History

Salon spoke to Robin over the phone from Brooklyn, N.Y., about the triumph of the American conservative movement, the meaning of Sarah Palin and Obama's real political slant.

You end the book with a statement that the modern conservative movement has successfully defeated the left. Why do you say that?

Social conservatism mainly came about in response to, broadly speaking, the labor question. Beginning in the 1880s, the working classes started making democratic claims about the reform of the workplace, and many of the distinctive things we associate with conservatism come out of that experience. It was a roughly 100-year battle, and to all intents and purposes, they have won that battle.

When you have a president who celebrates the market; who thinks of the State as maybe necessary, but certainly not the first order of business; who believes that the businessman is the driving engine of the economy, there’s just really no question. And if you want to break it down on policy grounds, look at the level of unionization. Look at the level of wealth inequality. All of those indices that we are always talking about, conservatism has won.

On civil rights, they weren’t able to beat back the fundamental challenge of the civil rights movement, but they certainly were able to beat the movement's second wave and  really bring it to a standstill. Likewise with the women’s movement. Wage inequality is still quite large, and if you do a survey on all abortion rights and reproductive rights state-by-state, they are clearly winning that battle. They haven’t been able to overturn Roe v. Wade, but, effectively in many states, you just don’t have access to an abortion. Though I think, on a whole wide array, the one area where they probably have lost is on gay rights.

I was going to mention that. Why do you think that is?

I don’t have a good answer to that. Partially, I think they were caught off guard. I mean, gay rights was a very late arrival to the '60s emancipation movement. It gets started in the '70s but it really becomes a real force in the '80s and the '90s, and I think it’s partially a testimony to the gay rights movement. They completely reinvented a whole repertoire of social movement activity and were daring and defiant. But who knows? It’s still very early. The fact is, you still only have gay marriage in, what, five or six states.

Which is funny because it seems that gay marriage or gay rights seemed like such a safe wedge issue by conservatives just a few years ago, and now it doesn’t seem to have all that much power anymore.

Conservatism is always a response to many things, but particularly to challenges to hierarchy and the private domain. The gay rights movement has been just so successful in pressing that. You know, gay men and women coming out to their own parents, to their families, their co-workers and neighbors. I just think it was such massive onslaught. I think they really didn’t know how to deal with it.

You also argue that the defeat of the left is a mixed blessing. Why?

Going back to the fundamentals: If conservatism is a reactionary movement, once it has succeeded in its project of beating back the left, it really has nowhere to go. You see this increasingly amongst more thoughtful conservatives -- a real concern that conservative ideas are not what they used to be, that they don’t have the same heterodox, innovative flavor that they in the ’50s and ‘60s and ‘70s. That’s because of their success. I think this is where commentators really get themselves turned upside down where they think the reason conservatism is failing is because its ideas are failing. That gets it complete backward. Its ideas are failing because it was so successful.

How closely do you think the Tea Party represents true conservatism?

I think the Tea Party is the fulfillment of modern conservatism. There are an awful lot of commentators both on the left and the right who make the accusation that the Tea Party is a betrayal of conservatism, in the same way in the 1980s there was a fair number of commentators who said Ronald Reagan is a betrayal of conservatism and in the 1960s there was a fair number that said Bill Buckley, Barry Goldwater were. There's always this earlier, more pristine conservatism someone is going to point to and say Buckley, Goldwater, Reagan, Palin, the Tea Party betrayed.

But if you go back to the original source, Edmund Burke, the things people accuse the Tea Party of being -- ideological fanatics, unrealistic, Utopian, fundamentalist -- are built into the DNA of the conservative movement. It has been the M.O. of conservatism from the very beginning, and you see it time and time and again, and it's just so amusing to see people argue that Ann Coulter is [more shrill] than Bill Buckley. Go back and read Bill Buckley. He was the original Ann Coulter.

A lot of people I know talk about how the political discourse on the right is more coarse and reactionary than it's ever been. What has changed?

Conservatism arises in reaction to something, and it oftentimes perceives itself to be the underdog. The welfare state was dominant in the mid-20th century, and so when conservatism was reacting to that, it was a movement that was by definition constrained. But right now, the Tea Party is not constrained. You have an extraordinarily weak Democratic Party. This is a president and a party who were handed an opportunity that has not been seen in generations. And yet the Republican Party, a minority party that was absolutely repudiated at the polls, managed to turn this into a victory. I don't think the DNA has changed, but I think its external environment has changed, and that's why you're seeing this kind of expression of its inner tendencies. Now you're seeing what conservatism looks like when it has won.

Since the 2010 midterm elections, the most visible efforts of the GOP have focused on women's and employee rights. Why do you think that is?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton famously asked why it is that these guys were so resistant to the franchise to women in the public realm. She argued it's because they didn't want to give up power in the home and I think she was absolutely right. There's something about the intimacy of control in the private realm -- the home and the workplace -- that has always been central to conservatism. After the 2010 elections the first thing they did was to go after labor rights, and not just in Wisconsin. Something like the order of 35 states have some version of the Wisconsin plan. The Times just had a piece on the onslaught on reproductive rights, also in about 35 states.

