- What Would the Founders Do?: Our Questions, Their Answers by Richard Brookhiser

I am a huge fan of Richard Brookhiser. His short biographies are great reads. If you think history is boring, you haven’t been reading Brookhiser. Now he is coming out with this fascinating work that views today’s issues through the lens of the founding fathers. This one has been moved to the top of my TBR list! A combination of history and political debate? How could I resist.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, here is what Michael Lind had to say (writing for Publishers Weekly):

It might be thought that nothing new could be said about America’s founding fathers, in the midst of the contemporary avalanche of tomes about Washington, Jefferson and other early American leaders. But Rick Brookhiser, inspired perhaps by a Christian motto—”What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD)—has come up with a way to describe the views of the architects of the American republic that is as entertaining as it is informative.”

Americans have been asking what the founders would do since the founders died,” writes Brookhiser, a journalist and historian (Alexander Hamilton and The Way of the WASP). Combining the skills of a first-rate writer with those of a medium at a séance, Brookhiser channels the spirits of eminent early Americans in discussing contemporary public debates. At times, Brookhiser has to stretch to find an analogy between the era of the founders and today, such as his comparison between stem cell research and the old practice of robbing graves for medical research.

In other cases, however, the conceit works to shed light on present and past alike. Should the U.S. attempt to spread democracy around the world? Brookhiser makes a case for the caution of Alexander Hamilton rather than the optimism of Thomas Jefferson. The war on drugs? “The founders would not have fought a war on drugs,” but would have taxed them instead, Brookhiser declares, reasoning from the excise tax on whiskey imposed by the federal government. What would the founders do about Social Security? “Social Security follows none of their models (family provision, charity, reward for service, investment).”

The book reveals that many of the public policy questions confronting the early American republic are similar to challenges Americans wrestle with today. The values of 18th-century Americans, by contrast, were radically different and benighted by modern standards. Jefferson, while opposing slavery, argued that blacks were inferior and should be expatriated from the United States. The founders took a male-dominated society for granted, though Hamilton was willing to consider sweatshop work for women: “It is worthy of particular remark, that, in general, women and children are rendered more useful… by manufacturing establishments than they would otherwise be.”

With a rare union of wit and scholarship, What Would the Founders Do? presents history as a source of continuing debates, rather than as a set of answers. Comparing the founders to present-day Americans, Brookhiser concludes: “We can be as intelligent as they were, and as serious, as practical, and as brave…. We can; as they said, all men are created equal.”

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I received another one of those weird Amazon emails. The computers over there are off again. Here is the latest odd match:

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased The Cold War : A New History by John Lewis Gaddis also purchased books by Joseph Volpe. For this reason, you might like to know that Joseph Volpe’s The Toughest Show on Earth : My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera will be released on May 2, 2006.

Could someone please explain what a historiogrphical study by one of the pre-eminent Cold War historians has to do with the Metropolitan Opera? Wouldn’t those snooty rich liberals (at least stereotypically) at the Met disdain this kind of conservative cold warrior stuff? Or perhaps they are rich snooty Republicans who were Reagan supporters. . . .

In case anyone is wondering, yes I still read fiction and will be reviewing plenty of it here in the days and weeks to come. This week has had a rather somber focus, what with books on death and war and whatnot. I thought it might be good to bring fiction back into the picture.

I am currently reading A Short History of a Small Place in anticipation of reading the recently released sequel Glad News of the Natural World . I have found it to be a delightful read so far and have read a number of passages out loud to my wife. I thought I would share a passage with you as well. In describing the latest work, Publishers Weekly says “the novel rambles gracefully.” This seems an apt description. And, as long as you are in the mood for it, isn’t a particularly harsh criticism to my mind.

The section quoted below describes how the narrator, Louis Benfield, comes to know it is winter. It struck me as true and poetic.

So once a year in November I wake up on a Saturday with the sort of felling that must come over birds just before they migrate, and I get straight out of bed into my playclothes and put on my carcoat and my work gloves and my green corduroy hat with the earflaps and I fetch the rake out of our cellar and set out for the bottom of the back lot, where I am condemned to thrash at the mock orange bushes for the balance of the day. And that is when it usually happens, not while I’m still trying to extract from the mock oranges everything that has blown or fallen into them in the course of the year, but after I have left off from the struggle for a spell and have sat down on the grass where I pluck at the rakehead to make the tines sing, and I listen to the sound of the sprung metal dying away sometimes mixed with the cry of a hound or the low, indecipherable noise of a voice on the air, and suddenly I am aware of the sort of chill I haven’t known in a year and I notice that the sky is very high and tufted and the color of ash in a grate, which is the color of my breath, which is the color of the afternoon, which is the color of the season; and I know it isn’t autumn anymore.

Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review and the author of The Party of Death recently published by Regnery. He is a graduate of Princeton University and has covered politics for more than a decade. In addition to his work with National Review, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, Newsday, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard, and Financial Times.

With the recent publication of his book and the debate that is sure to spring up around it, Ramesh was kind enough to agree to answer some questions vial email. What follows is the result. My questions in bold, Ramesh’s answers below.

You claim in the book that: “Everything you think you know about Roe is a lie.” What do you mean by that?

Most people believe that Roe v. Wade was a more limited decision than it was: They don’t realize that it created a right to abortion at any stage of pregnancy for any reason, which is more extreme than any other developed country’s abortion policy. Many people mistakenly believe that overturning Roe would amount to criminalizing abortion nationwide. Most people are under the impression that the country was headed toward liberal abortion laws even before Roe. That’s not true either. Finally, they think that women were dying in large numbers from illegal abortions before Roe. Again, that’s false. Even after 33 years, there are a lot of myths about Roe that haven’t really been challenged—myths that the media continue to spread. Even many pro-lifers believe some of the things I just mentioned.

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Even before Ramesh Ponnuru’s new book, The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life, came out it was being attacked. As is sadly all too common these days, “reviewers” at Amazon and bloggers began to complain that the book’s title was inflammatory, hypocritical, etc. They sought to discredit the author and dismiss the book.

As a result of this - and to be fair certain of the book’s marketing material – some will be tempted to dismiss this book as another hyper-partisan attack; as just another book of GOP talking points cranked out by a pundit. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Party of Death is tightly argued, meticulously researched, and remarkably rant free. It might very well be the definitive book on “life issues” for years to come.

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In an effort to expand my military history knowledge beyond the wars in the Twentieth Century, I decided to read Fred Anderson’s The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War. The book is an excellent summary of the French and Indian War in fewer than 300 pages.

Described by some as the first world war, the Seven Years War – or, as referred to in America, the French and Indian War – mainly pitted the British Empire against the French Empire. The book primarily focuses on the struggle between the combatants in North America with summaries of the War’s other significant events in Europe and elsewhere sprinkled throughout.

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I wanted to pass along this note from Bud Parr at MetaxuCafe:

All week long we will be covering the Pen World Voices Festival here at MetaxuCafe. In conjunction with the Words Without Borders blog, we will be covering over 30 events this week and posting at MetaxuCafe and other places around the Web. Highlights include an interview with Dubravka Ugresic (author of The Ministry of Pain) by James Marcus and photographs by Mary Reagan.

Here are the participants:

Words Without Borders blog
M.A. Orthofer, The Literary Saloon
James Marcus, House of Mirth
Levi Asher, Litkicks
Michelle Lin, NY Brain Terrain
Bud Parr, Chekhov’s Mistress
Mary Reagan, NYC Photo

Sarah Weinman will be attending on her own and sharing her thoughts on the “Taking Crime Fiction Seriously” discussion.

Be sure to check it out. And if you haven’t already Metaxu Cafe in general.

I am not the first person to note the irony, but let me say it again: if we went to war in Iraq for cheap oil we got screwed. The price for a barrel of oil just topped $72 and it doesn’t seem to be going down significantly any time soon. As a result, the price of gasoline is increasing just in time for summer vacations. Economists are worried that these high prices will slow economic growth. Throw in uncertainty surrounding Iran and things don’t look so pretty.

So who is to blame for all of this? (Besides Bush, Cheney and the rest of the Blood for Oil gang, of course!) In his book, Over the Barrel: Breaking the Middle East Oil Cartel, Raymond Learsy argues that OPEC (The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) bears a good deal of the blame and yet avoids facing the anger and frustration these prices engender. While Learsy believes there is plenty of blame to go around - including the President and his friends in the big oil companies - he saves his real ire for the powerful oil cartel. He sets out to detail the history of this powerful organization and to explain how we can work together to destroy it.

While almost everyone will find something to disagree with in terms of Learsy’s various arguments, the subject is critical and the history is fascinating and important. If you are interested in the intersection of geopolitics, business, and energy this is a book you should check out.

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In case anyone was wondering, I am not an undercover National Review marketer. They just post a lot of content that I find interesting. Case in point is this interview with Ramesh Ponnuru. I just finished reading Ponnuru’s excellent book The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life and will be posting my review soon. I also hope to do a Q&A with Ramesh. But since Kathryn Jean Lopez is his editor at NRO, she understandably gets first dibs.

Those who don’t already see themselves as agreeing with Ramesh might be tempted to ignore this book as simply another partisan rant. That would be a mistake. The book is remarkably evenhanded and balanced. This is not a rah rah GOP book, in spite of some of the language on the book’s cover jacket, but a serious and articulate discussion of the legal, scientific, philosophical, and political arguments surrounding “issues of life.” This is the first of a two part interview. Here are some useful snippets:

Lopez: You make clear in the book that the “party of death” in the title is not the Democratic party. Plenty of Republicans are members. But the Dems have embraced it with open arms, so aren’t they kinda sorta the party of death, or its main political manifestation?

Ponnuru: One of the stories the book tells is how abortion transformed the Democratic party from a party primarily concerned about protecting the weak to one that is more avid about defending the alleged rights of the strong. Pro-life Democrats have resisted this transformation, but it is certainly true that the Democratic party has become the party of unrestricted abortion, lethal research on human embryos, and euthanasia. The way I put it is that the party of death has largely taken over the Democratic party and has an outpost in the Republican party too.

Lopez: What do you say to people who say that conservatives are the “party of death,” since they have supported the death penalty and the Iraq war?

Ponnuru: I get that a lot from people who haven’t read the book. The most articulate defenders of abortion, some types of euthanasia, infanticide, and lethal embryo research argue for those things on the theory that the human beings they kill are not persons. My book argues against that theory and goes into the chilling implications of that view.

Articulate defenders of the death penalty and the Iraq war make very different arguments. They do not, that is, say that death-row inmates and Iraqi insurgents are “human non-persons.” Thus the death penalty and the war raise very different issues. This is not to say that the moral issues raised by the war and the death penalty are not serious. (I think the moral issues raised by the death penalty are sufficiently serious that I oppose it.) It is only to say that they are mostly distinct from the ones that come up in this book.

Blurbs:

“Forensic investigators don’t get more real than Thomas Holland. One Drop of Blood is the first thriller in an exciting new series that looks at cold cases with lightning heat and speed — a fascinating read.”
– Linda Fairstein, New York Times bestselling author of Death Dance

“Holland’s debut novel is a riveting read — filled with duplicity, cover-up, mystery and the realities (and frustrations) of forensic science. This is an engrossing thriller that immerses the reader in an historical injustice that only One Drop of Blood can resolve.”
– Dr. Michael Baden and Linda Kenney, authors of Remains Silent

“This is the best first novel I’ve read in years. Thomas Holland has solid forensic science credentials — he’s a leading expert in his field. That might get you to pick up this book, but block out some time — you won’t want to put it down. Engaging characters, high-octane suspense, and Holland’s remarkable storytelling skills combine with a voice that’s fresh, strong and true to provide a terrific read.”
– Jan Burke, author of Bloodlines and Bones

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