The Electoral College’s Racist Origins

Having been born in New York State and living there through high school, many in the South will never consider me a Southerner despite my maternal grandmother being a New Orleans belle. Nonetheless, I have lived in Virginia the majority of my life (I arrived not long after the Supreme Court's final ruling in Loving v. Virginia) and as a history major I am well aware of Virginia's conflicting legacy of on the one hand of having been the home of many of the Founding Fathers who espoused liberty and equality while on the other hand always time protecting white power/privilege and later serving as architect of the Jim Crow laws. A piece in The Atlantic by a legal scholar that I seemingly missed at the time looks at the Electoral College and how, when examined in the light of history, it has a racist origin originally aimed at maintaining the political power of southern slave holding states such as Virginia. As numerous posts on this blog have argued, the Electoral College needs to be eliminated. This article and the facts presented further bolster why that elimination needs to occur sooner as opposed to later. Here are article highlights: 

Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the [U.S. Supreme Court's] Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then. 

In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes.” Ironically enough, there is some truth to an otherwise frighteningly numb claim. American elections have an acute history of racial entitlements—only they don’t privilege black Americans.

For centuries, white votes have gotten undue weight, as a result of innovations such as poll taxes and voter-ID laws and outright violence to discourage racial minorities from voting. (The point was obvious to anyone paying attention: As William F. Buckley argued in his essay “Why the South Must Prevail,” white Americans are “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” anywhere they are outnumbered because they are part of “the advanced race.”) But America’s institutions boosted white political power in less obvious ways, too, and the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.

 

Commentators today tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, in effect whitewashing history: Of the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and slavery were perhaps the foremost.

Of course, the Framers had a number of other reasons to engineer the Electoral College. Fearful that the president might fall victim to a host of civic vices—that he could become susceptible to corruption or cronyism, sow disunity, or exercise overreach—the men sought to constrain executive power consistent with constitutional principles such as federalism and checks and balances. The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.

But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy, succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms:

There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.

Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.

 

Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr. What’s less known about the election of 1800 is the way the Electoral College succeeded, which is to say that it operated as one might have expected, based on its embrace of the three-fifths compromise. The South’s baked-in advantages—the bonus electoral votes it received for maintaining slaves, all while not allowing those slaves to vote—made the difference in the election outcome. It gave the slaveholder Jefferson an edge over his opponent, the incumbent president and abolitionist John Adams. To quote Yale Law’s Akhil Reed Amar, the third president “metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.” That election continued an almost uninterrupted trend of southern slaveholders and their doughfaced sympathizers winning the White House that lasted until Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860.

 

In 1803, the Twelfth Amendment modified the Electoral College to prevent another Jefferson-Burr–type debacle. Six decades later, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, thus ridding the South of its windfall electors. Nevertheless, the shoddy system continued to cleave the American democratic ideal along racial lines. In the 1876 presidential election, the Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but some electoral votes were in dispute, including those in—wait for it—Florida. An ad hoc commission of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices was empaneled to resolve the matter. Ultimately, they awarded the contested electoral votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote. As a part of the agreement, known as the Compromise of 1877, the federal government removed the troops that were stationed in the South after the Civil War to maintain order and protect black voters.

The deal at once marked the end of the brief Reconstruction era, the redemption of the old South, and the birth of the Jim Crow regime. The decision to remove soldiers from the South led to the restoration of white supremacy in voting through the systematic disenfranchisement of black people, virtually accomplishing over the next eight decades what slavery had accomplished in the country’s first eight decades. And so the Electoral College’s misfire in 1876 helped ensure that Reconstruction would not remove the original stain of slavery so much as smear it onto the other parts of the Constitution’s fabric, and countenance the racialized patchwork democracy that endured until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

What’s clear is that, more than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern whites, the Electoral College continues to do just that. The current system has a distinct, adverse impact on black voters, diluting their political power. Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. Three of those states have not voted for a Democrat in more than four decades. Under the Electoral College, black votes are submerged. It’s the precise reason for the success of the southern strategy. It’s precisely how, as Buckley might say, the South has prevailed.

