Britney Spears finally caught a break. In what had been a very bad period in her life–she lost custody rights to her children and has been admitted this year for psychiatric evaluation–she finally caught some good news. In what may go down as one of the most ridiculous commercials of campaign 2008, the John McCain campaign featured Britney and Paris Hilton in its latest attack against Barack Obama, comparing Obama’s celebrity to that of Paris and Britney. The ad, featured prominently on John McCain’s Web site (complete with a screenshot of Paris), shows pictures of Obama’s recent speech in Berlin, where he played to a crowd of 200,000 +. Apparently, a politician being able to fill stadiums compares unfavorably to playing the cheese aisle at a local grocery store. (I wonder if Nelson Mandela is just a celebrity, since his birthday party attracted tens of thousands of people last month?)

There are so many things that are just downright bizarre about this latest attack, but this nugget is perhaps the one that shows how out of touch John McCain’s advisers may actually be. Explaining the ad, McCain adviser Rick Davis has said:

“What we decided to do is find the top three international celebrities in the world. And I would say from our estimations, Britney and Paris came in second and third.”

Britney second and Paris third? Of all the celebrities…IN THE WORLD?

Where’s Oprah? How about David Beckham? Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie? According to Forbes, which recently published a list of Top 100 celebrities, neither Paris nor Britney are in the top 100. (Britney is probably very relieved that Forbes’s methodology must have been off and that she is indeed still one of the top celebs in the world.)

In the ad, it was obvious that the McCain campaign was not really trying to compare Obama to a celebrity (or else, the GOP would have to explain away why Arnold Schwarzenegger or Ronald Reagan were acceptable celebrity politicians); rather, they were trying to compare Obama to celebrities who have been held up for scorn, trying to attach their Scarlet letter to Obama. But, in trying to be cute and funny and at the same time make a serious political point, the campaign unveiled its own cultural illiteracy.

A clumsy ad, executed clumsily. But, at least it’s probably only a one-day story. Onto the Veepstakes! (Hopefully.)

My new book White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement places conservatism within the big picture of modern American history. The book traces the origins of modern conservatism to the 1920s. It explains why conservativism triumphed in the late 20th century and why it is has fallen into disarray under the leadership of President George W. Bush.

The review of my book in the New York Times by former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum shows that at least some diehard defenders of the Bush administration do not wish to enter into in a serious conversation about America’s conservative political tradition, but rather are engaged in sweeping self-denial at the expense of fairness, accuracy, and historical understanding. In Frum’s view only patriotic anti-communist and the pristine free-market theories of University of Chicago economists should be included in the conservative pantheon. Certainly nothing belongs that even hints of a less than respectable and inclusive approach to sensitive issues such as race, gender, religion, or business-self interest.

This response to Frum’s partisan-driven review is aimed at opening up a discussion about the rise (and likely fall) of conservativism based on the actual historical record.

My book shows that the modern right arose in the 1920s “out of a widespread concern that pluralistic, cosmopolitan forces threatened America’s national identity.” The “vanguards” of American conservatives in this era “were white and Protestant and they had to fight to retain a once uncontested domination of American life.” Support for private enterprise completed this social conservatism to forge a consensus in the 1920s centered on conserving “white Protestant values and private enterprise.” Most of the subsequent history of conservatism revolved around the reinforcing and contradictory features of these core values.

Frum begins his review not by responding to what is in the book, but by critiquing its alleged neglect of contributions to conservatism by Catholics as illustrated by a list of 10 familiar Catholic conservatives. Yet each of these figures rose to prominence in the 1940s or later (most of them much later), which validates my point that a movement launched primarily by white Protestants after World War I later reached “a partial and uneasy rapprochement with Catholics.” This rapprochement “reflected a crucial double-shift in American history: the decline of anti-Catholicism among white Protestants and the rise of a politically and theologically conservative Catholicism that put sexual morality, traditional gender roles, biblical truth, and the protection of Christianity above Church teachings on labor, the death penalty, and social welfare.” (p. 4) Thus, rather than changing the conservative consensus, conservative Catholics largely accommodated themselves to an ongoing tradition.

Rather than neglecting Catholic conservatives I devote a section of the book to the rise of conservative Catholicism at mid-century and extensively probe the contributions of individual Catholics. For example, the book includes 19 pages of references on Senator Joseph McCarthy, 33 pages on William F Buckley, Jr., and 14 pages on Phyllis Schlafly.

Frum claims that I trace the origins of the modern American right to the Ku Klux Klan and to “fascist groupings that troubled the peace of American society in the aftermath of World War I.” Yet historians know that significant fascist groups arose in America only after the advent of the Great Depression. And rather than tracing conservative origins to such groups I conclude that “They gained headlines and worried legislators and prosecutors but ultimately signified little within the larger conservative movement.” (p. 76)

The importance of the Klan of the 1920s, however, should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the now voluminous new Klan literature. This work demonstrates the political importance of the 1920s Klan and its broad appeal to white Protestants that extended far beyond crude racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism.

