The U.S. Constitution clearly states that “Representatives . . . shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers” and reapportioned every ten years.  The ten-year reapportionment is for adjustments caused by a decade’s national census.  Under the last census, Texas gained four representatives because of a growth in her population.  The state legislature has the right and obligation to reapportion the districts to reflect the change in Texas, with a map outlining the districts.  Nowhere in the Constitution, or the amendments thereto, is there a mention of a federal court having to approve such a legislative map before it goes into effect.  In fact, the Tenth Amendment makes it clear that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution are reserved to the states.  So what’s the problem?

The legislature of Texas has made its reapportionment map.  Indeed, it has made several, in succession.  Unfortunately, none can take effect because of the (unconstitutional) Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has been renewed four times, the last by President George W. Bush, for 25 more years.  The act purports to require the approval of a federal court before a Southern state’s reapportionment is legal, and usually, Texas has meekly complied.  For several years past, various racial and ethnic organizations, whether or not they actually represented anyone, have challenged the legislative maps and won before the federal court, causing the maps to be redrawn to accommodate such groups.  This year there are a record number of complainers, a Republican legislature with some backbone, and a vacillating federal court.  The panel of judges has ruled recently that all of the complainers, plus the legislature, must be in full “voluntary” agreement on all district lines.  Meeting after meeting, and map after map, have produced nothing, since there is always at least one complaining group holding out.  Today, it is LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens, which claims that two new Hispanic-majority districts out of four is not enough, though the increase in citizens is mostly Anglo.  Public pressure has not moved this group, and there is always a chance that, even if it gets its way, one of the other groups might then decide that it doesn’t like the resulting map.

The upshot is that the primary originally scheduled for March might not be held until April, May, or even after the national conventions.  The court is also playing with the idea of Texas holding two primaries, one for the parties’ presidential/senatorial nominations, and another one for the parties’ nominations to the House of Representatives and state legislative offices.  This would cost the state millions, as well as possibly cause the failure of the latter primary to be held in time for campaigning.

Meanwhile, no would-be candidate for the House knows which district he is in.  So he doesn’t know which to announce his candidacy for, or whether to do so at all, since he doesn’t know who his constituency would be.

Today’s mess ensued because the Voting Rights Act has become a sacred cow, since it was mislabeled a civil-rights law.

The Voting Rights Act was first passed during a highly emotional time, a situation the Constitution as a whole was designed to discourage in the making of our laws.  It applies only to the Southern states, even thought the Northern states are now most guilty of gerrymandering by race, ethnicity, and for other demographic considerations, as well as to protect incumbencies.  The last federal court to approve a Texas map by the exhausted legislature created a district stretching from a part of San Antonio, in the south-central part of the state, to a part of El Paso, in the far western tip, a distance of almost 550 miles, and only a few city blocks or a quarter-mile wide in most areas.  There was no “community of interest” in that district whatsoever.  The newest map, now requiring the full agreement of so many disparate groups, will probably be worse, if it is approved by the federal court at all.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the Voting Rights Act of 1965—this throwback to the unlamented Reconstruction period—is now the only U.S. law in 150 years to recognize the Confederate States of America, if only for the purpose of punishing those states of which it had consisted.

—Egon Richard Tausch

[Ed.: On March 1, 2012, one day after this article went to press, a three-judge panel in San Antonio approved an "interim map" and declared May 31 to be the date for the 2012 Texas primaries.  See this article for more information.]

[This article first appeared in the April 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  To subscribe, click here.]

When the Northern Illinois Women’s Center closed its doors for good in early January, after nearly 39 years of profiting from women’s exercise of their “constitutional right” to have an abortion, the death toll stood much higher than 58,000—perhaps as high as 70,000, according to Kevin Rilott of the Rockford Pro-Life Initiative.  Before NIWC founder and first abortionist Richard Ragsdale passed to his eternal reward in 2004, he estimated that he alone had performed 50,000 abortions from April 1973.

Yet how we regard that loss of life depends largely on what we think abortion is, and what we think abortion does.  The many local Christians who prayed outside of the Northern Illinois Women’s Center every day that it was open over the course of four decades, and the many other Christians who supported them with prayers and donations, regard that loss of life with the same sadness as we do the death of American soldiers in Vietnam.  And indeed, in that view, these children were the victims of a war, victims who had one distinct disadvantage over the soldier in Vietnam: They had no means or opportunity to fight back.  Whatever chance they had to emerge unscathed from the house of horrors known as “Fort Turner”—a majestic old public school converted over to the destruction of life—came entirely through grace by the prayers of others.

For those who believe abortion does not stop a beating heart, but simply solves a problem or safeguards a “right,” there can be little question of mourning over the tens of thousands of lives lost.  Even those who regarded the Vietnam War as just and necessary could view the loss of each American soldier’s life as a cause for grief, but in abortion, the child stands in for the enemy soldier, and even the best of us find it hard to mourn the loss of the enemy.  That is simply the way the world works: In war, lives are cut short, futures erased, so that others may continue to live.

Of course, not all of those who support abortion have taken part in the killing.  While the armchair warriors in the media and think tanks are more bloodthirsty than the average soldier, because they do not have to spend the rest of their lives remembering the faces of those their rhetoric has killed, the mothers who end the life of the children growing within their wombs are, like the soldier, much more likely than the abstract defender of “our way of life” to recognize what they have done, even if guilt compels them to continue to justify it as necessary.  The woman who proudly proclaims that she has had several abortions and would gladly have another reminds the normal person of the veteran who laments that he had but one tour of duty to kill for his country.

On Monday, January 23, ten days after the Northern Illinois Women’s Center announced that it would close its doors for good, and 39 years and one day after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, our eighth child was born.  Because the anniversary of Roe fell on a Sunday this year, the organizers of the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., decided to transfer it to that Monday, as if it were, say, Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.  Interestingly, the supporters of Roe followed suit—a curious sign, on both sides, of how much of the battle over abortion has entered the realm of abstraction.

When, however, your child is born on the day that all of America is either celebrating or commemorating the right of mothers to kill their own children, abstraction is simply not possible.  To receive hearty congratulations on the birth of your child on, say, Facebook, offered by those who have spent the rest of the day expressing their gratitude for Roe and attacking those who acknowledge that life begins at conception, is profoundly chilling.

When did Clare Frances’s life begin?  Not when she emerged via C-section from her mother’s womb a week before her due date—a time when many states would still allow a “late-term” abortion to “save the life of the mother.”  Nor did it begin 15 weeks earlier, when she reached the point of viability—before which almost every state would have allowed her life to be ended to “preserve the health of the mother.”  Nor did it begin another eight or so weeks before, when Amy first could be certain that she felt Clare move.  Nor six weeks before that, when, at ten weeks’ gestation, we first heard her heartbeat, and when abortion is legal in every state for any reason.  Indeed, her heart had been beating since the 23rd day after her conception, a time when many a first-time mother is only just beginning to sense that her life is about to change forever.