 

Among the Electoral College’s supporters, the favorite rationalization is that without the advantage, politicians might disregard a large swath of the country’s voters, particularly those in small or geographically inconvenient states. Even if the claim were true, it’s hardly conceivable that switching to a popular-vote system would lead candidates to ignore more voters than they do under the current one. Three-quarters of Americans live in states where most of the major parties’ presidential candidates do not campaign.

 

More important, this “voters will be ignored” rationale is morally indefensible. Awarding a numerical few voting “enhancements” to decide for the many amounts to a tyranny of the minority. 

 

Critics of the Electoral College are right to denounce it for handing victory to the loser of the popular vote twice in the past two decades. They are also correct to point out that it distorts our politics, including by encouraging presidential campaigns to concentrate their efforts in a few states that are not representative of the country at large. But the disempowerment of black voters needs to be added to that list of concerns, because it is core to what the Electoral College is and what it always has been.

The race-consciousness establishment—and retention—of the Electoral College has supported an entitlement program that our 21st-century democracy cannot justify. If people truly want ours to be a race-blind politics, they can start by plucking that strange, low-hanging fruit from the Constitution.

The Washington Post Fans Contrived Outrage

Virginia's Executive Mansion which dates from 1813

I'm not sure what's up with the Washington Post, but it seems hell bent on throwing aside serious journalism and focusing instead on sensation, feeding outrage and satiating those looking to find grievance and offense anywhere and everywhere.  Indeed, given the manner that the Post staff have sought to fan the flames of racial friction in Virginia, rather than being a serious source of news, elements of the newspaper seem to be holding up the National Inquirer as their template.  What's caused me to go off? A ridiculous piece in the Washington Post authored by Laura Vozzella who's claim to fame based on her bio is that she was a food writer and sometime political columnist at the Baltimore Sun that takes totally uncalled for cheap shots at Pam Northam, First Lady of Virginia, a woman I have known for close to 12 years.   The story arises out of a tour for legislative pages of the Executive Mansion and the former kitchen located in an separate building (as all kitchens were in Southern homes built in 1813) that has been maintained in its original condition for the purpose of teaching  about the history of the mansion and Virginia, both the good, the bad and the ugly.

In addition to knowing the Northams for years, I have been to the Executive Mansion many times and spent the weekend there back in July, 2018, at which time Pam Northam gave my husband and me a detailed tour of the mansion, the historic kitchen dependency and the grounds - the Governor had given us an abbreviated tour on a prior visit - during which she stressed how she was seeking to have the mansion reflect it's early history for good and for bad, including the presentation in the lady's parlor, the men's smoking room, and the original kitchen which is largely in its 1813 condition. By profession, the Fist Lady of Virginia is an educator and believes knowing and understanding accurate history is important, something I agree with heartily as a history major in college.  The reality is that just because some aspects of history are not pretty or nice, doesn't mean that today's students and youths do not need to know what really happened. 

I cannot help but suspect that Ms. Vozzella has (i) never met the Northams, (ii) has never visited the Executive Mansion, (iii) has never take the First Lady;s guided tour, and (iv) knows nothing of the mansion's history.  Seemingly, all that mattered to Ms. Vozzella (and her editors) was stirring the pot, ginning up controversy, and hopefully promoting her own name.  That's not responsible journalism.  It's yellow journalism and what one would expect from the National Inquirer or Fox News.   The telling lines in the piece which are NOT reflected in the least in its headline is as follows: 

Northam’s office and one other parent of a child who was present said the first lady did not single out the African American students and simply handed out the cotton to a group. . . . she simply handed the cotton to whoever was nearby and wanted everyone to note the sharpness of the stems and leaves on the raw cotton, to imagine how uncomfortable it would’ve been to handle all day.