The left as a whole segregates the issue of reproductive rights as if it's separate. But it is absolutely critical and central to the conservative project because it is about man's control over women in the home. Go back to the French revolution and Louis de Bonald, who is one of the great theoreticians of the counterrevolution -- he was obsessed with the liberalization of divorce because he saw a connection between the emancipation in the family and of women and the whole revolutionary project.

Conservatism has been associated with manliness or manly pursuits. How successfully do you think Palin and Bachmann have changed that?

I think they are. But it's not as much about gender politics as it is about the politics of victimology. It's really stunning if you look at the history of the great conservative theoreticians and politicians -- Burke, Disraeli, Andrew Carnegie to some degree at the turn of the century, and then Francis Fukuyama, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz -- it's always been a movement to a remarkable degree led or theorized by outsiders. And there's an awful lot of reasons for that, but outsiders have been the real source of metabolism within the conservative movement. Sarah Palin portrays herself as the ultimate outsider. She's a woman in a man's world, and she's from a state that's literally outside of the 48 contiguous states. It's just absolutely critical that the movement feed off these outsiders to reenergize itself.

Sarah Palin recently made a few comments praised by some people on the left, like Ralph Nader, arguing that there's a permanent political class that's detached from the will of the people. Is that actually a betrayal of conservatism?

No. It's just bullshit. There's a distinction between democratic and populist and we should never, ever conflate them. Just because Sarah Palin affects that style and rhetoric by no means makes her democratic, and remember -- and Nader knows this more than anyone else -- the preeminent sphere of inegalitarian non-democratic practices is not the state. It is in the marketplace, and she wants to enhance the power of employers to wield their ever more autocratic will.

To what extent do you think Obama embodies conservative ideas?

I don't really know what's in the heart of hearts of this man. He seems to be extraordinarily impressed by the credentials of elites, especially Wall Street elites, but more important than him, and his biography or his ideology or his persona, is that he's part of a party that has been completely divested of its progressive organizational infrastructure, the labor movement in particular, but also civil rights. I just don't see that he's a conservative, but I would certainly say he is a symptom of the power of conservatism in the United States.

Do you think we at least think of America as less of an empire?

Well, you certainly don't see the kind of full-throated imperial rhetoric that you saw under Bush, which doesn’t mean the violence isn't happening, but it's not celebrated. There's an extraordinary amount of violence that the United State is still perpetrating that goes unremarked and is unremarkable to our culture and that in itself I think is a symptom of some kind of imperial presence. 

Whether they were prompted by insanity or simple desperation in the face of his looming, almost inevitable execution, there was element of truth in Guiteau's ravings. In "Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President," Candice Millard reconstructs the events leading up to and following Garfield's assassination. The murder serves as a lens through which to examine Garfield's life, Guiteau's peripatetic existence, the fortunes of the Republican Party, the political spoils system, the role of scientific invention, and the state of the American medical profession. By keeping a tight hold on her narrative strands, Millard crafts a popular history rich with detail and emotion.

One of the pleasures of the book is the chance to learn more about Garfield, who appears as a fully realized historical figure instead of a trivia answer. A child of a poor family, he worked as a canal driver before attending college at Ohio's Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. During the Civil War, Garfield's leadership of Ohio's 42nd Regiment yielded a bloody victory over Confederate forces at the Battle of Middle Creek, securing Kentucky's allegiance to the Union. Elected to Congress as a Republican, Garfield served nine terms in the House, developing a reputation for oratory and a willingness to dig into financial issues. Drafted to stand for president against his wishes, Garfield entered the White House in 1881 with more than a bit of reluctance.

Unlike Garfield, Guiteau never found his calling. An odd little man, he was by turns a lawyer, a swindler, and a traveling evangelist whose constant movement from city to city made it possible for him to escape the consequences of unpaid bills and delusional behavior. As his fortunes declined, so did his mental state. Having delivered a short speech at a "small gathering" in New York endorsing Garfield's candidacy, Guiteau came to believe that he had orchestrated Garfield's victory. Guiteau spent weeks loitering in the waiting rooms of the White House and State Department, intent on securing an ambassadorship to Vienna or Paris. When the appointment didn't materialize, Guiteau was subject to a divine revelation that came "like a flash" while he lay in bed: God commanded him to kill the ungrateful president.

His mind quickly taken over by this obsession, Guiteau borrowed some money, bought a pistol at a sporting goods store, and commenced stalking the president, an activity that Millard shows to have been shockingly easy, even in a city that had witnessed Lincoln's shooting less than two decades prior. After some false starts, the assassin waited for Garfield in a Washington, D.C., train station on July 2, 1881, and shot him twice in the back. Seized by the crowd, Guiteau gave himself up to the police and asked them to deliver a letter to Gen. Sherman. He expected in short order to be proclaimed a hero.

Millard devotes most of the second half of the book to a revealing chronicle of Garfield's treatment after the attack, and its consequences. American medicine in the 1880s had not yet embraced Joseph Lister's ideas about germs and their role in promoting infection -- indeed, many were mounting a furious counterattack against what they considered a nonsensical foreign innovation. Within minutes of Garfield being shot, dirty fingers were inserted into the wounds to feel for the bullets. Millard shows how contemporary ideas about patient care -- diet, pain management, the cause of infections, wound care and sterilization -- led to Garfield's death two and a half months later. An invention by Alexander Graham Bell, which could detect the presence of metal, might have been able to locate where one of the bullets had lodged, but the doctor overseeing Garfield's care restricted its use out of concern for his own ego. The once-robust Garfield would lose 80 pounds as his body became a collection of pus-filled abscesses brought on by septic poisoning.

