Facing the present, the future, and the past

 Many of my acquaintances, to varying degrees, are having emotional problems brought about by the daily news.  Hysteria has also gripped numerous op-ed writers for major newspapers and, I strongly suspect, various cable news commentators.  (I don't watch them.) I certainly agree that the United States and the world face a very serious situation in many ways.  Our  leadership not only wants to exert an unprecedented level of control over much of American life, but also lacks any real understanding of many important issues, and thus will make our lives worse on many fronts.  President Trump is abdicating from the role the US has played in the word since 1941.  Things will almost surely get a good deal worse before they get better, and by the time they get significantly better, many or even all of my contemporaries will probably have left the scene.  

I do  not share one of the worst symptoms of this emotional trauma:  the belief that changes so alien to what I think and feel simply cannot be happening.  This malady is very strong among op-ed writers like Thomas Friedman and among many historians because for decades they have presumed to tell us all what is wrong with the world and what should be done about it.  Such hubris pays well, but it often comes before a fall.  So it is today.  I don't share it, probably, because I have had to cope with the destruction of my own profession and of the discipline of history for about forty years, and because of my own historical work.  I spent many years studying the middle third of the twentieth century and have a keen sense of what made that period great, and how we have left its key features behind.  Looking back on the Vietnam War in 1999, I wrote, "The disintegration of the civic order that the war had begun still continues, and seems to be leading inexorably to some new and unforeseeable crisis."  That has come to pass.  

More than hubris, however, is involved.  For 250 years our society and the whole western world has cherished the idea of progress, and despite certain catastrophes on an unprecedented scale--the two world wars, and the effects of totalitarianism in the USSR and China, and elsewhere--we have lived through remarkable progress.  We naturally have come to assume that it will continue forever--but history never really did suggest that was the case.  Antiquity saw significant progress of many kinds, and particularly in the intellectual sphere, but that progress was largely interrupted for about 1000 years after the fall of Roman Empire.  A remarkable book, The Closing of the Western Mind, suggested to me that Christianity destroyed most of the intellectual heritage of antiquity in the same way that new ideologies have undermined our intellectual heritage in our own time.

I am also convinced that the human spirit will survive whatever lies before us.  Forty years ago I began teaching a course in historical fiction of the great crises of the first half of the twentieth century, including works by Pasternak, Malraux, Fallada, Orwell, Silone, and Solzhenitsyn.  Dr. Zhivago and The First Circle celebrated the ways in which extraordinary men and women kept their sense of the value of life alive in the most difficult circumstances imaginable.  I am going to give a shortened version of that course in a program for retirees this fall.  If Russians could endure those times, we can endure ours.

For more comfort I have turned to some short selections by the great German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), often regarded as the founder of modern history,  Not only did Ranke write multi-volume history of the papacy, England, France, and Prussia in the early modern period, he also thought a great deal about the purpose and the overall lessons of history--and by lessons he did not mean guides for action in the present and future.  His ideas on these topics are scattered among various works, and I have found an excellent 8-page collection of them online here.  No one has successfully translated Ranke into graceful English, but I think these passages are clear enough--and they have critical lessons for our response to the present, as well as the past.

Blind in old age--probably simply from cataracts--Ranke spent his last years dictating a world history, focusing on the development of civilization as he understood it. He scattered more general intellectual reflections through it.  Here are the first paragraphs that I want to discuss.

"It has often been noted that there is a certain contradiction between immature philosophy and history. Some thinkers have decided on a priori grounds what must be. Without observing that others, more doubting, will disagree with their ideas, they set forth to rediscover them in the history of the world. Out of the infinite array of facts, they select those which they wish to believe. This has been called the philosophy of history! One of the ideas which is continually repeated in the philosophies of history is the irrefutable proposition that mankind is involved in an uninterrupted progress, a steady development of its own perfection. . . .If [such a scheme] were somehow true, then universal history would have to follow a progression, and the human race would travel in its appointed course from one age to another. History would be completely concerned with the development of such concepts, with their manifestations and representations in the world. But this is largely not so. For one thing, philosophers themselves are extraordinarily at odds about the type and selection of these dominating ideas. Moreover, they consider only a few of the peoples in the world's history, regarding the activity of the rest as nothing, merely superfluous. Nor can they disguise the fact that from the beginning of the world to the present day the peoples of the world have experienced the most varied circumstances."

This paragraph defined the great vice of the historical profession: the tendency to start with a conclusion and mine the evidence to support it.  Nationalism (of which Ranke was remarkably free) and ideology probably provide many historians' conclusions ready made.  Thousands of pages have appeared explaining how the Confederacy should have been able to win the Civil War, or denying that Germany started the First World War, or celebrating Britain's political and moral superiority over continental European states.  At least 95 percent of the writing on the JFK assassination is devoted to proving one pre-selected thesis or another.  Marxist history inevitably looked for evidence that each class was playing its assigned role, and postmodern history sees every issue as a function of race, class, and gender.  All of these approaches, Ranke is suggesting, are historical dead ends, because they deny the complexity of history, which I would add reflects the complexity of human nature.

Continuing, Ranke presented his view of how historical knowledge could be acquired.

"There are two ways to become acquainted with human affairs: through the knowledge of the particular, and through the knowledge of the abstract. There is no other method. Even revelation consists of the two: abstract principles and history. But these two sources of knowledge must be distinguished. Those historians who disregard this err, as do those who see history as only a vast aggregation of facts which must be arranged according to a utilitarian principle to make them comprehensible. Thus they append one particular fact to another, connected only by a general moral. I believe, instead, that the science of history is called upon to find its perfection within itself, and that it is capable of doing so. By proceeding from the research and consideration of the individual facts in themselves to a general view of events, history is able to raise itself to a knowledge of the objectively present relationships."  This is what I attempted to do in my most ambitious book, Politics and War: European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler.  I spent the better part of a decade exploring Ranke's broader legacy, the enormous literature on European international politics from the mid-16th until the mid-20th century, with particular attention to four periods of general European war.  It took years, but that allowed me to establish patterns of conflict--what wars were about, and how successfully nations managed to achieve their aims--that changed over time.  Over the centuries power shifted from aristocracies to states, until in the era of the two world wars war became too big for European states to compete with even large entities.  

In lectures on world history delivered in 1854, Ranke tackled the issue of progress.  He rejected the ideas either that a supreme being was directing the course of events, or the Hegelian view of "an onward-marching progression of the spirit which necessarily drives [humanity] towards a defied goal."  He noted that the same political, intellectual and spiritual changes did not occur simultaneously in different parts of the world, with Asia losing ground to Europe since antiquity.  The movement of mankind, he wrote, "refers to the great spiritual tendencies which dominate mankind, which arise alongside one another, and which fall into certain arranged patterns. But in these tendencies there is always one certain direction which prevails over the others and causes them to recede. Thus, for example, in the second half of the sixteenth century the religious element was so overpowering that the literary was forced into the background. By contrast, in the eighteenth century, utilitarian efforts at social and economic improvement occupied such wide territory that the arts and related fields had to yield. In every epoch of humanity certain great tendencies are expressed. Progress consists in this: in every period a certain movement of the human spirit is revealed, by which for the first time one or another tendency becomes pre-eminent and maintains itself in its own way."  Technological and intellectual changes, I would argue, are changing fundamental aspects of human life and culture once again, and we cannot foresee the outcome.  Then Ranke comes to the heart of the matter.

"To adopt a contrary point of view, asserting that progress consists in each epoch's raising the life of humanity to a higher power, and that every generation is more perfect than the preceding one, with the later always the preferred one, the earlier ones only porters for the following generations, would be a divine injustice. For such a preceding generation would have no significance in and for itself. It would become meaningful only insofar as it became the steppingstone [sic] to the next generation, and would not stand in any immediate relation to the divine. I would maintain that every epoch is immediate to God, and that its value consists, not in what follows it, but in its own existence, its own proper self. This value gives to the contemplation of history, and of individual lives in history, a unique delight, so that every epoch must be regarded as something valid in itself, fully deserving of such respect.

"Thus the historian must direct his principal attention to the way in which the people of a certain period thought and lived; he will find that, apart from certain unchangeable main ideas, every epoch has its particular tendency and its own ideal. Though every era has its own justification and its own worth, we should not overlook the results which it causes. Secondly, the historian must discover the differences between the individual epochs, in order to consider the inner necessities affecting the way in which they succeed one another. A certain sort of progress in the process cannot be denied. But I would not want to argue that it moves forward in a straight line. It is more like a stream, whose course winds about in its own way. It seems to me—if I may dare the remark—that God, existing in no particular time, gazes over the whole historic humanity in its totality and finds them all equally valuable. Although the idea of the education of humanity has some truth in it, from God's point of view all the generations of mankind have equal rights, and this is the way the historian too must regard them."

Here we have it: a blunt denial that history can be seen as one progress towards a pre-determined goal, and a declaration that every era deserves our respect.  I, a lifelong unbeliever, would revise the sentence, "I would maintain that every epoch is immediate to God" with "Every epoch highlights different features of human nature," while adding that, for better or for worse, they are all equally human.  I would similarly revise the second paragraph above.  Donald Trump has brought an unprecedented authoritarian style and approach to executive power to the White House, but that proves only, to me, that our institutions and traditions could only keep those tendencies in check for so long. The same apparently applies to the whole regulatory structure the government has built up since the New Deal, which the Trump Administration is now trying to eliminate.   Meanwhile, our deeply bureaucratized world, which includes our state, federal and local governments, our health care system, and our educational system, has become sclerotic and has failed to deal with many problems.  We are now heading in a new direction--the one development that history can reliably predict.

Ranke was twenty when the Napoleonic Wars ended, and he was never a soldier. He lived the rest of his adult life during an era of progress, interrupted by a brief an unsuccessful series of German revolutions in 1848-9 and the three relatively brief wars in the 1860s that created the German Empire, which he welcomed.   His views, in short, did not have to face the kind of crisis undergone by another great German historian, Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954), who in 1946 had to write the very painful short work, The German Catastrophe.  Yet I believe that Ranke's views of history can help us deal with whatever the next few decades might bring.

Human history can inspire us despite the presence within its most impressive eras of cruelty and bigotry, especially if we situate those characteristics within the context of their time and recognize the long-term response to them.  Yes, the federal constitution of 1787 tolerated slavery where it was still legal, but opposing views towards slavery repeatedly generated huge political controversies from the constitutional convention itself all the way to the Civil War, which abolished it.  Wars throughout the ages have taken millions of lives--culminating in the two world wars of 1914-45--but peoples and nations have consistently shown extraordinary powers of recovery, and the greatest wars have often secured decades of peace for them, most notably from 1945 onwards in Europe and much of Asia.  And throughout the centuries, the arts have given us works of eternal value, many carefully preserved to this day, which confirm our very real kinship with men and women of eras past.  That remains the lesson of Yeats's great poem, "Lapis Lazuli," written on the eve of the catastrophe of the Second World War.  Our frustration with today's world--which for the moment remains relatively peaceable and prosperous--reflects the extraordinary good fortune that we have enjoyed for the last 80 years.   They two have had their own tragic episodes in South Asia, in China, in Vietnam, and in many other places as well, but they have compared very favorably with many earlier periods.  

For four years, early in my career, I helped teach  a course, "The Uses of History," at the Harvard JFK School of Government.  I eventually concluded, however, that the real function of history was defined by Dr. Johnson as the function of literature: "Better to enjoy life, and better to endure it."  And rereading these lines of Ranke's, I understood why I have never had a moment's doubt about my vocation as an historian.

"To make a true historian, I think that two qualities are needed, the first of which is a participation and joy in the particular in and for itself. If a person has a real fondness for this race of so many, so varied, creatures to which we ourselves belong, and for its essential nature, always ancient and somehow always new, so good and so evil, so noble and so brutish, so refined and so crude, directed toward eternity and living for the moment, satisfied with little yet desirous of everything; if he has a love of the vital manifestation of humanity at all, then he must rejoice in it without any reference to the progress of things. To his observation of humanity's virtues he will add an attention to its accompanying vices, to its happiness and misfortunes, to the development of human nature under so many varied conditions, to its institutions and customs. In summary, he must seek to follow the kings who have ruled over the races, the succession of events, and the development of the chief undertakings. All this he should do for no purpose other than his joy in the life of the particular individual, just as we enjoy flowers without considering to which genus of Linnaeus and Oken they belong. Enough: he must do this without thinking how the whole appears in the individuals.

"But this is not enough. It is essential that the historian also have an eye for the universal. He ought not to conceive of it a priori as the philosopher does. Rather, his consideration of particular individuals will show him the course which the development of the world as a whole has taken. This development is related, not to the universal ideas which have ruled in one or another period, but to something completely different. No people in the world has remained out of contact with the others. This relationship, inherent in a people's own nature, is the one by which it enters into universal history, and must be emphasized in universal history."

The first paragraph explains why I have never had a boring or unhappy moment in an archive, and why I still find magic in the stacks of Widener library, even though I very rarely see another person during my visits there.  The second expresses the real nature of historical change--unpredictable, often random, never final, and often spectacular.  It gives all of human history the capacity which Orwell, another inspiration of mine, ascribed to England in his pamphlet, The Lion and the Unicorn, and which I already paraphrased at the end of Politics and War:  human history, like all living things, has the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.  These are much easier truths to live by in periods of relative quiet in which generations like Ranke's and mine grew up, but those who can still grapple with them can fit literally anything into a broader sense of history that remains inspiring.

Some comments on tariffs

 Yesterday I was talking about Trump's tariffs with my wife, and it suddenly occurred to me that the way that President Trump has structured the discussion of them makes no sense.  The United States currently has a trade deficit of about $1.13 trillion a year, but one cannot understand it by looking at bilateral trade relationships with other countries and the EU.   A trade deficit comes from importing too much of something and exporting too little of something else, and nearly every commodity can be bought or sold from a number of countries.  This morning an economist makes the same point in the New York Times. Meanwhile, I had gone to the web and found some of the statistics I was looking for: a breakdown of imports and exports by major categories, showing what commodities contribute the most to our deficit.

There is literally nothing on this list that the US does not both import and export, and I have not been able to find statistics on the total production of various entries in the United States, which would help as well.  Still the figures tell a remarkably simple story.  First of all, four categories of goods generate 81 percent of our trade deficit:  machinery, nuclear reactors and boilers (24.7 percent); electrical and electronic equipment (24 percent); vehicles other than railway or tramway (21.9 percent); and pharmaceuticals (10 percent).  US exports in those categories total $ 704 billion, but their imports total $1.621 trillion,  The leading car exporters to the United States are Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and Germany, and the administration has dropped new tariffs against Canada and Mexico (whose plants, I believe, are mostly American brands) for the time being.   I haven't found country-by-country data on electronic imports, but they seem to come mostly from the Far East--Japan, China, South Korea, and Taiwan--with some from Europe.  I don't think that any televisions are made in the United States any more, although I could be wrong.  Imported machinery --the single biggest item in the deficit--comes from other industrial powers.

Net on the list are nine items that account for between 5.6 and 1.9 percent of the overall deficit: furniture, unspecified commodities (??), articles of apparel, toys, games, and sporting goods, iron and steel articles, footwear, rubber goods, and beverages of all kinds.  Most of those items, I suspect, come from Asia.  Raw aluminum, iron and steel add another 2.4 percent.  No other commodity accounts for as much as 2 percent of the deficit.  

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, the only industrial product for which the US has a substantial export surplus is aircraft and spacecraft.  The surplus is $98.3 billion, compared to our deficit of $279 billion in machinery.  Our three other leading export surpluses are cereals (that is, grains), equal to 1.9 percent of our trade deficit; oil seeds and fruits at 2.4 percent of it; and "mineral fuels, oils, and distillation products," at 6.1 percent.  

Now it should be obvious, it seems to me, that tariffs designed substantially to reverse our trade deficit should focus on the imports that are primarily responsible for that deficit: machinery, electronics, vehicles, and pharmaceuticals.  Of those four categories, pharmaceuticals look to me to have the best chance of rapidly substituting domestic for foreign production--and I don't know how many jobs such a substitution would be likely to create. The other three would take years to substantially expand production, as well, in many cases, as expertise which we may no longer have.  If the US really set a goal of expanding production in those areas--and I am not saying that it should--wouldn't it make more sense to pass a small tariff on those goods now that would gradually increase for a period of years, thus making domestic production more profitable in the long run?  Such a policy would also have inflationary effects, but it could increase domestic production in various industries.  

As the Times op-ed notes, however, these tariffs appear to have been imposed without any serious analysis to back them up.  They could provide leverage to reach new agreements with individual countries, but what objective will those agreements have and how could they achieve it?  And that leads me to a different set of reflections on what President Trump seems to be trying to do--another occasion where the dreaded Hitler analogy is simply unavoidable.

I don't know how many people realize now that the Second World War occurred because both Germany and Japan wanted to create huge self-sufficient empires.  Hitler wrote and talked about this frequently and at length, as I discussed in my first book, Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War.  The future, he thought, belonged to superstates on the scale of the British Empire, the United States, and the USSR.  Germany needed much more territory not only for raw materials, but above all for food.  During the 1930s, I found, Hitler and his collaborators found ways to keep Germany fed--barely--while substantially reducing imports and spending precious foreign currency mainly on critical raw materials.  They also tried to use synthetic oil to make the country self-sufficient in energy until they could conquer the oil fields they needed in Russia.  Hitler deeply resented dependence on international trade, in part because he thought that Jews controlled it.  The Japanese and the German economies were both hurt badly by the after-effects of the First World War, which led to overproduction of many commodities, and by the Depression, and that gave the idea of autarky more appeal. 

It turned out, of course, that their plans were doomed.  They were strong enough to unleash wars with Britain, the United States, and the USSR, but totally unable to match their production of key weapons, leading to their complete defeat.  I don't think Trump's plans have anything to do with preparation for war, but I think that his attempts to escape from dependence on the world economy are equally doomed to failure.  Once again an egotistical political leader thinks that he can rewrite the laws of economics, and finds himself in a position to do so.  He too is likely to be disappointed, with fateful consequences.

How we got here and where we are going

 This article has gone up in the Boston Globe this morning.  With their permission I am reproducing it here in full.

 The 1997 book that prophesied a revolutionary on the scale of Trump

Thinking of American history in terms of generations helps explain our current breakdown — and how long this new era may last.

By David Kaiser Updated March 21, 2025, 3:00 a.m.

David Kaiser taught history at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, the Naval War College, and Williams College from 1976 to 2013. He is the author of 11 books, including “States of the Union: A History of the United States Through Presidential Addresses, 1789-2023,” and writes the blog historyunfolding.com.

In January 1997 I reviewed a new book for The Boston Globe: “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy,” by William Strauss and Neil Howe. The book broke US history down into 80-year periods, each of which included four “turnings” that were generally about 20 years long. They called the great crises of US history “fourth turnings”: the era of the American Revolution and the Constitution (1774-94), the Civil War (1860-65), and the Depression and the Second World War (1929-45). Doing the math, they predicted another such crisis in the first 15 years or so of the 21st century. In that crisis, as in the previous ones, new leadership would mobilize the nation to accomplish a great task and renew the bonds between the people and their government.

I, a historian, was one of very few professional academics who took an interest in what Strauss and Howe had to say, and I began using their framework in my own work. Their critical insight, the idea that set their work apart, was that even the most stable domestic and foreign orders and the values that underlie them will die off along with the generations that created them. That leaves an intellectual and even emotional vacuum that someone inevitably comes along to fill.

Events have now confirmed their predictions, even if they are not unfolding as inspirationally as Strauss and Howe expected. The United States is experiencing the climax of a crisis that will transform our country, its government, and its role in the world. And Strauss and Howe’s framework of generations and turnings still provides the best framework for understanding where we are.

