Is the Voting Rights Act in danger?

This  morning's New York Times includes an op-ed by retired Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse, who graduated from Harvard one year before I did.  I never met her and I have learned a lot reading her pieces, but I am going to question some of the premises of that article today, all the more so since the article typifies contemporary liberal commentary on a number of issues. I would describe the principle underlying that commentary as follows:  if you do not unhesitatingly endorse every step that has been taken by Congress and various courts in the last 60 years to increase racial equality, then  you want to go back to the segregationist era.  This is how Greenhouse characterizes the situation at the moment regarding the future of the Voting Rights Act of 1965:

"Questions about the Voting Rights Act’s constitutionality have long been hanging in the air at the Supreme Court. But it was only this month, in an order expanding a Louisiana redistricting case, that the justices placed the issue squarely on their docket.

"Now that they have done so, with argument scheduled for Oct. 15, there is little doubt that what remains of the 1965 law after its evisceration in the Shelby County case 12 years ago will be seriously weakened, if not repudiated in its entirety by the time the court’s next term is over."

Some history is in order.  The Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964 all included attempts to restore the right to vote to black Americans living in southern states, but none of them  had had much effect in the Deep South, where few if any black Americans voted.  After the police violence against the Selma voting rights march in early 1965, Lyndon Johnson sent the Voting Rights Act to Congress.  Its most important provision, by far, gave the federal government the power to take over the voter registration process in areas that denied black people the vote.  That, as it happens, was how the Republican supermajority in Congress in the late 1860s had managed to enfranchise the recently freed slaves in the South, leading for a very brief period to the election of large numbers of black officials in southern states, and particularly the three states--Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina--that had black majorities.  Reconstruction ended in 1877 and by the late 19th century nearly all southern states were finding ways to disenfranchise their black populations.  Johnson and the Congress decided that enough was enough.   As it turned out, it was not necessary to set up federal registrars all over the South.  The southern states got the message, and barriers to registration disappeared pretty quickly.  I am unaware of any areas in the country today where voters are denied the right to register based on race.

The current controversy over the act relates to section 2, which caused some controversy from the beginning and was amended in 1982.  The amended text is as follows:

"42 U.S.C. § 1973. Denial or abridgement of right to vote on account of race or color through voting qualifications or prerequisites; establishment of violation.

"a) No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color, or in contravention of the guarantees set forth in section 1973b(f)(2) of this title, as provided in subsection (b) of this section.

"(b) A violation of subsection (a) of this section is established if, based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a class of citizens protected by subsection (a) of this section in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice. The extent to which members of a protected class have been elected to office in the State or political subdivision is one circumstance which may be considered: Provided, That nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population."

The key passage of the act is the last paragraph, which guarantees "members of a protected class"--minority voters--equal opportunity "to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice."  Now I would suggest that electing "members of their choice" has never been the right of any class of Americans since the founding of the Republic.  That opportunity has customary been denied to anyone belonging to a minority political party within a particular jurisdiction, such as Massachusetts Republicans and most Texas Democrats today.  The Voting Rights Act however aimed specifically at ensuring the rights of long-disenfranchised black Americans, and in the last two sentences of that paragraph, it indicates that a "protected class"--that is, minority black voters--have some right to be represented by members of their class, which the drawing of congressional or legislative districts must respect.  The last sentence, however, rules out the interpretation that black voters are entitled to representation based upon their proportion of the population.

Despite that last sentence, I have the impression--and I would be glad to be corrected if it is false--that a number of court decisions have effectively endorsed the idea that enough majority black districts should be drawn to give black voters proportional representation within states.  And nationwide, the Congressional Black Caucus has 62 members, 14 percent of the House of Representatives--eseentially exactly the same proportion as the black population of 13 percent.  Greenhouse's article, while referring frequently to Section 2, completely ignores that last sentence and its implications.  Here is her argument for its continuing application:

"The argument that the Voting Rights Act has outlived its usefulness is easily refuted by facts on the ground. The County Commission of Fayette County, Tenn., recently settled a Voting Rights Act suit brought by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund that challenged the county’s electoral system as racially discriminatory in violation of Section 2 and the Constitution. Despite a Black population in the county of more than 25 percent, the 19-member commission has no nonwhite members. The Legal Defense Fund dismissed its lawsuit after the commission drew a new districting plan with three majority-Black districts."

