posture in which they may happen to stand at particular periods.

Here's the thing: Hamilton's critique of the Articles of Confederation is precisely applicable to the United States Senate.

Equal representation for each state, regardless of state size? Montana and New York both have two senators each, even though the population of Montana wouldn't even fill out Manhattan.

And a supermajority requirement for major legislation? That's pretty much the case in the Senate, where 60 votes are required to break a filibuster -- and a filibuster is brought, by one account, against 70 percent of all legislation.

George Will, who likes the filibuster, did the math in February after Scott Brown's election to the Senate:

Liberals fret: 41 senators from the 21 smallest states, with barely 10 percent of the population, could block a bill. But Matthew Franck of Radford University counters that if cloture were blocked by 41 senators from the 21 largest states, the 41 would represent 77.4 percent of the nation's population. Anyway, senators are never so tidily sorted, so consider today's health impasse: The 59 Democratic senators come from 36 states containing 74.9 percent of the population, while the 41 Republicans come from 27 states -- a majority -- containing 48.7 percent. (Thirteen states have senators from each party.)

Enjoyable how Will counts the number of states as a majority, and not the number of voters. As the Senate is currently constructed, though, the minority -- both in the number of senators and in the amount of population they represent -- routinely frustrates the will of the majority.

And Hamilton likened this state of affairs to "poison."

Should he have known that his critique would also be a problem under the new Constitution? Kinda, maybe. After all, the Senate was always proportioned to give each state an equal say. And since any legislation that would pass Congress would have to pass the Senate, it was always going to be the case that more-populated states would be proportionally less powerful in the national governance.

Where Hamilton maybe gets a pass: The filibuster isn't written into the Constitution. It's part of Senate rules, which the Senate itself adopts. Every few years there's talk of abolishing the filibuster, but whoever is in the minority -- sometimes it's Democrats and sometimes its Republicans -- usually starts waxing eloquent about the rights of the minority, and nothing ever comes of it.

And I wonder: Why don't they bring up Hamilton's critique of the Articles of Confederation? And why aren't conservatives like Will -- who seem to think they're more faithful than thou on matters of fidelity to the Constitution and the Founders -- the loudest voices on this? True, Hamilton wasn't directly criticizing today's U.S. Senate, but that doesn't matter. The state of affairs he describes is exactly the same.

Federalist 16-20: Alexander Hamilton's hopey-changey thing

Here we are, once again: The shadow of the Civil War -- about 70 years in the future -- keeps popping up as we make our way through the Federalist Papers. Why? Because Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison keep making the case that the United States under the Articles of Confederation is prone to such a war.

Hamilton revisits this theme in Federalist 16, suggesting that the states under the Articles have so much latitude to act on their own -- instead of falling in line under a central government -- that conflict is more likely to arise between the states. "The first war of this kind," he warns, "would probably terminate in a dissolution of the Union."

There's another possibility, though, as Hamilton admits: If one state went its own way in defiance of the national government, the other states would probably do likewise -- rather than make a big deal and incite war. "And the guilt of all," Hamilton writes, " would become the security of all."

And I admit: I'm having a hard time finding a major flaw in that arrangement. It appears there are two possible ways of insuring against a civil war: building a central government with the power to keep the states in line, or giving the states the freedom to act on their own and not impose laws and rules on each other.

Indeed, the antifederalists argue that building and empowering a centralized government will make a civil war more likely -- and more devastating when it occurs. "A Farmer" is one of those who made the argument.

Whether national government will be productive of internal peace, is too uncertain to admit of decided opinion. I only hazard a conjecture when I say, that our state disputes, in a confederacy, would be disputes of levity and passion, which would subside before injury. The people being free, government having no right to them, but they to government, they would separate and divide as interest or inclination prompted-as they do at this day, and always have done, in Switzerland. In a national government, unless cautiously and fortunately administered, the disputes will be the deep-rooted differences of interest, where part of the empire must be injured by the operation of general law; and then should the sword of government be once drawn (which Heaven avert) I fear it will not be sheathed, until we have waded through that series of desolation, which France, Spain, and the other great kingdoms of the world have suffered, in order to bring so many separate States into uniformity, of government and law; in which event the legislative power can only be entrusted to one man (as it is with them) who can have no local attachments, partial interests, or private views to gratify.