Physically, Clare Frances’s life began at conception; but even that does not tell the whole story.  “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you“ (Jeremiah 1:5), and before she was conceived, Clare existed in the sacramental union between Amy and myself.  That, however, is a thought to develop in a different piece on another day.  For now, suffice it to say that if we reduce the beginning of life to a biological milestone, we will never understand just how destructive abortion truly is.

I first visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Wall, a few years after it opened, and found myself there frequently when I was a graduate student at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.  The impact of the Wall on visitors is often ascribed to the fact that the war remains close to us in time.  But I think there is something more to it.  Seeing those 58,261 names all brought together in such a small space distills the very real human costs of the Vietnam War.  The visitor standing in front of the Wall cannot escape the consequences of our actions in Southeast Asia.  And the very design of the wall gives the impression that this is just the tip of the iceberg, that behind and beneath each name lie mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and children and friends, all the lives that the fallen had touched, and those that they would have touched, had they survived the war.

Fort Turner is, in its own way, just the tip of the iceberg represented by the tens of thousands of children whose lives ended therein.  Might it, one day, become a monument to the war on the unborn, to the tens of millions of lives lost through legalized abortion, and to the hundreds of millions of lives affected by that loss?

Perhaps, but it will not be any day soon.  Just as the Wall could not be built until the war had ended and the nation had begun to come to grips with the destruction it had caused, so, too, we will never fully comprehend the horror of legalized abortion until we have moved beyond it.  Fort Turner, pray God, may remain shuttered for good, but its heart of darkness long ago outgrew its walls and is spreading throughout the land.

[This article first appeared in the March 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  Click here to subscribe.]

The statement on its surface reads like a PSA from the Disney Channel, a favorite of Mr. Obama’s daughters Malia, 13, and Sasha, 10: Follow your dreams, dream big, let nothing stand in the way of your dreams.  Yet underneath is the simmering stench of latex and death.

Babies get in the way of dreams.

Malia, says her father, dreams of getting her driver’s license and having her own car.  In a speech last summer to U.S. automakers, Obama joked that he hoped they were working on a model “that gets a top speed of 15 miles an hour.  [And one that would deploy an] ejector seat any time boys are in the car.”  As a father, he knows what’s on the minds of 16-year-old boys.

And what happens to a boy if he fumbles around in an automobile, with no particular place to go, and happens to unfasten his young female passenger’s safety belt?  Well, nothing, really.  He can go on and pursue his dreams of being an NBA star or a community organizer.

Were it not for Roe, however, the unlucky girl, somebody’s daughter, might face the nightmare of morning sickness, an episiotomy, or stretch marks, not to mention lining up to register at Target or AFDC.

Roe v. Wade helps to fulfill little girls’ dreams.

“When Negroes have been able to ascend economically, statistics reveal they plan their families with even greater care than whites.”  Thus wrote Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1966, in a speech on the occasion of his acceptance of Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award.  “Negroes of higher economic and educational status actually have fewer children than white families in the same circumstances.”

In his speech, Dr. King lamented the “Negro folkways” carried from large plantations and farms into the ghettos of America’s cities, which resulted in “many unwanted children.”  But the blame for their sad existence fell squarely on the shoulders of powerful whites, who, by thwarting Sanger’s efforts, withheld a “profoundly important ingredient in [the Negro man’s] quest for security and a decent life.”

Providing ready access to contraception to black families, King insisted, would help to free the Negro man, unlocking “the income potential he can command.”

One week before the recent Roe anniversary, Mr. Obama marked the national MLK Day by visiting a largely black Washington-area school.  “Today, we celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” he told the children.  “And we should honor that legacy by acting as drum majors for service and lifting up those less fortunate.”

It’s hard to imagine anyone less fortunate, statistically, than an African-American baby in the womb.  For, although blacks make up roughly 12.2 percent of the population of the United States, black women account for between 30 and 38 percent of all abortions.  (According to the Gutt­macher Institute, whites, at 63.7 percent of the population, have 36 percent of all abortions; Hispanics, at 16.3 percent, have 25 percent of the abortions.)

Sanger’s and King’s dream of the great leveling effect of free and easy contraception sank under the weight of the Sexual Revolution.  Ever since Roe, Planned Parenthood has tried to fulfill that dream by transforming itself into a killing factory.  And despite the civil-rights revolution of the 60’s, black ghettos still exist, providing a prime location for Planned Parenthood clinics, who prey on the poor of every ethnicity, but on blacks especially.

One part of Dr. King’s statistical analysis holds true: In the years to come, we won’t likely find the President’s daughters in the waiting room of an abortuary.  They are well educated, affluent, and live in an intact home.  But not every African-American family can afford a hybrid car with an ejector seat: 27.4 percent remain below the poverty level, imprisoned by a welfare state that offers them abortion as a medicine of hope.

“I understand teenage-hood is complicated,” the President told automakers.  But his daughters need not worry about randy young men with illicit dreams: “I should also point out that I have men with guns that surround them, often.”

Roe v. Wade, now entering ripe middle age, made sure that no protection would surround the very least and most vulnerable among us—black, Hispanic, or white—who dream away silently in their uterine cradles.  Whether the product of outdated folkways or of fumblings in fancy cars, they are, after all, a psychological and financial burden, an obstacle standing in the way of big dreams.  As such, they may be discriminated against at will.

Their dreams don’t matter.

[This article first appeared in the March 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  Click here to subscribe.]

perspective

Revolting Parasites
by Thomas Fleming

views

The Inner Logic of Civil Rights
by Claude Polin

Zora Neale Hurston’s White Mare
by Jack Trotter

news

Crusader in the Crossfire
by Timothy Stanley

reviews

A Warring Visionary
by Tom Piatak

[The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan, by Timothy Stanley]

History Today
by Darío Fernández-Morera

[God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, by David Levering Lewis]

Big Surprise
by Clyde Wilson

[Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa, by Ilana Mercer]

correspondence

Interview With a Border Warrior
by Peter B. Gemma

stories

Ophelia and Genavy
by Tom Landess

vital signs

The Revolution That Wasn’t
by William J. Watkins, Jr.

columns

Paul’s Last Hurrah
by Justin Raimondo

Democracy and the Internet
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The Heart of Darkness
by Scott P. Richert

Aere Perennius
by Andrei Navrozov

Inventing the European Union
by Srdja Trifkovic

Illusions and Delusions
The Artist, A Dangerous Method
by George McCartney

Rage Against the Cowards
by Taki Theodoracopulos

poetry

Pulvis Eris
Half in Love
At the Ford of the Rock
by Thomas Fleming

departments

Polemics & Exchanges

American Proscenium
"Dreams of My Daughters"
by Aaron D. Wolf

Cultural Revolutions

The Crusader: The Life and
Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan

British scholar Timothy Stanley  has produced the first significant biography of Patrick J. Buchanan, describing his life from his boyhood in Washington, D.C., up to the present.  Stanley’s book is written in a breezy, informal manner—Buchanan is referred to as “Pat” throughout—and it makes for quick and generally enjoyable reading.  Stanley gets much right in his general narrative of Buchanan’s life, particularly his description of Buchanan’s 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns.

