FROM THE ARCHIVES: Self-flattering Notions Die Hard

The Myth of American Exceptionalism

The idea that the United States is uniquely virtuous may be comforting to Americans. Too bad it’s not true.
BY STEPHEN M. WALT | Originally: Foreignpolicy.com, NOVEMBER 2011
Feature suggestion by Editor at Large Ed Duvin

Over the last two centuries, prominent Americans have described the United States as an “empire of liberty,” a “shining city on a hill,” the “last best hope of Earth,” the “leader of the free world,” and the “indispensable nation.” These enduring tropes explain why all presidential candidates feel compelled to offer ritualistic paeans to America’s greatness and why President Barack Obama landed in hot water — most recently, from Mitt Romney — for saying that while he believed in “American exceptionalism,” it was no different from “British exceptionalism,” “Greek exceptionalism,” or any other country’s brand of patriotic chest-thumping.

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Most statements of “American exceptionalism” presume that America’s values, political system, and history are unique and worthy of universal admiration. They also imply that the United States is both destined and entitled to play a distinct and positive role on the world stage.

The only thing wrong with this self-congratulatory portrait of America’s global role is that it is mostly a myth. Although the United States possesses certain unique qualities — from high levels of religiosity to a political culture that privileges individual freedom — the conduct of U.S. foreign policy has been determined primarily by its relative power and by the inherently competitive nature of international politics. By focusing on their supposedly exceptional qualities, Americans blind themselves to the ways that they are a lot like everyone else.

This unchallenged faith in American exceptionalism makes it harder for Americans to understand why others are less enthusiastic about U.S. dominance, often alarmed by U.S. policies, and frequently irritated by what they see as U.S. hypocrisy, whether the subject is possession of nuclear weapons, conformity with international law, or America’s tendency to condemn the conduct of others while ignoring its own failings. Ironically, U.S. foreign policy would probably be more effective if Americans were less convinced of their own unique virtues and less eager to proclaim them.

What we need, in short, is a more realistic and critical assessment of America’s true character and contributions. In that spirit, I offer here the Top 5 Myths about American Exceptionalism.

Myth 1
There Is Something Exceptional About American Exceptionalism.

Whenever American leaders refer to the “unique” responsibilities of the United States, they are saying that it is different from other powers and that these differences require them to take on special burdens.

Yet there is nothing unusual about such lofty declarations; indeed, those who make them are treading a well-worn path. Most great powers have considered themselves superior to their rivals and have believed that they were advancing some greater good when they imposed their preferences on others. The British thought they were bearing the “white man’s burden,” while French colonialists invoked la mission civilisatrice to justify their empire. Portugal, whose imperial activities were hardly distinguished, believed it was promoting a certain missão civilizadora. Even many of the officials of the former Soviet Union genuinely believed they were leading the world toward a socialist utopia despite the many cruelties that communist rule inflicted. Of course, the United States has by far the better claim to virtue than Stalin or his successors, but Obama was right to remind us that all countries prize their own particular qualities.

So when Americans proclaim they are exceptional and indispensable, they are simply the latest nation to sing a familiar old song. Among great powers, thinking you’re special is the norm, not the exception.

Myth 2
The United States Behaves Better Than Other Nations Do.

Declarations of American exceptionalism rest on the belief that the United States is a uniquely virtuous nation, one that loves peace, nurtures liberty, respects human rights, and embraces the rule of law. Americans like to think their country behaves much better than other states do, and certainly better than other great powers.

If only it were true. The United States may not have been as brutal as the worst states in world history, but a dispassionate look at the historical record belies most claims about America’s moral superiority.

For starters, the United States has been one of the most expansionist powers in modern history. It began as 13 small colonies clinging to the Eastern Seaboard, but eventually expanded across North America, seizing Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California from Mexico in 1846. Along the way, it eliminated most of the native population and confined the survivors to impoverished reservations. By the mid-19th century, it had pushed Britain out of the Pacific Northwest and consolidated its hegemony over the Western Hemisphere.