We can understand this by analogy with the last crisis: the Depression and the Second World War.

How the New Deal order arose

The Civil War had created a new elite composed of Northern and Midwestern businessmen, and their views dominated the nation for more than 60 years. The Carnegies, Morgans, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and the rest built new industries and new infrastructure, paying immigrant labor subsistence wages. New ideas of economic justice arose during the Progressive Era, but corporate dominance survived into the 1920s.

By 1929, however, a new generation with different values was taking power, and under Franklin D. Roosevelt, they radically changed the role of the federal government. The New Deal strictly regulated the financial community, raised top marginal income tax rates well above 50 percent, made the government the employer of last resort, passed Social Security, regulated wages and hours, and recognized and defended the rights of labor. FDR also mobilized 10 million young Americans from the GI or “greatest” generation to fight and win the Second World War, and the United States emerged as the leading world power and the leader of new institutions like the United Nations after 1945. The GI generation, which included every president from John F. Kennedy through George H.W. Bush, generally remained committed to those principles for most of their adult lives. Faced after 1945 with the threat of communism around the world, they committed the United States to defending every bit of free territory.

But as their generation eventually fell from power, both the values of the 1933-93 era and the bond that Roosevelt and his successors forged between the government and the people eroded. Neither the silent generation (born 1925-42) nor the boomers had the same respect for authority or commitment to an egalitarian economy.

In 1996, Strauss and Howe looked forward to a catalytic event that would allow a transformative president to form new bonds with younger generations — particularly millennials, a term they had coined in a 1991 book. In “The Fourth Turning,” they listed a number of events that might trigger the next great crisis, just as the election of Lincoln triggered the Civil War and the stock market crash ushered in the Depression and led to FDR’s victory.

We have experienced a few of the kinds of events they predicted — 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID pandemic — but successive presidents failed to deal with them effectively or use them to create a new national consensus.

                                   The missed opportunities Trump exploited

George W. Bush after 9/11 explicitly proclaimed that the nation was in a crisis comparable to the Second World War. The United States, he explained again and again, had to go to war to remove dictators and spread democracy to protect us from nuclear terrorism and move the world into a completely new era. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to overthrow hostile governments, but he did not bring back the military draft to get the whole population involved in his crusade, and he cut taxes instead of raising them. Worst of all, his ambitious team ignored the problem of setting up new governments in nations of tens of millions of people. Both wars had become unpopular by the time Bush left office, and both ended in disastrous failure.

When Barack Obama took office in 2009 in the midst of the worst economic collapse in 80 years, a Time cover explicitly compared him to FDR in 1933. Roosevelt had immediately eased the citizenry’s three biggest problems — bank failures, unemployment, and home foreclosures — with legislation targeted at those ills. He thereby increased his congressional majorities in 1934 and passed new measures, including Social Security. Obama accepted his advisers’ view that the system remained fundamentally sound and that recapitalizing major financial institutions must be the country’s top priority. He failed to mobilize the nation’s anger against the financial interests responsible for the crash, as Roosevelt had. As a result, he lost his majorities in the House and later in the Senate, and with them went any hope of further transformation or any renewal of the American people’s confidence in their leadership.

So it was that Donald Trump, businessman and entertainer, easily defeated a field of Establishment candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and narrowly beat the Democratic heir apparent, Hillary Clinton, in the general election. Trump was our first president with no experience in public service at all — a measure of how low the prestige of our governmental leadership had sunk. He argued that both party Establishments had betrayed average Americans. He spent much of his first term battling with the Establishment of his own party, and he too failed the test of the great crisis that struck his administration: the pandemic. That probably cost him his reelection. Joe Biden, however, lacked the energy to form a real bond with the American people and failed to deal with the inflation that made his administration unpopular. Kamala Harris lost a close but undisputed election to Trump, and the Republicans emerged with control of both houses of Congress.

Donald Trump now leads a coalition of interests that have long opposed key aspects of the post-1945 order. Much of the business community never completely accepted the New Deal, and in the 1970s it began a long counteroffensive that has undone the regulation of the financial community, rolled back the rights of labor, and built a network of think tanks and foundations dedicated to smaller government and free markets. The Federalist Society has recruited, trained, and helped put in place hundreds of new federal judges who would endorse that agenda. The religious right, angered by Supreme Court decisions on school prayer and abortion, is another major element of that coalition. The fossil fuel industry relies upon Trump to keep increasing its production, and the pro-Israel lobby has won him over to all-out support of right-wing Israeli governments. In a remarkable turnaround, the working class has become majority Republican. And Trump’s coalition now includes a number of young tech billionaires from Silicon Valley who believe that they can use the computing power of AI to transform virtually every feature of economic life around the world. All these actors reject key aspects of the post-1945 order, and most have worked for decades to overturn it. Now their time has come.

Trump and his coalition want to kill off the idea that the federal government should protect the environment, guard against monopoly, regulate financial markets, and protect the rights of labor. They want to deport millions of immigrants. They also are renouncing US responsibility for fighting famine and disease overseas or protecting an international order with stable frontiers and security for all nations and peoples, such as the Ukrainians. Trump’s loyal, dedicated team — most of it relatively young — will never stand in his way. Elon Musk and his acolytes are trying to destroy the bureaucracy that FDR created.

Strauss and Howe anticipated that a boomer leader would eventually fill the vacuum left by the disappearance of the previous generation of American leadership. They could not anticipate either that Trump would be that man or exactly what he would do. Trump is clearly the most important American political figure of the 21st century thus far, with a devoted following that no one else has been able to match. He has taken advantage both of the Establishment’s specific failures and of the general disregard for authority and precedent that has characterized the last 60 years of American life. He is now reshaping our government, our society, and our role in the world according to alternative values that various constituencies have been promoting for several decades.

This transformation is parallel to what happened under the New Deal, but we are now going in the opposite direction. The values of our mid-century order are being eclipsed. This is not where many of us wanted history to go, but I have learned not to argue with history.

Democrats tried for too long to live off the legacies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, even as they helped destroy the New Deal economic order. They now see Trump as a usurper promoting evil principles and threatening democracy. That is exactly how Republicans saw FDR. The battle between selfish greed on the one hand and respect for the good of all on the other never ends.

The Republicans enjoy small congressional majorities, but Trump has unprecedented control over them. The Supreme Court will side with him on at least some key issues. Neither the media nor academia has nearly enough prestige to stand up to him successfully. Whether or not he does the United States and the world any good, he may keep more than half the country on his side just by making a series of decisive moves, as his three immediate predecessors failed to do. And the United States will probably emerge from the Trump era with a very different set of political and economic values, just as it did following the Civil War and the Second World War. History suggests that new values will prevail for decades.

History gives us every reason to believe that the nation will eventually change direction again, but this fourth great crisis in our national life seems to be ending with a Republican victory and the consolidation of a new Gilded Age. The generation that will effectively challenge it may just be beginning to be born.

Centralizaton and its consequences

 Back in 1960, during the first presidential election that I could really follow closely, I saw candidate Richard Nixon interviewed on Face the Nation or Meet the Press.  He was asked about federal aid to education, a major campaign issue, fueled both by the competition with the USSR and the failure of school capacity to keep up with the baby boom, resulting in double sessions in many parts of the country.  Democrats favored federal aid both for school construction and to pay higher teachers' salaries.  Republicans opposed at least the latter step, arguing that federal aid would  lead to federal control.  One of the interviewers, as I remember, asked Nixon why it would necessarily lead to federal control.  He replied that "if you look at the history" of such programs, that was what you would find.  I think I asked my father--an exact contemporary of Nixon's--whether that was true, and he assured me that it was not.

It turns out that Nixon was right.

President Kennedy couldn't pass an aid to education bill in his term, because a Catholic Democrat from New York on the House Rules Committee refused to accept it if it didn't include aid for parochial schools.  Lyndon Johnson did pass such a bill in 1965, the year of the Great Society.  It included a provision allowing the government to withhold aid from any district that practiced racial segregation.  Federal spending on both K-12 and higher education has grown enormously in subsequent decades, reaching $174.9 billion on higher education and about $110 billion on K-12.  A great deal of the $174.9 billion that goes to higher ed apparently goes to a relatively small number of research universities, which cannot survive without it in their current form.  The federal government also finances student loans, which reached $83 billion in the last fiscal year, and keep higher education alive.  

Before turning to the impact of the Trump administration, I want to suggest that these funds have appear to have made both K-12 and higher education in this country worse, not better.  Even in 1965, when I entered college and the great society began, faculty at elite universities were taught to value research over teaching, and that trend has gotten much worse since research can bring in large amounts of money. I taught at Carnegie Mellon, where the administration taught faculty that grant proposals were the most important part of their job, in the 1980s, and I saw how the availability of federal research funds corrupted the institution.  Federal money--much of which goes for overhead, meaning that it can in effect be spent on anything--allowed faculties to expand and specialize, while administrations grew exponentially, to the point where they now outnumber faculty members at major institutions.  Almost every college and university in the nation has given up the idea of offering a distinct educational product.   A recent article by an undergraduate at Harvard in the Crimson reveals that the General Education program--the centerpiece of a Harvard education in my time--totally lacks the kind of fundamental course that dominated it sixty  years ago. Grade inflation has made performance in class almost irrelevant.  On the K-12 front, the bipartisan experiment that began under the Bush II administration, No Child Left Behind, has failed.  Test scores in basic skills have been falling in all demographic groups--a trend worsened (but not started) by the disastrous decision to close schools during the pandemic.  Meanwhile, as I believe I have pointed out before, the evidence that more money will improve public K-12 education is dubious.  Here in Massachusetts the Cambridge and Boston school systems--two of the largest and poorest--spend far more money per pupil than many of the wealthy suburbs, yet do worse on test performance.  I have not had the time to research other parts of the country.

The Trump administration regards the K-12 and higher ed educational systems as strongholds of leftist ideology--and it is far from wrong.  It wants to punish them by denying them funds, with potentially devastating effects.  To cite one well-publicized example, Columbia University has about $1.3 billion in federal grants and contracts annually, about 20 percent of its total $6.6 billion budget.  The loss of that money would put an end to Columbia as it now exists.  The same is true, almost certainly, of Harvard.  In the 1960s the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, as it then was, withheld federal funds from some southern school districts to force them to desegregate.  Now the Trump administration is apparently gong to withhold funds to force them to drop DEI programs, deal differently with demonstrations, and even change their curriculums.

How can these institutions respond to a loss of all these funds?

Those of us who have felt for a long time that American education was on the wrong track can fairly view this as an opportunity.  Harvard and Columbia and other similar institutions,. public and private, could do themselves a great favor by laying off more than half of their administrative staff.  DEI offices are only one part of this problem and by no means the biggest one.  Harvard now has ten vice presidents.  Their titles and salaries are Vice President for Alumni Affairs and Development ($884,000), Vice President and General Counsel ($740,917), Vice President and Chief Information Officer ($554,000), Vice President for Human Resources ($497,000), Vice President and Secretary of the University ($498,000), Vice President for the Harvard Library ($415,000--the only vice president concerned in any way with academic affairs), Executive Vice President ($625,000), Vice President for Public Affairs and Communications ($543,000), Vice President for Campus Services ($287,000), and Vice President for Finance ($680,000).  None of those positions existed 60 years ago, when I and my classmates began our far superior undergraduate education.  All of them presumably have staffs.  Harvard also has more varsity teams competing in  NCAA sports--about 45--than any other college in the country, and clearly spends much more money on athletics than it used to.  These are areas--along with research--that could be cut.  The faculty could once again be required to spend more time teaching and the humanities and social science faculty could be required to teach broader, more general courses of the kind that set the tone of the university in decades past.  That would be the hardest change to make, however, since generations of faculty have now been taught either that such courses are beneath them or that they served as instruments of white male supremacy.

In K-12 the solution to our problems has been found.  Certain urban charter school networks such as Achievement First, where my son worked for about fifteen years, have shown that uniforms, long hours, discipline, and academic demands upon their pupils can generate astounding results. Some hoped that charter schools would provide models for public education, but instead, school systems and teachers unions have treated them as enemies and fought their expansion.  In my opinion, had either higher education institutions or school systems done their jobs better in recent decades, they would not be in the vulnerable position that they are in now.  

Meanwhile, as Richard Nixon warned in 1960, our educational systems now find themselves at the mercy of the federal government because of its role as a huge source of funds.  Both party establishments cooperated with this situation for a long time, but now the Republicans reject it, and under Trump are determined to do something about it.  Local school systems and colleges and universities--some of whom probably will not survive--will have to rededicate themselves to their educational function and look for ways to fulfill it more effectively.  They need leadership that will make budget cuts where they most need to be made.  I hope such men and women can step forward.

Reason, Bureaucracy, and History

 The eighteenth century has long been called the age of revolution, often without acknowledging that at least two different revolutions were taking place.  That was the great insight of Alexis de Tocqueville, who described the two revolutions separately in two great books, Democracy in America, about the egalitarian society and representative institutions of the newly formed United States, and The Old Regime and the French Revolution, about the growth of a bureaucratic state in France in the 17th and 18th centuries and the failure of the  French Revolution to stop it.  The relationship between democracy and bureaucracy has changed a great deal over the last 250 years, especially in the United States, and it is entering a critical phase now, with potentially enormous consequences of the US and the world.

Some years ago I wrote a series of posts here about Democracy in America after reading it from cover to cover for the first time.  The search box at the top of this page will lead any interested readers to it.  I had read The Old Regime and the French Revolution much earlier, in the spring term of my senior year in college, with tremendous effect.  It emerged clearly from that book that Tocqueville personally preferred aristocracy to democracy, although he knew, as he had written twenty years earlier in Democracy in  America, that aristocracy was doomed and that democracy--by which he meant above all the legal equality of all citizens--was sweeping over the world.  His model of aristocratic rule was Great Britain, his wife's home nation.  The British aristocracy, he argued, had governed its nation in a public spirited manner, paying the lion's share of taxes through the land tax, allowing commoners to file suits against them in court, dominating local government, and cooperating with the lower classes in various ways.  The Old Regime argues repeatedly that the French aristocracy had behaved similarly in the later middle ages--an argument that I do not think many other historians have endorsed--but that things changed under Louis XIV, who began building a more centralized bureaucracy to govern the nation based mainly on his Intendants, the officials who represented him in the provinces. The French Revolution had tried to institute a democracy based in part on the new US model, but the nation had collapsed into near anarchy within a few years, leading to the dictatorship of Robespierre.  After a confused period in the late 1790s, Napoleon Bonaparte took over and revived the centralization of the Old Regime, with prefects taking the place of royal intendants.  