Millard's sympathetic portrayal of Garfield leaves the reader wondering what might have been had he lived. What kind of president would the bookish man from Ohio have turned out to be? The answers to these counterfactuals are outside the purview of Millard's book, but their seeming inevitability attests to her ability to bring to life the man at the center of her story, and his brief entry into the annals of presidential history.

Outside the South, most cities' murder rates are a multiple of the rates in those same cities sixty years ago -- notwithstanding a large drop in violent crime in the 1990s. Within cities, crime is low in safe neighborhoods but remains a huge problem in dangerous ones, and those dangerous neighborhoods are disproportionately poor and black. Last but not least, we have built a justice system that strikes many of its targets as wildly unjust. The feeling has some evidentiary support: criminal litigation regularly makes awful mistakes, as the frequent DNA-based exonerations of convicted defendants illustrate. Evidently, the criminal justice system is doing none of its jobs well: producing justice, avoiding discrimination, protecting those who most need the law's protection, keeping crime in check while maintaining reasonable limits on criminal punishment.

It was not always so. For much of American history -- again, outside the South -- criminal justice institutions punished sparingly, mostly avoided the worst forms of discrimination, controlled crime effectively, and, for the most part, treated those whom the system targets fairly. The justice system was always flawed, and injustices always happened. Nevertheless, one might fairly say that criminal justice worked. It doesn't anymore.

There are three keys to the system's dysfunction, each of which has deep historical roots but all of which took hold in the last sixty years. First, the rule of law collapsed. To a degree that had not been true in America's past, official discretion rather than legal doctrine or juries' judgments came to define criminal justice outcomes. Second, discrimination against both black suspects and black crime victims grew steadily worse -- oddly, in an age of rising legal protection for civil rights. Today, black drug offenders are punished in great numbers, even as white drug offenders are usually ignored. (As is usually the case with respect to American crime statistics, Latinos fall in between, but generally closer to the white population than to the black one.) At the same time, blacks victimized by violent felonies regularly see violence go unpunished; the story is different in most white neighborhoods. The third trend is the least familiar: a kind of pendulum justice took hold in the twentieth century's second half, as America's justice system first saw a sharp decline in the prison population -- in the midst of a record-setting crime wave -- then saw that population rise steeply. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States had one of the most lenient justice systems in the world. By century's end, that justice system was the harshest in the history of democratic government.

Take these three trends in turn. As drivers on our highways know well, American law often means something other than what it says. Roadside signs define the speed limit, or appear to do so: 65 or 70 miles per hour on well-built highways, 25 or 30 on local roads in residential areas, something in between for local highways and main roads in business districts. But drivers who take those signs seriously are in for a surprise: drive more slowly than the posted speed limit in light traffic and other drivers will race past, often with a few choice words or an upraised middle finger for a greeting. In the United States, posted limits don't define the maximum speed of traffic; they define the minimum speed. So who or what determines the real speed limits, the velocity above which drivers risk traffic tickets or worse? The answer is: whatever police force patrols the relevant road. Law enforcers -- state troopers and local cops -- define the laws they enforce.

That power to define the law on the street allows the police to do two things they otherwise couldn't. First, state troopers can be selectively severe, handing out fines for driving at speeds no higher than most cars on the road. Second, those same state troopers can use traffic stops to investigate other crimes (assuming one can call speeding a crime), stopping cars in order to ask permission to search for illegal drugs. That common practice gave birth to the phrase "racial profiling," as troopers patrolling state highways stopped black drivers in large numbers, ostensibly for violating traffic rules but actually to look for evidence of drug offenses. Both enforcement patterns lead to the same bottom line. Because nearly all drivers violate traffic laws, those laws have ceased to function on the nation's highways and local roads. Too much law amounts to no law at all: when legal doctrine makes everyone an offender, the relevant offenses have no meaning independent of law enforcers' will. The formal rule of law yields the functional rule of official discretion.

So what? Arbitrary enforcement of the nation's traffic laws is hardly a national crisis. Even discriminatory traffic enforcement is a modest problem, given the far more serious forms race discrimination can and does take. Why worry about such small problems? The answer is because the character of traffic enforcement is not so different from the ways in which police officers and prosecutors in many jurisdictions battle more serious crimes. The consequence is a disorderly legal order, and a discriminatory one.

In the 1920s, Prohibition's enforcers imprisoned those who manufactured and sold alcoholic beverages, not those who bought and drank them. Today, prosecutions for selling illegal drugs are unusual in many jurisdictions -- instead, prosecutors charge either simple possession or "possession with intent to distribute," meaning possession of more than a few doses of the relevant drug. Those easily proved drug violations are used as cheap substitutes for distribution charges. Worse, in some places, drug possession charges have become one of the chief means of punishing violent felons. Proof of homicide, robbery, and assault is often difficult because it requires the cooperation of witnesses who agree to testify in court. If the police find drugs or an unregistered weapon on the defendant's person or in his home, those witnesses need not be called and those harder-to-prove offenses can be ignored. The drug and gun charges all but prove themselves, and those charges stand in for the uncharged felonies.

