On this date in history, William Pitt the Younger became the youngest prime minister in British history at age 24, on Jan. 19, 1783. Whereas by the time I was 24 I had, um, won a one-third share in a scholarship worth $100. Each, I mean. Close enough to call it a tie, right?

Plus he didn’t become “prime minister” because there was no such job. So there. Mind you, he sort of defined a job that didn’t exist yet which some people might call an accomplishment. (Others might do the reverse, calling its subtle introduction a crucial step in the Executive achieving the pernicious domination of the legislature that it enjoys today.) But what else did he do, besides a few minor matters like extricating the nation from the American Revolution, reorganizing the national finances (including an early Laffer Curve-style reduction in tariff rates to increase revenue), winning the first round of the Napoleonic Wars, overseeing the banning of the slave trade within the British Empire, and dying of overwork at age 46 in 1806?

Did I mention that by 24 I had also won 3^rd place in the “C” category at the Toronto Open chess tournament and pocketed a cool $120?

Incidentally they don’t call him “the Younger” because he was younger than a great number of less distinguished people. It’s to distinguish himself from his father, a great leader in the Seven Year’s War who regrettably succumbed to gout and intermittent madness during the run-up to the American Revolution, though he recovered in time to champion the cause of liberty in the colonies before dying in 1778.

It is worth noting in this overly democratic age that Pitt would not have made it into Parliament at all had he not secured the support of the 1st Earl of Lonsdale who had significant influence over several “rotten boroughs” including Appleby. Pitt himself later turned on rotten boroughs. But a more diverse system that put higher priority on knowing what to do in office than how to get there had some important virtues.

Of course a large part of it was that Pitt himself was a truly extraordinary individual. History does produce them periodically. And in free societies, it’s often for the best.

So let’s clench our inferior teeth and cheer for William Pitt the irritatingly young and accomplished.

On this day in history, Jan. 18 1862, John Tyler died. Goodbye. They celebrate him in his birthplace. But it’s a stretch.

Tyler was an accidental Democratic president, the first of two Whig ticket VPs to pass through the White House without leaving a mark. At least the other, Millard Fillmore (see my July 9, 2015 post) was a Whig. Tyler was a Democrat. And he is remembered as…

No. He’s not. He’s the “Tyler” in “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” which American political junkies may be able to recite but often without knowing much about the nation’s tenth president. Tyler was not born obscure and did not have obscurity thrust upon him but did achieve obscurity and worse.

Born to a distinguished family, he had a long political career as a governor, representative, senator, vice-president and then by the 1841 death of William Henry Harrison president of the United States. Very little thought was given to his qualifications for the highest office, less because no president had ever failed to complete his term of office than because it never seems to be. Yet his presidency is marked by virtually nothing desirable (though the Webster-Ashburton Treaty was signed on his watch) and little that is undesirable.

Opinion may be divided on the resolution to annex Texas that he steered through Congress after the Senate rejected the treaty. I’m personally glad Texas joined the Union but sorry for the precedent of the executive bypassing the legislature. But that’s all one can really say about Tyler’s presidency, unless you count the fact that not much happened as a blessing too rarely experienced in governmental matters. Certainly neither the Whigs who had chosen him as Vice-President nor the Democrats to whom he truly belonged had the slightest interest in nominating him as President in 1844, and he slunk away while James Knox Polk and Henry Clay battled it out.

As for Tyler, he retired to a Virginia plantation he renamed from “Walnut Grove” to “Sherwood Forest”, a self-pitying and self-aggrandizing reference to Robin Hood on the grounds that he had been “outlawed” by the Whigs. And he spent his time farming, socializing and avoiding politics which also avoided him. But not long enough.

For what is striking about Tyler, aside from his having the most children of any U.S. president (15, by two wives), is that he ended his undistinguished career as a Congressman-elect to the Confederate House of Representatives. Yes, the Confederate House. A Virginian, he returned to public affairs in February 1861 as chairman of the Virginia Peace Convention which, as you’d expect given Tyler’s past record, accomplished nothing useful. Tyler then decided secession would prevent war. Wrong again.