Is the Post really so desperate for page views that it is endorsing this type of squalid journalism (which of course also regurgitated past slams at Governor Northam)?  If so, I know of one subscription they are about to lose.  On a larger scale, I suspect that pieces like this will have the opposite effect of what Ms. Vozzella intended - other than promoting her own name, of course - which is building support for racial equality and harmony in Virginia going forward.  Tawdry journalism like this will only serve to drive more whites into the Trump/white supremacist camp.  Shame on Ms. Vozzella and shame on her editors.

Pam Northam and the 19th century original kitchen to the Executive Mansion.

The History of "LGBT Hampton Roads"

June is Pride month and appropriately a friend, Prof. Charles Ford,  has released a book entitled "LGBT Hampton Roads"  that looks at the history of the LGBT community in Hampton Roads over the course of the nation's history, from the colonial period forward. Too often some try to depict the LGBT community as a relatively new phenomenon while the reality is that we have been around throughout all of history - as my June, 2016 VEER column will explore - and LGBT acceptance was largely the norm until the 12th century in Europe and until far more recently in other parts of the world.  The Daily Press looks at  Charles' new book which will be for sale at HR Pride Fest on June 18, 2016, in Norfolk's Town Point Park.  Here are review highlights:

While members of the Hampton Roads' gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community have been active in the region and state at large in recent years, represented in the arts, business and legal arenas, a Norfolk couple at the forefront of the battle to legalize same sex marriage in Virginia played a significant role in the life of the region for many years before that, Charles H. Ford and Jeffrey L. Littlejohn assert in their book "LGBT Hampton Roads," released earlier this spring.

The book by Ford, a professor and coordinator of history at Norfolk State University, and Littlejohn, an associate history professor at Sam Houston State University in Texas who worked at Norfolk State from 2001-2005, provides a historical and pictorial overview of the subject.

The book spans from the colonial era and the early days of the U.S., exploring gender identity in those years, all the way to the social, political and other aspects of LGBT culture over the last 50 or so years — the primary focus of the book. The two have co-authored several other books on topics in 20th-century Virginia history as well.

"Hampton Roads was not a backwater. It was not behind the times in the 1960s and 1970s," said Ford, who came out as openly gay in the 1990s. "It was the powerhouse in Virginia."

The region's mobile, transient population, especially when including sailors into the mix, gave the area a reputation for being one of vice, and in the 1890s, Norfolk was known as "the wickedest city in America," according to Ford and Littlejohn. It was there that the LGBT communities began to emerge and develop into the 20th century.

Those who would be identified as LGBT today also helped shape the cultural identity of the area, Ford said.

Anna Wood, a co-founder of a school for well-to-do girls, also helped start Norfolk's Little Theatre, Norfolk Symphony and the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, while Walter P. Chrysler Jr. helped transform the art museum that bears his name.

Gay people with local ties also gained international attention, Ford and Littlejohn said.
Leonard Matlovich, a Vietnam War veteran from Georgia stationed at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, landed on the Sept. 8, 1975, issue of Time magazine after publicly identifying as gay before being caught in a sexual act or being accused of being gay by someone else.

Part of the challenge came from trying to document the life of a community whose members for a long time didn't want to be out in the open for fear of criminal, social and other repercussions, said Ford.

"It was hard," Ford said. "First people don't want their pictures out there, at a time when people didn't take pictures. Now, people document everything in their life."

More recently, groups like Hampton Roads Business Outreach, which represents LGBT business owners and organizations, and events like Hampton Roads PrideFest, have become more prominent in the public eye.

Changes in state and federal laws in the last decade or so have also made a difference in how LGBT people are perceived in the community at large, Ford said

State sodomy laws were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003, and the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy ended in 2011.

While progress has been made for LGBT people in the U.S., there is still more that needs to happen according to Ford. Right now, activists are trying to ensure protections for LGBT people in workplaces all over the U.S., and debates about the rights of transgender people are taking place on a daily basis.  "We still have a long way to go," Ford said.

