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.

The JFK assassination documents--what the Trump administration should do

 A couple of weeks ago an editor at a major newspaper contacted me--we have corresponded before, never met in person--and asked if I would like to do an op-ed on the Trump administration's pending release of new JFK assassination documents.  It went through two drafts but he has decided not to use it.  I'm very disappointed because it might actually do some good.  Here is the text.

President Donald Trump, perhaps encouraged by his ally Tucker Carlson, recently ordered the declassification of all remaining records pertaining to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Carlson in 2022 accused the Central Intelligence Agency of involvement in JFK’s assassination and claimed that the agency was still withholding critical documents — an example of the corrupt behavior of the “deep state” which, then as now, in Carlson’s and Trump’s view, works only for itself. Trump is presenting himself as a tribune of the people who will let them see the truth. The new release will probably include some interesting information, but it almost certainly will not transform anyone’s understanding of the assassination.

We must begin with the history of the withheld records. In 1977-1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, or HSCA, led by chief counsel G. Robert Blakey, reinvestigated the JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations. The committee looked at millions of pages of documents from the FBI and CIA. Initially, those documents were sealed for 50 years, but in 1992, prodded by Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-minded film JFK, Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act and set up a review board to look at all the select committee’s documents and release whatever they could. 

The review board did an excellent job, and the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, now holds an extraordinary collection of CIA and FBI documents on topics broadly related to the assassination, including FBI files on major organized crime figures and CIA files on many operations against Fidel Castro. I and several research assistants spent many weeks with those files in the early 2000s, culminating in the publication of my book, The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy in 2008. The HSCA had identified three two organized crime bosses—Santo Trafficante of Tampa and Carlos Marcello of New Orleans—as having the motive and opportunity to kill JFK, and new evidence allowed me to go further, confirming an organized crime conspiracy and identifying some of those involved in it.

The review board did withhold some documents broadly related to the assassination, mainly CIA documents. One must understand, however, that these are not CIA documents that no one else has ever seen. HSCA staffers and the review board saw them but found legitimate reasons not to release them — probably because, even many years later, they might compromise intelligence sources and methods. In short, no new release is going to reveal a sensational CIA officers’ plot to assassinate the president of the United States. The documents may contain important information about other CIA operations, but not that. 

Most assassination specialists have adopted one of two conclusions: either that Oswald and Jack Ruby, who killed him while Oswald was in police custody, both acted alone, or that Oswald was probably innocent and a grand deep-state conspiracy killed Kennedy. The latter group cannot give up the idea that the CIA killed Kennedy over differences in policy toward Cuba — even though the documents that have already been released show that the president and the agency were still working hand in hand to overthrow Castro well into the fall of 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated. 

The Trump administration’s move could fill in some gaps in the record.  There are FBI and CIA files that should have fallen within the purview of the review board in the 1990s but which it never saw. I identified in my research one such CIA file on Eladio del Valle — a former intelligence officer in the Cuban regime overthrown by Fidel Castro — who was murdered in Miami in 1967 and later linked to the assassination.  The CIA refused to release it. I also discovered long FBI files on Carlos Marcello that the review board hadn’t seen, and some of them were released to me with virtually every name in them redacted, making them useless.  Journalist Jefferson Morley has long been seeking the release on CIA man George Joanides, the case officer for a militant Cuban exile group who became the agency’s liaison to the HSCA. The Trump administration should establish a small permanent review board to release documents like these, which could add to our knowledge of the case.  Meanwhile, like the previous releases under President Biden, the unveiling of more review board documents will provide some interesting information without changing anyone’s views.  Adherents of the deep-state theory likely stand ready to argue that the truth has been withheld, no matter what the documents show. 

David Kaiser is the author of American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (2000) and The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (2008).