That change certainly reflects section 2.  But the case of Louisiana congressional districts that is about to come before the Supreme Court--the case that has led Greenhouse to write her article--is another matter.  I quote from her again:

"Briefly, Louisiana v. Callais has its origins in an earlier case, a 2023 Fifth Circuit decision that required the state to create a second majority-Black congressional district. (A third of Louisiana’s population is Black and the state has six congressional districts.) A political struggle ensued over how to carve out a second district while protecting the districts of two leading Republican members of Congress, Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise."

I agree with Greenhouse that the Supreme Court majority will very likely overrule the Fifth Circuit (whose decision I have not read) and declare that Section 2 specifically rejects the idea that a one-third black population does not establish a right to two black districts.  And it does.  This controversy reminds me of Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent in Students for Fair Admissions vs. North Carolina a few years ago, in which she complained bitterly that the majority was rejecting affirmative action as a means of redressing historical disadvantage among black Americans.  The problem with that argument, as I pointed out at the time, was that no Supreme Court majority had ever accepted that rationale for affirmative action.

This, however, is not, for me, the real problem that we ought to look at.  Until now the courts and state legislatures have accepted the idea that minorities need districts in which they will be the majority, allowing to elect members of Congress of their race.  My question is, has this in fact been good for democracy?  I am not at all convinced that it has, for reasons that should not surprise long-time readers of this blog.

The creation of majority-minority districts, like many affirmative action programs in universities, law firms, and other institutions, has done a good job of diversifying our elite.  It would only have helped the minority voters to whom it is designed to give representation, however, if we believe that their problems are unique to themselves and if these representatives--still only 14 percent of the House--have been able to use their power to help those problems.  And that is exactly what I do not believe.  Almost every problem that poorer black Americans suffer--poverty, single parenthood, drug addiction and poor education--is shared by a larger number of white Americans and a substantial number of Hispanic Americans.  To characterize these problems as black problems seems to serve the interests of both of our political parties, in different ways, but it doesn't help the lower half of our population at all.  Indeed it has divided the lower half of our population, so that a substantial majority of poor white Americans vote Republican while a large (albeit shrinking) majority of poor nonwhites vote Democratic.  That represents a complete change from the middle decades of the twentieth century--the era, as I have often shown--when income inequality among all races was being reduced.  And no region of the nation needs multiracial coalitions more than the South,  which remains our poorest region and ranks the lowest by many measures of economic and social well-being.  

Republican legislators, judges, and many Republican voters now blindly adopt the position that anything President Trump wants must be right.  Democrats should not in return decide that anything the Supreme Court majority and the administration do must be wrong.  Both sides badly need to move beyond stereotypes both positive and negative.  If the Supreme Court does rule against the current Louisiana district plan this could open up a way to a better political future.  It will not mean a return to the pre-1965 era.

Anchorage and Munich

On March 11, 2022, just a few weeks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine began, I suggested here that NATO should very seriously consider entering the war on Ukraine's side. I did so because I thought the whole post-1945 world order was at stake and because Ukraine was making an all-out effort to defend itself.  Not only did the Biden administration immediately rule out direct intervention, but I do not know of a single other commentator who openly agreed with me.  The invasion did lead Sweden and Finland to join NATO and European nations to begin beefing up their defenses.  The Ukrainians have mounted an extraordinary defense, but the Russian threat has grown bigger, not smaller, over the last few years, and Ukraine has now been losing ground--although it is a long way from being militarily defeated.  In these respects, the situation today is very different from the crisis over Czechoslovakia in 1938 that led eventually to the Munich agreement conceding German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia to Germany, and leading just five months later to the entire destruction of Czechoslovakia.  Donald Trump's meeting with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, however, does have echoes of the crisis of September 1938 and may lead to something similar.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain actually met Hitler three times in 1938: first in Berchtesgaden when he agreed in principle to Hitler's demand for the Sudetenland, then at Bad Godesberg where Hitler escalated his demands further, and then at Munich, where Hitler had accepted Mussolini's invitation to meet with Chamberlain and French Premier Daladier, rather than attack Czechoslovakia after the Czechs, the French and the British had all rejected his Godesberg demands.  At Munich Hitler got most of what he wanted from Czechoslovakia, and signed a declaration, proposed by Chamberlain, in which the British and German governments expressed their desire never to go to war again.  The situation today is different, of course, because Russia and Ukraine have already been in full-scale war for two and a half years.  The Anchorage meeting resembles the first, Berchtesgaden meeting.  Trump received Putin claiming to want an immediate cease-fire, as Ukraine does, but he apparently not only dropped that demand, but accepted Putin's demand that he receive the entire Donbas region--much of which remains unconquered--in return for peace.  In addition according to reports this morning, Ukraine's security would depend in the future on the Russian government's promise not to attack it again, which, without going into detail, is pretty much what the Czechoslovak government got to insure its future security after Munich.  