So he and his northern-born but ardently pro-Southern wife embraced the Confederate cause. And after serving in the Provisional Confederate Congress he was elected to the first actual one but died before he could take his seat in the first of only two Congresses the Confederacy elected before going down in the flames of war it had itself kindled. Obscurity would have been better than this mediocre failure.

Nevertheless, oddly, I have driven past signs commemorating his birthplace and residence in Virginia. Americans seem to have more respect for the memory of this seriously undistinguished, accidental and ultimately disloyal president than we do for most of our prime ministers.

I grant that it would be hard to work up dramatic enthusiasm for, say, Mackenzie Bowell. But sometimes one salutes the rank not the man. Or at least one should.

If Americans can celebrate John Tyler, even locally and with lukewarm enthusiasm, surely we can do something for John Sparrow David Thompson.

On Jan. 17 of 1961 Ike said goodbye to America and, in some sense, America said goodbye to the innocent 1950s and hello to the turbulent 1960s. Eisenhower’s own small contribution was the remarkable warning in his Farewell Address about a “military-industrial complex”.

As I mentioned on January 12, it was in some ways odd for this warning to come from a career military man who’d been Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, that is, the boss of D-Day and on. Surely he’d seen the enormous benefits of mass-mobilized armies backed by mass production.

Indeed he had, both in defeating Hitler and in deterring Stalin. But he was also a classic small-government guy who wished the United States didn’t need a permanent expensive military establishment although he recognized, and said aloud, that it did. And he understood the harmful way in which those who benefit from big government can develop a vested interest in it that distorts politics.

Eventually this insight would be picked up and abused by radicals who would claim that the military-industrial complex actually went around creating, or even inventing, enemies to justify lucrative defence contracts. Alas, the world is a sufficiently dangerous place that there was no need to do so. And, I might add, the Western system of limited self-government is sufficiently robust that such conspiracies cannot flourish.

Interestingly, the radical critique came not only from the left. There is also a branch of the libertarian movement that condemns the “welfare-warfare state” in which moderate right and moderate left are united in supporting big government because the left likes the social programs and the right likes the defence programs. Personally I’m a libertarian in a lot of policy issues, though a conservative metaphysically, and one reason why is that libertarianism is generally way off base on national security. But let’s come back to the welfare bit.

I’m not sure the 1950s was really all that innocent; the baby boom surely indicates that they’d heard of sex. Nor am I sure that we’re as sophisticated as we think. Including in our naïve trust of huge government.

If Eisenhower was wrong, or at least exaggerating, about the dangers of the warfare state, his point about incentives distorting public policy surely applies to the vast apparatus of the modern welfare state. In his day defence took more than half the U.S. budget; now of course it is far smaller, and being perilously squeezed, by runaway social programs.

These have a vast constituency, not just in the obvious bureaucracy but among the tens of millions of Americans now dependent on the state, including a vast number of single mothers almost literally married to it. And in public education, where it is surely not coincidence that the dominant ideology among those dependent for a living on government funding is that government should be huge and within its vast bulk education should be securely contained.

If you try to cut social programs now, from welfare to pensions to education to health, you run into bitter, massive opposition. And it comes not just from those convinced it’s a mistake in principle but especially from those who have a huge personal stake in it and will resort to almost any argument, however disingenuous, to keep the cash flowing.

Eisenhower didn’t warn of this development because as late as 1961 social programs were still quite small and people still believed that they were highly dangerous.

One of his 20^th-century predecessors had said while campaigning “I am opposed to any form of dole. I do not believe that the state has any right merely to hand out money.” And in office that president had said “The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” And it wasn’t Herbert Hoover; it was Franklin Roosevelt. So it didn’t seem that likely that within a decade of Ike’s departure from office the nation would be facing a welfare-bureaucratic complex producing high taxes, huge deficits and multigenerational dependency whose distorting effects were clearly visible in the 2012 presidential election. But it did.

It’s too bad people didn’t listen more carefully to Eisenhower, to understand that behind the specifics of his warning so polemically useful to the New Left there was a much deeper insight about the unhealthy way in which a large government can create unwholesome distortions in the political process.

On the plus side, at least after eight years in the White House Eisenhower had something sufficiently memorable to say on the way out that we’re still talking about it. Many presidents are barely able to capture our attention even while holding office.

On Jan. 16 we celebrate a bad idea done right. Specifically, Prohibition, which came into effect in the United States on this day in 1919.

Prohibition was a really bad idea for all sorts of reasons. First, it was unenforceable. Second, trying to enforce it brought the law into disrepute in principle as ordinary people drank throughout the Prohibition period, willingly seeking out and paying good money to criminal alcohol peddlers. And it brought the law into disrepute in practice as bootleggers became powerful organized criminals. Can you say War on Drugs? Third, as Bishop William Connor Magee said in opposing restrictions on liquor in the UK in 1872, “Better England free than England sober” if that must be the choice. But, finally, that’s not the choice. Alcohol is not something bad we regrettably can’t stamp out. Rather, except for the unfortunate minority prone to alcoholism, it is a genuine pleasure that helps brighten existence. The subtle flavours, the culinary aspects, the companionship, the hobby aspects and yes, the buzz are all in the right place and with suitable moderation positive blessings.

Why then do I say Prohibition was done right? Precisely because it was brought in by a Constitutional amendment, the 18^th to the U.S. Constitution. I do not say such a thing is necessary every time you ban anything. Indeed, I do not think the prohibition on marijuana should have required such a measure, although I do think it was a bad idea and a silly one. But alcohol was so much a part of life in America, and in the lives of much of the human race going back to the dawn of agriculture soon after the end of the last glaciation, that it was not legitimate to try to remove it from the culture and people’s personal enjoyment without consulting the people in a fundamental way.

It was harder to remove once the nature and scope of the error became clear because it was brought in through such an elaborate procedure. It was necessary to pass another Constitutional amendment, the 20^th, to repeal the blunder of the 18^th, the only Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ever repealed. But they did so in 1933 and, apparently, learned nothing from it.

As I say, other drugs never occupied as central and accepted part in the culture as alcohol. But every other bad aspect of Prohibition is clearly visible in the failed laws against them. And at least they could be legalized without as much ruckus.

I should also note that with Canada’s Constitution being such a mare’s nest, we could never pass or repeal such an amendment. We cannot even make much less controversial changes given the way our fundamental law excludes the people from key questions of self-government. But that’s the point.

It’s wrong to do really major things without consulting the people. And even though Prohibition was an absurd and sanctimonious error, at least it was done that way before being undone that way.

So as I say, bad idea done right. You could do worse, and we often do

Today Democrats became donkeys for good. In 1870 that is. Yee haw.

As I mentioned on Nov. 7 in this space, both the Republican elephant and Democratic donkey owe their existence to brilliant cartoonist Thomas Nast. In 1874 he seems to have invented the Republican elephant out of thin (or thick) air, whereas the donkey he first drew on Jan. 15, 1870 has a pedigree going back to adversaries calling Andrew Jackson a jackass back in 1828. Jack-son Jack-ass, get it? Not every political insult is clever.

Jackson thumbed his nose at them, or hoofed his muzzle, defiantly adopting the beast as a symbol of his headstrong determination. Which was not entirely inappropriate. But it was Nast turning it into a cartoon symbol that made it forever theirs. As I also wrote on Nov. 7, it wouldn’t be my first choice for my party. But better that than, as in Canada, nothing.

I also mentioned that I find 19^th-century cartoons so strikingly, immediately incomprehensibly un-clever that it’s amazing the format survived long enough to become brilliant. It is now brilliant; I dream of teaching a comparative politics course using only political cartoons from various countries on the theory that (a) that if you get the cartoons you get the political culture and (b) therefore the spectacular unfunniness of, say, Soviet cartoons is an unanswerable indictment of their dictatorship. I even did use a Doonesbury book in a U.S. history course to the apparent bafflement of the students. But while I don’t agree with his politics, I think Doonesbury’s wit carries him far beyond his partisanship in ways that are as profound as they are funny, and not by coincidence.

Now back to Nast’s original donkey. It appeared, like much of his best work, in Harper’s Weekly and depicts (get ready now) a donkey labeled “Copperhead Papers” kicking a dead lion labeled “Hon. E.M. Stanton”, with an eagle and the U.S. Capitol in the background. And if you laugh at that, you laugh at anything.