The United States has fought numerous wars since then — starting several of them — and its wartime conduct has hardly been a model of restraint. The 1899-1902 conquest of the Philippines killed some 200,000 to 400,000 Filipinos, most of them civilians, and the United States and its allies did not hesitate to dispatch some 305,000 German and 330,000 Japanese civilians through aerial bombing during World War II, mostly through deliberate campaigns against enemy cities. No wonder Gen. Curtis LeMay, who directed the bombing campaign against Japan, told an aide, “If the U.S. lost the war, we would be prosecuted as war criminals.” The United States dropped more than 6 million tons of bombs during the Indochina war, including tons of napalm and lethal defoliants like Agent Orange, and it is directly responsible for the deaths of many of the roughly 1 million civilians who died in that war.

More recently, the U.S.-backed Contra war in Nicaragua killed some 30,000 Nicaraguans, a percentage of their population equivalent to 2 million dead Americans. U.S. military action has led directly or indirectly to the deaths of 250,000 Muslims over the past three decades (and that’s a low-end estimate, not counting the deaths resulting from the sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s), including the more than 100,000 people who died following the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. U.S. drones and Special Forces are going after suspected terrorists in at least five countries at present and have killed an unknown number of innocent civilians in the process. Some of these actions may have been necessary to make Americans more prosperous and secure. But while Americans would undoubtedly regard such acts as indefensible if some foreign country were doing them to us, hardly any U.S. politicians have questioned these policies. Instead, Americans still wonder, “Why do they hate us?”

The United States talks a good game on human rights and international law, but it has refused to sign most human rights treaties, is not a party to the International Criminal Court, and has been all too willing to cozy up to dictators — remember our friend Hosni Mubarak? — with abysmal human rights records. If that were not enough, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the George W. Bush administration’s reliance on waterboarding, extraordinary rendition, and preventive detention should shake America’s belief that it consistently acts in a morally superior fashion. Obama’s decision to retain many of these policies suggests they were not a temporary aberration.

The United States never conquered a vast overseas empire or caused millions to die through tyrannical blunders like China’s Great Leap Forward or Stalin’s forced collectivization. And given the vast power at its disposal for much of the past century, Washington could certainly have done much worse. But the record is clear: U.S. leaders have done what they thought they had to do when confronted by external dangers, and they paid scant attention to moral principles along the way. The idea that the United States is uniquely virtuous may be comforting to Americans; too bad it’s not true.

Myth 3
Myth 4
The United States Is Responsible for Most of the Good in the World.

Americans are fond of giving themselves credit for positive international developments. President Bill Clinton believed the United States was “indispensable to the forging of stable political relations,” and the late Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington thought U.S. primacy was central “to the future of freedom, democracy, open economies, and international order in the world.” Journalist Michael Hirsh has gone even further, writing in his book At War With Ourselves that America’s global role is “the greatest gift the world has received in many, many centuries, possibly all of recorded history.” Scholarly works such as Tony Smith’s America’s Mission and G. John Ikenberry’s Liberal Leviathan emphasize America’s contribution to the spread of democracy and its promotion of a supposedly liberal world order. Given all the high-fives American leaders have given themselves, it is hardly surprising that most Americans see their country as an overwhelmingly positive force in world affairs.

Once again, there is something to this line of argument, just not enough to make it entirely accurate. The United States has made undeniable contributions to peace and stability in the world over the past century, including the Marshall Plan, the creation and management of the Bretton Woods system, its rhetorical support for the core principles of democracy and human rights, and its mostly stabilizing military presence in Europe and the Far East. But the belief that all good things flow from Washington’s wisdom overstates the U.S. contribution by a wide margin.

For starters, though Americans watching Saving Private Ryan or Patton may conclude that the United States played the central role in vanquishing Nazi Germany, most of the fighting was in Eastern Europe and the main burden of defeating Hitler’s war machine was borne by the Soviet Union. Similarly, though the Marshall Plan and NATO played important roles in Europe’s post-World War II success, Europeans deserve at least as much credit for rebuilding their economies, constructing a novel economic and political union, and moving beyond four centuries of sometimes bitter rivalry. Americans also tend to think they won the Cold War all by themselves, a view that ignores the contributions of other anti-Soviet adversaries and the courageous dissidents whose resistance to communist rule produced the “velvet revolutions” of 1989.