Trump now faces the same task that Chamberlain faced after Berchtesgaden: to sell not only the embattled Ukrainians on such a deal, but to convince his traditional allies, the other NATO nations, to go along with it.  Chamberlain did in fact persuade both Czechoslovakia and his French allies to agree to the cession of the Sudetenland after Berchtesgaden.  President Benes of Czechoslovakia did not threaten to fight Germany alone and gave in, and the French government was more interested in keeping Britain on their side in case war with Germany eventually broke out than in standing up for Czechoslovakia, with which they had a treaty of alliance.  Now Zelensky has already said that he will not accept the formal transfer of any territory to Russia, and he will almost surely insist--as I believe he should--on the freedom to conclude security agreements with other powers.  Whether he could fight on if Trump washed his hands of the conflict depends on the attitude of the European powers, how much help they can give him, and on the speed and effectiveness of new Ukrainian military innovations, most of them involving drones, which have so far helped Ukraine avoid defeat while bringing the war into Russia itself. 

Both at home and abroad, I am convinced, Donald Trump cares more about drama than results.  Every week he introduces a new act of the long-running play, Donald Trump, Superstar, identifying a disastrous problem that must be solved and promising an imminent solution.  Like Chamberlain in 1938, he is poised to proclaim that a peace agreement with Russia guarantees peace for our time and claim the Nobel Prize that he craves so ardently.  At this point, it looks very unlikely to me that Zelensky or the major European states will agree to the surrender of additional Ukrainian territory or the renunciation of effective Ukrainian guarantees.  Ukraine has already proved that it is not Czechoslovakia in 1938: it is orders of magnitude larger in territory and population and it has fought effectively for more than two years.  The major European powers are all breaking with Washington now on the issue of Israel and Palestine, and I don't expect them to knuckle under to Trump this time.  In short, it looks to me as if Trump's current production will fail to produce the kind of triumphant climax that Chamberlain enjoyed, briefly, in September 1938.  I could easily be wrong, but I expect the war to continue.

Where are we going?

 Events in the last couple of months have laid out a road map for the Trump Administration.  

 During the last 90 years or so, the federal government has acquired enormous power and influence within our society.  Regulation and direct financial support have given it a critical role in all our economic institutions, from Wall Street to agriculture to higher education, medical care, transportation, communications media, energy production and distribution, and any industry facing foreign competition. And during those 90 years various administrations have used that power both to preserve and to change the way Americans live in important respects.  They drew upon the 18th-century principles of the Enlightenment, which held that governments could use reason and intelligence to improve the lives of all.  Meanwhile, the US government has deployed unprecedented power all over the world.  That power, too, originally claimed to serve higher principles: the destruction or containment of totalitarian regimes, and the creation of a world ruled by law.  For the time being, those experiments appear to be over.

The Republican Party has sought the undoing of the regulatory state and the complete liberation of free markets at least since Ronald Reagan, but only the rise of Donald Trump, a political outsider with no commitment whatever to any of the achievements of the last 90 years, to make their dream come true.  Trump commands a degree of loyalty among a majority of the Republican Party that no president since Franklin Roosevelt has ever matched, precisely because of his outsider status and his willingness to disregard taboos that have constrained political behavior for the entire history of the republic.  No president has ever publicly described political opponents the way he does.  Seeking power largely for personal reasons, Trump has achieved it through an alliance with our most powerful economic sectors, including the fossil fuel industry, the tech industry and the growing crypto industry.   His administration is reconfiguring the federal government to give them all anything they want.  Nowhere is this more apparent than with respect to fossil fuels.  Government policy has done a 180, shifting from trying to limit climate change to encouraging it.  How exactly the fossil fuel industry plans to cope with its consequences--of which they must be well aware--is not clear, and I haven't seen any media analysis of this rather critical question.  They may be counting on technological breakthroughs to block some of the sun's rays.