Obviously it’s partly that the subject matter, unflattering Southern newspaper commentary on the death of Lincoln’s former Secretary of War, is no longer exactly topical. But the moment you need labels on two things in your cartoon it seems to me it’s didactic rather than illuminating. (The original elephant cartoon is worse; the donkey is actually labeled “N.Y. Herald” and is wearing a lion skin labeled “Caesarism” while “Democratic Party” is on a fox’s collar and… well, you can find it online.)

I realize nineteenth century novels also have a style we find a bit florid, or turgid, today. But it’s not just a case of you had to be there. I really think the modern cartoon, which would not get past an editor if anyone still had those if it bore a single label saying “This is meant to be that,” is vastly better than the unwieldy messes that cracked up 19^th century audiences.

I do like the elephant and donkey, though. And I still wish someone would find animals for our parties. In November I didn’t have firm ideas and suggested putting a few classic Canadian animals in a hat and having a draw. But no one took me up on it and I’ve been thinking since.

How about a pony for the Liberals, an ostrich for the Tories and a crow for the NDP? Hey, it beats a donkey. Especially if it doesn’t have a long dull label pinned to it.

Let’s hear it for Wethersfield, Windsor, and Hartford. Hip Hip 1639. For on Jan. 14 of that year, representatives of those towns established the first constitution in what would become the United States, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut. Old habits die hard.

New habits, you may correct me, thinking this was a novel approach that led, via various state constitutions, to the Articles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution, and the enduring American habit of relying on popular sovereignty. But I said old habits and I meant it.

The Englishmen and women who came to the New World, and most pointedly to New England, were not just proudly free. They understood freedom to mean fundamental laws coming from the people limited what governments could do. They would come to understand it in theory partly through the writings of John Locke. But his Second Treatise of Government lay 50 years in the future when these delegates met, debated and voted. They understood it in practice because they were English and the English had always done it that way.

You may quibble that the Mayflower Compact actually predated the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut by 19 years. And it did. But I will quibble back that it was made on board ship not in what would become the United States. Moreover it merely said they would make laws. The Fundamental Orders actually laid out offices and voting procedures. And they were off, with Massachusetts coming up with its Body of Liberties in 1641 and on and on. But they were looking back, not forward.

They were looking back, of course, to Magna Carta, a fundamental framework for governance in England that set explicit limits on what the government could do, regardless of formal procedures employed, limits that protected freedom. If the British eventually drifted from that arrangement, and in a weird way so did we, moving toward the American system formally in 1982 but away from it substantively, and if the Americans lately have suffered a bloated, arrogant and increasingly uncontrollable government despite their system, it does not change the fact that it was a precious heritage that deeply shaped the conduct of the British when they reached the Americas and made their colonial settlements profoundly different from those even of other European powers.

OK, I don’t know where Wethersfield is, though I bet it’s in Connecticut. (Google confirms my guess and says it’s in the Hartford capitol region.) But it’s a legacy worth pondering and reclaiming today. So let’s hear it for Wethersfield, Windsor and Hartford. Hip hip 2016.

Never walk out of a voting body in a huff. Never. I know it can seem tempting. But history doesn’t encourage the practice.

For instance, on Jan. 13 1950 the Soviets stormed out of the UN Security Council because it wouldn’t unseat “Nationalist China” (Chiang Kai-shek’s regime holed up in Taiwan) for the Communist kind run by Mao Zedong from Beijing in, well, actual China.

In fact the Soviets restormed out. They’d walked out a few days earlier, returned for a vote on their own resolution to boot Taiwan out on the 13^th and, when it failed by a 3-6 vote, stomped out again, hurling typical Radio Moscow abuse about “reactionaries” and “lawlessness”. And out they stayed until the Korean War erupted thanks to their ally in North Korea, the comically misnamed People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, invading South Korea.

It was pretty silly. After all, they must have known the invasion was coming. They caused it. And yet when the Security Council met to consider it they were sulking outside instead of sulking inside where they could veto the American-backed resolution that, on June 27, authorized UN military action for the first time.

