Gil Troy: Partisan politics? Take a look at the 19th century

OP-EDS & REVIEWS

Joanna Weiss, Boston Globe, 10-9-12

For those of you despairing about the nasty tenor of elections today, the ugly partisanship of politics, the polarity of the press: Be happy you weren’t around in the 19th century.

Fox News vs. MSNBC? That was nothing. The early 1800s were known as the “Dark Ages of Partisan Journalism,” says Gil Troy, a history professor at McGill University. Too much talk about Cherokees? Big deal. The fight between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, in 1800, got so ugly that Abigail Adams despaired that the shenanigans could have “ruined and corrupted the minds and morals of the best people in the world.”

So it went, at a time when the party apparatuses were as ruthless as any super PAC, the newspapers were proud to take sides, and outrageous charges went out in handbills, the precursor to TV ads and direct mail. The flip side: Everybody cared. Election season was “the great national pastime before baseball,” Troy says, filled with carnivals and rallies designed to get out the vote. Voting rates were high, and only started dropping toward the end of the century — at about the same time as a national move to clean elections up and talk more about the issues.

“The American heart itself is divided,” Troy says. “We want a campaign that is suitable for the salon and the seminar room, but we actually respond better to a campaign with mud and blood.”

Consider that while watching the next debate. And consider these highlights of 19th-century bare-knuckle politics.

Jefferson v. Adams, 1800: Attack of the Personal Attacks!

Remember those founding fathers, so brilliant, so inspirational? They were also mean. Jefferson was accused of being pro-French and running a “Congo harem” out of Monticello. Adams was accused of conspiring to marry his daughter off to the British king’s family, in order to establish a royal bloodline. Also, foes said he had smuggled British prostitutes across the Atlantic to serve his needs.

Andrew Jackson v. John Quincy Adams, 1828: Swift Boats + Birtherism!

Jackson was accused of murdering defectors in the War of 1812 — charges laid out in what becomes known as the “Coffin Handbill.” He was also accused of having an illegitimate marriage, because his wife, Rachel, had been divorced. Meanwhile, Jackson supporters accused Adams of serving as a pimp for the Russian czar. Jackson won, but Rachel died before the election, likely of a heart attack. Jackson believed the election had broken her heart.

Abraham Lincoln v. Stephen Douglas, 1860: Our Looksist Nation.

Yes, they had those rhetorically brilliant 1858 debates, but the election of 1860, waged in a fiercely divided country, also honed in on the candidates’ appearances. It’s hard to imagine political parties going there today: Lincoln supporters mocked Douglas, a stout man of 5’4”, for being “as tall as he is wide.” (Even Douglas’s allies call him “The Little Giant.”) Lincoln foes, well into his presidency, made fun of him for looking like an ape.

Grover Cleveland vs. James G. Blaine, 1884: Nasty attacks, plus rhyme.

Blaine, known for his corruption, had to put up with chants of “James G. Blaine, continental liar from the state of Maine.” (It’s a good thing he wasn’t from West Virginia.) Meanwhile, Cleveland was accused of fathering an illegitimate child, leading to chants of “Ma, Ma, Where’s my Pa?” When he won, his supporters came up with a response: “Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!”

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CTV Interview: McGill professor Gil Troy on Mitt Romney & US Presidential Campaign

OP-EDS & REVIEWS

CTV NEWS, 9-19-12 

McGill professor Gil Troy on Mitt Romney

Source:  CTV Montreal, 9-19-12 

Gil Troy speaks about Mitt Romney

McGill professor Gil Troy speaks with Paul Karwatsky about American presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.

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Gil Troy Quoted: AP Analysis: Obama has little choice but to persuade

OP-EDS & REVIEWS

Associated Press, 9-4-12

 

Analysis: Obama has little choice but to persuade

Source: AP, 9-4-12

Remembered for soaring speeches at the last two Democratic conventions, President Barack Obama faces much tougher constraints Thursday when he accepts his party’s nomination for a second time.

Now he has a four-year record and must convince Americans to stick with the status quo in a climate of high unemployment, fallen home values and wide income disparity.

Given the tough environment, less lofty oratory is almost certain. And Obama has little choice but to walk a careful line as he unspools his vision for America’s future while picking apart Republican Mitt Romney’s plans for taxes, Medicare and the environment.

Overtly ambitious or novel proposals could invite an obvious rebuke: If it’s such a great idea, what hasn’t the president already done it?

“Obama is definitely in a presidential pickle,” said McGill University presidential scholar Gil Troy. “The candidate of hope and change now has reality to contend with, including disappointments and messes.”

The best re-nomination speeches — Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “morning in America” and Bill Clinton’s 1992 “bridge to the 21st century” — included “a heroic narrative of renewal,” Troy said. Obama must give a flavor of that Thursday, he said, despite a serious handicap: The economy lacks the obvious upward trend that boosted Reagan’s campaign.

“Obama has not gotten that statistical gift,” Troy said, “so he has to compensate with oratorical gifts.”

Great oratory has a mixed record in presidential campaigns.

Dwight Eisenhower and George W. Bush are among those who won two terms with lackluster speaking styles.

Obama excelled in big forums from the start. He rocketed to national fame at the 2004 Democratic convention, where his “one America” speech largely overshadowed the nominee, John Kerry.

“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America,” Obama told the adoring crowd in Boston. “There’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

When he accepted the nomination four years later in a huge outdoor stadium in Denver, Obama deplored “the broken politics in Washington.”

“America, we are better than these last eight years,” he said. “We are a better country than this.”

Now, of course, Obama is the incumbent under the microscope. Unemployment is higher, Washington’s politics are more bitterly partisan than before and the notion of no liberal-conservative divide seems naive at best.

Reagan’s “morning in America” optimism might be ridiculed in today’s climate. And rhetorical flourishes by Obama could add fuel to Republican jibes that he is much better at talking than leading.

But Obama can hardly afford to assume the dour demeanor of Jimmy Carter.

A presidential challenger can use big speeches to criticize the incumbent in detail while offering less-specific, even gauzy, alternatives. That’s what Romney did last week in Tampa, Fla., say Democrats, who repeatedly cite his lack of detailed explanations for claims that he can cut taxes, increase military spending and reduce the deficit.

Obama doesn’t enjoy that leeway. He’s constrained in looking both backward and forward.

He must defend his four-year record, of course. But fierce resistance from tea party-influenced Republicans has thwarted some of his key proposals, including jobs bills. His biggest legislative achievement, the 2010 health care overhaul, sharply divided the country and gave Republicans a new battle cry: “Repeal Obamacare.”