And meanwhile, to consolidate his power, Trump is using the power of the federal government to cripple any opposition to him and what he wants to do.  Our traditional media outlets--newspapers and television networks--are feeling heavy economic pressure, which has forced CBS/Paramount, for instance, to seek a merger.  That is why 60 Minutes had to break all precedent and settle Trump's lawsuit against it in order to make sure the merger might go forward, and, quite possibly, why John Oliver is leaving late night TV.  That is why Columbia, Brown, and the University of Pennsylvania have reached settlements with the Department of Education, and while Harvard is almost certain to do so as well. They cannot maintain the size and scope of their universities without federal money, and they do not have the courage to regain their independence by drastically restructuring themselves to allow themselves to live within their non-government income.  (I suspect they could do that by firing most of their administrators, but since those administrators completely control them, they won't.)  Trump convinced several major law firms to donate time to whatever he wants them to do, and probably deterred them from taking on clients working against his interests.  Trump has secured the allegiance of the right-wing American pro-Israel lobby by endorsing everything that the Netanyahu government wants to do, including the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza strip.  And that isn't all.

Trump has learned the hard way how federal investigations can create unfavorable media attention, distract the public, and drain the target's economic resources.  His Justice Department, working with the new leadership of the intelligence agencies, are working full time as I write to turn the tables on Democratic former presidents, including Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and very possibly Joe Biden.  We can't yet be certain but it looks like negotiations are underway to trade clemency or a pardon to Ghislaine Maxwell in return for testimony implicating prominent Democrats, led by Clinton, in Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein's sex crimes.  (The Biden Justice Department, to its credit, did not apparently give her the chance to trade such testimony for leniency when it convicted her of sex trafficking.)  The Justice Department is preparing to charge leading figures from the Obama administration with a criminal conspiracy to propagate the story that Russia in 2016 was trying to elect Donald Trump.  Their targets may include Obama--in spite of last  year's Supreme Court decision granting presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for any actions related to their presidential duties.  I will not be at all surprised if they start bringing cases against Democratic state and local officials as well, perhaps for attempting to obstruct federal immigration policies.

And last but hardly least, Trump has started using the federal bureaucracy to control information.  He has now fired the chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which has been keeping unemployment statistics for most of 100 years, because the bureau released a disappointing jobs report.  Like so much of what Trump is doing, this disregard for real facts is not  unprecedented.  I have repeatedly pointed out that administrations since Bush I have talked about the federal budget, throwing around five- and ten-year figures for expenditures and deficits, has made it impossible for average citizens to have a real sense of what is going on.  But Trump, by firing the head of the bureau based on false information about previous mistakes, has broken new ground.  Throughout his career he has depended on selling his own particular version of reality.  Meanwhile, the other Boomer at the the highest levels of this administration, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is abandoning some of the most important lessons of medical science, where the Enlightenment originally had some of its greatest impacts.

Trump is using parallel tactics in foreign policy.  His imposition of high tariffs has caused major US trading partners, including Japan, Great Britain,. and the EU, to make major tariff and trade concessions.  Whatever they may think of him, the Europeans apparently believe that they cannot afford a complete break with the United States.  Trump is also using threats to try to get Putin to halt the war against Ukraine, and he does seem to want Netanyahu to stop the war in Gaza.  Here his tactics so far have failed--and I'm not sure how serious he is about Netanyahu, anyway.  He has just escalated threats against Russia, responding to former President Medvedev's nuclear threat with one of his own, but where this diplomatic struggle will lead him is not clear. 

Earlier generations of Americans created a more just economic order and saved freedom in much of the world by sacrificing for goals bigger than themselves.  That ability, I think, allows institutions involving large numbers of people to succeed.  It was that kind of sacrifice that my generation rebelled against in the late 1960s because of the Vietnam War, in which the government tried to draw on it for mistaken goals.  Both sides of our political spectrum, as I have written here many times, have rejected that kind of sacrifice, in different ways, in subsequent decades.  That is why history and literature professors abandoned the idea of a body of knowledge that every educated person should have, why journalists stopped ignoring stories about politicians' personal lives that held them to impossible standards and simply undermined public confidence in leadership, and why so many educated people embarked on a long crusade against federal taxation.  That is why Donald Trump could become an heroic figure to tens of millions of Americans.  Such a shift has happened many times in history--it is part of the story of the fall of every great empire, and something very similar happened right here in the decades after the Civil War.  And I am not convinced that the Trump administration is the biggest threat to life as we have known it, or to freedom, that we face.  The whole digital revolution that has transformed our lives so much, and which is entering a new phase with AI, has given us a new generation of leaders who appear to have equally little concern for what their innovations will do for the common good and for the economic and emotional health of the citizenry.  They are more transformative figures than Trump and will last a lot longer.