Why Republican Claims that Iran Deal is "Another Munich" Are All Wrong

Facts and objective reality mean nothing to the base of the Republican Party, especially the deranged Christofascist and Tea Party elements.  Now, they don't mean anything to a frightening number of GOP elected officials in Congress.  Nor does any form of knowledge of actual history.  Had Bush and Cheney and their neo-con advisers done even a small amount of historical review, they would have known that the Iraq War as they envisioned it was a fantasy.  Now, similar ignorance fuels the GOP claim that the Iran nuclear deal is another Munich, referring to the betrayal of Czechoslovakia in 1938 when Germany was ceded parts of that country with no demands or concessions in return.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at the false comparisons being made by Republican demagogues.  Here are highlights:

[T]he rhetorical matching of the Iran accord with the 1938 Munich conference doesn't withstand scrutiny. That Iran is not analogous to Munich is clear from the following:

First, Munich was about altering Europe's map. Vienna isn't about geographical changes; its focus is arms control, a subject not on the Munich agenda.

Second, at Munich, Hitler gave up nothing - no territory, no weapons. He successfully procured Czechoslovakia's dismemberment because the conferees agreed to force that nation to cede the Sudetenland to the Nazis. Czechoslovakia wasn't even a conference participant.

Third, the Munich conference didn't address the accelerating buildup of Germany's vast military machine whereas the Iran accord significantly reduces that country's capability to produce a nuclear weapon by requiring that it cease pursuing a plutonium bomb; that it redesign and rebuild the Arak reactor so it will not produce weapons-grade plutonium; that the original core of the reactor, which would enable the production of weapons-grade plutonium, be rendered inoperable. Furthermore, its spent fuel is to be shipped out of the country.

Finally, unlike Munich, which placed no international inspectors in Nazi-occupied territories, this agreement relies on an unprecedented level of intrusive international inspection, not on unverified trust that critics falsely assert is inherent in the deal. Iran agreed to international inspectors having access "to the entire supply chain that supports Iran's nuclear program" according to a presidential statement released in April. Tehran's acceding to this degree of foreign inspectors on its territory is neither a partial nor "a total cave" by our administration, as Kirk has foolishly said. Clearly, Wendy Sherman got a lot more from Iran's negotiators than Chamberlain got from Hitler!

It's been made clear that Washington's holding out for increased sanctions and/or requirements not tied to the nuclear weapons issue - which is what so many hardliners here were demanding -- would have cost us the support of our negotiating partners and likely doomed this diplomatic effort. Such a development would have isolated us from our partners, much as failure to join the League in 1920 isolated us from Europe, and it would have increased tensions in the Middle East much as our withdrawal 95 years ago helped direct the world toward another war. Iran would have resumed its nuclear ambitions unhindered by international law and the strong international alliance formed against it. 

July's Iran nuclear deal stands as one of the most significant foreign policy achievements of this or any recent administration. It rejects a Munich replication and builds on the lessons of Versailles while eliminating many of its pitfalls.

I suspect - or at least hope - that most Republicans know what actually happened at Munich and, like their Christofascist allies, are simply lying and hope that many Americans are simply too stupid to realize that they have been played for fools. 

Americans Fail Pew Test of Basic Political Knowledge

If you want to know why the Tea Party and Republican Party manage to remain forces in American politics, look no farther than a new  Pew Research Center News IQ survey that found a frightening number of Americans politically ignorant.   Of course, Fox News and the GOP like things that way.  Here are highlights from Politico on the survey findings:

Only one-in-three Americans knows how many women serve on the Supreme Court, but 91 percent can identify Martin Luther King Jr., 47 years after his assassination.

That’s according to the latest Pew Research Center News IQ survey released Tuesday, which tests how well the American public knows the world in words, maps and pictures.

Almost all millennials surveyed — 96 percent — could pick out King from a list of names that included Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson and Thurgood Marshall. Older generations could mostly identify the slain civil-rights leader, as 89 percent of Gen Xers, Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation did.

But millennials apparently aren’t so great at identifying the current party makeup of the Senate. Only 47 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 were able to do so, compared to 52 percent overall. Those who described themselves as more politically engaged were more likely to know the upper chamber’s composition. (For the record, Republicans hold 54 seats; Democrats 44 seats; and Independents two seats.)