The same partisan dynamics could crimp Obama’s ability to offer a second-term agenda. With Republicans likely to retain control of the House along with filibuster powers — if not an outright majority — in the Senate, bold new Democratic proposals might seem implausible.

Still, a range of scholars and operatives urge Obama to err on the side of ambition and specificity.

“We think the country is desperate to know where the president wants to take the country — his vision and plan in the face of weak recovery but more important, the long-term problems facing the country,” veteran Democratic consultants James Carville and Stan Greenberg said in a memo released Tuesday. “The more robust and serious his plans are for American energy production and independence, for infrastructure and America’s modernization, for advancing education and innovation, for getting health care costs down,” they wrote, “the more the Republicans will look irrelevant.”

Carville and Greenberg urged Obama to hammer at Romney’s plans to preserve income tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans while also cutting taxes on investment income that applies mainly to the rich.

Voters “are rightfully angry and increasingly populist,” the two men said.

Troy agreed that Obama should risk being labeled too liberal if that’s what it takes to defend his stimulus plan and auto industry bailout. Both initiatives generally got higher marks from economists than from average Americans.

The president can talk about the bailout “as a reflection of a government that is good, a government that works,” Troy said.

He said the president should use Thursday’s speech to “invite Americans back into the Obama narrative. He has to sell Brand Obama.”

The president might skip many of the flourishes that wowed the crowd in Boston eight years ago. Instead, expect him to try to use the speech — one of the last remaining prime-time, heavily watched events of the campaign — to put the best possible face on a grim economy, and to convince voters that Romney would make it worse.

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Gil Troy Interview: The battle for the White House

OP-EDS & REVIEWS

McGill News, 8-31-12

The battle for the White House

Source: McGill News, 8-31-12

Questions & Answers

Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill and an expert on U.S. politics and the history of American presidential campaigns. Sylvain Comeau recently approached Professor Troy for his thoughts on the current race between Republican nominee Mitt Romney and U.S. president Barack Obama.

American politics seem to be polarized between right and left. Which side will “get out the vote” most effectively?

The biggest problem both candidates are facing, at the moment, is that neither of them has really excited the American people yet. When you compare Obama in 2012 to Obama in 2008, he’s not going to get the same kind of vote, the same passion and enthusiasm. As for Romney, he hasn’t shown an ability to stir the nation. I believe this will be a vote characterized by a little bit of exhaustion, and a sentiment that “we’d rather have him than the other guy.” My fear is that we won’t have a winner; we will have the one who doesn’t lose. And at this point in American history, I think the nation needs a winner.

So the election will be won by default?

The winner will be the one left standing. Obama should have increased his lead in the polls by now, but that hasn’t happened. On the other hand, Romney should have been able to [capitalize] on the current high levels of anxiety in the country. He hasn’t. So both of them are more distinguished by their weaknesses than by their strengths so far in this campaign. And that’s unfortunate.

Does the incumbent normally have some kind of built-in advantage?

In American politics, that is usually the case. Name recognition, a certain conservatism among voters, fund raising, infrastructure; all these are huge advantages. Also, in the last half-century, the only sitting presidents to lose the White House were the ones who faced very serious challenges in the primaries, before getting the nomination. This year, Obama got the nomination in a cakewalk, so historically, that means the odds are much more in his favour. On the other hand, the economic numbers are pretty weak.

How would you evaluate Obama’s first term?

It would not be controversial to say that it has been a disappointment. But that was inevitable, considering the incredibly high expectations surrounding him, and the set of problems he faced. It has been a very sobering first term. It’s interesting to note a certain convergence between the policy decisions of the Bush and Obama administrations. Bush responded to the initial housing crash and financial crisis by stimulating the economy by pouring in hundreds of billions of dollars. What did Obama do? The same thing. Bush locked away suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, a policy which Obama promised to eliminate; that never happened. The president who tracked down and eliminated Osama Bin Laden was not Bush, it was Obama. What do we learn from that? The world looks very different from outside the Oval Office, compared to inside. Outside the Oval Office, we emphasize the differences. But once in office, there is a lot of similarity [between administrations] when it comes to key government ideas.

Obama inherited many of his administration’s key economic challenges from the Bush administration; will that hamper his chances, or will the voters take that into account?

Obama’s narrative is that he inherited all these Republican problems. He applied Democrat solutions to them, the economy has improved, and we will have improved health care now. The Republican narrative is that those problems were the result of both party’s policies, going back to Reagan and then Clinton, and that we have to take a long term view in order to understand how this mess developed.

What role will health care play in this election?

The Democrats are coalescing around health care as a new American right, and that plays well for Obama. In order to win, Romney has to mobilize the Republican base against universal health care. He has to help them overcome their doubts about him, by making them realize that they need him in order to overturn the health care reforms.

Do you think the bullying incident involving Romney will come back to haunt him during the vote?

So far, Romney appears to be a Velcro candidate: all kinds of negative stories have stuck to him. He has allowed the Democrats to define him by these negative reports. He needs to reintroduce himself to the American public, and to focus on basic issues such as the economy and health care.

What about his “silver spoon” image, in which he is said to be responsible for layoffs at companies where he worked, and to favour tax policies that benefit the rich?

During a time of depression or recession, it is very difficult for a super-wealthy person to succeed in American politics. And yet, [Franklin Roosevelt] pulled it off. How did he do it? He was able to turn his aristocratic air into a jaunty, breezy self-confidence that transcended class barriers. He turned a negative into a positive, and that’s what Romney has to do. Romney has to make the case that his skill set in business is not about outsourcing and destroying American jobs; he has to show that they’re exactly the kind of skills needed to lead the country into a healthy 21st century economy.

Has Romney deliberately positioned himself as a far-right candidate? For example, he said that he would eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood, and oppose gay marriages.

American candidates have a tendency to swing to the extremes of the right or left during the primary debates. Campaigns tend to bring candidates back to the centre, but Romney hasn’t really shown that ability yet. So his challenge will be: can he recalibrate and go back to the centre without appearing to be inauthentic? If he only plays to the right, he will not win.

How will his choice of Paul Ryan as vice presidential candidate change the campaign?

Ryan is an experienced congressman with a strong ideological record. This choice shows that Romney is not afraid to run with someone who is articulate, energetic and ideological. This was a bold way of defining the Republican ticket.

Was it a gamble, picking a running mate who is favouring big budget cuts for medicare, and is considered a fiscal hawk?

No matter who he picked, it was going to be someone who is more of a deficit hawk and more fiscally conservative than the Democrats — but picking someone like Ryan defines it very clearly. And I think Romney recognizes that Ryan is not afraid to fight and can articulate his vision — he won’t just sit there and absorb blows.

Romney could have made a “safer” choice. Did he feel that he had to do something, since he has been behind in the polls?

Yes, I think he needed to make a move that shows that this is not business as usual; that was equally important for the morale of the troops as it was for the campaign. This choice also means that the rest of the presidential race will focus on more substantive issues than where Obama was born or what Romney did to the family dog.

Do you think Obama’s handling of the financial crisis, including the unpopular bank bailouts and the ballooning deficits, will hinder his chances?

There is a gut feeling [among the American people] that not enough was done, and yet too much debt was taken on. Also, there is an impression that his decisions are too closely tied in with the philosophy of the Democratic Party, yet he dealt with the crisis in much the same way as Bush. So there are a lot of contradictory, mixed feelings when it comes to the financial crisis.

Do the Republicans face any challenges in this election associated with the fact that the last Republican president, George W. Bush, was not a popular figure when he left office?

I think Obama wants to cast Romney as Bush II — and even Republicans understand that the baggage from the Bush administration persists. Romney has to show — without disrespecting Bush, because some Americans still support the former president — that he is a true Republican, an effective Republican, a competent Republican, and that the Republicans have the answer.

Do you believe that any third-party candidates could dilute support for either of the main party candidates?

Six months ago, I could have speculated about all kinds of people. Today, it doesn’t look like any serious third party contenders are emerging. This is definitely the kind of election in which a third party candidate could have made some noise and possibly done some damage, but so far, that doesn’t seem to be the dynamic. On the Republican side, during the nomination process, the third party phenomenon played itself out. They gave a lot of room to a lot of voices, some of them quite extreme, and ultimately, those were defeated. On the Democratic side, the power of the Obama myth, and, frankly, his status as the first African-American president, means that it’s not viable for anyone on the far left to contend with him.

Since Reagan, every sitting president has presided over a ballooning deficit and national debt. Will that continue to colour both the campaigns and the terms of future presidents?

Reagan tried to start a conversation about deficits and limits, but even he failed. He only succeeded in limiting the growth of government. There has been an addiction to government spending and deficit spending, and no politician has had the power, the courage or the standing to really take on this problem. There have been government commissions and lots of good ideas are out there, but what it really take is leadership, and guts. It is a toxic mix of special interests trying to protect their turf, and politicians who are more concerned with the next election than with long term solutions.

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My temporary visa to the land of the disabled

OP-EDS & REVIEWS

By Gil Troy, Montreal Gazette, 4-30-12

It was the kind of big, fancy cocktail party I attend rarely enough that I enjoy the occasion. I was looking forward to this one because, in addition to liking the honoree and his family, there were half a dozen friends whom I rarely see amid the 1,500 guests, just enough to make for an interesting evening.

Yet as soon as I arrived, I wanted to leave. I felt nervous, vulnerable, endangered. For the first time in my life, I entered a crowded room full of partying people enjoying themselves and not really thinking about who they might bump into – literally – while I was hobbling on crutches.

Less than a week before, I had been soaring, running in the Jerusalem halfmarathon while on academic leave in Israel this year. Running with thousands of people with this ancient city as the backdrop was magical. Unfortunately, an undiagnosed and improperly healed fracture from a bicycle accident two years before turned into a stress fracture, and I collapsed at the 20.5-kilometre mark of the 21-kilometre race. I ended up with emergency surgery, a plate, and five screws in my femur two days later.

Ironically, both the bike accident and this stress fracture resulted from a health kick. For decades I had a sedentary professorial lifestyle that resulted in no hospital runs. I started jogging and occasionally biking with dramatically mixed results – weight and blood pressure down, heart rate excellent – but two sports injuries.

Fundamentally, I am fine. This setback is temporary. But my two crutches – the low-forearm kind, not the painful under-the-armpit type – offer a visa to the world of the handicapped. In this alternate universe, innocuous settings like cocktail parties can feel dangerous, and so many actions that most of us take for granted must be thought through and planned out, or sometimes skipped because the extra effort is not worth it.

As I am still in post-op recovery, I frequently fall into an unusually deep sleep. Whenever I awake, I assume I am fine and can stand – until I see those darned crutches. Hobbling about with them invites sympathetic stares, stopped cars when I cross the street, and far too much discussion when I socialize.

When I am using the crutches, my hands are helping me walk and can’t do much else. Even breakfast is an ordeal, although I can now grasp the big orangejuice container with my fingertips while gripping the crutches with my fist. What was once an easy, automatic morning routine now requires three laborious round trips: yogurt and OJ from fridge to table; glass, bowl and spoon from cabinet to table; and cereal from pantry to table. Of course I could ask my wife or children, who have been extraordinarily helpful. But when you ask for so much so frequently – because everything is always in the wrong room or on the wrong floor – you also want to do something yourself.

My breakfast trial is repeated morning, noon and night. Getting dressed, showering, fetching the newspaper – each action requires too much planning, too much strain, too much improvisation. After two weeks of this, I should feel cranky. Yet I am more often humbled and awestruck.

I am humbled because I know my visa will lapse soon and I will return to “normal.” I have friends with permanent passports to this challenging world of the disabled. Some have always lived there, while two friends in particular are learning to cope with dramatically more limited and more lasting limitations. All I need to do is remember their predicaments – or those of countless others – and my drops of self-pity transform into tidal waves of empathy for them and their families.

Moreover, while as a historian I am more the rationalist than the mystic, my visit to this demanding, draining world has made me awestruck by the miracles of the everyday. We take for granted our health, our functioning, the many things we do instinctively, automatically. Our brains process so much and orchestrate so many actions hour by hour, flawlessly, and our bodies co-operate magnificently. I would wish my experience on no one. But I want to share with everyone my new-found appreciation for what most of us do have, for what most of us can do.

In modern society, despite all we have materially, technologically and politically, we are enduring epidemic levels of unhappiness, discontent and psychological distress. The therapy business is booming; we consume psychotropic drugs by the warehouse-full. I have long believed in Vitamin P: perspective. We need to view our concerns, challenges, worries and fears in a broader context. North Americans should see their problems – as pressing as they may feel them to be – in comparison to the poverty and the sanitation and safety challenges that most humans in Africa and Asia endure.