 We can all keep the need to sacrifice for the common good and to respect actual facts alive in our own lives.  Eventually a critical mass will get tired of selfishness and lying and things will start to swing back the other way.  It took 1000 years, until the Renaissance, to restore the Greco-Roman respect for science and facts, and I don't think it will take that long this time.  In any case, to paraphrase Ranke, no era completely defines human nature, and all our lives are part of a much larger story in which the good far outweighs the bad.  No era--like no life--last forever, and many give birth to something completely different.

Here We Go Again

 In 2017, when Donald Trump took office for the first time,  a story broke that some suspected the Russian government of having assisted his campaign and taken steps to help his election.  That led quickly to the appointment of Robert Mueller as Special Counsel and a two-year media frenzy about Russiagate, which fizzled when Mueller found no evidence of active collusion between Russia and that campaign.  The Russians had apparently hacked into the Democratic National Committee email server and had made some emails public during the campaign, but evidence for anything more was lacking.  The leaders of the intelligence community in the new Trump Administration, led by Tulsi Gabard, are now gathering documents and building a case that the FBI and CIA doubted the premise from the beginning, but that the Obama White House, in its last weeks in power, pressed them to make a statement taking it more seriously.  They are even talking about legal action against former President Obama, conveniently forgetting, it seems, that the Supreme Court did Donald Trump a huge service last year when it essentially exempted presidents from criminal liability for any official act during their term of office.

Simultaneously, the Trump Administration has enraged some its most committed supporters by suddenly declaring that there was no interesting information in the files of the investigation of the late Jeffrey Epstein--months after assuring the nation that they were preparing devastating revelations.  The controversy has started a feud between Attorney General Bondi and some of the new leadership of the FBI, and the administration is now trying to regain the initiative by trying to release the files of the grand jury investigation of Epstein.  And in the last week, our two leading newspapers, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, have added fuel to the fire. The Journal described a salacious and suggestive birthday card that Trump supposedly sent Epstein in 2003, without actually reproducing the card of explaining how reporters saw it. The Times, quoting media stories from roughly the same time, makes a strong case that Trump and Epstein were partners in womanizing, backed by accounts from at least one targeted woman.  Trump has denied everything and filed a $2 billion law suit against the Journal and I will be very surprised if a suit against the Times does not follow shortly.

This blog aims at increasing understanding of current events, not at the rather fanciful goal of changing them.  In my opinion, this is one of many instances in which the Trump administration and our major media outlets are simply building upon trends that have been around for decades--in this case, since Watergate.  Having helped to expose one administration genuinely guilty of corrupting our electoral process and trying to use intelligence agencies to save itself, reporters and editors decided that this was their most important role.  They gave into, and increased, the sense among the American people that our political leadership could not be trusted about anything.  The now-repealed independent counsel statute passed after Watergate got the legal profession more deeply involved in this process and provided the media with long-running stories.  The next really big scandal--although not the next scandal--was the Iran-Contra Affair, which culminated in the use of pardons by the Bush I administration to exonerate a few convicted conspirators (such as Oliver North and Elliot Abrams)  and at least one higher-up threatened with an indictment (Caspar Weinberger.)  Earlier, Watergate had already bequeathed a most unfortunate innovation into our legal system: the general pardon that Gerald Ford gave to Richard Nixon for any offenses he might have committed as president.  That, I believe, was the first such pardon ever given to any American, but it has now been given repeatedly by presidents including Bush I, Trump, and Joe Biden.  Bill Clinton spent years dealing with Whitewater and was eventually impeached for lying about his personal life, after Ken Starr had decided to include that subject in his mandate.  George Bush II and Barack Obama escaped any similar imbroglios, but Trump struggled with scandals all through his first administration.  Since Watergate, however, every president, including Trump, has managed to avoid any truly critical consequences of any of these investigations.  That has not dulled the media's appetite for scandal.