Nor is the phenomenon limited to drug cases. Convicting Martha Stewart of insider trading proved impossible, but no matter: Stewart could be punished for hiding the insider-trading-that-wasn't. O. J. Simpson skated on the murder charges brought in the wake of his ex-wife's death. Again, no matter: Simpson now serves a long prison term -- he will be eligible for parole nine years after he began serving his sentence -- for a minor incident in which he tried to recover some stolen sports memorabilia. The government rarely charges terrorism when prosecuting suspected terrorists; convicting for immigration violations is a simpler task. In all these examples, criminal law does not function as law. Rather, the law defines a menu of options for police officers and prosecutors to use as they see fit.

Discretion and discrimination travel together. Ten percent of black adults use illegal drugs; 9 percent of white adults and 8 percent of Latinos do so. Blacks are nine times more likely than whites and nearly three times more likely than Latinos to serve prison sentences for drug crimes. The racial composition of the dealer population might explain some of that gap but not most of it, much less all. And the same system that discriminates against black drug defendants also discriminates against black victims of criminal violence. Clearance rates for violent felonies -- the rates at which such crimes lead to suspects' arrest -- are higher in small towns and rural areas than in suburbs, higher in suburbs than in small cities, and higher in small cities than in large ones. Those relationships correlate both with poverty and with race: the more poor people and black people in the local population, the less likely that victims of criminal violence will see their victimizers punished. Bottom line: poor black neighborhoods see too little of the kinds of policing and criminal punishment that do the most good, and too much of the kinds that do the most harm.

A larger measure of official discretion has also coincided with the rise of pendulum justice. Beginning around 1950, imprisonment rates in the Northeast and Midwest began to fall. By the mid-1960s, the decline had accelerated and extended nationwide. The nation's imprisonment rate fell by more than 20 percent, while the murder rate -- a decent proxy for the rate of violent felonies and felony thefts more generally -- doubled. In northern cities, these trends were more extreme. Chicago's murder rate tripled between 1950 and 1972, while Illinois's imprisonment rate fell 44 percent. In New York City, murders more than quintupled in those twenty-two years; the state's imprisonment rate fell by more than one-third. Detroit saw murders multiply seven times; imprisonment in Michigan declined by 30 percent. The combination of those trends meant that the justice system was imposing vastly less punishment per unit crime than in the past. This turn toward lenity was followed by an even sharper turn toward severity. Between 1972 and 2000, the nation's imprisonment rate quintupled. The number of prisoner-years per murder multiplied nine times. Prisons that had housed fewer than 200,000 inmates in Richard Nixon's first years in the White House held more than 1.5  million as Barack Obama's administration began. Local jails contain another 800,000.

The criminal justice system has run off the rails. The system dispenses not justice according to law, but the "justice" of official discretion. Discretionary justice too often amounts to discriminatory justice. And no stable regulating mechanism governs the frequency or harshness of criminal punishment, which has swung wildly from excessive lenity to even more excessive severity.

Why? Two answers stand out: one concerns law, the other democracy. As unenforced speed limits delegate power to state troopers patrolling the highways, so too American criminal law delegates power to the prosecutors who enforce it. That discretionary power is exercised differently in poor city neighborhoods than in wealthier urban and suburban communities. Far from hindering such discrimination, current law makes discriminating easy. That sad conclusion has its roots in a sad portion of America's legal history. When the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of the "equal protection of the laws" was enacted, one of its chief goals was to ensure that criminal law meant one law alike for blacks and whites -- that both ex-slaves and ex-slaveowners would be held to the same legal standards, and that crime victims among both groups received roughly the same measure of legal protection. That understanding of equal protection did not survive Reconstruction's collapse. Today, the equal protection guarantee is all but meaningless when applied to criminal law enforcement, one reason why both drug enforcement and enforcement of laws banning violent felonies are so different in black communities than in white ones.

The democracy answer likewise has its roots in history: the history of American local government. In most countries, national governments or provincial governments enforce criminal law. Here, local institutions -- chiefly city police forces and county prosecutors' offices -- do most of the enforcing, while locally selected juries judge those criminal defendants who take their cases to trial. Likewise, in most of the world prosecutors and judges are civil servants. Here, local prosecutors -- the ones who try the large majority of cases -- and trial judges (appellate judges, too) are, with few exceptions, chosen by voters of the counties in which they work. At least in theory, these features of the justice system give citizens in crime-ridden neighborhoods a good deal of power over criminal law enforcement in their neighborhoods.

That power is less substantial than it once was, thanks to four changes that happened gradually throughout the twentieth century. First, crime grew more concentrated in cities, and especially in poor neighborhoods within those cities. Historically, crime was not an urban problem in the United States: cities' murder rates were no higher than the nation's. In the last sixty years, that has changed. Poor city neighborhoods are more dangerous than they once were, and wealthier urban and suburban neighborhoods are probably safer. Today, a large fraction -- often a large majority -- of the population of cities and metropolitan counties live in neighborhoods where crime is an abstraction, not a problem that defines neighborhood life. This gives power over criminal justice to voters who have little stake in how the justice system operates. Second, the suburban population of metropolitan counties mushroomed. This shift in local populations matters enormously, because prosecutors and judges are usually elected at the county level. Today, counties that include major cities have a much higher percentage of suburban voters than in the past. This means suburban voters, for whom crime is usually a minor issue, exercise more power over urban criminal justice than in the past.