And those of us lucky enough to be healthy – and I still define myself as belonging to that happy club – should appreciate the simple joys of getting breakfast, going to work, being able to play, and living the basic miracle of life.

Meanwhile, my sojourn in the land of the disabled has helped teach me that those with physical limitations also find joy and meaning in the important things of life – relationships, ideas, values, achievements – despite their challenges.

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Gil Troy: The Changing Presidential Campaign on Minnesota Public Radio

INTERVIEW ANNOUNCEMENT

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Thursday, August 25, 2011Midmorning with Kerri Miller, Minnesota Public Radio

Minnesota Public Radio Stories

MPR News Radio — Listen Now

• The changing presidential campaign
  The 2012 presidential election is 15 months away, and campaign coverage is pervasive in the media. We know about Obama’s summer reading list and can look at pictures of Bachmann eating a corn dog. Has the level of scrutiny changed? What can we expect from the presidential campaigns in the coming months — 9:06 a.m.
  Guests
  Gil Troy: Professor of History at McGill University in Montreal, and a Visiting Scholar affiliated with the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. His latest book, “The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction.”
  Karen Tumulty: National political correspondent for The Washington Post. She joined the Post in 2010 from TIME Magazine, where she had held the same title.
  Resources
  About Gil Troy
  About Karen Tumulty

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Lunch and Learn with Gil Troy: Obama at Midterm

Date: Mon, 03/28/2011 – 12:30pm – 1:30pm

With the U.S. midterm elections over, President Barack Obama faces a complex array of challenges, choices and expectations. Join us for a thought-provoking lecture with McGill History Professor Gil Troy, who will offer a non-partisan analysis of, and questions about, (though no predictions for) President Obama’s promises, performance and prospects from a historical perspective. A native of Queens, New York, Prof. Troy is also the visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and the author of several books, including “Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s” and “Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady.” He comments frequently about the American presidency on television and radio, and has published articles in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe and USA Weekend. Seating for this event is limited so please register online as soon as possible to reserve your spot (one ticket per person). If you can’t attend, don’t worry, the event will also be streamed live on the Campus Community Committee’s website. This event is part of a Lunch and Learn series presented by the Campus Community Committee, which is working to bring the McGill community together through activities and helping Campaign McGill achieve its ambitious $750-million fundraising goal.

URL:

http://www.alumni.mcgill.ca/event/?id=NzYxMQ%3D%3D

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Gil Troy: North American Politics on McGill’s Centre Stage

North American Politics on McGill’s Centre Stage

Cross-border relations 

We’ve already talked about Canada’s, and particularly McGill’s, special interest in that big country to the south. But as far as recurring topics go, cross-border politics takes the cake.

This month’s campus events don’t exactly buck the trend. Two events in particular will close out the month with some serious, and star-studded, discussions about U.S.-Canada relations.

Kind of a big deal 

The first, and decidedly more glamorous, event is a two-day conference held in the swanky Hotel Omni Mont-Royal, but flying under the McGill flag. The event, entitled ‘Canada and the United States: Conversations & Relations’, seems like old hat at first glance but a quick peek at the guest list certainly suggests otherwise. Scheduled to attend the event are Brian Mulroney, former Prime Minister of Canada, the current Governor General of Canada David Johnston (a McGill head back in the 1990s), Quebec Premier Jean Charest, and acting Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, among a gaggle of other ambassadors, academics and career politicians. The format of the conferenace should please lecture-weary undergrads, as the organizers have opted for informal, moderator-led, conversations in lieu of the traditional podium and PowerPoint format. How many McGill students will actually be able to get in the doors is another question all-together. Registration has already been closed, and the majority of students that attend have probably been hand-picked from the department that is hosting the event, The McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. In any case, the entire event will be web cast live here. Unfortunately, technology hasn’t advanced enough to have the cocktail portion of the event transmitted via the web. One day. For now, students can watch some major players in regional politics talk about the challenges of sharing the North American continent from the safety of their own room. Just don’t try to attend if you haven’t been invited, security will be tight.

Sizing up the many faces of Mr. Obama 

The other event focusing on US-Canada relations will keep the red carpet in storage and is decidedly more student-friendly. Gil Troy, McGill history professor and Queens, New York native will be hosting a lunch-time conference entilted ‘Obama at the Midterm’ on March 28th in the Leacock building’s room 232. The conference promises to be a non-partisan look at the challenges, choices and expectations facing U.S. president Barack Obama as he wades into the second half of his first term with the specter of a presidential re-election campaign looming. With American unemployment hovering near %10, U.S. led strikes launched against the Libyan regime, and a country-wide budget crisis in the news, there should be plenty to talk about. Although not quite up to snuff with the President’s, Troy’s resume is impressive, with a long list of book and article publications attached to his name. Registration for the event is required, but if you can’t make it the entire event will be streamed live for free. Either way, political junkies shouldn’t miss Troy’s talk.

Canada and the United States: Conversations and Relations

March 24th, 25^th

Hotel Omni Mont-Royal (1050 Sherbrooke St. West)

REGISTRATION CLOSED

Lunch and Learn with Gil Troy: Obama at Midterm

March 28^th: 12:30pm

Room 232, Leacock Building

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Gil Troy: Canada Focuses More On The U.S. Than The Reverse

Source: VPR, 3-22-11

From Vermont Edition: Getting Along: Canadian-U.S. Relations

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AP/The Canadian Press, Sean Kilpatrick
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, left, shakes hands with United States President Barack Obama after taking part in a joint press conference in February in Washington, D.C.

According to McGill University Professor Gil Troy, the U.S. is a tone setter for pop culture and political culture and Canada can get caught up in the wake of this colossus. But Americans tend to look at Canada as “the nice nation next door” with some interesting little idiosyncrasies.

David Biette, director of the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center, says that U.S. officials pay little mind to Canada because the relationship between the two countries just “works.”

Troy and Biette will be moderating a conference this week at McGill University looking at the relationship between Canada and the United States.

Click Listen to hear Jane Lindholm’s interview with Gil Troy and David Biette.

Getting Along: Canadian-U.S. Relations

Tuesday, 03/22/11 Noon and 7pm

AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano

Canada and the United States tend to agree on most everything. But Canada has taken a different tack on wars in Iraq and Vietnam. And there are also differences of opinion on trade and energy.