Tocqueville wrote The Old Regime in the 1850s and noted that the system of centralized administration and prefects had survived for half a century, through several dynastic and regime changes.  It survived all the way into the current Fifth Republic, buttressed by the grandes écoles, the national professional schools that trained young people for it.  Other European nations, led by Prussia and the German Empire that Prussia created in 1871, also had highly developed bureaucracies.    The early American Republic inspired Tocqueville largely because it did not have such a bureaucracy.  Its democratic institutions began at the local level, with New England town meetings, and US citizens constantly formed political associations to pressure their local, state and national officials.  The whole citizenry followed political affairs closely and took part in them.  That, he thought, was what made democracy a living thing.

Things began to change very slowly in the US in the last decades of the nineteenth century.  While the federal bureaucracy remained relatively small, dominated by postal workers and customs inspectors, elected senators and representatives now controlled appointments to it through informal arrangements worked out within the Republican Party in the wake of the Civil War.  The civil service reform movement began to argue for a permanent corps of non-partisan officials who could pass competitive examinations.  The Pendleton Act of 1883 created such a system for a few individuals, and in successive decades more and more of the federal service was brought under it.  In 1921 the Budget Act created a federal budget office, and in 1924 the Rogers Act created the Foreign Service, our first professional diplomatic corps.  The US never developed anything like the French grandes écoles, but an expanding higher educational establishment helped fill the ranks of the new civil service.  As in Germany, France, and to a lesser extent in Britain, the civil service was viewed as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment, trying to use science to promote the greater good.  That idea also had roots in Plato's Republic and its dream of a government ruled by philosophers, literally, lovers of knowledge.

The real explosion of US bureaucracy took place, of course, under Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal.  The new SEC began regulating Wall Street trading, the NLRB provided a mechanism to settle disputes over union registration, the Department of Agriculture began trying to control crop production, and public works agencies supervised huge projects.  The Federal Security Agency, the ancestor of the Department of Health and Human Services, administered social security.  The Second World War and its aftermath created huge new defense bureaucracies, and new agencies sprung up in the era of the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, including the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.  Most Republicans had opposed the New Deal agencies, but by the time of the Nixon Administration Republican leaders were going with the flow.  Barry Goldwater in 1964 had waged the first all-out presidential campaign against the bureaucratic state, and lost overwhelmingly.  In 1971, however, the then-confidential Powell memorandum by future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell laid down a countermanifesto, proposing a political offensive against government regulation of free enterprise.  In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president based upon anti-government rhetoric.

Reagan's bark turned out to be worse than his bite,  but something was changing in public opinion.  With the possible exception of Joe Biden, every president since Gerald Ford--including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama--has complained and joked about the size of the federal government and tried to cut it back.  The size of the federal work force has been remarkably stable for most of the period since 1970, which means that it has shrunk substantially as a percentage of our population.  Meanwhile, bureaucracies have had a decidedly mixed record in other advanced parts of the world.  The most powerful bureaucracy in the world now appears to belong to the European Union.  It administers and regulates a vast territory but it has aroused a great deal of resentment, leading to Brexit and to the growth of rightwing parties all over the continent.  The Soviet bureaucracy--probably the largest and most intrusive in history--collapsed in 1989 and has not been rebuilt.  China still seems to have a very powerful centralized bureaucracy, even though its economy is largely privatized.  The UN bureaucracy numbers more than 35,000 people around the world. In general, it seems to me that state authorities have been losing effective power and influence to private interests, especially here in the United States.

Over the last thirty years or so a new anti-bureaucratic movement has grown up within the Republican Party, fueled by foundations like the Koch brothers' and ideologues like Grover Norquist and foundations like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.  Those interests are now aligned with Donald Trump and Elon Musk and they are mounting an unprecedented attack on the federal bureaucracy, beginning with efforts to eliminate the Agency for International Development and the Department of Education.  They seem likely to reduce the size of our public health bureaucracies and may even try to privatize the post office.  The fate of these efforts will remain somewhat uncertain at least until the Supreme Court rules on various parts of them, but I think they represent a turning point in human affairs.  The Republicans have declared war on the ideal of an educated bureaucracy reordering economic life to promote the common good, and the closely related idea of a national government empowered to keep private economic power within certain limits.  Those ideas date back to the 18th century.  I deeply regret the decline of those ideas, but I also believe that Tocqueville's criticisms of impersonal bureaucracy had a point.  Our public institutions have become unresponsive in many ways, not least because of the influence of private interests exercised through our political system.  Bureaucracies do become devoted to their own self-preservation, if not their own growth.  Our vast state and local educational bureaucracies--probably the ones with the greatest impact on the average citizen--have been doing a very ineffective job for decades and let the nation down badly during  the pandemic.  And bureaucracy and regulations have made it almost impossible for governments of either party to accomplish great things, such as the proposed high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles.  

I doubt very much that the federal government as I have known it all my life will survive this administration.  Even if a Democrat succeeds Trump, they will not have the power to restore it to where it was two months ago, even if they want to.  I cannot possibly predict where this will lead the nation, but I conclude that an important era of modern history is indeed coming to an end.