Third, jury trials, once common, became rare events. The overwhelming majority of criminal convictions, more than 95 percent, are by guilty plea, and most of those are the consequence of plea bargains. This change shifts power from the local citizens who sit in jury boxes to the less visible assistant district attorneys who decide whom to punish, and how severely. Fourth and finally, state legislators, members of Congress, and federal judges all came to exercise more power over criminal punishment than in the past. The details are complicated; how and why this change happened is one of this book's larger stories. But the bottom line is clear enough: a locally run justice system grew less localized, more centralized.

All these changes limited the power of residents of poor city neighborhoods -- the neighborhoods where levels of criminal violence are highest. Residents of those neighborhoods, most of whom are African American, have less ability than in the past to govern the police officers and prosecutors who govern them. As local democracy has faded, the rule of law has collapsed, discrimination has grown more common, and criminal punishment has become prone to extremes of lenity and severity. Here as elsewhere, correlation does not prove causation. But this coincidence seems more than coincidental. If criminal justice is to grow more just, those who bear the costs of crime and punishment alike must exercise more power over those who enforce the law and dole out punishment.

Which leads to an obvious question: How might things be set right? The solution to the system's many problems has two main ingredients.

The first is a revival of the ideal of equal protection of the laws. Criminal punishment will not control crime at acceptable cost as long as punishment is imposed and the law's protection is provided discriminatorily. The second ingredient is a large dose of the local democracy that once ruled American criminal justice. That second aspect of wise reform is already happening: the rise of community policing has made local police more responsive to the wishes of those who live with the worst crime rates. That trend needs to go farther. Plus, we need fewer guilty pleas and more jury trials in order to give local citizens -- not just prosecutors -- the power to decide who merits punishment and who doesn't. More jury trials in turn require a different kind of criminal law: law that looks more like the criminal law of America's past, and less like the speed limits that give state troopers unconstrained power over those who travel America's highways.

William J. Stuntz was Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law at Harvard University.

Electronically reproduced by permission of the publisher from "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" by William J. Stuntz, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2011.

Washington's vision was prophetic. He was ahead of his times. His contemporaries, especially in Europe, expected tyranny, anarchy, or the return of foreign empire in North America after the British defeat. Eighteenth-century thinkers had few models of a good government "with powers properly distributed and adjusted." They had even fewer models of a strong government that became a "guardian" rather than an oppressor of liberty.

George Washington's eighteenth-century radicalism evolved into the twenty-first century's conventional wisdom. The success of the American experiment in building a prosperous and democratic Union discredited other options. When Washington wrote his words people advocated many kinds of government: monarchy, theocracy, confederation, empire, city-state, and even small republic. Representative government for a large, diverse, and united population living in a dispersed but discrete territory -- that became the contemporary standard for the modern "nation-state." It was almost nonexistent during Washington's lifetime. In its early American formation, the political institutions that we now take for granted were an eccentric experiment -- an "exception" to the common arrangements of the era.

Two hundred years after Washington, American exceptionalism became the normal expectation for citizens. The United States proved that large, diverse, and united societies -- "nations" -- could achieve more than their fragmented counterparts. The United States also showed that the first president's claims about the virtues of a representative government were well founded. A powerful government of the people did more for the people, and it was generally more stable than its predecessors. The American model stood out for its unity and its representativeness.

Although many Americans -- including women, African Americans, and others -- did not initially have full rights of citizenship, the society they inhabited encouraged more popular participation in politics than any late-eighteenth- or nineteenth-century counterpart. Politics was part of the nation's common culture. The state birthed from rallies, debates, and conflicts claimed legitimacy from its roots in the street, not the gentleman's club.

By the twentieth century virtually all governments organized themselves as nation-states. Dominant state institutions claimed legitimacy because they spoke for the people -- not divine authority or a borderless ethnicity -- in a particular place. Modern political power was nation-state power. National populations claimed particular rights and privileges because they were constituted in a single state. The ties between nation and state became symbiotic and near universal.

Political power centered on territory, institutions of control, and repertoires of consent -- all symbolized by the flags and passports distributed to mark simultaneous identity and authority. The unbound merchant traveler of an earlier age became the Chinese citizen regulated by the Chinese government, or the German citizen protected by both the German and European Union governments. When entering the borders of another nation-state, one must show one's passport to prove that one is a bona fide part of the larger nation-state system, with clearly defined loyalty and responsibility. If you do not have a nation and a state, then you have neither a homeland nor a right to travel safely beyond. If you do not have a nation and a state, you do not count in the modern world.

The antiterrorist measures implemented across the globe since 11 September 2001 to control the free movement of peoples, weapons, and products have reinforced this nation-state system. Borders are rigidly policed by states. People are closely categorized by nationality. "National security" takes precedence over all other claims. Nongovernmental organizations (like Amnesty International) and intergovernmental institutions (like the United Nations) continue to exert important influence, but they are tightly tied to nation-states for their resources, recruitment, and leverage over policy. International advocates of human rights, environmental protection, and religious freedom are most effective when they work within and between nation-states, not as alternatives to nation-states. The same is true for multinational corporations. Although they operate globally, they remain regulated by nation-state laws and organizations composed of nation-states, especially the World Trade Organization. The world of the early twenty-first century is a world dominated by political "Unions" that resemble Washington's farsighted conceptualization. He would be surprised only at their uniformity and their near universal spread.