Frum also ignores the many other crucial influences that I specify as responsible for the “birth of the modern right,” including post World War I anti-communism, business conservativism, evangelical Protestantism, and conservative activism among women. Frum claims that the book “hails women’s suffrage as progressive” and Prohibition and other conservative initiatives as reactionary. Yet the book avoids any attempt to label conservatism as reactionary and argues instead that “American conservative is a powerful and forward-looking as liberalism, although for conservatives the driving forces of American history are Christianity and private enterprise, not secular reasoning and social engineering.” Indeed, by tracing the origins of conservativism to the 1920s the book shows that the movement represented far more than a response to the rise of the modern liberal state in the 1930s. And rather than drawing a supposed progressive-reactionary dichotomy between suffrage and Prohibition as Frum asserts, the book argues instead that “the campaign for suffrage drew its vitality from the same ethnic, racial, and religious forces that backed Prohibition.” (p. 22)

Contrary to Frum’s unsupported claim, the book does not claim that all aspects of conservative philosophy and policy neatly mesh together. Rather, as with every movement, much of the history of conservatism revolves around challenges posed by contradictions from within. It is perfectly plausible for business men like the Du Pont brothers who founded the landmark Liberty League of the 1930s to also have opposed Prohibition, which “exposed the tension between moral reformers and a business community opposed to government control of industry.” That is why, the “dynastic Du Pont family … took the leader in organizing the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment.” (p. 14) But for Frum to say the “Liberty League was basically the old Association Against the Prohibition Amendment under a different name,” is a gross distortion of history. Unlike the Prohibition Association, the Liberty League “launched a broad crusade for conservative ideals that advanced the maturation of an interest-group politics not tied to a particular issue or constituency.” (p. 61)

Likewise, individual leaders like Democratic Governor Walter Pierce of Oregon (cited by Frum) struggled with similar contradictions, while others evolved in their thinking over time. For example, Illinois Congressman Samuel Pettingill and General Robert Wood, the Chair of Sears, Roebuck turned from backers of FDR’s New Deal to major conservative leaders. Many of the most prominent neo-conservatives began their political lives as dedicated Marxists.

Although Frum suggests that the book ignores the forward positions on race sometimes taken by Republicans in the early 20th century, the work devotes considerable attention to the racism endemic within the Democratic Party of the era. It notes that until the 1940s, Republicans were much more likely to support civil rights measures than Democrats.

Despite the fact that about half of White Protestant Nation is devoted to business conservatives and their relationship to social conservatives, Frum’s review includes only two brief lines on business conservativism. He says that the book offers “scant reason” for its claim that conservatives have backed private enterprise, but not necessarily free enterprise. In fact, the book includes thousands of words explaining the numerous departures by business conservatives from free market principles. These include backing for protective tariffs; loans, subsidies, and special tax breaks for business, export guarantees, below market access to grazing and drilling on public lands, and special protective legislation. As the Executive Director of the staunchly conservative National Association of Manufacturers said in the 1940s, “businessmen, faced with the hard, cold facts of their immediate self-interest, will endorse ‘exceptions’ to any commonly-accepted definition of the function of competition.” (p. 137)

Frum also charges that the book neglects “change over time.” He fails to understand, however, that the history of political movements combines both stability and change over time. Without common features a movement would be incoherent historically; without change it would stagnate and die. Beyond explaining continuities from the 1920s to the present, the book analyzes major historical transformations within conservativism as well. Examples include the partial rapprochement with Catholics, the advent of neo-conservatives, and the split with libertarians. The book analyzes the shift from conservative support for balanced budgets to supply-side economics, from protectionism to free trade, from isolationism to aggressive interventionism abroad, from support for public education to the backing of private-school vouchers, etc.

Frum additionally suggests that the book needlessly dredges up irrelevant conservative figures and groups such as Elizabeth Dilling, the Liberty Lobby, and the Pioneer Fund. Yet Dilling was a pioneering woman anti-communist whose charges of communist influence within the Roosevelt administration (although tinged with an anti-Semitism that was hardly unusual at the time) had wide resonance on the right in the 1930s and for decades to come. She was a key leader of the enormous mothers’ movement against America’s involvement in World War II. The Liberty Lobby was the first important conservative group to set up shop on Capitol Hill. In the 1960s, its pamphlets on Lyndon Johnson’s unsavory past and the capitulation to the left by Republicans in Congress circulated in the many millions. The Lobby’s Liberty Letter surpassed all other political publications in circulation and its lurid conspiracy theories were echoed by many conservatives including Phyllis Schalfly in her historic work on Barry Goldwater, A Choice Not an Echo, which like Dillings’ books was self-published. The founder of the Pioneer Fund, Wickliffe Preston Draper, was the single largest financial contributor to the massive resistance movement that delayed school integration and other civil rights initiatives for a decade in the 1950s and early ‘60s. His Fund poured many millions of dollars into research that kept alive assertions of black inferiority in intelligence and ability. Some of this work also found its way into the blockbuster book, The Bell Curve by Richard Hernnstein and Charles Murray.