So is it a perfect marriage between the two countries separated by the 49th Parallel? A conference convenes in Montreal this week to answer the question. We hear from McGill University Professor Gil Troy and David Biette, director of the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center, on what Canadians really think about their southern neighbors.

Let us know what you’ve observed about the relationship between these two countries and if there are any issues on the horizon that could alter it. Post your comments or questions here or email them to Vermontedition@vpr.net.

Plus, Montreal’s charter calls it “a French-speaking city,” but a recent survey conducted by the Association of Canadian Studies found that 81% of Quebecers thinks it’s bilingual. We hear from those living in Montreal about what they think.

And, VPR’s Bob Kinzel provides an update on what’s going on in the State House during this 71st biennial session of the Legislature.

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Gil Troy Quoted in Globe & Mail: “One night of civility won’t change 200 years of hostility”

Source: The Globe & Mail, 1-25-11

…History suggests Abraham Lincoln’s faith in “the better angels of our nature” has been a fleeting sentiment in American politics. Indeed, his 1861 inaugural appeal to secessionists preceded by only five weeks the outbreak of the paradoxically named Civil War.

Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, with its “self-evident” truths, among them the belief that all men are created equal. Yet, while campaigning for president in 1800, his political pamphlets derided John Adams as “having a hideous hermaphroditical character.”

“Politics could get very raw and tough in those days,” McGill University history professor Gil Troy explained in an interview. But incivility in American politics “has waxed and waned.”

The framers of the U.S. Constitution understood human nature. They wanted to prevent American society from degenerating into rigid, ideologically driven factions – and their potential for destructive conflict. They designed a political system to favour consensus over confrontation.

“They hoped there would be enough countervailing forces and conflicting loyalties, and enough of a sense of a common cause and big-picture nationalism, that there wouldn’t be these permanent parties,” Prof. Troy said.

Instead, rabid partisanship is as much a pillar of American politics as the separation of powers. And it is no coincidence that the current language of political debate rivals in vitriol the worst periods of past two centuries.

“What’s going on in our politics is a reflection of what’s going on in our culture,” Prof. Troy, an American native, added. “We’re in a phase in our history where our culture’s become extremely vulgar. The blogosphere is extremely shrill.”…

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Gil Troy Quoted in NYT: “Let Obama’s Reagan Revolution Begin”

FRANK RICH: Let Obama’s Reagan Revolution Begin:

Source: NYT, 1-8-11

…The present-day radicals donning Reagan drag, led by Sarah Palin, seem not to know, as Cannon writes, that their hero lurched “from excessive tax cuts to corrective tax increases disguised as tax reform” and “submitted eight unbalanced budgets to Congress in succession.” Reagan made no promise whatsoever of a balanced budget in the document that codified Reaganomics, his White House’s 281-page message to Congress in February 1981. The historian Gil Troy has calculated that spending on entitlement programs more than doubled on Reagan’s watch. America slid into debtor-nation status, and Americans “went from owing 16 cents for every dollar in national income in 1981” to owing 44 cents per dollar in 1988….

At this point the speed of our own halting recovery is not in the president’s hands. The ability to remake his style of leadership still is. But that makeover can come only from him, not from old Clinton hands in a reshuffled West Wing. Without it, the miracle of his Christmas resurrection could be over by Easter…. -

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Gil Troy Quoted in Newsweek: Obama’s Choice of Daley Fits Mold for Embattled Presidents

Obama’s Choice of Daley Fits Mold for Embattled Presidents

Bringing in an outside critic to run his operation might help change the narrative of the presidency.

by Ben Adler, Newsweek, 1-6-11

J. Scott Applewhite / APPresident Obama listens as new Chief of Staff William Daley makes a statement in the East Room of the White House.

Bill Daley, whom President Obama has just named to be his new chief of staff, is a banker, former Commerce secretary under Bill Clinton, and the brother and son of Chicago mayors. This may sound like a fairly typical Obama appointment, but it is actually a significant shift. Daley, a centrist, has been publicly critical of the direction of the Democratic Party under Obama. In 2009 he wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post warning Democrats, “Either we plot a more moderate, centrist course or risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come.” Last year he told The New York Times that the White House had “miscalculated” on health-care reform. “The election of ’08 sent a message that after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left—not left.” And when former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel asked Daley, the Midwest chairman of JPMorgan, to lend his support to financial regulations, which would have been a public-relations coup for the administration, Daley declined, saying he opposed the proposal.

Sure, Obama wants an emissary from the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party in a core strategic role. But Daley’s past harsh words could also help the ailing president. To bring in an external critic as chief of staff is an unusual move, but it is not unprecedented. Recent history shows that presidents have made such pivots at similar junctures, when they were politically embattled and seeking to recapture the political center or change the narrative of their presidency.

In 1987 Ronald Reagan replaced his chief of staff, Donald Regan, who had taken a lot of blame for the administration’s embarrassing Iran-contra scandal. Reagan brought in Howard Baker, the Republican Senate leader from Tennessee, a relative moderate. (Years earlier he had called Reagan’s supply-side tax policy “a riverboat gamble.”) “He reflected the more moderate wing of the GOP that felt Reagan had gone too far in his budgetary policies that were busting the deficit,” Julian Zelizer, an expert on American political history and professor at Princeton University, wrote in an email. “In this case, the criticism [Baker had made of Reagan’s policies] was in some ways a positive for his later appointment as chief of staff since it signaled that Reagan had moderated his views by bringing in someone who held different perspectives into his inner circle.”

Another analogy is Erskine Bowles, whom Bill Clinton tapped as chief of staff in 1997 during his period of “triangulation,” after the Democrats had suffered their massive defeat in the 1994 midterms, similar to what they endured this past November. Bowles brought many of the same qualities to the job that Daley will. “Clinton was turning to someone who was corporate, pragmatic, centrist—to signal his move to the center, and actually get there effectively,” says Gil Troy, an expert on the American presidency who teaches history at McGill University.
Of course, President Obama emphasized Daley’s experience rather than ideological convictions in announcing his appointment. In that light, the historical analogy is Ronald Reagan’s choice of James Baker as his first chief of staff in 1981. Baker had worked for President Gerald Ford in his bitter primary battle against Reagan in 1976 and had managed the campaign of Reagan’s primary rival, George H.W. Bush, in 1980. Baker could be said to come from the mainstream establishment wing of the party relative to Reagan’s conservative insurgency. But Reagan was not perceived as choosing Baker to signal an ideological shift, but just to take advantage of his managerial skills and political savvy. To the extent that President Obama’s perpetually grumpy liberal base perceives Daley’s appointment as fitting that mold, rather than as a directional pivot, it may dampen their criticism. Liberal standard-bearer Howard Dean, for example, praised Daley even while acknowledging their ideological differences.

While the progressive grassroots organization MoveOn.org has criticized the selection of Daley, liberal backlash has so far not been as dramatic as one might expect. Robert Kuttner, a fellow at Demos, a liberal think tank, and coeditor of The American Prospect magazine, who has frequently criticized the administration from the left, suggests that Obama may get a partial pass simply because liberals want to pick their battles. “I suspect that progressives are saving their fire for issues where they think they can actually have some influence, such as pressing Obama not to save on needlessly cutting Social Security benefits,” he told NEWSWEEK.

It is also possible that Daley’s selection will be packaged with choices that mollify liberals, since Larry Summers, another Wall Street–friendly centrist, just left his role as head of the National Economic Council. “Maybe appointing Daley frees up Larry Summers’s job for someone not Wall Street–connected, like Gene Sperling,” suggests Stephen Hess, a senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution who served in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations. (Sperling, the leading candidate for NEC chair, actually did some consulting for Goldman Sachs, but he is considered more liberal than Summers and most other potential replacements.)

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs tried to split the difference between highlighting and downplaying an ideological shift by telling NBC’s Chuck Todd on Thursday morning that Daley would be “new blood” and a “new voice.”

Of course, to Obama’s critics on the left and fans in the center, he has always been a cautious moderate anyway. “Daley is a Democratic centrist who believes that the center is where his party can thrive and win,” says Chester Pach, a history professor at Ohio University who has written histories of the Nixon, Reagan, and Lyndon Johnson presidencies. “It seems as if Obama has similar views. Maybe he’s come to that conclusion only since Nov. 2.”

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Gil Troy Quoted “Are Canadian politics hot enough to brew U.S.-style Tea Party?”

Canada.com, 11-5-10

….Gil Troy, an American who teaches U.S. political history at McGill University in Montreal, cautions that however passionate Canada’s Tea Party wannabes might be, their ideals are unlikely to ignite the same fires in this country as in the U.S.

For one thing, Canada’s economy is in far better shape. Troy says the wreckage in the U.S. — high unemployment, shuttered factories, foreclosed homes — is the real reason behind the Tea Party’s success this year.

“Their victories are the result of economic distress, and the fear that there’s something seriously wrong with the country,” says Troy. “If we take out the recession, if we take out the sense that there’s serious dysfunction going on, would there be the same kind of phenomenon? I don’t think so.”…

Troy says not only is that divide less acute in Canada, but that political discourse here remains far more civil. Canadian debate has not yet been hijacked by what he calls the “toxic media culture and the toxic blogosphere” that feed the Tea Party’s populist anger.

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Lecture and Reception with Gil Troy (McGill Toronto alumni branch)

Lecture and Reception with Gil Troy (Toronto alumni branch)

Import event:
iCalendar General information:

Description:		Assessing the Professorial President  On Tuesday, October 19, join us for another thought-provoking McGill on the Move lecture. As midterm elections loom in the United States, President Barack Obama faces a complex array of challenges, choices and expectations regarding the economy, the war in Iraq, and religious rights and freedoms in the U.S. In his talk “Obama: The Professorial President in the Time of Midterms,” Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill, will assess the performance, thus far, of a president who has faced unprecedented pressures at home and abroad. A native of Queens, New York, Gil Troy is also the visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and the author of several books, including “Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s” and “Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady.” He comments frequently about the American presidency on television and radio, and has published articles in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and USA Weekend. We look forward to seeing you at what is sure to prove a fascinating lecture.
Date/Time:		Tuesday, October 19, 2010 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM
Location(s):		Badminton Racket Club, 25 St. Clair Avenue West Toronto, Ontario CANADA
RSVP/Pre-Register:		September 6, 2010 to October 19, 2010
Admissions:		General $15.00 CAD includes light hors d’oeuvres; cash bar # of tickets  in basket
Contact:		• Event Registrar Phone: 1-800-567-5175 x 7684, Email: event.registration@mcgill.ca

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Gil Troy Quoted in The Canadian Press: Summertime is living easy for Canada’s PMs

Source: The Canadian Press, 7-6-10

…Where presidents vacation is part of their story, said Gil Troy, a professor of American history at McGill University in Montreal.

Most U.S. presidents have a private summer home they use for vacation. George W. Bush had both his ranch in Texas and a home in Maine. The Kennedys had the famous Hyannis Port.

“There are definite dynamics connected to vacationing,” Troy said.

“Ronald Reagan was the oldest man ever elected president and he had to show that he was vacationing, not doddering.”…

But family dynamics help some leaders, says Troy.

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Gil Troy Interview with Macleans: On the Gores’ breakup, the Clintons’ survival, and the marital toll of a lost election

On the Gores’ breakup, the Clintons’ survival, and the marital toll of a lost election

Presidential expert Gil Troy in conversation with Kate Fillion

by Kate Fillion, Macleans, Wednesday, June 16, 2010 10:00am

Yoray Liberman/Getty Images

A professor of history at McGill and a visiting scholar affiliated with the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, Gil Troy is the author of several books on the U.S. presidency, including an examination of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as first lady and Mr. and Mrs. President, a study of presidential marriages in the modern era.

Q: Why are people shocked that Al and Tipper Gore are separating?
A: People want to believe in marriage, and the Gore marriage was part of the national furniture. Starting in the mid-1980s, with Tipper’s involvement in the movement promoting warning labels for records [with explicit and violent lyrics], the Gores set themselves up as an iconic couple representing family values—significantly, from the left. They were saying, “Republicans do not have a mono­poly on faith, flag and family.” Especially during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Gores emerged as the counter to the Clintons’ famously dysfunctional marriage, culminating in 2000 at the Democratic National Convention with the famous smooch.

Q: What do you make of that kiss?
A: Al Gore’s line was, “I wasn’t trying to send a message to the American people, I was trying to send a message to Tipper.” But it was very much a message to the American people. Everybody was joking about how wooden he was, and the issue on the table was: is he a full-blown personality or a Gore-bot? That prolonged kiss was the easiest, most dramatic way to respond. It got people talking, and telegraphed a disdain for Bill Clinton’s behaviour while reinforcing this narrative that the Gores were the Democrats who would not embarrass you.

Q: Well, Tipper looked pretty alarmed.
A: Here you are on national television, glaring lights, blaring music—it’s not necessarily the most romantic of settings.

Q: In this cynical age, why would people fall for such obvious political stagecraft?
A: Canadians do this less, but all of us in modern, celebrity-oriented democracies tend to project onto our leaders some dimensions of our lives and dilemmas. In general, Americans are torn between wanting to progress and still wanting something old-fashioned. That’s how Al and Tipper Gore became the soothing background music in this cacopho­nous age: see, there are some couples and families that still work. Marriage, whether you’re getting married in Vegas with an Elvis impersonator or in front of 400 people in the most traditional Catholic ceremony, is a leap of faith. To have totems is reassuring, and the Gores set themselves up as totems.

Q: Why did they continue doing that, with the publication of Joined at the Heart, even after Tipper ruled out her own Senate run in 2002?
A: It makes sense in modern American celebrity culture to cash in on your identity, and the central signifier of the Gores’ lives was their togetherness. It was very much a baby-boomer togetherness, not an Ozzie and Harriet we-never-fight togetherness. It was, “We’re different: he’s a bit of a stiff, and I’ve had some emotional ups and downs.” They’ve always competed with the Clintons in the popular imagination as contrasting symbols of their generation. The Gores were preaching “it’s hip to be square” while the Clintons seemed buffeted by the turbulence of the sexual revolution, which is one of the baby boomers’ signature cultural contributions. It’s the irony of ironies that the Clintons are still together while the Gores are splitting, because, of course, divorce is an iconic baby-boomer act.

Q: Why has the Clintons’ marriage endured?
A: I think it has to do with the bar of history. When you become president, in the same way that your family is suddenly the first family and you don’t just work in an office but in the Oval Office, you become extremely aware of the fact that there’s going to be a presidential library, there’s monumentalism about the whole experience, and I think it becomes that much harder to divorce. Especially with the Clintons, where people were constantly saying, “The marriage is a sham,” there’s hesitation to give their enemies any satisfaction. Plus, there’s a bond there.

Q: It’s not just a political alliance?
A: I was never part of that school of thought. Their commitment to Chelsea kept them together; they very rarely rolled her out as a political prop, they protected her to an extraordinary degree. And throughout all the ups and downs, Bill Clinton always made it clear Hillary was the smartest woman he’d ever met and had a kind of discipline he lacked, and she often talked about his tremendous people skills, which she lacked. They worked together, they fed off each other and built off each other. Those are parts of the recipe that make for a marriage.

Q: Why does campaigning put such a strain on a marriage?
A: It’s a combination of the hellishness of being apart and the hellishness when you’re together. The hellishness of being apart is Betty Ford counting that when Gerald Ford was House minority leader, he was away from home 256 days in a year so she was on call 24 hours, seven days a week for their kids. Even when the couple is together, there’s a certain apartness; the drug of public adulation makes it difficult [for the candidate] to come down. It’s not a whole heck of a lot of fun being in a room where all eyes are on your spouse, you’re the prop, and your mandate is a variation of the Hippocratic oath: do no harm. And this guy that you married 25 years ago when you were just students, there are ego issues—and simply the insanity of the campaign trail, the late nights, the jumping from hotel to motel. But the White House is a surprisingly healing place for a marriage.

Q: How?
A: The couple is finally living above the store, as they say. There’s less travel, they’re entertaining more, so she’s no longer just a prop. Also, you’re in this glamorous mansion with servants galore—there’s a fairy-tale nature to the existence. The other thing that heals presidential marriages, and probably to some extent vice-presidential ones, is that it’s hard when you’re president to get straight advice, especially if it’s critical. Even some of your closest friends clam up. Nancy Reagan reported that during the Iran-Contra scandal, she asked Robert Strauss, a Democrat and one of the wise men of Washington, to explain to her husband how serious the issue was. But as soon as Strauss sat down he got all “Mr. President” and couldn’t deliver the message. So she had to do it. Presidents love the adulation, but also understand the need to be grounded, and the spouse is often the conduit to reality. It’s a key bond.

Q: So if you go through the hell of campaigning and then lose, like Gore, you don’t get that healing opportunity?
A: It was a devastating public blow. Al Gore was raised for the presidency, and they came so close to getting the White House.

Q: Was it crushing for her, too, after decades as the Good Wife?
A: Absolutely. The job of first lady is alluring because you do have a certain kind of power, you can make a difference in people’s lives. You bring a lot of political capital to the table as the spouse, through the entertaining, through creating the narrative. We don’t really know what goes on even in our best friends’ marriages, so we don’t know to what extent did she blame him for the loss in 2000? Did she think he could’ve campaigned more effectively? We have no idea.

Q: Would she have grounds for blaming him?
A: It wasn’t just that forces beyond Al Gore’s control stole the election. Al Gore lost it. Two things were going on: the press was very hard on him, and his campaign was a nightmare—poorly planned, poorly run. There were all kinds of ridiculous things that came out, like he was thinking of dressing more in brown, because it’s an earth colour. How did we even hear about that? There was competition among Gore’s campaign staff, and also a failure to lead on his part. Part of the reason he didn’t run in 2004 is that a lot of his fundraisers just wouldn’t work with him again.

Q: What is it like to have to leave your home, Washington, after a loss like that?
A: Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter wrote very powerfully about how devastating it was to be repudiated by the American people [in 1980], especially after they had such an amazing run in 1976, and to come home to Plains and think, “Now what?” There’s also the comedown, which the Gores would’ve experienced after eight years of having staff at their beck and call. It’s not just that you’re not in the White House but that all these goodies you’ve become accustomed to disappear. Harry Truman talked about coming home after his time in the White House and having to drag his own luggage, though he was the kind of person who enjoyed it. But few of us enjoy going backwards.

Q: Has any other losing candidate for the presidency reinvented himself as Gore did?
A: No. He hit the celebrity trifecta: bestselling book, Nobel prize, Academy Award. He’s had political impact, cultural impact, international impact—which takes us back to why their separation is generating water-cooler conversations. The Gores remained in the popular mind; they didn’t fade away. But maybe, like Pat Nixon, Tipper had had enough. Once they left the White House, Pat Nixon said, “You can do what you want, but I’ve paid my dues and I’m not going to be a public woman anymore, no more speeches.”

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Gil Troy Quoted in New York Times on Al & Tipper Gore Separation

Assumptions Go Asunder as Gores Split

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Al Gore with his wife, Tipper, in 2007.

By MARK LEIBOVICH, NYT, 6-1-2010

…Al and Tipper Gore’s announcement Tuesday that they would be separating after 40 years together underscores, yet again, a basic truism about any marriage, particularly political ones: You just never know. The point is made as vividly by the fraught political partnerships that remain intact — the Spitzers, the Clintons — as those that do not.Still, when the Gores circulated a joint e-mail message to friends announcing that “after a great deal of thought and discussion, we have decided to separate,” the news landed with some shock.

“We obviously have learned that the public is not always private and the private is not always public,” said Gil Troy, who teaches American history at McGill University in Montreal and has written about political marriages. “But you want to believe that there are certain marriages that will last. And the Gore marriage seemed to have become part of the national furniture in the best of ways.”…

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A version of this article appeared in print on June 2, 2010, on page A14 of the New York edition

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Gil Troy on “Take 5″

Take 5 Complete Edition 02/02/10

CIUT 89.5 FM

McGill History Professor Gil Troy on Barack Obama’s first year as POTUS…

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BOOK REVIEW: Tear down this idea– Review of Gil Troy’s “The Reagan Revolution”

The Washington Times, 1-14-10

COMMUNISM: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION

By Leslie Holmes

Oxford University Press, $11.95, 144 pages

THE SOVIET UNION: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION

By Stephen Lovell

Oxford University Press, $11.95, 144 pages

THE REAGAN REVOLUTION: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION

By Gil Troy

Oxford University Press, $11.95, 168 pages

Reviewed by Jeremy Lott

“This is a book,” writes University of Melbourne political scientist Leslie Holmes, “about a dream … that for too many became a nightmare.”

The book is “Communism: A Very Short Introduction,” and it is one of three related volumes released recently as part of Oxford University Press’ invaluable, sprawling Very Short Introduction series. The other two Very Short Introductions that we will consider are “The Soviet Union,” by Kings College reader Stephen Lovell, and “The Reagan Revolution,” by McGill University historian Gil Troy. These three authors help document the nightmare that was communism and how most of the world finally managed to jolt itself awake from it.

“The overwhelming majority of states that were Communist as recently as the late 1980s have now moved on,” explains Mr. Holmes, former president of the International Council for Central and East European Studies. “While, formally, five Communist states remain, the two successful ones (China and Vietnam) are so largely because they have jettisoned many of the original basic tenets of communism and are in some important areas – notably the economy – already post communist.”

Of the other three holdouts, Laos is a “backwater” that is beginning a transition to capitalism, North Korea is an isolated kingdom, and Cuba is trying to hold back American influence, with a little help from U.S. sanctions. In another decade or so, it’s possible that the few remaining nations will not even bother to describe themselves as communist.

The near total collapse of communism is a really remarkable thing, given how ascendant world communism looked for so long. From the Russian Revolution of 1917 to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1978, the reds were on a roll. Mr. Holmes reminds us, “By the 1970s, more than a third of the world’s population lived in a Communist system.”

In 1989, the same year the Berlin Wall was torn down, the same year Ronald Reagan boldly declared “the Cold War is over,” Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson wrote in the latest edition of his popular textbook “Economics” that the “Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.” Mr. Lovell provides the perfect rebuttal to that sort of blinkered theorizing in his survey of the Soviet Union: “The Soviet order ended as it had started: with food queues.”

There aren’t many remaining out-and-out apologists for communism left, but some thinkers have offered creative arguments for why it failed. Karl Marx theorized that communism was the stage that an economy could reach only after capitalism, but the places that communism really took root – Russia, China, Cambodia, etc. – were not industrialized, and the communist regimes felt they had to sacrifice a great deal of their citizens’ blood, sweat and foolish bourgeoisie dreams to secure a better proletarian future.

The result was buckets of blood – senseless death on a massive scale. Perhaps 100 million people were killed by communist governments in the 20th century, and, no, that’s not counting most wars. Mr. Lovell says his task is to “characterize the Soviet Union, not pass sentence on it,” but any accurate characterization will invite angry condemnation.

Forget, for a moment, the purges, the gulag, the show trials and most other state-sponsored forms of violence. Even when the communists weren’t actively trying to kill people, they still often managed it through dogmatic determination and malign neglect.

The efforts to collectivize agriculture brought famines, killing millions of innocent people. This is illustrated by one haunting photo in Mr. Lovell’s book, captioned “A starvation victim in Kiev, November 1932.” In the picture, one man lies on his back on the sidewalk while half a dozen people mill around him. No one looks at him or gives any indication that he is anything other than a part of the landscape. People chat. A father takes his son’s hand and shuffles him away. Nothing can be done about it, so the people avert their gaze.

Mr. Lovell and Mr. Holmes look more at communism’s interior deterioration but do say that outside agents hastened its demise. Mr. Holmes writes that “by the beginning of the 1980, leading Western nations had a new generation of much tougher-minded anti-communist leaders, notably Margaret Thatcher in the UK (1979) and Ronald Reagan in the USA (1980). The tide was about to turn, and the days of Communist power’s expansion were over.”

Mr. Troy does a good job showing the part Ronald Reagan’s statesmanship played in hastening communism’s end in the Soviet Union and its satellite states. President Reagan’s religious upbringing and his reading of free-market economists played a role, as did his anti-communist credentials. He knew that communism had gotten human nature dead wrong and that a command economy couldn’t work; thus he knew where the Soviet Union was vulnerable.

The surprising thing, to many of President Reagan’s critics, is that he showed how vulnerable he could be as well. “[W]hile recovering from John Hinckley’s bullet,” Mr. Troy reminds us, “Reagan wrote a surprisingly warm letter to soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev” and he would reach out to Mikhail Gorbachev, which helped to make the Soviet Union’s dissolution relatively bloodless. He wanted world peace and – for one all-too-brief moment – he got it.

Jeremy Lott is editor of Capital Research Center’s Labor Watch newsletter and author of “The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency” (Thomas Nelson, 2007).

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Gil Troy “The bin Laden decade”

National Post, 12-29-09

“America went into the decade as the great victor from the Cold War. There was a combination of self-righteousness and a sense of power. Both of those have been lost,” says Gil Troy, a history professor at McGill University.

“The two biggest traumas of the decade – 9/11 and the economic meltdown – hit America very personally, where it hurts. You have a country that has been knocked down a peg or two.”

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