That kind of sounds like what happened, doesn't it? But Hamilton argues for big gubmint. Get this:

The government of the Union, like that of each State, must be able to address itself immediately to the hopes and fears of individuals; and to attract to its support those passions which have the strongest influence upon the human heart. It must, in short, possess all the means, and have aright to resort to all the methods, of executing the powers with which it is intrusted, that are possessed and exercised by the government of the particular States.

There's a lot of talk here about pretty mushy concepts like "hopes" and fears" and "the human heart." It sounds, in fact, almost Obama-like. Hamilton isn't really talking about limited government staying out of the way of citizens, who are then free to make their own way by dint of their rugged individualism. He's talking about using the power of the state in the service of citizen self-actualization. When Democrats talk like this these days, my conservative friends react with horror and contempt. Am I missing something?

Don't worry, Hamilton says in Federalist 15. The federal government under the U.S. Constitution will be too limited to really infringe on the people, or even to displace state governments. And it's here that I confess: My conservative friends are probably right when they say Hamilton et al could never have imagined the huge federal government we have today. Here's Hamilton talking about those limitations:

I confess I am at a loss to discover what temptation the persons intrusted with the administration of the general government could ever feel to divest the States of the authorities of that description. The regulation of the mere domestic police of a State appears to me to hold out slender allurements to ambition. Commerce, finance, negotiation, and war seem to comprehend all the objects which have charms for minds governed by that passion; and all the powers necessary to those objects ought, in the first instance, to be lodged in the national depository. The administration of private justice between the citizens of the same State, the supervision of agriculture and of other concerns of a similar nature, all those things, in short, which are proper to be provided for by local legislation, can never be desirable cares of a general jurisdiction.

Mr. Hamilton: I give you the Department of Agriculture -- which has done more to affect why, how and what we grow and eat than any other institution in human history, perhaps. So there's that.
He keeps going.

There is one transcendant advantage belonging to the province of the State governments, which alone suffices to place the matter in a clear and satisfactory light, -- I mean the ordinary administration of criminal and civil justice. ... This great cement of society, which will diffuse itself almost wholly through the channels of the particular governments, independent of all other causes of influence, would insure them so decided an empire over their respective citizens as to render them at all times a complete counterpoise, and, not unfrequently, dangerous rivals to the power of the Union.

Mr. Hamilton, I give you the FBI. Bank robberies, no matter how third-rate and niggling, aren't really a local matter anymore -- they're prosecuted in federal courts. Just last month, the Supreme Court ruled that federal officials could civilly commit sex offenders who've served out their criminal prison sentences -- a role that used to be exclusively reserved to the states. And that ruling came from a conservative Supreme Court -- based on the so-called "necessary and proper clause" of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to make any law it needs to carry out its duties.

And hoo boy: The Antifederalists saw that one coming. Here's "Brutus," writing in Antifederalist 17.

The legislature of the United States are vested with the great and uncontrollable powers of laying and collecting taxes, duties, imposts, and excises; of regulating trade, raising and supporting armies, organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, instituting courts, and other general powers; and are by this clause invested with the power of making all laws, proper and necessary, for carrying all these into execution; and they may so exercise this power as entirely to annihilate all the State governments, and reduce this country to one single government. And if they may do it, it is pretty certain they will; for it will be found that the power retained by individual States, small as it is, will be a clog upon the wheels of the government of the United States; the latter, therefore, will be naturally inclined to remove it out of the way.

Now it's not true that state governments have been "annihilated." But it is true that the trend has been that federal power has increased and state power has contracted. Which brings us to Hamilton's most flatly untrue statement -- though, perhaps, he couldn't have known it at the time.

It will always be far more easy for the State governments to encroach upon the national authorities than for the national government to encroach upon the State authorities.

It didn't really work out that way, did it?

Now, I don't think that's entirely bad. But if I'm honest here, I've got to say, the Antifederalists were generally right and the Federalists were generally wrong: The government being built under the new Constitution did morph into something big and powerful and giant, reaching into many areas of the lives of its citizens. Maybe that growth is a distortion of the Founder's vision -- probably, to some extent, it is -- but Hamilton's pretty blase about the possibilities. "It can't happen here," is what he seems to be saying. But it did.

Federalists 18, 19 and 20 also concern themselves, ostensibly, with the insufficiency of the Articles of Confederation -- but rely mostly on a verrrry dry reading of history from throughout the ancient world. I'm not familiar enough with Greek or German or Dutch history to judge the interpretations offered by Hamilton and Madison here, so I won't try.

But now I'm faced with a question: Will reading the Federalist and Antifederalist papers turn me into a libertarian weirdo? It's a possibility!