Moreover, as Godfrey Hodgson recently noted in his sympathetic but clear-eyed book, The Myth of American Exceptionalism, the spread of liberal ideals is a global phenomenon with roots in the Enlightenment, and European philosophers and political leaders did much to advance the democratic ideal. Similarly, the abolition of slavery and the long effort to improve the status of women owe more to Britain and other democracies than to the United States, where progress in both areas trailed many other countries. Nor can the United States claim a global leadership role today on gay rights, criminal justice, or economic equality — Europe’s got those areas covered.

Finally, any honest accounting of the past half-century must acknowledge the downside of American primacy. The United States has been the major producer of greenhouse gases for most of the last hundred years and thus a principal cause of the adverse changes that are altering the global environment. The United States stood on the wrong side of the long struggle against apartheid in South Africa and backed plenty of unsavory dictatorships — including Saddam Hussein’s — when short-term strategic interests dictated. Americans may be justly proud of their role in creating and defending Israel and in combating global anti-Semitism, but its one-sided policies have also prolonged Palestinian statelessness and sustained Israel’s brutal occupation.

Bottom line: Americans take too much credit for global progress and accept too little blame for areas where U.S. policy has in fact been counterproductive. Americans are blind to their weak spots, and in ways that have real-world consequences. Remember when Pentagon planners thought U.S. troops would be greeted in Baghdad with flowers and parades? They mostly got RPGs and IEDs instead.

Myth 5
God Is on Our Side.

A crucial component of American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States has a divinely ordained mission to lead the rest of the world. Ronald Reagan told audiences that there was “some divine plan” that had placed America here, and once quoted Pope Pius XII saying, “Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind.” Bush offered a similar view in 2004, saying, “We have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.” The same idea was expressed, albeit less nobly, in Otto von Bismarck’s alleged quip that “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States.”

Confidence is a valuable commodity for any country. But when a nation starts to think it enjoys the mandate of heaven and becomes convinced that it cannot fail or be led astray by scoundrels or incompetents, then reality is likely to deliver a swift rebuke. Ancient Athens, Napoleonic France, imperial Japan, and countless other countries have succumbed to this sort of hubris, and nearly always with catastrophic results.

Despite America’s many successes, the country is hardly immune from setbacks, follies, and boneheaded blunders. If you have any doubts about that, just reflect on how a decade of ill-advised tax cuts, two costly and unsuccessful wars, and a financial meltdown driven mostly by greed and corruption have managed to squander the privileged position the United States enjoyed at the end of the 20th century. Instead of assuming that God is on their side, perhaps Americans should heed Abraham Lincoln’s admonition that our greatest concern should be “whether we are on God’s side.”

Given the many challenges Americans now face, from persistent unemployment to the burden of winding down two deadly wars, it’s unsurprising that they find the idea of their own exceptionalism comforting — and that their aspiring political leaders have been proclaiming it with increasing fervor. Such patriotism has its benefits, but not when it leads to a basic misunderstanding of America’s role in the world. This is exactly how bad decisions get made.

America has its own special qualities, as all countries do, but it is still a state embedded in a competitive global system. It is far stronger and richer than most, and its geopolitical position is remarkably favorable. These advantages give the United States a wider range of choice in its conduct of foreign affairs, but they don’t ensure that its choices will be good ones. Far from being a unique state whose behavior is radically different from that of other great powers, the United States has behaved like all the rest, pursuing its own self-interest first and foremost, seeking to improve its relative position over time, and devoting relatively little blood or treasure to purely idealistic pursuits. Yet, just like past great powers, it has convinced itself that it is different, and better, than everyone else.

International politics is a contact sport, and even powerful states must compromise their political principles for the sake of security and prosperity. Nationalism is also a powerful force, and it inevitably highlights the country’s virtues and sugarcoats its less savory aspects. But if Americans want to be truly exceptional, they might start by viewing the whole idea of “American exceptionalism” with a much more skeptical eye.

Stephen M. Walt, an FP contributing editor, is Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He blogs at walt.foreignpolicy.com.

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The Broken Link Between OWS and a Murder

By Jim Naureckas, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
THANK YOU, FAIR 

 

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The Supreme Court and “Playing Politics:” The Upper Upper House of the U.S. Legislature

By STEVEN JONAS, MD, MPH
Simulpost with BuzzFlash

 Ah yes, now the Grand Old Tea Party is screaming about “politics” and the Supreme Court. How could Chief Justice Roberts betray them on the “man from Kenya’s” health care reform act? (Actually, as a number of observers have pointed out, there is a poison pill on the Commerce Clause in Justice Roberts’ supposedly “liberal” majority opinion, but that is another matter.)  At first blush, according to the Right (and they often don’t go any farther than first bluish) he was just “playing politics” and that was a terrible thing.

Oh really? So you think that the functions of the US Supreme Court really follow the prescripts of Article III, Section 2 of the US Constitution, or should do so:

“Section. 2.

“The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;–to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;–to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;–to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;–to Controversies between two or more States;– between a State and Citizens of another State,–between Citizens of different States,–between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.

“In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Well, no, they don’t really follow these prescripts. The Right screams about the Court “playing politics” only when they lose one (which historically hasn’t happened that often). As we know, the Supreme Court’s functions-in-fact go well beyond those stated above. The Constitution was amended in fact if not in the law by a series of decisions made under the leadership of a Chief Justice, John Marshall, whose appointment itself was entirely political. From the time that John Marshall wrote his first ruling that claimed that the Court had the power to review and declare “unconstitutional” actions of both the legislative and executive branches of the US government, a power nowhere to be found in the Constitution, it has been political in a major way, as Professor Fred Rodell of the Yale Law School documented in a book published as long ago as 1955 (1).  That was well before the Court made several very important decisions, like Roe v. Wade, that the Right likes to scream about as being “political.”  Indeed, the most important decisions that it has made since Marshall’s time have been entirely political, following along, not with juridical or legal considerations, but with the politics and the political considerations (very important in Roberts’ decision in the Affordable Care Act [ACA] case) of the majority of the justices sitting at the time. How did that happen?

In 1776 Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were allies in leading what was to become the American Revolution. But by the time the election of 1800 rolled around they had become bitter political enemies. The founders had not contemplated a two-party system, but by golly, there it was. Jefferson won. Attempting to continue his Federalist party’s influence/participation/control in/of the successor government, in a political stratagem Adams got his holdover Congress to create a whole set of new courts (2). Then, in the first attempt at “court-packing,” just before Jefferson’s inauguration on March 4, 1801, he appointed a whole set of Federalist “Midnight” judges and justices. Among them was one William Marbury, a wealthy Federalist from Maryland, appointed to be Justice of the Peace for the District of Columbia (a position that carried with it rather more power than it does now).

Shortly before that time, Adams had appointed his then-Secretary of State (at that time considered the number two power in the government), one John Marshall, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Thus a political decision made by Adams led to the most important amendment to the U.S. Constitution other than the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth which followed the conclusion of the First Civil War. Of course it was not a written amendment. It was not approved by two-thirds votes in each House of Congress. Nor was it ratified by three-fourths of the states. Nevertheless, the establishment of the system of “judicial review” by the Supreme Court of Acts of Congress and actions of the Executive Branch was an amendment to the Constitution. As noted, and as you can read for yourself above, there is nothing in Article III which comes close to giving it such powers.

So how did this happen? By two accidents of history. One was that Mr. Marbury really, really, really wanted that appointment. The other was the slowness of communications of the time (slow horse, broken wagon wheel, bad roads?) The appointment notice did not reach him before Jefferson’s inauguration. The new President, furious with Adams’ machinations, told his new acting Secretary of State, Levi Lincoln, not to deliver the original notice. James Madison (who happened to have been one of the main drafters of the Constitution as well as the Bill of Rights) would soon come in as Secretary of State. Marbury then sued Madison to have the commission delivered, and so the most important case in the judicial history of the United States, Marbury v. Madison, was created.

Without getting into the nitty-gritty of the case, in his writing for the majority John Marshall, a political appointee, made a political decision, although he couched it in judicial terms. He claimed that in order to decide the case, the Court would have to consider the legality of the law which created the position to which Adams had appointed Marbury. He then concluded that if the law were a proper one, Marbury was entitled to the position, despite the technicality of the non-delivery of the notice. BUT, he then concluded that that particular law, the Judiciary Act of 1789, was not in accord with the provisions of Article III of the Constitution and was therefore null and void, that is “unconstitutional.” Thus Marbury was NOT entitled to the position, whatever the technicalities of the non-delivery.

Thus the irony of Marbury v. Madison: it unconstitutionally created a power for the Supreme Court that nowhere appears on the Constitution. Jefferson complained (1):

“You seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps…. Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.”

Jefferson had it right, even though little did he know what was to come of the establishment of such a “despotic” power. But neither he nor any of his allies went further than that, politically, and the custom/system, whatever you want to call it, was gradually accepted. Under Marshall’s leadership, over time, in a series of cases, McColluch v. Maryland being the most important one, the power of the Supreme Court in this regard was gradually expanded and, among other things, extended to the states.

Thus the Supreme Court’s powers grew out of political infighting between Adams and Jefferson, as of course did its political role. Yes, the Court has heard and still hears tons of cases under its powers as spelled out in Article III but we never hear about those.  The cases we do hear about are the political ones: Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, all of the New Deal decisions pro and con, Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, and etc. Just looking at the politics of the membership of the Court for any of the major cases over time tells you how they went.

Was Chief Justice John Roberts taking politics into account with his decision for the ACA case (and he apparently changed his mind late in the game on it)? You betcha. Was his namesake Justice Owen Roberts (no relation) taking politics into account in 1938 when, at the height of the Second Court-Packing controversy, FDR’s, he suddenly switched sides from anti-New Deal to pro- and all of a sudden a whole bunch of New Deal programs became constitutional? You betcha! The first Roberts’ switch was immediately called “the switch in time that saved nine.” One wonders how long it will be before the second Roberts’ switch is so called as well. When the Court rules an act of Congress or an action of the Executive Branch unconstitutional it is acting politically. Certainly in the former case it is acting as the Upper Upper House of the U.S. legislature, in the latter simply as an extra-Constitutional umpire: “You’re outta here!”

The nature of the Court over time is the result of the political process of Presidential and Senatorial elections. For most of our history we have been ruled by right-wing or “center-right” Presidents who have made the bulk of the Supreme Court appointments. It is no mystery why most Supreme Court decisions, except during very limited periods of time, have been reactionary ones. During those relatively short historical periods when the Court has had a liberal majority and has made liberal political decisions, the Right has screamed “judicial self-restraint” and “states’ rights.” But what they are really concerned about is the politics of those decisions.

Consider, for example, Bush v. Gore. In it the Court over-ruled the Supreme Court of the State of Florida on the matter of how to (re-)count votes in the state. One would think that that would be a matter of “states’ rights” and that the Court should “restrain itself.” But no such screams were heard. That’s because the screams of the Right have nothing to do with the process, as much as they would like to convince us that it does. They have everything to do with the political nature of decisions they don’t like. But now, all of a sudden with a firm right-wing majority (except for this one decision, and the ACA is hardly revolutionary) one of the leading reactionary voices in the country, George Will, is calling for “judicial activism” to overturn a bunch of those occasional liberal precedents that go back a century (3), just as did happen in Citizens United.

And so, this Roberts’ decision was made on narrow legal grounds. It was made for political reasons having to do with an attempt to maintain the legitimacy of the Court for a whole bunch of reactionary decisions that it will be making in the future (always 5-4, one can be virtually sure — and Roberts will not be on the liberal side for a very long time to come), such as over-turning Roe v. Wade when it can get its mitts on that case. It is just another in a long line of such decisions made by an institution whose powers grew, not out of the Constitution, but out of a clash between the first two political parties of the United States. One must wonder how US history might have been different if Mr. Marbury had not wanted that appointment so badly or if that notice of his appointment had gotten through to him before March 4, 1801.

STEVE JONAS serves as senior editor with The Greanville Post. He is also a senior contributing editor for BuzzFlash and other leading progressive venues.

——————————————————————————————————-

References:

1. Rodell, Fred, Nine Men: A Political History of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1790 to 1955, New York: Random House, 1955.

http://www.rgj.com/article/20120618/COL01/306180006

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PSA: Stop Internet interference on behalf of fat cats.

alert is HERE.—PG

Hi, I am Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and if you care about justice and the future of the Internet freedom, Demand Progress and I need your help. 