The United States did not create this system alone, but it contributed to its development and expansion. Washington's calls for "Union" in a new country began the wider diffusion of the nation-state as the foundation for political power in the modern world. Other forms of political authority declined as the American-inspired version rose. The United States influenced this process by model, by rhetoric, and often by direct policy. Since the eighteenth century, Americans have sought to create a world that would be "safe" for their form of government -- a world that would adopt harmonious political institutions, despite continued cultural diversity.

That is, of course, the deeper meaning of pluralism: "unity in diversity." It was the foundation for Woodrow Wilson's famous -- perhaps infamous -- call for a "League of Nations." Franklin Roosevelt followed with plans for a "United Nations." His successors have furthered this process through the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, the World Trade Organization, and other international bodies that define power around nation-states -- not races, religions, or other markers of identity. American pluralism is the pluralism of nation-states. Modern globalization is the globalization of nation-states too.

There are very few substitutes for this system in the twenty-first century. If you want respect as an international player, you must be a nation-state. Compare the circumstances of Egyptians, who have a recognized nation-state, and the Kurds, who do not. United peoples represented by strong institutions in a given territory can claim voice in global negotiations. Those who are not united, not represented, and not identified with a particular place get little attention. Political sovereignty in the modern world is based on national identity and effective state governance. Other forms of authority get little recognition. Politics has become less diverse since the eighteenth century.

President Barack Obama's description of contemporary American foreign policy reinforces this point. When he echoed George Washington, extolling the United States "as one nation, as one people," his words were neither original nor revolutionary. They were common to American political statements. Obama was describing the obvious, articulating the standard clichés, appealing to American triumphal self-regard. His words were ritualistic, repeated by nearly every president. United action in a strong nation-state had become the touchstone for protecting security and liberty, especially after attacks by vicious nonstate actors. Building stable nation-states in regions filled with "tribal" hatreds and "failed" states -- both of which sponsored terrorist activities -- had become the most accepted approach to ensuring peace and prosperity. This is what Obama meant when he spoke of an American "creed that calls us together, and that has carried us through the darkest of storms."

Applying the wisdom of accumulated American experience, Obama and most of his listeners believed that the suffering citizens of Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries would live better if represented by institutions that governed local groups "as one nation, as one people." Effective nation-states in those countries would establish security, they would help their citizens, and they would keep extremists out. They would also serve American and other international interests in stability, access, and profit. Afghan and Iraqi nation-states were the solution to terrorism, as they had been the American solution to other threats in prior decades. From the founding to the first years of the twenty-first century, the history of American nation-building repeated itself.

Obama pledged that the United States would continue to support nation-building abroad, despite all the other demands on resources at home:

Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation's resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we have fought for -- what we continue to fight for -- is a better future for our children and grandchildren. And we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.13

Nothing could be more American than to pursue global peace through the spread of American-style institutions. Nothing could be more American than to expect ready support for this process from a mix of local populations, international allies, and, of course, the United States government. Between the presidencies of Washington and Obama, nation-building became the dominant template for political change among Americans. Matched with the growing power of the United States, this template gained unparalleled global force.

The most difficult part of policy is making change. Time pressures, resource constraints, cultural diversity, bureaucratic red tape, and the fear of the unknown reinforce resistance to reform. This is true within both rich and poor societies. For this reason, many leaders give up. They satisfy themselves with efforts to work on the margins, to preserve rather than to progress. This is often called pragmatism, but it really is not. It is the politics of least resistance and the tolerance of the lowest common denominator. Never understimate how risk-aversion prolongs failed policies, including wars and other conflicts. To sue for peace and invest in reconstruction -- that is often the most uncertain and unsettling endeavor.

Americans have made more wars than many others, but they have also tried more often than anyone else to build nations after battle. That is why I call Americans "a nation-building people." That is why Americans are continually trying to change societies. That is why American policies are so unique, so interesting, and sometimes so baffling.

Jeremi Suri is the Mack Brown Distinguished Professor for Global Leadership, History, and Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin.

Excerpted from "Liberty’s Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama" by Jeremi Suri. Copyright 2011 by Jeremi Suri. Published by Free Press.

"Death in the City of Light" recounts the infamous case of Marcel Petiot, a physician believed to have killed over 60 people in Paris between 1942 and 1944, under the Nazi occupation of the city. King presents the story as a procedural, beginning with the day in March 1944 when residents in the chic 16th arrondissement complained of a foul smoke billowing out of a neighboring townhouse. When attempts to rouse the house's inhabitants proved fruitless, the fire department was called. In the basement, they found a coal stove with the "charred remains of a human hand" sticking out of it. Body parts and bones littered the floor. Further police investigations discovered a pit in which numerous corpses in various stages of decay had been covered with quicklime. In total, over 11 pounds of human hair would be gathered from the remains.