[O]nly 51 percent could recognize Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren from a series of four photos with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.).

Education levels again factored into the responses, but Pew notes that half or more respondents with a high school education answered eight of the quiz’s 12 questions correctly. Among college graduates and post-graduate degree holders, most answered 11 out of 12 correctly.

Christofascists and Noah - A case Study in Batshitery

The "godly folk" never cease to give examples of their lunacy and extreme need to cling to mythical writings found within the Old Testament.  Never mind that the authors of the myths are unknown and had a level of knowledge of science and the universe lower than that of most middle school students nowadays.  Indoctrination - and I believe psychological problems - make it absolutely essential to these folks that nothing be allowed to challenge the fantasy world in which they live.   One of the latest targets of their wrath is the movie Noah which is being condemned for not being sufficiently "biblical."  It goes without saying that most of the hyperventilating "godly folk" do not know that the story of Noah is either (i) a complete myth or (ii) a regurgitation of older flood myths.  A piece in Religion Dispatches looks at the possible real basis for the Noah myth.  Here are excerpts:

Noah did its job. It brought an ancient biblical story about a cataclysmic flood to life for audiences today. Was it biblical? Was it the least biblical Bible movie ever made? These questions flare up in what is frankly a flat and over-rehearsed debate about the Bible in American life. Honestly, does it matter whether a movie is biblical? Do the spiritual-but-not-religious care? Do those evangelicals who grow tired of the stereotype made of them in the media care? Do secular liberals who have no use for the Bible really care about these questions?

Long before the Bible was written, The Flood was a blockbuster of the ancient Mesopotamian and Mediterranean worlds. It originated in Sumer over 4000 years ago. New versions were  deposited in the greatest imperial libraries of the Mesopotamian empires (Babylonia and Assyria). The Biblical authors fashioned their own versions of the tale, and post-biblical authors continued to ruminate on its potential for meaning-making. The Flood found its proper place in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and flood stories crop up in Hindu, American Indian, and African story-telling as well.

The first known flood story comes from Sumer in the tale of Atra-hasis (19^th century, BCE). This story sets the basic elements of the ancient genre: gods try to eradicate humanity, while a flood hero builds a boat to save the animals. A tragicomedy about polytheism starring petty gods who complain like tired parents annoyed by their noisy children. With plans to destroy a boisterous humanity, they are thwarted not once but three times by the flood hero’s personal god and eminent trickster, Enki. With each divine attempt at total genocide, Enki gives the flood hero secret knowledge about which god to appease with a sacrifice. This worked against the first two rounds of disease and drought. However, Enki had to get creative for the third and final attempt. For the deluge, Enki instructs the flood hero to build a boat for family and fauna.

[T]he Epic of Gilgamesh shines a light on the flood hero’s excruciating experience. Dated somewhere between 1200-900 BCE, the Mesopotamian epic says little about the divine drama. We only hear that “the hearts of the gods were moved to inflict the flood.” The rest of the tale focuses on the flood hero, who builds an ark in a brave abandonment of his wealth: “tear down the house and build a boat; abandon wealth and seek living beings; spurn possessions and keep alive living beings.” He not only rescues his family and the animals from the deluge, he saves his workers, the craftsmen, who helped him build his boat. The moral suppleness of the flood hero crescendos with his first reaction to the post-flood world. Stepping into a sun beam, looking out the window of his ark, he sees that all humanity returned to clay, and with tears streaming down the lines of his face, he slumps down weeping.  

The biblical account owes much to the Gilgamesh version . . . While Islamic tradition focuses on the character of Noah, the Genesis Flood is entirely about God, about a new monotheistic construal of both divine judgment and the pro-human reversal of that judgment. 

The biblical Flood emphasizes the unique role humans played in corrupting the earth. In contrast, the post-biblical tradition of Enochic Judaism lays blame on a human civilization that was corrupted by supernatural forces. Society is shot through with war, industry, and vainglory, all of which were taught by fallen angels.