Despite his recognition that Buchanan has been a major figure in American politics, Stanley refuses to commit himself on the nature of Buchanan’s legacy:

He is a controversial figure, so I have avoided passing judgment.  It is better simply to tell his story from beginning to end and let the reader make up his or her mind as to whether [Buchanan] is a visionary or a brute.

No one who reads Stanley’s biography, however, can reasonably conclude that Buchanan is a “brute,” since the book details nothing that can reasonably be described as brutish.  A former aide, Greg Mueller, recounts that, during the 1996 campaign, Buchanan “was incredibly patient and never got angry.”  Indeed, all those who know Buchanan realize that he is a gentleman, a conclusion buttressed in the book by such disparate figures as liberal columnist E.J. Dionne, Andrew Sullivan (to whom Buchanan wrote a supportive private note after Sullivan was diagnosed with AIDS), and Joe Scarborough, who told Stanley that the young interns at MSNBC would balk at working with Buchanan, until they actually met him: “They’d really squirm and say, ‘Isn’t he an awful person?  He’s so right wing.’  But after a couple of days with him, they’d all want to adopt him as their father.”  Scarborough’s interns were repeating the reaction of Peggy Noonan, who was worried about having to work for the hard-right Buchanan in the Reagan White House, yet ended up making him one of the heroes of What I Saw at the Revolution.

[To subscribe to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, click here.]

Stanley also provides facts that refute some of the attacks made on his subject.  Those who charge Buchanan with antisemitism need to come to grips with the fact that, “Throughout his career, Buchanan had been a cheerleader for Israel.”  Buchanan’s view of America’s relationship with Israel did not change definitively until the end of the Cold War, which caused him to reevaluate his foreign-policy views across the board.  Buchanan opposed George H.W. Bush’s first foreign intervention, the invasion of Panama, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Indeed, as Stanley relates, on Crossfire Buchanan called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, provided the Russians withdrew their troops from Eastern Europe.  Stanley notes that Buchanan’s concern for Americans charged with complicity in the holocaust, such as John Demjanjuk, grew out of Buchanan’s anticommunism and the fact that the evidence being used against such Americans came from the Soviets.  In a similar vein, Stanley writes that Ronald Reagan’s visit to “Bitburg had nothing to do with Buchanan; the decision to go was made before he was appointed.”

The author also deals with the Myth of Houston: the notion that Buchanan’s speech to the 1992 Republican convention blindsided the White House and destroyed George H.W. Bush’s chance for reelection.  Indeed, the Bush White House coveted Buchanan’s endorsement and vetted the speech.  As Greg Mueller told Stanley, “The White House saw that speech.  And they loved it.”  They were not alone.  David Brinkley pronounced it “an astoundingly good speech,” and Sander Vanocur agreed:

Viewed in terms of classic raw rhetoric, that was the most skillful attempt to remind the party faithful of the role that ideas have played in American politics since Eugene McCarthy nominated Adlai Stevenson at the 1960 Democratic convention.

The polls validated the judgment of those veteran political journalists: Following Buchanan’s speech, Bush went from trailing Clinton by 52 to 35 percent to lagging behind him by only three percentage points (45 to 42 percent) with a lead among male voters of 47 to 41 percent.  Indeed, given the state of the economy, the social and cultural issues highlighted by Buchanan were Bush’s only possible road map to victory.  But after the left savaged Buchanan’s speech, Bush grew timid and went down to defeat instead.  The soundness of Buchanan’s strategy was shown by Bush’s son, who used the division of America into Red States and Blue States that accompanied his 2000 election to win reelection and elect more Republicans to Congress in both 2002 and 2004, until the disastrous tendencies of his administration became impossible to ignore.

Stanley’s narrative also provides plenty of facts to support the view that Buchanan has been a “visionary.”  In the Nixon White House, he played a significant role in crafting Spiro Agnew’s attack on the media, an attack that has been imitated by conservatives ever since.  Buchanan wrote to Nixon that “Our future is in the Democratic working man, Southern Protestant and Northern Catholics,” and also “argued that if [Nixon] wanted to get reelected, he had to reach out to the people who voted for George Wallace.”  Republican success in winning over such former Democrats has been instrumental to the GOP’s political success, and likely would have made the Republicans as dominant as the Democrats were under FDR, had the GOP not stood by and allowed the left’s Gramscian march through the institutions and the Immigration Act of 1965 to transform America.

Buchanan’s foresight has been clearest in the areas where he broke from the Republican mainstream.  As Stanley notes, Buchanan was one of the first Republicans to argue that America should resume her traditional policy of nonintervention following our victory in the Cold War.  After the United States lost thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in a vain attempt to transform the Middle East into something resembling the Middle West, more and more Americans have come to agree with what Buchanan has been saying forcefully and consistently since the collapse of communism.

[To subscribe to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, click here.]

Buchanan was one of the first Republicans to question the GOP’s policy on trade and economics, decrying “vulture capitalism” long before Rick Perry applied that term to Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital and opposing the free-trade policies that decimated American manufacturing long before Rick Santorum began lamenting the deindustrialization of America.  Stanley quotes these remarks by Buchanan from his 1996 campaign:

There’s no doubt there is an inherent contradiction between conservatism and unfettered capitalism.  Conservatives ought to be worshipping at a higher altar than the bottom line on a balance sheet.  What in heaven’s name is it that we conservatives want to conserve if not social stability and family unity?

Stanley is correct in seeing Buchanan as a conservative transformed into a revolutionary by the leftist ascendancy in American society:

Traditionalism created a paradox among orthodox Catholics like Pat.  On the one hand, Buchanan longed to obey.  On the other hand, to preserve anything worth obeying he had to fight the authority of reforming priests and bishops.  Traditionalism turned conservatives into unlikely revolutionaries.

This insight is also applicable outside the Catholic context.  Stanley quotes the penetrating analysis of contemporary America offered by Buchanan’s friend Sam Francis in this magazine:

We must understand that the dominant authorities in . . . the major foundations, the media, the schools, the universities, and most of the system of organized culture, including the arts and entertainment—not only do nothing to conserve what most of us regard as our traditional way of life, but actually seek its destruction or are indifferent to its survival.  If our culture is going to be conserved, then we need to dethrone the dominant authorities that threaten it.

Buchanan’s campaigns were an attempt to dethrone those dominant authorities.  He was shaped by, and remains loyal to, the America that existed before the cultural revolutions of the 1960’s, just as the revolutionaries have no use for the America that predated them.  This is why Buchanan was viciously attacked at the time and is still viciously attacked today, most recently by leftist groups petitioning MSNBC to terminate his employment, using Buchanan’s most recent book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive Until 2025?, as a pretext.

Unfortunately, Buchanan’s presidential campaigns, to which Stanley devotes the bulk of his biography, did not succeed.  There were many reasons for this failure.  The task was always a daunting one.  As I argued in 2008 in an article on VDare.com,

What Buchanan did in his campaigns, by defending traditional morality and beliefs and arguing against mass immigration and globalism, was to take on both wings of America’s elite at the same time—the left-wing elite that gives lip service to displaced manufacturing workers but is really animated by its hatred for traditional morality and its desire to advance social radicalism; the right-wing elite that gives lip service to defending traditional morality but is really animated by its desire to advance the interests of transnational corporations and enrich its members.

When Buchanan showed signs of succeeding, both wings attacked him.  As Stanley notes of Buchanan’s victory in the New Hampshire primary in 1996, “No humiliation the Tea Party endured in 2010 could match the things that were said about Pat Buchanan in New Hampshire, 1996.”  And the resources of the campaign were simply insufficient to meet such a challenge.  What Stanley wrote of the 1992 campaign was true of them all: “his campaign was a genuine crusade of the little man; paid for and staffed by ordinary people united in anger at the way things were.”

[To subscribe to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, click here.]

But another reason the campaigns failed is that too many of those who knew enough to support Buchanan refused to do so.  Buchanan has long been a stalwart social conservative, and he certainly is the most socially conservative candidate to have won a Republican primary or caucus in the post-Reagan era.  But Buchanan ran his campaigns without any significant support from the leaders of the Religious Right.  As Stanley observes (again regarding the 1992 campaign), “the organized religious right was committed to supporting [President Bush].”  In 1996 and 2000, its leaders preferred Bob Dole and George W. Bush, even though neither man could match the consistency and intensity of Buchanan’s social conservatism.  Indeed, in 1996, Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition did all he could to help Bob Dole beat back the challenge from Buchanan, especially in the South Carolina primary.  The same is true of the more conservative members of the Beltway Right, none of whom bestirred themselves to help Buchanan, even when they agreed with Buchanan on most of the issues.

Then there was Buchanan’s run as the Reform Party candidate in 2000.  Although Stanley is critical of that campaign, he does note that at one point national polls showed George W. Bush at 39 percent, Al Gore at 35 percent, and Buchanan at 16 percent—far more than the 5 percent the Reform Party would have needed to continue to receive federal matching funds.  Buchanan’s goal, as he told supporters, was to create “a new fighting conservative traditionalist party in America.”  Unfortunately for Buchanan, mainstream conservatism had become obsessed with the obvious moral failings of Bill Clinton, and, as a result, most conservatives were too consumed by the need to deny Al Gore the White House to consider whether the cause of conservatism might benefit from “a new fighting conservative traditionalist party in America.”  Another significant problem was Ross Perot, whose chief political aide, Russ Verney, had encouraged Buchanan to run for the Reform Party nomination.  But after Buchanan had served Perot’s interests by thwarting former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura’s attempt to take over the Reform Party, Perot turned on Buchanan: “Perot could use Pat to break [Ventura], and then use the convention to break Pat.  The Buchanans were being set up.”  Indeed, Perot later signed an affidavit stating that he regarded Buchanan’s opponent for the Reform Party nomination, John Hagelin (a devotee of transcendental meditation and “yogic flying”), as the nominee of the Reform Party, and ultimately endorsed George W. Bush—even though Bush championed NAFTA, which both Perot and Buchanan had opposed.

There are problems with Stanley’s biography.  He sometimes adopts conventional criticisms of Buchanan without much additional thought or analysis.  He has a tendency to employ colorful generalizations to keep his narrative flowing, even when those generalizations are supported by scanty evidence at best.  And he gets a number of details wrong, including attributing to me a belief that the Republican establishment “cheated” during the 1996 campaign and citing me to establish that John Hagelin won the support of the Reform Party in Ohio.  Neither statement is accurate.  Stanley devotes little attention to the substance of the many books Buchanan has written since the 1996 campaign, not to mention the many White House memos and hundreds of columns Buchanan has authored, and the transcripts of Buchanan’s numerous television appearances.

Despite these flaws, anyone who followed Buchanan’s presidential campaigns and remains interested in this American statesman will want to read Stanley’s biography.

This review first appeared in the March 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. To subscribe, click here.

It’s when we get to the “beyond,” however, that things get interesting.

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What, exactly, is Paul’s endgame?  What does he want?  This is the question the pundits are asking, and the answer is maddeningly elusive.

On the one hand, Republican primary voters are increasingly open to his message of real free markets (as opposed to the crony capitalism championed by most Republicans), the defense of civil liberties (against largely Republican antagonists), and a noninterventionist foreign policy (an idea opposed by the leadership of both parties).  He is regularly getting around 20 percent of the vote in GOP primaries, and his supporters are mostly (albeit not exclusively) young, independents inclined to vote Republican, and not that well off (under $50,000 per year).

His support grew by the day, in spite of a media blackout—and when simply refusing to report on his campaign didn’t put a dent in his support, the mainstream media turned to smear tactics.  That hasn’t worked, either.

On the other hand, Paul’s support within the GOP has a definite ceiling: I’d be surprised if his poll numbers exceeded 25 percent in any state’s primary.  This is a commentary not on Paul, but on the evolution of the Republicans, whose brand has been sullied by eight years of George W. Bush’s big-government conservatism.  Since many Republican presidential primaries are closed, Paul’s political fortunes are left in the hands of those who are registered members of a party committed to eternal war, corporate subsidies, and the cult of the presidency.  The political independents and disaffected Democrats who make up half his base are prevented from voting for him in closed GOP primaries, which is why we see polls showing him in a dead heat with Barack Obama in the general election juxtaposed against other polls showing him in the upper teens in the GOP primary pack.

GOP leaders are living in fear of a Paul third-party candidacy in the general election: Polls show Paul would garner 18 percent of the vote as an independent, and as the election draws nearer and scrutiny of Romney gets more intense, I fully expect that number to rise.

Provocatively, Paul hasn’t ruled out a third-party run, but he says he isn’t planning on it, and doesn’t want to do it.  Of course he doesn’t want to do it: Who would?  After all, even getting on the ballot is a Herculean task; and besides, he’s having too much fun right now running in the major leagues to be sent down prematurely to play third-party “gadfly,” which he did in 1988 with negligible success.  So he’s likely to keep them guessing until the very last moment.

[Click here to subscribe to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, so you won't miss one of Justin Raimondo's exclusive columns!]

If the GOP bigwigs are hoping Paul will eventually endorse the nominee, and bring his supporters into the Romney camp, they don’t know anything about the Texas congressman, who has spent his whole political career fighting the very forces represented by Romney and his backers.  Take it from me: It isn’t going to happen.  And even if it did—if Ron Paul were suddenly possessed by an evil spirit—he wouldn’t bring very many of his supporters with him.  His followers are just like him: principled, cantankerous, and uninterested in merging with the “mainstream.”

The GOP hierarchy thinks it has Paul over a barrel.  By holding his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), hostage, the wags inform us that Paul is unlikely to launch a third-party campaign, because it would supposedly end Rand’s career.

Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.  This isn’t just a political campaign—it’s a cause.  The many followers who have been recruited to his banner are expecting something more than a fizzle-out in Tampa.  They have put their hearts and souls—and, more significantly (for libertarians), their cash—into this effort, and they aren’t going to be happy with some anticlimactic end to the Ron Paul story.  They want closure.  They want to know they at least did everything they could to avoid the apocalypse Paul has spent the last 30 years or so warning us about: an economic downturn that will make the crash of ’08 look like child’s play, and the end of liberty in America.

In my view, a third-party campaign by Paul is the logical outcome of his entire career: After being rejected by a GOP mutated beyond recognition, he and his brigades of fervent followers will not be content until they’ve stormed the gates of the federal Leviathan and made a good-faith attempt at bringing the monster down.  It will be Paul’s last hurrah—and, perhaps, the last hurrah of our Old Republic.

This article first appeared in the March 2012 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.  Click here to subscribe, so you won't miss one of Justin Raimondo's exclusive columns!

Chronicles

Look for a full obituary and reflections on his life in future issues of Chronicles, as well as several of his yet-to-be published pieces.

Henceforth, the Department of Homeland Security would focus on deporting illegal aliens who are violent criminals, convicted felons, or repeat immigration-law violators.  Those priorities would be fine and dandy if the secretary weren’t willing to leave the remainder—that is, the majority—of the illegal population alone.

Napolitano also indicated that federal immigration authorities aren’t going to do anything about illegal immigrants who would have benefited from the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors), a targeted amnesty that according to one estimate would have legalized 1.3 million people (not counting the parents of those the bill would have amnestied).  That would be the same DREAM Act Congress specifically declined to pass, under both Democratic and Republican majorities.

“The President has said on numerous occasions that it makes no sense to expend our enforcement resources on low-priority cases,” Napolitano wrote.  She also informed the sympathetic group of senators that the administration was going to review 300,000 illegal immigrants already in deportation proceedings to make sure that their cases are in line with these new, more lenient guidelines.

What Napolitano is discussing is essentially amnesty by executive fiat.  While the brazenness of this end run around Congress may be shocking, the handwriting has been on the wall for some time.  In leaked memos and unguarded public pronouncements, the political appointees tasked with enforcing our immigration laws have demonstrated that they are more interested in finding exceptions to the rules.

In June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief John Morton sent out a memo highlighting all of the factors that should be taken into consideration when exercising “prosecutorial discretion” in immigration cases.  The document was a not-too-thinly-veiled invitation to stop enforcing the law against whole categories of illegal aliens and to use necessary administrative leeway to effect policy changes that lack support in Congress.  (It is not surprising that unions representing border-patrol and customs agents have repeatedly passed “no confidence votes” against Morton.)

Last year, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) obtained a memo being circulated within the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), kicking around the idea of “administrative alternatives” to “comprehensive immigration reform.”  Like Morton’s manifesto, USCIS sought to use its own discretion in individual hardship cases effectively to amnesty large numbers of illegal immigrants.  Humanitarian parole, deferred action in deportation proceedings, and parole in place were all floated as ways to achieve amnesty without Congress.

“In the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, CIS can extend benefits and/or protections to many individuals and groups by issuing new guidance and regulations,” claimed the 11-page document, which was prepared by four senior officials from different parts of USCIS for the agency’s director.  Two of the memo’s authors were Obama appointees.  One of the suggestions was simply to stop serving illegal immigrants with notices to appear at deportation hearings unless they had “significant negative immigration or criminal history.”

The Obama administration dismissed this as a mere brainstorming session with no policy impact.  Grassley, however, complained that “This memo gives credence to our concerns that the administration will go to great lengths to circumvent Congress and unilaterally execute a back door amnesty plan.”

About a month later, there emerged a draft memo from within the catacombs of DHS proposing a “bold” program “using administrative measures to sidestep the current state of Congressional gridlock and inertia.”  The Homeland Security scribblers—whose handiwork, sources told me, went all the way up to Napolitano’s desk—discussed whether their generosity should be bestowed upon “the current unauthorized population or selected subsets.”

After all, they speculated, they could come up with loopholes to benefit “the entire potential legalization population” with exceptions for “individuals who pose a security risk.”  Alternatively, DHS could come up with something “narrowly tailored” and only extended to “individuals eligible for relief under the DREAM Act, AgJOBS, or other specifically defined subcategories.”  AgJOBS (Agricultural Job Opportunities, Benefits and Security), like DREAM, is a targeted amnesty that Congress declined to pass on more than one occasion.

Unlike their pals at USCIS and ICE, the DHS staffers were at least worried about the potential political fallout: “Even many who have supported a legislated legalization program may question the legitimacy of trying to accomplish the same end via administrative action, particularly after five years in which the two parties have treated this as a matter to be decided by Congress.”

“The Secretary would face criticism that she is abdicating her charge to enforce the immigration laws,” the memo’s authors fretted.  “Internal complaints of this type from career DHS officers are likely and may also be used in the press to bolster the criticism.”  Annoying voters, irritating elected officials, and obnoxious people who have put their lives on the line enforcing immigration laws!  “Opponents of the registration program will characterize it as ‘amnesty,’” they continued, and protest that it is “being proposed to pander to Latino voters.”

All of those objections would have the benefit of actually being true, unlike the self-aggrandizing spin the memorandum offers as arguments for an unprecedented immigration power grab.  The document contains speculation that the President and Democratic congressmen will “be viewed as breaking through the Washington gridlock in an effort to solve tough problems.  Giving nervous Members of Congress something tough to vote for while providing Latino voters with something they can support will be a win-win for us all.”

Except, you know, Americans.  When the second of the amnesty memos came out, the most the administration would publicly promise was this: “To be clear, DHS will not grant deferred action or humanitarian parole to the nation’s entire illegal immigrant population.”  Napolitano used similar language in arguing that Congress should still pass the DREAM Act even after administrative amnesty, as the new policy “will not provide categorical relief for any group.”

What a categorical relief!

The move comes as Hispanic leaders are becoming increasingly angry at President Obama for failing to win approval for amnesty legislation and for bragging to swing voters about “record deportations.”  (There is some evidence, such as a recent Pew Hispanic Center survey, that suggests rank-and-file Hispanic voters are more concerned about jobs and the dismal economy.  But they don’t give liberal quotations in perfect English to the New York Times, so their views don’t matter.)

Speaking to the National Council of La Raza in July, Obama told the frustrated crowd that he was constitutionally bound to enforce the nation’s immigration laws and that he couldn’t change them without congressional approval.  They shouted in response, “Yes, you can!  Yes, you can!”  Obama was apparently convinced by a clever twist on his own campaign slogan.

Interestingly, Obama is at loggerheads with Hispanic activists over a policy designed to make amnesty more palatable.  The President has continued the Bush administration’s Secure Communities program, which identifies illegal immigrants already in state and local custody.  This has helped boost deportation statistics by putting criminal aliens on a fast track out of the country while leaving most run-of-the-mill illegals alone.

Many liberal jurisdictions are starting to opt out of Secure Communities, because even this limited immigration enforcement is too much for them.  But just like the Bush administration that cooked up this program, the Obama administration is using selective enforcement to sell amnesty down the road.  That’s why Obama can support Secure Communities, on the one hand, and then file lawsuits against Arizona, which wants to use local law enforcement against illegal immigration in general.  Unlike La Raza, the pro-amnesty political professionals are taking the long view.

With the 2012 presidential election fast approaching, Team Obama is shrinking from the long view a little bit.  Florida, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and even North Carolina all have significant Hispanic populations, and these are the states that will determine who wins the White House.  Redolent of the Clinton administration’s naturalization of a large number of immigrants right before the 1996 election, Obama needs to reshape immigration policy in a way that gets out the Latino vote even if Congress won’t go along.

Thus ICE, USCIS, and DHS talk about a leniency you will never read about in memos distributed within the IRS.  Who knows how many people will benefit from administrative amnesty now that illegal immigration by itself is frequently no longer treated as if it is illegal?  The administration is pursuing these ends through the highly technical means of memorandum mumbo-jumbo, so as to avoid the kind of backlash that annually sank the McCain-Kennedy amnesties under Bush.  They hope voters will turn a blind eye to Janet Napolitano as she turns a blind eye to vast numbers of illegal immigrants who simply aren’t an enforcement priority anymore.

W. James Antle, III is associate editor of  The American Spectator.

This article first appeared in the November 2011 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

In the same year, 1787, in regard to what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, he wrote another friend, “God forbid that we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.”  A lack of rebelliousness among the people would demonstrate “a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. . . . And what country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?”

The “rebellion” in Massachusetts had alarmed many, especially the masters of that commonwealth, who were imbued with a Puritan longing for regulated behavior and saw the tax revolt of Capt. Daniel Shays and his farmers as a threat to their control.  In Jefferson’s perspective, the “rebels” were merely adhering to good American practice.  What, indeed, had the recent War of Independence amounted to but resistance to heavy-handed government?  And such rebellions against unsatisfactory government officials and policies had been a regular occurrence during the long colonial history of the Americans, especially in the Southern colonies.

Persistent misrepresentation of Jefferson’s words here and elsewhere by later generations has obscured what he meant.  A dangerous radical?  A chronic upsetter of social order?  No.  Jefferson does not call for an overturn of society and its reconstruction according to some abstract plan.  Think of the root meaning of the term revolution.  Jefferson, in fact, is mostly satisfied with his society (Virginia), although he is interested in a few small reforms that might broaden its base.  So are his followers satisfied with their portions of America.  That is why they support him.  Despite the hysterical and sometimes insincere denunciations of the New England clergy, the Virginia planter is no Jacobin.  As he sees things, any government, with the passage of time and the accretion of abuses and bad precedents, becomes corrupted.  It needs to be revolved back to its original principles.

This is not a radical program but a deeply reactionary one.  What Jefferson fundamentally wants to tell us is that the people should never fear the government, but the government should always fear the people.  This is not the battle cry of a movement with a radical agenda.  President Jefferson comes to the White House with no agenda except to preserve the joint independence of the States United and their separate rights as “the best bulwark of our liberties.”  To carry out this agenda requires a rollback of the economic and judicial corruptions introduced by the Hamilton/Adams innovators.

For the Jeffersonian democrats, Americans were fortunate to enjoy widespread property ownership, with a large body of independent citizens, and to be free of the class hegemony and conflict of the Old World, thankfully an ocean away.  There is no French or Russian revolutionary fantasy here.  The government is not to be used as a sledgehammer to destroy and rebuild society.  In this way of thinking, the greatest enemy of society and of individual liberty is government itself.  The tendency of power is everywhere and forever toward concentration.  As a popular Jeffersonian saying has it, “Power is always stealing from the many to the few.”

It is this basic orientation that separates Jeffersonian democrats from “conservatives” of Jefferson’s own time and later.  It explains the curious phenomenon that throughout American history the people have been “conservative,” and revolutionary changes have always come from the top down.

My point is illuminated by the argument between John Adams in his A Defense of the Constitutions of the United States and John Taylor of Caroline, the systematic philosopher of Jeffersonian democracy, in his Construction Construed, and Constitutions Vindicated.  Adams’ view of history was that the popular majority always had a tendency to envy the wealth of its betters and use the government to appropriate it, and that this tendency was the chief source of destruction of a free regime.

He hoped to avoid the subversion of American republicanism by various devices that would dilute and delay an unwise popular majority: a bicameral legislature with an upper house remote from popular opinion, an executive veto, and an independent judiciary.  All Adams’ devices have catastrophically failed to limit government and to preserve freedom, as Taylor plainly predicted.

For Taylor, Adams had got his history wrong.  The people, in a society like that of Americans, were not dangerous.  Most of the time they went quietly about their own business and demanded nothing—unless they were intolerably provoked by abuses of government.  It was the “court party” that was the enemy of liberty and that would subvert the free commonwealth.  History showed that there were always self-seeking minorities, would-be elites, ready to use the machinery of government to live off the labor of the majority.  Sometimes this was done by force, and sometimes by fraud, as in the Hamiltonian maxim “a public debt is a public blessing.”  The remedy was not to erect artificial “checks and balances” but to make sure power was widely dispersed, limited, and amenable to recall.

The Jeffersonian Constitution has been misrepresented as much as or more than Jeffersonian philosophy.  It was not “strict construction,” a nonstarter, nor even states’ rights.  It was state sovereignty.  Jefferson (and Madison, too) may be quoted ad infinitum to this effect.  The Virginia and Kentucky documents of 1798-1800 spell out beyond any doubt that the final defense of freedom in the American system is the people acting in their only constitution-making identity, that of their sovereign states.  The states were the legitimate and peaceful resort to protect the liberties of their citizens and themselves as communities from federal encroachment.