If King's book has a protagonist, it's police detective Victor Massu (an inspiration for Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret), who picked up the case at the beginning. Determining, capturing and convicting the culprit, however, would prove supremely challenging in a city whose civil institutions were hopelessly compromised under Nazi rule. It was difficult for anyone to sort out wrong from right. For example, the patrolmen initially dispatched to the scene allowed a man claiming to be the brother of the owner to enter the building and take away some undetermined piece of evidence. Why? Because he assured them that the house was a Resistance outpost and that the bodies inside it were the remains of "Germans and traitors to our country." Later, they learned that the man was in fact Petiot, the house's owner and the prime suspect.

People were disappearing from Nazi-occupied Paris in droves. Some escaped to Spain and beyond via clandestine networks. Others vanished into the prisons of the Gestapo; you could be arrested for something as simple as wearing red, white and blue on Bastille Day. Above all, the city's Jewish population was subject to raids and deportations, plucked from their homes or off the streets and loaded into trains destined for death camps, never to be seen again. This made identifying the dismembered and mutilated remains in Petiot's charnel house extremely difficult, especially given that the parts of the bodies most useful to this process were missing.

King sketches this background in brisk, workmanly prose. At first it seems a bit too workmanly, but as the case evolves into a bizarre farrago of false identities, paranoia, wild goose chases, rumors, secret agendas and outright delusion -- all liberally sprinkled with Gallic histrionics -- the choice makes perfect sense. Authorial flourishes would be superfluous in a story already replete with penny-dreadful details: a mysterious femme fatale, a coffin stuffed with treasure just before it was interred, a crime boss who "obsessively collected" rare dahlias and orchids and entertained socialites in his lavish townhouse while members of the Resistance were tortured in the cellars beneath, and so on.

The authorities finally caught Petiot after a seven-month search. By then, Paris had been liberated -- an event described with crisp brio by King -- and Massu had been charged with collaboration, losing his job. (He was later fully exonerated.) The doctor was deliberately goaded into revealing himself by a newspaper that ran the wild testimony of a witness (who later disappeared), alleging that Petiot was a cocaine smuggler who hired prostitutes to have sex with other men while he watched and who wore German uniforms to hunt down Resistance fighters. Outraged, Petiot sent the paper a long, handwritten note filled with clues that led to his apprehension. He was working under a false identity as a captain in the counterespionage service, where he participated in the investigation of his own crimes.

Petiot's trial gave him further occasion to display his almost superhuman brazenness. He was accused of operating a false "escape agency," promising to spirit people out of France, then killing them and stealing their valuables. Petiot maintained that he had worked for a Resistance operation, called "Fly-Tox," that "liquidated" collaborators and informants. He painted his victims -- including several Jews fleeing Nazi persecution -- as Gestapo agents. He admitted to killing scores of people, just not the ones found in the townhouse. Those corpses, he insisted, had been planted there by the Gestapo in order to frame him.

The trial quickly became a three-ring circus -- a situation exacerbated by the French judicial process, which allows civil attorneys hired by victims' families as well as prosecutors to question witnesses and permits the participants (including the defendant) to interrupt testimony and statements. The quick-witted Petiot lambasted his enemies with barbed jokes and accusations of collaboration, capitalizing on the uneasiness everyone felt in the aftermath of the war. He nearly came to blows with one attorney while on the stand.

Petiot was not the only one to misbehave. Incredibly, the presiding magistrate was quoted describing the accused as "an unbelievable demon" and "an appalling murderer" in the press while the trial was in process and yet no mistrial was declared. The public fought over spots in the overflowing courtroom, then camped out, munching on sausages and sandwiches and shouting remarks like spectators at a sporting match. It was the best show in town. The writer Colette turned up to report on the trial, and such luminaries as Prince Rainier of Monaco and the duke of Windsor requested seats.

King has unearthed new evidence (a first-person account of the early days of the investigation written by Massu not long after the trial) to counter the widespread assumption that Petiot killed his victims via lethal injections. He also suspects that Petiot had powerful protectors in the Occupation regime and presents a convincing case for those suspicions. But the most startling impression left by "Death in the City of Light," is of Paris itself, confronting the bestiality lurking behind its supremely civilized facade, and of the handful of Parisiennes who tried to serve justice in spite of it.

The influence of Marx's ideas has been so momentous that at this point the name Karl Marx hardly even seems to attach to a person. It is easy to forget that a human being stands behind those voluminous and forbidding books, and the even more forbidding system of thought those books express. As Mary Gabriel's new biography of the Marx family, "Love and Capital," makes clear, though, Marx was indeed human: a philosopher and revolutionary thinker, yes, but also a husband and father who loved his family and who experienced a tremendous anxiety over his failure to provide for them.

Marx's more human aspects have been played down by both his detractors and his supporters. Some Marxists, Gabriel notes, went so far as to try to suppress knowledge not only of certain scandalous aspects of their idol's history and conduct (the fact, for instance, that he fathered an illegitimate son with the family's housekeeper while his wife was in Europe pleading with her relatives for financial assistance) but also of such innocuous facts as that Karl had a nickname (his close friends and relatives called him "Mohr").

But the attempt to cleanse Marx's profile of human elements is both silly and misleading. The idea that "the personal is political" has become commonplace if not a cliché, but it is nevertheless true, and Karl Marx's life and thought provide a quite compelling example of their inseparability. One cannot fully understand the radical elements in Marx's thought without being acquainted with the details of his life. To take an obvious example, the fact that he witnessed the political persecution of family members and their associates at an early age surely contributed to his resistance to the authority of the state, and his awareness of the variety of ways in which that authority could be used as a means for limiting human liberty and maintaining the status quo. "Freedom," he wrote in 1875, "consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it" -- a statement that clearly indicates the distance between his own views and many of the programs that were eventually implemented in his name.