TVShack.net – which linked (similarly to a search-engine) to places to watch TV and movies online.

O’Dwyer is not a US citizen, he’s lived in the UK all his life, his site was not hosted there, and most of his users were not from the US. America is trying to prosecute a UK citizen for an alleged crime which took place on UK soil.

The Internet as a whole must not tolerate censorship in response to mere allegations of copyright infringement. As citizens we must stand up for our rights online.

 Please click here to join me in demanding that British authorities refuse to extradite O’Dwyer, and that US officials cease persecuting him.

When operating his site, Richard O’Dwyer always did his best to play by the rules: on the few occasions he received requests to remove content from copyright holders, he complied. His site hosted links, not copyrighted content, and these were submitted by users.

Copyright is an important institution, serving a beneficial moral and economic purpose. But that does not mean that copyright can or should be unlimited.

It does not mean that we should abandon time-honored moral and legal principles to allow endless encroachments on our civil liberties in the interests of the moguls of Hollywood.

This is but one of several recent attempts by the US government and Hollywood to expand the definition of copyright infringement to include those who simply link to other sites that are accused of housing infringing content.   

Please click here to join us in standing up for Richard O’Dwyer and Internet freedom.

Those who are being prosecuted face huge fines, and multiple years in prison.  These actions represent an unacceptable attack on Internet freedom — and one of questionable legality.

Congress should act to reign in US prosecutors and protect Internet freedom — and the UK should refuse to extradite O’Dwyer.

Richard O’Dwyer is the human face of the battle between the content industry and the interests of the general public.

Earlier this year, in the fight against SOPA and PIPA, the public won its first big victory. This could be our second.

This is why I am petitioning the UK’s Home Secretary Theresa May to stop the extradition of Richard O’Dwyer, and asking the United States to end his prosecution. 

I hope you will join me — please click here to stand up for Richard O’Dwyer and Internet freedom.

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5 States Where “Living in Sin” Is Illegal? America’s Irrational Love Affair With the Institution of Marriage

By Thomas Rogers, Salon
Crossposted with Alternet

For most people living in major American cities these days, the idea of an unmarried couple living together is as controversial as toasted bread. Since the 1990s, more than half of married couples in the United States live in sin before getting married. The percentage of people who disapproved of unmarried cohabitation has dropped from 86 percent in 1977 to 27 percent in 2007. In fact, for most of us, it seems far more suspicious to see a couple moving in together after they’ve gotten hitched than before. So how is it possible that living with your boyfriend or girlfriend is still against the law in Michigan and several Southern states?

As Elizabeth H. Pleck details in her fascinating new book,“Not Just Roommates: Cohabitation After the Sexual Revolution,” unmarried cohabitation has had a rocky path toward cultural acceptance — and, unbeknownst to many of us, is still held back by widespread retrograde legal policies. For much of the 20th century, couples were dragged to jail, had their social benefits revoked or lost custody of their children because they decided to live with the person they loved. And even as the civil rights, feminist and gay rights movements gradually won more rights for cohabitators, the law has continued to place an irrational importance on marriage, especially when it comes to Social Security. Pleck’s book focuses on a series of key legal cases from the past half-century, but manages to make a convincing argument about the misguidedness of our country’s continued, irrational love affair with the institution of marriage — and why it’s high time the law caught up with our hearts.

Salon spoke to Pleck over the phone about the importance of gay marriage, the New York Times’ bad science and why America is still so obsessed with matrimony.

For someone like me who lives in New York, the idea that there is still a stigma or a legal case against unmarried people living together is really surprising.

There’s the cultural stigma and the legal stigma, but it’s the legal stigma that is more interesting to me. How come the law and our policies haven’t caught up to the fact it’s no big deal anymore? Cohabitation is still a crime in five states — the four Southern states and Michigan. Yes, no one has been arrested for cohabitation in recent years but there are a few situations in which the fact that it’s criminal can be used against people. There’s the example of Michael Schiavo, Terri Schiavo’s husband, who was denied guardianship of his wife because her parents went to court saying he broke the law of Florida because he was living with his girlfriend.