Now you may say that it didn’t matter much. The United States and its allies, including Canada which was able to send a force to this one conflict larger than our entire military establishment today, would have intervened anyway. But it gave the whole operation an attractive public relations veneer that it was formally “the UN” not the Western imperialist and their running dogs fighting against the armies of the maniacal Kim Il-sung and, eventually, Mao Zedong as well.

You’d think the Soviets of all people would have grasped this dynamic, especially as Stalin was still in power. And he’d been around when the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, basically its Communist Party, split when some relatively moderate members got so tired, bored frustrated and sore that they left the Second Party Congress in 1903 which promptly gave Lenin organizational control and, in appropriate Newspeak fashion called the minority that prevailed the Bolsheviks or “majority faction” and stuck the less iron-bottomed, grim majority with the label Mensheviks or “minority faction”.

Again, Lenin’s faction probably would have seized power, repressed and slaughtered the Mensheviks anyway. But the smaller factions who opposed Lenin within the RDSLP should not have left no matter how long-winded the orators and petty the points of order of their adversaries. Once you join an assembly, even this one, you leave your legitimacy behind when you stagger out to bed, for coffee, to breathe fresh air (people smoked inside rooms back then) or just to retain your wavering sanity.

There are plenty of grounds for not joining an organization. And some for quitting it decisively and permanently, laying out your grounds for denying its legitimacy. But don’t boycott or walk out in the middle of proceedings. They’ll just vote without you. And no matter how smart or dumb, well-meaning or villainous you are, you don’t want that to happen.

On this day in 1954, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced the policy of “massive retaliation” in a speech to the Council of Foreign Relations. It all sounds terribly like something out of Dr. Strangelove, including the cozy Establishment setting in which he made this potentially highly disquieting announcement. But it had a certain powerful logic.

On the surface, the main point was that the United States would rely on its nuclear superiority to deter a Soviet attack on Western Europe. And by emphasizing the overwhelming, asymmetrical nature of an American response, it warned the Soviets not to nibble at the edges and think they could possibly take territory one small manageable crisis at a time.

It had a deeper logic too. Dwight Eisenhower, despite being the face of so-called “modern Republicanism”, had a deep streak of the old kind. He wanted to spend less on defence (and did: as John Lewis Gaddis notes in his fine book Strategies of Containment, defence spending fell as a share of the budget from 65.7% in fy 1954 to 48.5% in fy 1961, and from 12.8 to 9.1% of GDP in the same period).

Eisenhower was a career military man. But he remembered, favourably, that the United States traditionally had a very small military establishment except during actual wars. And he wanted to cut defence spending for budgetary reasons and also for something approaching libertarian ones.

The phrase may have been picked up by countercultural types who had as little use for Ike as he did for them. But it was Eisenhower, the golfing, free-enterprise, corporation-loving, church-going old white guy, who first warned of a “military-industrial complex” gaining undue influence in the United States if it remained on a permanent war footing.

Ultimately the strategy even got a more friendly name than “massive retaliation”: It was heralded as “More bang for a buck”. For all that, the policy had a significant weakness. And if it seems odd to find that Eisenhower was a reasonably profound thinker with a distrust of the military and of industry as well as of big spending governments generally, it is positively weird to hear the most lucid criticism of the policy coming from within the Administration and, indeed, from the unshaven jowls of the Vice-President, a certain Richard Milhous Nixon.

As he would later express it, in his 1985 book No More Vietnams, “Great nations do not risk nuclear suicide to defend their interests in peripheral areas.” And while Eisenhower’s strategy worked just fine in Europe, and an incipient version probably helped bring an armistice in the Korean War, it was of no use in the Third World. (To his credit, Eisenhower recognized it early; when the French tried to persuade him to use nuclear weapons to bail them out in Vietnam he firmly refused.) It’s also not the case that the strategy kept the American government small, though it did ensure that social programs took the bulk of funding even at the peak of Reagan’s rearmament.

On the other hand, it’s not clear what strategy would have brought success for the United States in the revolutionary upheavals in newly decolonized nations in the 1960s and 1970s. And massive retaliation, for all its cold-blooded user-unfriendliness as a phrase and a doctrine, did avoid massive conflicts between major powers.

In that sense, it got a lot of bang for a buck. Many policies announced with at least as much fanfare have done far worse.