More broadly, it surely helps us understand the overall meaning and intent of Marx's economic critiques to know that he and Jenny, his wife, spent the majority of their life together in considerable and frequently miserable poverty, relying on contributions from supportive friends (most reliably Friedrich Engels, Marx's lifelong intellectual companion and coauthor of The Communist Manifesto). "The man who wrote 'Capital,' " writes Gabriel, "was an extraordinary philosopher, economist, classicist, social scientist, and writer, but he was also someone intimately acquainted with the slow death of the spirit suffered by those condemned to poverty while surrounded by a world of wealth."

If this was hard on Marx, it was surely harder still on Jenny. Born in Prussia in 1814, four years before her future husband, Jenny von Westphalen was raised in an aristocratic family but inherited her father's relatively radical political views. Though she knew that in uniting with the young Karl she was turning her back on a life of comfortable privilege, she could not possibly have predicted just how uncomfortable and impoverished her life with Marx would prove to be. Karl Marx's journalistic writings earned him little, his philosophical writings nothing at all. Both he and Jenny lived in the expectation that his masterwork, "Capital," would earn enough capital to relieve their debts and render them financially secure. But the book took far longer than expected to write -- Marx missed the publisher's deadline by sixteen years -- and when the first royalty check arrived, sixteen years after that, it had to be delivered to his children because both he and Jenny had died some years before.

The tardiness of "Capital," while extreme, was characteristic of Marx. More than once in his life he promised some publisher a brief pamphlet on some topic or other, only to turn in, months or years past the deadline, a work of several hundred pages. Gabriel writes of Marx:

[He] never met a deadline, adhered to length limits, or completed an assignment in the manner requested it (the sole exception to this last was The Communist Manifesto). The problem was not lack of initiative but his inquisitive mind. Marx simply could not set aside research and begin writing; he was enthralled by the unknown and felt he could not commit his theories to paper until he understood every angle of his ever-evolving subject. But that, of course, was impossible -- the halls of knowledge are infinite and mutable, and though he would have been happy to wander through them for the rest of his days, a contract required that he stop.

Moreover, Marx's intellectual curiosity was far from his only distraction. His political activities drew the attention of authorities wherever he went, and his family spent several years relocating from one European country to another before finally finding a home -- London -- they would not be expelled from. He spent much of his life in poor health and constant pain as a result of various ailments. (One particularly humanizing moment has him writing to Engels that he had had to give up going to the British Museum Reading Room on account of his hemorrhoids, which "afflicted me more grievously than the French Revolution." ) And there were other, profounder sufferings: four of the couple's seven children -- including all three sons -- died before reaching adolescence. Perhaps the most poignant moment in "Love and Capital" has Marx at the funeral of his second son, the eight-year-old Edgar, or "Musch," shouting at those who attempted to comfort him, "You cannot give me back my boy!"

A good deal of "Love and Capital" is devoted to the three surviving Marx daughters. Like their father, they tended to be intellectually adventurous and possessed a zeal for social reform. And like their father, they lived lives plagued by personal difficulties -- indeed, two of the three ended up dying by their own hand. It is hard not to feel compassion, and at times admiration, for these women and for their mother, all of whom ended up living, in more than one sense, in Marx's shadow. Yet one ends the book still feeling somewhat remote from them -- as one does, despite Gabriel's efforts, from Marx himself. "Love and Capital" is well researched and does a fine job of relaying historical facts, but it will leave at least some readers longing for a deeper delving into the daily texture of its subjects' lives, an intimate portrait rather than a deftly sketched big picture.

Perhaps to some degree this is due to the nature of its primary subject, who, Gabriel writes, was "often fiercely argumentative, intellectually arrogant, and notoriously impatient with anyone who disagreed with him. His frequent drinking episodes...often devolved into verbal if not physical fights. He had little time for niceties; for someone so conceptually fascinated by the alienation of man, Marx routinely alienated those who encountered him." Yet on the same page she notes that "in private Marx was warm, loving, kind, and generally described as excellent company when he was not plagued by sleepless nights or stricken by disease, both due to anxiety over his work." Many visitors to the Marx home, indeed, remarked with surprise on how warm, hospitable, and charming the great theoretician turned out to be.

Some of the book's most touching moments center not on Marx's relations with his wife and daughters but on his friendships; it is here, perhaps, that he managed to be most fully human. Following Marx's death, Engels took it on himself to go through his voluminous papers, trying to assemble the later volumes of "Capital" that his friend had so often claimed were near completion. At one point he wrote to an acquaintance, "For the past few days I have been sorting letters from 1842-62. As I watched the old times pass before my eyes they really came to life again, as did all the fun we used to have at our adversaries' expense. Many of our early doings made me weep with laughter; they didn't after all ever succeed in banishing our sense of humor." A long-dead figure's sense of humor, and other such subtleties of character, are tremendously difficult for the biographer to capture. But in this and other passages we get hints of another Marx, a shadow Marx who has somehow contrived to escape even the re-humanized depiction Mary Gabriel has given us.