Years after leaving the White House, Jefferson writes to an inquisitive foreigner,

But the true barriers of our liberty in this country are our State governments; and the wisest conservative power ever contrived by man, is that of which our Revolution and present government found us possessed.  Seventeen distinct States, amalgamated into one as to their foreign concerns, but single and independent as to their internal administration.

In the last months of his life Jefferson suggested to influential Virginians that it was time once again to consider interposing the sovereignty of the state against unconstitutional federal legislation.  Never for a day in his life did Jefferson doubt that the people of a state could exercise their sovereignty by leaving the Union, though it was not something to be encouraged rashly.  He rather expected that the expanding country would break up into two or more confederacies.  That was fine, if it was what the people wanted.  Americans were rightly joined together by fellow feeling—shared blood and sacrifice—not by the armed force of Washington City.

Commentators have twisted themselves into incredible acrobatic postures and wholesaled semiplausible lies to assert that Jefferson did not really mean the plain language of what he said.  Others have “explained” that Jeffersonian states’ rights was only a temporary and expedient device to defend liberty, a device now made unnecessary by the establishment of the American Civil Liberties Union.  They miss the point, unwelcome to all adherents of elitist agendas and centralized power—for Jefferson, individual liberty and state sovereignty were indivisible.  Properly rebellious free men defended themselves and their communities from Leviathan.

The eclipse of the Jeffersonian preference for limited power and economic freedom had less to do with politics than it did with changes in the spirit of society as the 19th century progressed.  Almost from the first days of the United States, New England leadership undertook to establish the New England way as the true and only American way.  This was carried out in politics, religion, education, literature, historical writing, and even in lexicography, with vigor and persistence.  This is a subject worthy of a multivolume study of a phenomenon that is unrecognized today, although it was a decisive event in our history and clearly understood while it was taking place.  Louis Auchincloss, in The Winthrop Covenant, gives a surface account of the persistence of this Puritan mission throughout American history.

The Puritan conquest of the North was not as easy as has been thought, but was accomplished by about 1850.  James Fenimore Cooper in his Littlepage trilogy describes and laments how the unique Anglo-Dutch society of old New York was transformed by the swarm of immigrants from east of the Hudson.  Meanwhile, Emerson went to Europe and absorbed the Germanized version of the French Revolution, which was really just going back to his Puritan roots.  He came home a Unitarian.  The mission was changed, but the intensity of the need to correct the world to conform to the New England plan remained the same.  It soon brought to heel the West and the unruly Catholic immigrants.

The South was a different matter.  It had developed from a different base and in a different way.  Southerners were proud and determined to do it their way, individually and as a people.  The South could not be converted or subverted, so it had to be destroyed, the grapes of wrath had to be trampled out.  A 30-year campaign of slander and hatred, combined with economic developments, finally brought on in 1861 the circumstances in which this could be accomplished.  Americans like to think that their campaign for the abolition of slavery was all about benevolence and liberty.  A bit of genuine historical research into what they actually said at the time paints a different picture.  The Yankees hated slavery because the slaves were a non-Anglo-Saxon element who had, in their view, hopelessly corrupted white Southerners.  In the slaveholding society, white men had far too much liberty and independent power.  Such liberty offended puritan sensibilities and created an evil disposition to thwart New England economic and cultural hegemony.  It was not that the black man had too little liberty; it was that the Southern white man had far too much.

That crusade pretty well finished off Jeffersonian democracy.  As Gen. R.E. Lee wrote to Lord Acton the year after his surrender, “the consolidation of the States into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home,” was the precursor of American ruin.  Lincoln rightly remains the truly representative American.  He is the symbol of the highly successful synthesis of capitalist oligarchy, puritan conformity, and perpetual social revolution from the top down that is the mainstream of American life.  There are many who find that synthesis beautiful, though most often they do not really understand what it is, identifying with one or another of the elements and not with the combination itself.  Money rules and permits a politics that consists almost entirely of sham battles between the old puritans, the “conservatives,” and the secular ones, the “liberals.”  From time to time they all join together in a messianic war to destroy the latest menace to Lincoln’s vision: the South, the kaiser, the Red Menace, drugs, terror, etc.

They share the sense that the meaning of “America” is a mission to bring the abstract ideals of the American standard to all mankind.  The only difference is that the “conservatives” want to do it by force, and the “liberals” by welfare.  A Jeffersonian, if any still existed, would insist that Americans are not here to be used for anybody’s mission, and the proper point of reference is what is good for them.

The Jeffersonian spirit survived for a while underground, and now and then a weak and confused revival occurred, as in the days of William Jennings Bryan and populism.  The last significant appearance was perhaps the agrarian, non-Marxist critique of capitalism in the 1930’s.  Nowhere to be seen now are the old Jeffersonians, once a major American type, rebellious men who dared defend the rights of themselves and their communities from outside impositions.  But buried somewhere deep in the American soul is a tiny ember of Jeffersonian democracy that now and then gives off an uncertain, feeble, and futile spark.

Clyde Wilson proudly reports that one of his ancestors took part in Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676.

This article first appeared in the November 2011 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Steve Jobs, the 55-year-old cofounder of Apple, Inc., who resigned as the company’s CEO on August 24, has never hidden his political views.  A vegan Buddhist who supported Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Barack Obama and extended spousal benefits to the “domestic partners” of Apple employees, Jobs—in violation of contemporary business wisdom—has even inserted his political views into Apple’s advertising.  (Think of the grammatically incorrect “Think Different” campaign, which featured such liberal icons as Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Ted Turner, and Mahatma Gandhi.)  Reportedly a voracious reader, Jobs would probably not find much in Chronicles to his liking.  Yet for almost 25 years, every issue of this magazine has benefited greatly from technologies developed by Jobs at Apple and NeXT, the computer company he founded after leaving Apple in 1985.

Lest you dismiss these remarks as the ravings of an Apple “fanboy,” let me illustrate briefly what I mean.

Before Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh on January 24, 1984, Chronicles was put together the way most magazines were.  Authors sent their typewritten manuscripts (with corrections often handwritten in pencil or ink) by mail to our editorial office.  The manuscripts had to be retyped (incorporating the authors’ corrections) before they were edited, and after every round of editing.  To lay out the magazine, the text had to be typeset into galley form, and then cut and pasted (with scissors and glue) onto the page, and waxed to hold everything in place (and hide the cut edges).  The pages were sent to a prepress house, which tidied them up, inserted images and ads, and took pictures of the composed page (one piece of film for each color on the page).  “Bluelines” (essentially mimeographed proofs) were created from those negatives and returned to our offices.  Any necessary corrections to the bluelines entailed recomposing the entire page, shooting new film, and running new bluelines.  When the bluelines were finally approved, the negatives were shipped to our printer, where they were transferred to printing plates.  Any problems discovered by the printer on any of the plates required returning to square one on that plate.  (And each plate contained either four or eight pages of the magazine, so a problem on one page affected several others as well.)  The printer would provide the first hard copies in about ten business days after delivery of the final, problem-free negatives.