Frum further claims that White Protestant Nation fails to consider the broader political context for the triumph of conservatism in the late 20th century, notably the failures of the Democrats. Yet the book analyzes in great detail the failures of Democratic liberals in the 1970s to respond to economic troubles and challenges abroad. It concludes that Democratic President Jimmy Carter “could not overcome the failings of his first term.” (p. 351) The book also devotes scores of pages to the development of new conservative infrastructure and political appeals in the 1970s. It studies the formation of organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the Conservative Caucus, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, and the Moral Majority. It explores the revival of political activity among conservative business groups including new groups as the Business Roundtable. It explains how conservatives reformulated their social ideology in terms of “pro-family” policies and how they responded to new issues such as the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights.

Ironically, George W. Bush’s former speechwriter fails to address the epilogue of White Protestant Nation which explains how conservatism has fallen victim to internal contradictions during the Bush years. (pp. 436-456) The analysis shows that today’s conservatives cannot reconcile their historic opposition to social engineering with their backing for one of the most expensive and ambitious social engineering ventures in US history: the reconstruction of Iraq. They cannot square their backing for states’ rights with their support for constitutional amendments on abortion and gay marriage and their opposition to vehicle emission standards set by California and other states. They cannot reconcile their advocacy of individual freedom with their support for warrantless wiretapping of U. S. citizens, stringent versions of the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts. They cannot reconcile their support for limited government, fiscal responsibility, and balanced budget with a president who has built the biggest, most expensive, and most intrusive government in U.S. history.

Perhaps if conservativism were in better shape today, David Frum would feel less compelled to force its history into an ill-fitting partisan box.

Herbert Kalmus had hoped to be a concert pianist, a career choice cut short by a sports injury; he had to settle for an ordinary high-school education, cut short at the age of 16 when, cast out by his stepmother’s family, he went to work as a carpet salesman and bookkeeper. Yet, in the Horatio Alger mold, adversity only made him more determined. He scrimped until he had enough to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he learned physics and chemistry and set out on a promising academic career.

Fortunately for the filmgoing world, Kalmus had side interests. He liked to tinker, he liked to hang out with inventors and experimenters, and he liked to make money. Well trained in the sciences and something of a venture capitalist before there was a word for such a creature, he was ideally placed to take the call when, along about 1915, an investor showed him the rudiments of a mechanism for taking the flicker out of the flicks, the still-new motion pictures.

Just then Kalmus was experimenting with a new kind of camera. Since the investor had a large sum of money, Kalmus reasoned, why not go one better and, he said, “use it to finance his firm in the development of color moving pictures?”

The investor agreed, and the flicks flickered on. And though it took a long while to recoup the money, the result was a set of technologies called Technicolor, a name containing homage to Kalmus’s alma mater and to the Greek word techne, meaning “art.” All through 1916 and 1917 Kalmus and his partners struggled to overcome a battery of technical problems: how to superimpose multiple negatives and project through multiple apertures, how to wrestle what the human eye sees onto film.

In doing so, they set off a technological revolution. Soon actors and studios, initially skeptical, rushed to attach themselves to the new process. As movie historian Fred Basten writes in Glorious Technicolor, by 1930, the year the Technicolor film King of Jazz won the Academy Award for art direction, Kalmus and company had contracts for 36 features—even though Kalmus really wanted to produce edifying shorts and documentaries rather than what a partner called “two-reel comedies of very ordinary type so far as action goes, but Ziegfieldized to the absolute limit that the censorship will stand.”

The partner won that argument, though inking a deal with Walt Disney kept things clean. The rest is history: Technicolor, which improved on nature just as it revealed it, would soon yield epochal films such as Becky Sharp, The Wizard of Oz, and Gone with the Wind and help make stars of the likes of Maureen O’Hara, Lucille Ball, Carmen Miranda—and, of course, Lassie.

The times have changed, but Technicolor endures, now providing digital dailies and figuring in videogames and big-budget features such as The Aviator, Syriana, and Kung-Fu Panda. Look for the logo next time you see a film, and the chances are good that you’ll find it somewhere in the credits, nine decades on.

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Here’s a video tribute to Technicolor: