Portrait of our intellectual elite in the midst of crisis

I have subscribed to The New York Review of Books for more than 50  years. I still get a lift when a new issue arrives on my doorstep, but that is more of a habit than anything else.  The giants who filled its pages for so long, such as Stanley Hoffmann, Theodore Draper, Mary McCarthy, I. F. Stone, Frances Fitzgerald, are mostly dead, and subsequent generations have not produced anyone who compares with them.  The original editors--Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers--have proven equally irreplaceable since their deaths, and in 2018 one successor, Ian Buruma, was forced out after he allowed a Canadian broadcaster to describe his experience of being accused by several women of sexual assault--charges of which he was acquitted in court.  The current issue features a slew of articles on the current election--none of them written by anyone who can analyze it with much electoral sophistication.  Instead, a miscellaneous collection of intellectuals mostly tells us what the election means to them.  On this they seem to agree: one after another they let  us know that the American people obviously don't live up to their ideas of how people should think, act, and vote, mostly because of their incorrigible racism and sexism.  There are a few exceptions, but in general, the issue suggests that the NYRB is now mired in an intellectual swamp, turning out articles that only a small minority of Americans could appreciate, and with good reason.  

I will focus on certain common themes rather than analyze the articles one by one.  Condescension and towards Trump voters is perhaps the leading one.  Here is the Irish novelist Anne Enright:  "These good people sound small and lost and poorer than they used to be. None of them mentions the fact that Trump is deranged, and this, in its turn, seems crazy to me. I am hypnotized by their denial, blinded by their inability to see. What is the secret, maddening wound that sets their minds spinning away from the obvious problem here? And why are American men so huffy? Sometimes, when a Republican voter is interviewed, I catch the cold glint of racism—it seems to keep them smug—but the undecideds come across as helpless and well intentioned."   Here is Pomona College writing professor Jonathan Lethem:  "It has become common to understand the current Republican Party as the full optimization of Nixon’s “southern strategy.”. . .Yet what if Nixon’s real triumph wasn’t the production of Trump’s presidency? What if instead it was the seeming permanent necessity of a neoliberal technocratic bulwark against the dispossessed, vengeful, and, yes, in many cases undeniably racist hordes—an Overton window that slides in only one direction? By this logic we find ourselves in a world where Kamala Harris is endorsed by none other than Dick Cheney, the personal conveyor of Nixon’s global dream into the twenty-first century. . ."

Misandry may actually beat accusations of racism as the leading prevailing theme.  Here is the Indian author Pankaj Misrah:  "Whether crowing about her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a torchbearer for torture; promising to shoot intruders in her home; or vowing to make the US military 'the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,' the first Indian American presidential candidate from the Democratic Party shows few signs of defying the steadily dominant far-right ideals of violent hypermasculinity." British literary critic Jacqueline Rose goes further:  "The image of Trump tearing off his surgical mask before the 2020 election is still eloquent of a form of masculinity that will do pretty much anything, including place itself and others at mortal risk, to affirm the limitless mastery that one man’s ego can exert over the world and over itself. . . .It then falls to women to secure the future and keep human misery out of sight. Reproducing in the teeth of inequality and hopelessness is meant both to camouflage the world’s cruelty and to make it a better place. The misogyny against Harris is undoubtedly fueled by that silent demand and the precise form of gendered hatred it promotes. " Susan Faludi devotes her piece to the reaction to Harris's tendency to laugh and what it shows to her: "Harris’s lightheartedness runs afoul of a seemingly bedrock political principle that women in the spotlight have fun at their peril and should under no circumstances laugh. France is banning hijabs, the Taliban is forbidding singing by women, and MAGA Republicans are coming up with a female comportment restriction of their own: Thou shalt not laugh in public while politicking." 

The lead article of the issue and the longest of the series by law professor Patricia Williams combines these two themes.  Williams won a MacArthur Grant in 2000 after publishing her magnum opus, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, which introduced postmodern thinking and intersectionalism to a wide audience.  For her Harris's candidacy--like any major event involving a black American--is another chance to enumerate the ordeals that have traumatized black people for centuries, starting with slavery, which, she argues, must have stamped Kamala Harris as well, even though her Jamaican father came from a very well-to-do Jamaican family and her mother was an Indian Brahmin.  The Alchemy of Race and Rights was largely autobiographical, trying to show how even a black Ivy League law professor continually had to cope with racism and sexism at the end of the twentieth century, and Harris turns herself and into the two embattled  heroines of the piece, along with Harris.  And Harris can speak Williams's language, too, as Williams shows in this quote from a 2019 interview: "Look. All of us who have become the first, part of the challenge is that people have their boxes…. They have this set of boxes, and they’re trying to figure out which one you fit into. But the number of boxes they have is limited to whatever they’ve seen before…. And we’re asking them to see something that they’ve not seen before."  Harris was already a U.S. Senator from the US's most populous state, and a year later she was elected Vice President, but for Williams this problem never goes away for either of them.  She also insists, as commentators so often do, that no man ever suffers the kind of attacks that women running for office do--a statement that would come as a surprise to men like Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, and George W. Bush, to name only a few.  American politics was no love fest when it was reserved for white males, and to quote one of them, no person who can't stand the heat should decide to enter its particular kitchen.

Harvard law professor emeritus Lawrence Tribe, a long-time NYRB contributor, is no postmodernist, but his contribution shows how far Trump opponents (of which I certainly am one) will stretch logic to make a point.  His piece analyzes the legal dangers of a new Trump administration, which would be poised to unleash the Justice Department against his political opponents.  The bulk of it, however, takes a new (to me) approach to the abortion issue.  Tribe, it turns out, won a case in the Supreme Court in the early 1980s that allowed Grendel's Den, a Harvard Square restaurant, to get a liquor license.  It had been denied one until then under a Massachusetts law that allowed churches to veto liquor licenses for any establishment within a short distance of the church.  Tribe argued successfully that this law constituted an establishment of religion, and that the Constitution does not allow religion to influence law.  He now extends that argument to the abortion issue, claiming that since opposition to abortion is mainly based upon religion, outlawing it at any level is also an establishment of religion prohibited by the First Amendment.  This strikes me has a desperate attempt by a secular intellectual to find an excuse to enshrine his personal values in the law.  It also seems to me a very slippery slope.  Our opposition to murder, theft, testifying and testifying falsely is also based in large part upon religion and specifically upon the ten commandments, but I can't believe that Tribe would want to argue that that would invalidate our laws against those practices.  To be clear, I favor abortion rights and always have, but I also believe that they cannot be found in the text of the constitution.  The Dobbs decision didn't outlaw abortion, it put the issue in the hands of the voters.  They have already endorsed abortion rights in many states and it looks like there's a good chance that eventually they will do so in all of them.

Other contributors take different tacks.  The political scientist Mark Lilla, a long-time critic of identity politics,  is eminently sensible, blaming the elite for failing to teach the nation how politics really works and for  lacking any commitment to the process.  Elaine Blair, regular contributor, wants Harris to mobilize a coalition of moderates and poorer people against corporate power, but that battle has been lost.  The sociologist Matthew Desmond, who has written an impressive book about evictions, lists a great many measures to help the housing market that he hopes a new president might undertake, but much of them would require housing legislation. He includes a federal right to overturn local zoning laws. Both candidates, of course, constantly imply that they can make anything happen if they just reach 270 electoral votes, but we all know that life is more complicated than that.  The Indian Pankaj Mishra contributes a scathing indictment of US foreign policy since George W. Bush, emphasizing how the Gaza war has undermined US claims to lead a "rules-based order" and Biden's longstanding links to the pro-Israel lobby in the US.  Nathaniel Rich, focusing on environmental issues, notes Harris's and Walz's complete failure to make them an issue--and her new embrace of fracking.  Younger activists have to tell their acolytes that we can depend on them anyway.  Marilynne Robinson, a scholar of the Bible, bemoans our falling victim to a con man but was inspired by the Democratic convention.

I have written many times that Donald Trump would never have become a major party candidate and president had not the elite of both parties lost touch with too much of the population.  Despite his increasingly bizarre behavior, half the country accepts him as a potential president, and there is a slightly better than even chance that an unhappy population will vote the in party out and return him to office, just as they have done in four of the last six elections.  Four other sitting vice presidents have run for president in  my lifetime--Nixon, Humphrey, Bush I and Gore--and only one of them won.  In one sense the election is a win-win for Williams, Mishrah, Lethem and Enright:  they will be delighted by a Harris victory, while her defeat will confirm that the United States is irretrievably racist and sexist, as they have long suspected.  Their sensibility dominates our major media and academia, while alternative views are spreading on alternative websites like Quellette and various podcasts.  That may be the hope of the future.

 

More on States of the Union

 I am delighted to report that the talk I gave last June at the FDR Library on my new book, States of the Union, is now available online.  Enjoy.

How a new elite thinks

 I finished Nate Silver's On the Edge a week ago, but I didn't write this planned post then because I was too preoccupied with a forthcoming piano recital that took place yesterday (and, I am happy to report, was well received by a small audience.)  I plan to tape a studio version of it and make that available on line.  I will not be able to do justice to On the Edge here, but I highly recommend it.  It deals with complex and very important topics, lays out key different ways of thinking in today's world--especially among the younger generations--and is very entertainingly written.  I plan to summarize it very quickly and then turn to what I regard as its most significant contribution--an attempt to see inside the souls of a younger generation of entrepreneurs and thinkers like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and the now-infamous Sam Bankman-Fried, who wield enormous power in our society today.

Silver, to begin with, identifies two distinct communities, "the River" and "the Village," into which, it seems to me, the elite of Gen X and Millennials are divided.  The River includes gamblers (like himself), venture capitalists, tech giants like Jeff Bezos and Musk, and "effective altruists"--a hot new term--who want to use new tools and ways of thinking to improve the world.  The River thinks and acts according to probabilities, especially probable expected value (EV), upon which it relies to make decisions. The Village includes most of our academic and journalistic elite and most of the Democratic Party, and relies far more on a particular set of moral values that it reflexively applies to every problem--values also known as woke.  The two are often at odds, which may explain why Silicon Valley, a center of the River, is now split politically, with an important minority favoring Donald Trump.   Based on my own increasingly ancient perspective I think that Silver has certainly identified real groups, but they seem to me far from all-inclusive.  I am certainly closer to the River than the Village in how I think, but I don't think that wokeness is the only possible set of moral values, much less the best one from which to question the relentless value-maximization of the River.  The problem with EV in the marketplace, it seems to me, is that the V for value represents anything that people will spend money on--the more the better.  That includes addictions such as gambling and drugs, which are playing a bigger and bigger role in our lives and our economy, with disastrous consequences.  Our whole health care system, including Big Pharma, is now largely focused on increasing its expected value, and that is not improving the health care we are receiving or making it cheaper and more efficient--even though, to take a Village perspective, the health care industry is increasingly diverse.  I'll return to this problem a little later.

The first four chapters of the book survey the gambling scene--casinos and sports betting--and the kind of thinking that goes into it.  Two chapters are about poker, and show how mathematical sophistication--the kind of analysis familiar to many via the book and movie Moneyball--has to be balanced with game theory, which relies on identifying with one's opponent and trying to figure out exactly what he is trying to do.  Then the casino business gets a fascinating chapter, telling us that slot machines are the most important casino profit generator, because the house has the  biggest edge, as well as the most addictive casino product.  There is even a way to try to beat certain slot machines that tend to pay off big when they haven't given much to the customers for a long time--if one can identify them.  Then comes a highly technical chapter on sports betting, which among other things illustrates Silver's particular perspective.  Despite the deluge of sports betting ads on every televised sporting event nowadays, few people realize, I suspect, that the new books and the sports books at casinos will either severely limit or stop taking a customer's action if they turn out to be consistent winners.  This "only losers need apply" strategy--which casinos also use to try to ban card counters from blackjack--is, to me so incredibly unfair that it's amazing that no state has tried to ban it.  Silver talks a lot about what he and others do to try to get around it, but he simply accepts it as a fact of life.  In decades past, illegal bookmaking operations relied on their 10 percent commission on all bets to make money and manipulated the odds and tried to lay off bets to insure against risk.  (The manipulation of the odds was designed to get the public to bet equal amounts on both sides.)   I do wonder why none of the legal books seems to be using that strategy now.

           The second part of the book is about risk and risk management, beginning with a chapter on venture capitalists and largely focusing on Silicon Valley.  Having written that sentence it occurs to me that this tells us a lot not only about the book, but about today's economy, which is marked by truly fantastic concentrations of capital.  Silver isn't looking at how people design superior products.  He's looking at how zillionaires try to profit from superior product designs.  And the answer is, it seems, that they take a chance on a lot of new ideas, knowing that most of them will fail but that a very few will be worth billions.  And that leads me, now, to my main critique of the book, which is really a critique of contemporary capitalism.

             The ideas that will be worth a lot of money are those that will appeal to the public.  The problem is that they may appeal to the public's worst instincts, or even to their minds' and bodies' capacity for addiction to things like gambling, social media, or prescription drugs.   Silver acknowledges this in various asides but without spending much time on what might be done about it, or even speculating about whether the legalization of gambling in the last half century or so has been a good thing.  (He does repeatedly mention that it is a very regressive tax on poor people.)  In the same way, one might ask whether superhero movies are good for the public, even though they have become the studios' most reliable sources of profits.  Silver seems to me to believe in free markets but they unfortunately free consumers to give into, and merchants to exploit, the worst human instincts--and that in turn can have very negative social and economic consequence.

            And that leads me to the next few chapters of the book, which focus on the spectacular rise and fall of Samuel Bankman-Fried.  The son of two Stanford law professors and an MIT graduate himself, SBF, as Silver refers to him, founded a quantitative trading firm specializing in crypto-currencies in 2017, when he was 25.  Two years later he founded his own cryptocurrency exchange, FTX.  Crypto, of course, is a new form of asset, and I do not claim to understand it fully.  Its main advantage seems to be complete freedom from government oversight or regulation, and that, in addition perhaps to its novelty, has induced investors to put many billions of dollars into it.  It has already had wild swings of value and it may turn out to be one of the legendary bubbles of all time.  While things were going well, SBF made enormous contributions to various charities and many political candidates.  He was a disciple of Effective Altruism, which hopes to use new digital techniques, including Artificial Analysis, to solve all humnaity's problems quickly and cheaply.  In late 2022, however, FTX went bankrupt and SBF was arrested for a series of huge frauds relating to its operations, which had siphoned off a lot of the money investors spent on its digital assets.  Late last year he was convicted on multiple counts and he has been sentenced to 25 years in prison.  Silver spends quite a few pages wondering how all this could have happened, but without speculating, as far as I can see, that the episode reveals how much of our spectacular new economy may ultimately be built on sand.  He evidently knows a good deal of history, but not quite enough, I suspect, to be able to put our mad world in a real historical context.

Another chapter goes into the controversies over AI, and whether it has a good chance of extinguishing human life on the planet. While Silver declares himself, relatively speaking, an optimist about AI, he thinks that that danger is a real one.  I was very frustrated, though, that he never got around to explaining exactly how AI might bring the death of humanity about.  I see a somewhat different danger. Because of the collapse of history education in both high school and college, the younger generations--even the graduates of our most distinguished universities--have grown up without any sense of the kinds of great catastrophes that have befallen humanity in the past, even as recently as the first half of the twentieth century. Having grown up amidst extraordinary technological and economic progress, they think that this will never end.  That was what nearly everyone thought in the first decade of the twentieth century as well, and for the same reasons.  