Like many other aspects of the sexual revolution, [the rise of cohabitation] appeared first and had its greatest effects on the two coasts and while it has affected the entire country, there are holdouts. You find lower rates of cohabitation and more opposition in the non-coastal and rural areas of the country.

How does this current state of affairs compare to the early 1960s and before?

The numbers of cohabitators are estimates, but to the extent they are accurate, the increase is absolutely off the charts. This is one of the huge trends of family and sexual history where you just find the arrow going almost straight up at an incredibly rapid rate. In the early ’50s and ’60s it was confined to cosmopolitan areas, bohemians, student neighborhoods, interracial couples and poor people because of poor people’s flexible relationship status. What we’ve found since then is that it’s become more common, more frequent, more acceptable, and spread in terms of regions, age profiles of the people and so forth. The majority of people, in the 70 percent range, now live together before they marry — about 12-15 million people right now.

If these laws aren’t being enforced, why should we care?

The criminal laws are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s one of a variety of ways we don’t honor the idea that every person is the same or that everybody can be just left alone as an adult to do what they want. The law makes a symbolic stand in favor of legal marriage and promoting marriage, and major entitlement programs — both private and public — are based on this idea, and on the benefits side there are many important points of social insurance, personal insurance, that have to do with being married. Cohabitators, for example, are two or three times more likely not to have health insurance than married people. A lot of social insurance goes to people who are legally married and their dependents. You find many people on the Internet discussing how they only got married to get health coverage, and many who are engaged don’t understand their fiancés aren’t covered by this. Same with Social Security benefits, they are based on marriage. This is about something I call the right to not have to marry.

It’s funny, I’m Canadian and in a relationship with a man and I’m very conscious of the fact that, because of DOMA, I don’t have that option to marry my boyfriend if I want to stay in the United States. It’s something that I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about.

Yes, immigration policy favors legal marriage and punishes people who are not married. Cohabitation used to be thought of as immoral and one of the reasons for deportations was that people were engaged in immoral conduct.

Where does America’s extraordinary love of marriage come from?

I’m extremely interested in the exceptional nature of the American nation. The idea of promoting marriage and marriage policy goes way back. America is a very religious nation. Cohabitation [is seen by many as] a religious sin and a sin against God whereas marriage is not sinful. People think it has to do with 19thcentury and Victorian ideas, but the truth is that there has been an active fight going on in various states on cohabitation since the 1970s, in Florida and Wisconsin and different states. The growth of the New Right in the late ’60s and early ’70s added on new layers of emotional maneuvering.

So how did our attitudes change?

The first big turning point was when the Supreme Court struck down laws against interracial cohabitation in 1964. Florida had a law saying a black man and a white women or a black woman and white man could not legally cohabit at nighttime. It was a major victory for cohabitation but they still said it’s fine for states to have those laws; they just couldn’t use race as a classification in making punishments. You can’t punish black and white couples for cohabitation but it’s still a crime on the books for a couple to live together.

The No. 1 most important change was the domestic partnership movement. The gay liberation movement fought for it especially in the ’80s and ’90s and cohabitators — straight and gay — ended up being the major beneficiaries of it. It’s a huge shift because it took cohabitation from the shadowy world and made it be recognized. You can use it to receive benefits from private or public employers and you can register this status with a municipality and a state government to get favorable tax treatment and some benefits.

How important was pop culture’s role in making Americans more accepting of cohabitation?

Cohabitation is actually very visible in popular music, because popular music is music of young people and young people were doing it. There’s a Bon Jovi song about it and Joni Mitchell sang about it. It was on “Soul Train.” A few movies by liberal filmmakers in the early ’70s showed countercultural people living together. In the late ’70s there were movies like “Rocky” and “Annie Hall” where it was taken for granted. TV is another story because in the late ’60s or early ’70s series would show an age gap where the parents were offended and the parents’ values were eventually affirmed. It was only in the middle ’70s with this Norman Lear TV show “All’s Fair,” that we got a positive view of cohabitation.

People that you quote in the book talk about the “marriage cure,” the widespread belief among lawmakers that marriage is the solution to a variety of social ills. Does the marriage cure work?

