Customer Reviews

Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

For me, the major impression left by this book was it's massive originality. Every page was the equivalent of opening your lunchbox in expectation of the usual bologna sandwich, and finding instead a skyscraper, the Hope diamond, or Elvis' twitching torso. Karp looks at the theories of American politics and attempts to overturn every accepted explanation, always suggesting complex, subtle and powerful alternatives. Whether he succeeds or not you can judge for yourself, but he somehow manages to be always unique on ground previously trodden by so many feet. Yet, he isn't merely a contrarian. His intricate theory retains remarkable consistensy throughout this book and his other three books on politics.

The previous reviewer sums up one of the books main ideas very well. Another argument of the book is that power in America is almost totally monopolized by the two parties -- contrary to most opinion today which seeks to blame anyone and everyone for our problems except the most obvious suspects, the politicians who pass laws and frustrate reform. Since so many pundits blame either the "liberal media elite" or monopolistic corporations for our woes, Karp details the ways in which both groups are under the complete domination of the two parties (his analysis of the media is part of a separate book _Buried Alive_). As Karp points out, the idea isn't new. Madison, Jefferson, Washington, et. al. shouted until they were hoarse about the necessity of zealously watching politicians and rulers. They had little if any concern about journalists, manufacturers and bankers, except insofar as they might become willing tools for would-be despots and oligarchs. But no one except Karp has thoroughly explored the implications of this founding belief in the modern political context.

I learned more from this book then I did in all the classes I was required to obtain my political science degree. The main premise of the book is that the Republican and Democratic party leaders collude to keep power, often by not contesting elections that could easily be won with any money or effort expended. A quick example from today,25 years after the book was published: in my home state of Florida, half the congressional seats this year will not even be contested (several other "contests" simply have write-in candidates with zero chance of winning). Yet, the public perception is that the parties fight like dogs to win elections at all possible costs. Karp sees what pundits today can't: the goal of party leaders is to maintain control of their organizations,not to win elections. One quote from former Democratic speaker Sam Rayburn demonstrates this principle;when faced with a coming landslide for his party and a gain of many seats for his party,he ruefully says :"I'd just as soon not have that many Democrats, they'll be difficult to control." This is the shocking but real story of how politics in America really works.

Karp not only pulls back the curtain on the evils of partisan politics, but goes on to propose a Jeffersonian style of self-government. Some of my favorite analysis from this book includes the following:

* Party oligarchs and their Cold War statism highlights his "principle of waste."

* A State inherently tends toward collusion and monopoly-granting, and therefore expansion, and this necessarily leads to war.

* Special privilege is in direct odds with liberty and self-rule, and only serves to further entrench a ruling political elite. And this he says, is a result of the "Hamiltonian tradition."

* Political ideology necessarily takes the form of the ruling bureaucracy.

*Decentralization [and hence, secession] is the key to breaking the back of the Hamiltonian system.

Karp, a revisionist historian, takes on such sacred cows as FDR, Wilson, Johnson, McKinley, Hamilton, and trade unions (gasp!). It's one of the best books ever on raw political machinations.

I think this book is one of the best readers in American political science I have ever come across. What is stunning about this book is that it is the only one I have ever encountered that attempts to address that rather mysterious phrase we so often hear in modern politics, "government gone wild," or "government run rampant," or "out of control spending." After hearing such nonsense for years I almost believed it and then I read this book. Karp's retort is simply that things happen in government because those whose serve in government make them happen. There is no "holy ghost" running the show and increasing domestic or defense spending while members of Congress or the Executive are home sleeping. Karp seeks to remind the public that everything that is happening is because those in power will it to happen.

Karp has a thesis that is central to this work as well as his wonderful books Liberty Under Siege and The Politics of War and that is that those who govern do their best to make it appear as if forces beyond their control are always forcing them to act. This is not so, says Karp and he shows you why. Did Woodrow Wilson have to get us into war? Did the Germans attack us without provocation? Did FDR have to attempt (so blatantly and unconstitutionally) to pack the Court with "Activists" to get his New Deal made into law? Did LBJ really have no choice at Tonkin? Did JFK have to cave in to public funding for parochial schools? Why did the Democratic leadership always have so many of its own party legions defecting to the Republican cause when it had tremendous majorities in the House and Senate? The answers to these questions and more are in his books.

The way to read Indispensable Enemies is not for its minute details but as a working meditation on power and how those who wield it are so often afraid of entrusting it to the people who elect them. Leaders recognize that their power can disappear in a moment if the public wills it so they constantly attempt to snow their constituents by never taking responsibility for any of the decisions they make fearing they will stir those they serve. How do they get away with it? The public sleeps through their sleight of hand and shows little interest in looking carefully at the record of those they put into power. They often times are even willing to believe government is some vast immovable object incapable of action. Yet isn't it amazing how quickly it can respond when there is an emergency? Connect the dots and you will find that leaders of all parties are in collusion with one another to set the course of the day! It makes one wonder why, for example, the Democrats never offer much organized resistance to the GOP these days. Accident? Not if you accept Karp's perspective on American politics.

A must read, especially now.

There are times when a critic approaches a popular subject of criticism, only from an angle exactly opposite to the common one. Marx and Engels used to praise Honoré de Balzac, noted reactionary French writer of critical novels, for his accurate and representative criticism of the corruption and oppression in the society of Napoleon III, even though their political viewpoint (in other words, what they thought was the solution to those problems) was the precise opposite of Balzac's. To a great degree, the same principle operates here with Walter Karp's polemic "Indispensable Enemies".

In this book, Walter Karp, a writer for Harper's Magazine, criticizes the incorrect assumptions of American political pundits and journalists about American political parties and their operation. Usually American politics is portrayed as the contest between the two major parties over winning elections, whereby the party that manages to win the most elections is doing the best, and all involved in each party are assumed to strive for as much election victory as possible. Not so, says Karp: in reality, both political parties are run entirely as political machines, although it is very taboo among politics watchers to point this out. This means that the leadership of these parties in fact often want to LOSE elections, if winning the election would imply that a reformer candidate, unliked by the leadership, would win. After all, both political machines rely on the other to stay effective, so for a Democratic machine leader it is better that a Republican machine candidate win than that a Democratic anti-machine candidate win.

From this obviously correct premise - after all, why are so many parts of America perpetually in the hands of one party or the other? Even with gerrymandering taken into account, if all parties strove for was election victory, why can't the Democrats run a 'clone', i.e. a candidate with the exact same programme as the Republicans, in a district where they always lose? - Karp deduces many insights about the real functioning of America's parties and political leaders throughout the 20th Century. There is much in here to be praised, since it gives a very sober and sobering look at the actual behavior of such supposed heroes of reform as F.D. Roosevelt and L.B. Johnson, and Karp is very useful in tracing how they responded to any candidate who genuinely represented a reform, such as Huey Long or Eugene McCarthy. Absolutely essential here for understanding American politics is Karp's emphasis on the practice, by both parties, of purposely 'throwing' elections when a victory would have harmed their status quo.

However, Karp approaches everything the wrong way up, and that leads to many oddities. He is absolutely ideologically opposed to any kind of principle that implies that politicians are influenced by anything external - he rejects theories that attempt to describe American politicians' behavior in terms of lobbyist pressures, class interests, and so on as ridiculous. Rather, he seems to be of that rare breed who genuinely believe in the rhetoric of the American republic, that is that all American citizens basically are equal, have the same interests, and would fairly and democratically resolve their differences at a local level of directly involved democracy if it weren't for nefarious and corrupt politicians dividing them in order to rule. The whole Jeffersonian model of politics is Karp's uncritically idolized model, and this means that where his criticisms are often apt, his solutions and ideological commentary are anachronistic and absurd. Although he has some interesting criticisms to make about many prevailing analyses of American politics as being driven by business interests (he is quite right about the role of the opposite, businesses being bribed by special legislative favors and so being 'taken into the fold', having been ignored by too many such critics), he utterly ignores things like the role of money in election campaigns, the meaning of lobbyists, the role of global economics, and so on.

Karp was clearly a principled republican of the old type, and his intelligent eye pierces many a smokescreen that has baffled more modern and radical critics. His book is of use for improving one's understanding of the practical political side of American politics, rather than focusing just on the 'official' ideological side. However, he was also an anachronism, backward-looking and naive about the nature of the American state as much as he was critical and insightful about the nature of American politicians.

Walter Karp was one of the great political writers of the 20th Century. Dying young, he was still able to give us two masterpieces: "Liberty Under Siege", the story of exactly how all the rampaging forces of true democracy unleashed by the insanity of the 60s and the tacky criminality of Richard Nixon were crushed, how the republic died the day Ol' Crack Ronald Reagan was elected; and "The Politics of War", the best book ever written about Woodrow Wilson and the best book one can read to understand how the Texas Cracker Gangster got away with his rape of Iraq.

"Indispensable Enemies" -- written in the early 1970s -- shares with the two later masterpieces the same white-hot writing style, brilliance, and understanding of so many things. If one comes to this book after reading the later works(as I did), immediately one gets the feeling of a man over-reaching due to a vision of the world not yet formed or deepened. Frankly, the book is bogus. Karp looks at 20th Century America and finds one -- and only one -- bogie man behind everything: "party bosses". (Whomever they are.) Wars, scandals, economic power, unionism, the press and public system of education -- all are decided upon or subservient to: party bosses. FDR sank his own reformist program intentionally. Why? To uphold the power of the party bosses. (Karp is especially ridiculous in recounting the history of the Supreme Court Packing Plan. FDR came up with this idea, according to Karp, to intentionally shoot himself in the foot, so serious reform would fail.) LBJ started Vietnam to intentionally cripple his Great Society('cause the Party Bosses didn't like the Great Society). Per Karp, everyone throughout 20th Century history had only one motive -- to please and uphold the power of the party bosses.

Horsepoop. The book is so rigged, that if I'd come across it before reading the other books, I wouldn't have bothered. No mention of class. No mention of corporations. No mention of the Pentagon, the CIA or the National Security State. Nope. All these forces are just hand-maidens of the "party bosses" -- who are never named.

Curious. If a lesser man had written this, it would have correctly been tossed into the same dust bin as "None Dare Call It Conspiracy", "The Elders of Zion", "The Illuminati" and the collected works of Tim LaHaye. But it wasn't. It's by Karp. So we give the book a benefit it doesn't deserve.

It's balderdash. But the other Karps are magnificent. Read them.

I have to concur with the five-star reviewers. This book is absolutely essential to a solid understanding of American politics. Karp explodes the myth of the great rivalry between Democrats and Republicans by examining their deeds, not their words. Most importantly, he examines their collusion by the evidence of what they've done.

This book also cites one of the best defenses of "conspiracy theory", by none other than Abraham Lincoln himself. Open your mind, and read this book, and then enjoy an even more open mind.

I cannot stress this book too strongly!

For those who are under the illusion that political parties really are "different" and that you really still have a choice at the ballot box, this is a must read. And also read Karp's "The Politics of War" about the Spanish American War and WWI. It is very relevant for today's problems, but you won't have any illusions about Wilson or your high school history lessons.