All of that began to change in 1984.  The Macintosh’s graphical user interface allowed programmers to create a “WYSIWYG” environment—“What You See Is What You Get.”  That, along with Apple’s LaserWriter printer (which accurately reproduced what you saw on screen), set the stage in 1985 for desktop publishing.

Today, authors send us their text as e-mail attachments (an innovative feature of Jobs’ NeXTSTEP operating system), mostly written in Microsoft Word (which made its first appearance as a WYSIWYG word processor when it was ported to the Macintosh in 1985).  Many of our writers now own a Mac, but some still use a PC running Windows, which got its start as an imitation of the Macintosh operating system, bolted on top of MS-DOS.

Aaron Wolf imports the text directly into Adobe InDesign and exports it for editing onscreen in Adobe InCopy.  Adobe’s first big break came in 1985, when Apple licensed Adobe’s PostScript language for use in the LaserWriter.  Aaron and I edit each article twice onscreen (30-inch Apple Cinema Displays connected to Mac Pros), before Aaron sends the galleys (as PDFs, via e-mail) to each author.  Aaron enters any corrections received from the author, Dr. Fleming, and proofreaders  into InDesign.  Along the way, he inserts images and ads directly into the layout.  George McCartney, Jr., who provides many of our covers, creates them on a Mac and sends them through e-mail and the web.

After a final reading of page proofs and the entering of any last-minute corrections, we export each page as a separate PDF (perhaps ten minutes’ work total, the time it took to wax a couple of pages) and upload them through the internet to our printer in Michigan.  The printer immediately provides a digital proof of the entire issue, and we approve it onscreen.  It goes into production the very next morning, and the printer provides hard copies after four business days.  The production process for a single issue has gone from almost three months to less than a month.  And a reader near the top of the mailstream can now read words written as late as one week before the issue arrived at his house, compared with six weeks or more in 1984.

So many of the advances that make our current production process possible happened so gradually that we sometimes lose sight of the revolution that took place in publishing over the last 25 years.  And Steve Jobs was there at every step of the way, through both Apple and NeXT.  Not only did the NeXTSTEP operating system become the basis for Mac OS X (and thus also iOS, which powers the iPod, iPhone, and iPad), it spurred the creation of Adobe’s PDF format (after NeXT adopted Adobe’s Display PostScript for its windowing system), the widespread adoption of e-mail (built into NeXTSTEP at the system level), and the rise of the World Wide Web, created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee on December 25, 1990, on a NeXT computer.

Without any one of these things, Chronicles as we know it today would be a different type of magazine.

Scott Richert and Aaron Wolf wax the final pages of the March 2006 issue on a PowerMac G5.

And it would be a much more expensive magazine, too.  Or rather, it might well have folded at several points in the past 25 years, had it not been for the reductions in cost occasioned by technologies that trace their roots back to Steve Jobs and Apple and NeXT.  Chronicles’ staff is a fraction of what it was in 1984: fewer editors; no typists and typesetters; no dedicated designer and layout person.  (At one point in 1999, even before all of these advances had made it to Chronicles, Dr. Fleming and I put out several issues without any additional in-house production staff.)  Hand-composed pages, film, and bluelines, along with the prepress services that they required, are things of the past; the PDFs that we send to the printer are now imposed directly on the plates.  Chronicles’ direct costs today are about 40 percent lower than they were when I became assistant editor back in September 1997 (and they were already much reduced then from 1984).

There are many more stories I could share, such as how the e-mail and PDF-viewing capabilities of the first iPhone allowed me to take my family on a much-needed vacation in August 2007, while still managing to supervise the production of three separate Chronicles Press books and make sure that they would arrive in Washington, D.C., in September in time for the John Randolph Club—a feat made possible by print-on-demand technologies that rely on the same advances that have made their way into Chronicles’ production process.  But I think you get the point: Whether you use a MacBook Air and an iPhone and an iPad or a Dell laptop and a Verizon Droid and an HP TouchPad, if you’re reading Chronicles, you’ve benefited from Steve Jobs’ efforts.  In a mere quarter of a century, he has revolutionized the publishing industry in a way not seen since the rise of moveable type.

I don’t mean to downplay the contributions of the tens of thousands of employees of Apple and NeXT (and Adobe and Microsoft) who acted as foot soldiers in this revolution—indeed, quite the opposite.  Over the last few years, as it became increasingly obvious that the day was coming when Steve Jobs would have to step aside as Apple’s CEO, Wall Street analysts cried doom and gloom, and institutional investors sold Apple short on every piece of bad news concerning its CEO’s health.

But those of us who rely on Apple products every day, and pay a bit more attention to the internal operations of Apple than the average person does, haven’t been overly worried.  Steve Jobs’ famed attention to detail and his desire for perfection did not stop with Apple’s products but extended to the company itself.  He was, as many ex-employees of Apple attest, a hell of a man to work for.  But those who continued to work for him, who were loyal to both the man and his vision, who recognized that his mercurial temper went hand-in-hand with his brilliance—those employees were indelibly shaped by him.  They have risen to the top ranks in Apple, and they took over the day-to-day operations on the world’s largest and most successful corporation long before Jobs stepped aside.  Thus, for those who rely on Apple products, there is nothing to fear, because Jobs’ faithful lieutenants have as little desire to change the company that Steve Jobs built as those of us who have dedicated our lives to Chronicles have to change this magazine.  As tech columnist John Gruber wrote on DaringFireball.net,

The company itself is Apple-like.  The same thought, care, and painstaking attention to detail that Steve Jobs brought to questions like “How should a computer work?”, “How should a phone work?”, “How should we buy music and apps in the digital age?” he also brought to the most important question: “How should a company that creates such things function?”

Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product.  It is Apple itself.

When the news of Steve Jobs’ resignation was announced on the evening of August 24, Apple’s stock immediately dropped seven percent in after-hours trading.  As I write this the next morning, it is down just a little over one percent from yesterday’s high, in line with the overall market.  That indicates institutional investors and Wall Street analysts are finally realizing what some of us small investors have long known: Apple succeeded because of Steve Jobs, but the company’s success no longer depends primarily on him.

In a world that too often values quick profits and “rock star” fame above solid products and hard work and loyalty, the fact that Steve Jobs could pull off such an orderly succession may, in the end, prove to be his greatest success.

This article first appeared in the October 2011 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. On October 5, Steve Jobs passed away, at the age of 56.