Silver does raise important questions about values in his last few pages.  People, he says, need agency--the ability not only to make choices, but to make good ones that avoid pitfalls like addiction.  Plurality,  he says, means giving different points of view seats at the table, and rejecting any totalizing ideology--although whether that would include free market ideology isn't altogether clear to me.  And lastly, he calls for reciprocity, which amounts to treating other people as we would like to be treated, instead of just trying to manipulate them for one's own benefit.  This is an echo of Orwell's great essay on Dickens, where he argued that moral criticism of society's values could be just as revolutionary as structural criticism of its institutions.  

I learned a great deal from this book--and I have many questions about the future.  The changes we are living through provide capital with enormous new opportunities, which may or may not rebound to the public good.  They have also created a new aristocracy of which Elon Musk is now the most spectacular example--and he is not using his great power for the greater good.  Humanity is embarked upon a new great adventure which could end very well or very badly.  This will be an enormous challenge for all those now under 50, and those not yet born.

Thank you, General Mattis

 Five years ago I described a talk I heard given by retired General James Mattis, and the exchange that I had with him during the Q & A about Donald Trump, whom he had served for some time as Secretary of Defense.  Here are the key portions of that post.

Sunday, November 03, 2019

The Impeachment Debate--a Barometer

Last week I attended a talk by General James Mattis (ret.), the former Secretary of Defense, at the JFK School in Cambridge.  General Mattis is a history buff, and he talked a great deal about how history can enhance your perspective and help you make better decisions.  His host was Prof. Graham Allison, the head of the school's applied history project, whose roots I helped grow myself about 40 years ago.  He also talked about the crisis in our democracy and the problems of tribalism and partisanship.  He did not specifically discuss his tenure as secretary of defense, although he alluded more than once to the great difficulty of making or executing any coherent policy in this administration.

I decided to participate in question time.

I began by introducing myself as a former member of the Strategy and Policy Department in Newport. "General," I said, "I share you concerns about the crisis in our democracy.  Recently it seems to have entered another phase.  During the next year, both the House and Senate and the American people will have to decide whether our President should continue in office.  One critical question bearing on their decision--and I don't think that it should be a partisan political question--relates to his intellectual and managerial competence and whether he is really capable of doing the job.  It seems to me that men like you, and General McMaster, and General Kelly, and Mr. Tillerson have a lot of information bearing on that point.  Whether or not you want to comment on this now, I hope that some of you will take an opportunity in the next year to make the information you have available to the Congress and the public so that they may make a more informed decision."  (That's a paraphrase but it is certainly very close to what I said.)

The general replied emphatically, making clear that he had already settled this question in his own mind.  The American military, he said, has a non-political tradition going back to the Newburgh conspiracy during the Revolutionary War.  It must not set itself up as some kind of Praetorian guard.  I certainly did not think that I was asking him to do that.  I suspect that if Donald Trump were a serving officer commanding a battalion in General Mattis's division, that he would understand that he had to be relieved, but he still feels that his years of military service debar him from exercising his rights as a citizen to pronounce upon his fitness as commander in chief.

General Mattis, then, refuses for his own reasons to enter into a discussion of whether Donald J. Trump can adequately perform the duties of President of the United States.  Yet the issue of why that question isn't at the forefront of our political discussion generally, and why it seems very unlikely that it will be the specific basis for an article of impeachment, goes well beyond his personal views of the duties of military officers.  It goes to the question of whether the citizens of the United States now have enough understanding of, or belief in, our government, to make it work effectively.  I feel more and more forced to believe--by evidence--that they do not.

In Bob Woodward's new book, War, former JCS Chairman Mark Milley took a different tack and labelled Donald Trump as "Fascist to the core."  and pleaded with Woodward to help stop Trump's bid for re-election.  According to Woodward, as reported here, General Mattis told Woodward that he agrees with Milley's concerns and encouraged him to bring the threat Trump poses to the attention of the American people.  I regret that it took General Mattis so long to come around to the view that the nation needs his testimony, but I appreciate that he finally did.  

Update

 I have been very busy with some other matters--nothing to worry about--and I am also most of the way through Nate Silver's book, On the Edge, which is entertaining and stimulating.  I will be blogging about it before long.  In the meantime I may get to something else here, or I may not.

The election remains, and probably will remain, a toss-up.