If the story of Enoch’s Watchers cleanses society, the Hindu flood myth cleanses the mind. The ancient Hindu scriptures emphasize a novel feature of The Flood: enlightenment. In the Mahabharata (and later in the Puranas), the flood hero rides out the deluge in a boat with animals just like Noah.

One has to wonder how many of the cretins and spittle flecked preachers understand that the story of The Flood in the Bible is really just a recycled pagan story.  As noted above, I truly cannot grasp the mindset of these folks who are so terrified of having to think and understand that there is uncertainty in life and in the world that cling to an invisible friend in the sky that, if a creator of the universe exists, bears no resemblance to reality.  Once upon a time such ignorance could be excused given the lack of education and scientific knowledge.  But in today's world this mindset represents nothing less than the deliberate embrace of ignorance.

Should American Military Hawks Stop Hyperventilating Over the Crimea?

Cossack troops

As noted in a post this morning, to understand much of what is happening in Russia and the move to seize the Crimea from Ukraine, one must understand the history of Russia and the almost psychosis that afflicts Russia and its attitude toward the west.  And to avoid the disaster that befell Europe a little less than a century ago in August, 1914, it is important to learn a lesson that should have been learned long ago: demagoguery and inflammatory language can have horrific consequences and short term political posturing is not worth the ultimate cost.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the hyperventilating by many Republicans and conservative pundits and some of the questions these dangerous blowhards ought to be asking.  Here are excerpts:

Watch an hour of cable—and I’m talking MSNBC; forget Fox—and you might well come away from the hyper-ventilations thinking that we will or should go to war over Vladimir Putin’s takeover of Crimea. Listen: Nobody’s going to war over Crimea. This isn’t 1853. Yes, it matters to us how Crimea may once again become a part of Russia, and we don’t like it a bit, but let’s face it, it doesn’t really matter to us in cold, hard, realpolitik terms, whether Crimea is a part of Russia. It’s used as a naval base, and Russia’s had that all along.

 

Now Ukraine, that’s different. Or so everyone on TV says. But when everyone starts saying something, I start doubting. After all, a decade ago, nearly “everyone”—every “grown up,” that is, every person who took a “properly expansive” view of American security in the post 9/11 age—said we needed to topple a dictator who had nothing to do with 9/11. So: Is Ukraine different? We may decide that yes, it is, but there are some real and specific questions we’d better ask ourselves before we just automatically make that declaration.

One way we decide these things is by looking at the historical record, and the historical record practically screams no, Ukraine is not different, is not a vital American or Western interest. Soviet Russia annexed Ukraine in 1922, after a war that had commenced in 1917, when the Bolsheviks took Moscow. 

[H]istorically, Ukraine hasn’t been something the West regarded as worth fussing over very much. In more recent years, after the USSR’s collapse, Russia asserted that Ukraine and, for that matter, all 14 former satellite SSR’s were within the Russian sphere of influence. They even coined a term for it: the “near abroad.” Not all Americans have accepted the idea that the near abroad falls strictly within the Russian sphere of influence, by any means.

There’s nothing easier for pundits or commentators on cable to stomp the table about how Putin is playing us and running rings around Obama and he’s a madman who must be stopped. Our former ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, said yesterday after Putin’s duma speech that the post-Cold War era was over. McFaul has been a reliable guide through these rapids, but that’s nonsense. We aren’t in a new Cold War. Spend five minutes ruminating on what happened during the Cold War and what sparked it, and you should be able to clear your head of such combustible notions. We’re a long way from that yet.

I’d like to hear everyone tossing around those kind of rhetorical lightning bolts answer, in a calm voice, three questions: One, why should Ukraine, which never before was a realpolitik first-order concern of the United States, be one now? Two, what exact sacrifices are we willing to make to preserve Ukraine’s territorial integrity? And three, what broader risks might those acceptable sacrifices entail, and are they worth it?

There might be very good answers to all three questions. But our political culture has a very bad habit of not wanting to discuss them much. That’s a habit we need to change.