So, for example, a judge will have a young couple coming to him. They’re living together and the guy is unemployed or on probation and he’ll say he won’t punish them in any way if they get married. The state is coercing couples to get married with the idea that then you have cured the problem. Some people want to cure poverty by doing this, others want to cure crime, some immorality. But it turns out you can’t cure these things in these ways. One major reason is you can’t make people stay put once you marry them off; they often don’t stay married.

The marriage promotion movement — which consists of conservative social scientists, especially in the ’90s, engaging in anti-poverty policy, welfare reform, abstinence education at schools — has a very strong belief in this. The idea is that marriage is the ultimate poverty program. I quote extensively from the research in the book to show there’s very little evidence that this works.

It’s very interesting that marriage is seen in the U.S., unlike in Western Europe, as the magic bullet that’s going to cure all kinds of ills. Why are their attitudes so different over there?

[In Western Europe, their ideas are] based on recognizing reality: “This is the way people are living, and we’re not going to be able to change it very much so we should be able to recognize this is what’s going on and treat people fairly given that.” In the U.S. it’s, “This is what’s going on, and this is something we don’t approve of, and maybe we can’t really stop it but we should use our law and our policy to make a broad statement that we believe in marriage and stand behind it even if we know in our hearts that it might not be able to work.”

It’s an expression of these very schizophrenic elements of American culture. On one hand the U.S. celebrates individualism and on the other hand it has these moral policies that are very paternalistic.

That’s a great way of putting it. I think there is a schizophrenia or a divide and some people tend to emphasize one and not the other but they’re both there and tugging at each other — I think that’s called the culture war. It’s a very important part of American history especially since the 1970s.

There was a recent, very popular New York Times articlethat argued that premarital cohabitation was bad news for marriages. What did you make of it?

I actually wrote a letter to the editor in response to this. First of all, that writer quoted social science as if it is the bible on this. The various statistics about cohabitation on the whole tend to show that engagement cohabitation is more likely to lead to a marriage that does not end in divorce. But all studies of cohabitation are studying a moving target; last year’s findings are not this year’s findings. But the reason the article is interesting to me is that it became a cultural phenomenon. It was the most emailed article of that week, I believe, as it seemed to be for all “what leads to divorce” articles.

Those kinds of articles actually go way back in American history, but they tap into tremendous anxiety and fear with the assumption that correlation is causation. I sense that isn’t just because we have lots of children of divorce but because when the country is unstable and the economy is still recovering and our country’s national greatness is not what it was, marriage and divorce become the symbol of the nation. They pick that anxiety and mirror it. My opinion is you’re pretty much going to have to do what is best for you and what accords with your beliefs. Dear Abby had to change her views on cohabitation; she was advising people not to do it until the ’90s, and then she capitulated and said it seems to be OK. I just don’t think that it’s very beneficial to engage in fear-mongering about cohabitation and fears of divorce.

I’ve never been terribly fond of the idea of marriage, and it’s interesting to me that the gay community has increasingly moved from this idea of abolishing marriage to making marriage the central part of the movement. Why do you think that change occurred?

The No. 1 reason was the AIDS epidemic. It showed the fragility of life and the fragility of non-legally recognized relationships and the need for social benefits associated with legal marriage. On top of that, there was the lesbian baby boom and, in general, a new generation of gay liberationists who were not coming out of ’60s critique of the nuclear family.

Cohabitation is not a social movement, but it gets a huge amount of energy from gay civil rights. So when gay civil rights moved in the direction of legal marriage the issue of non-marriage benefits seemed to take a back seat. There was the potential at one point that there would be a both-and strategy — that people would be for the right to marry and the right to not have to marry — but it hasn’t been the case. Now it seems like all the energy goes into the right to marry.

For me the ideal future outcome is something close to the Scandinavian model in which many of our rights toward hospital visitation, inheritance, healthcare and so forth are disentangled from the institution of marriage. How realistic is this in the U.S.?

I don’t think it’s very realistic to expect that outcome. I have been absolutely surprised by the success of the legal same-sex marriage movement and that we are on the verge of declaring DOMA null and void. This is a positive movement in same-sex marriage but my calculation is same-sex marriage has to happen first then cohabitation after that, so it’s kind of at the end of the train. I see the train is picking up and moving faster but that end point doesn’t seem to be coming any time soon.

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