There could be information in the FBI files bearing on Donald Trump.  He evidently hung out quite a bit with Epstein.  There is no way, however, to know.  What we do know is that no information would really add much to what we already know about Trump thanks to the testimony of a number of women and the Access Hollywood tape.  And most important of all, we also know that half the country doesn't care about the topic at all, and that no new evidence will turn any Republicans in Congress against him.  Once again, as with Russia in the first term, our leading media outlets may decide that if they talk enough about the situation, something good will happen.  I don't think that it will.   The Journal and the Times, one would think, would have considered the possibility of a lawsuit and are ready to contest it, but the new CBS/Paramount precedent, in which the network caved for financial reasons rather than invest in a lengthy defense of its 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, is worrisome.  Trump now seems determined to use any weapon at his disposal to get his way about anything that comes up, either at home or abroad.  He thinks that the presidency, his financial resources, and the nation's economic power should allow him to make any law firm, university, newspaper or foreign government bend to his will.  We need institutions to stand up to him, but picking losing battles is not the way to do it.

The column inches and evening news minutes devoted to Epstein would be better spent, in my opinion, telling the American people exactly what is happening on the immigration front, to the economy, and to various parts of the federal government.  The major media have been trying to convince the whole country that Trump doesn't deserve to be president for ten years now, and it hasn't worked.  We need the media to help us think seriously about where our economy is going and what the American people really need.  We could use more foreign coverage.  The media, I think, should focus above all on reporting what is, not what they think should or shouldn't be.  That is properly the job of our elected officials, and it has been a long time since the media tried to let them do it.

The Boomer Tragedy

 I have spent much of my life among liberal Boomers and I still meet with a group of them on zoom once a week.  Some weeks ago, I remarked on a paradox about our generation.  On the one hand, I think that college-educated Boomers got an excellent education, better than any subsequent generation--largely because colleges forced us to learn a lot about a number of different subjects.  But on the other hand, our major institutions, from higher education to the professions to K-12 education to our political system, have deteriorated on our watch, and it looks as if the most important political figure of our generation will be Donald J. Trump.  What went wrong?

Well, to begin with, most of us put the skills we learned in school at the service of our moral imagination.  This is what Prophet generations--the ones born in the aftermath of a great crisis--tend to do.  That began in the Garden of Eden, when God gave Prophets Adam and Eve everything they could possibly want for their happiness but commanded them not to eat the fruit of the tree of Good and Evil.  Naturally they did so.  In the United States, the generation born under our first four presidents, the Transcendental generation, went on crusades for and against slavery, leading to the Civil War.  As I documented in No End Save Victory, the post-Civil War generation focused on creating a more moral order both at home and abroad.  The Boom generation inherited the most abundant and the most just society in human history, in my opinion, and saw the two next-oldest generations successfully struggle against society's biggest flaw, legal segregation.  But the Vietnam War, for most educated Boomers, proved that their elders were hypocrites and criminals.  To some, who eventually dominated academia, it proved that the nation was irretrievably imperialist and exploitative.  And the Boom generation declared war on two other real evils, sexism and homophobia.

What left wing Boomers still prefer to ignore is that the other side of their political fence--led by such Boomers as Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist and William Kristol and George W. Bush--also felt that they knew the only path to justice and happiness for all.  In Generations, written in 1991, Strauss and Howe noted tellingly that the only thing liberal and conservative Boomers now agreed upon regarding the Vietnam War was that their elders had mismanaged it, with the former arguing that we had fought on the wrong side and the latter claiming that we had quit when victory was in sight.  The right adopted moral issues such as abortion from American churches, and built much of its electoral coalition around them.  But the right's real religion was the free market--and the left gradually gave up on the modifications to free market ideology that had given us the relatively egalitarian economy of mid-century.

The tragic flaw of Democratic boomers has emerged, I think, in response to Donald Trump.  Since around 1968, they have convinced themselves that their combination of superior intelligence and superior morality simply must prevail.  The Supreme Court flattered that delusion with certain key decisions like Roe v. Wade--a decision written by a justice from the GI generation that has now been overturned in a decision written by a Boomer.  The left has relied on the federal court system both to secure rights and it to stop many things it opposed on environmental and other grounds.  And when Trump won the election of 2016, Democrats began arguing that such a morally and intellectually inadequate man simply did not belong in the White House and threatened basic American values by his very nature.  They expected American voters to agree with them that the threat he posed was more important than any Democratic failure to address their day-to-day concerns.  Most of them have refused to face that about 50 percent of the electorate--less than a plurality in 2016 and 2020, but more in 2024--evidently disagree with them about this. That doesn't mean that they will applaud everything this administration does, but it does mean that they will not reject this administration based on its very nature.

The emphasis on morality also leads to the conclusion that what the Trump administration  is trying to do--such as deporting illegal immigrants and cutting back the size of the federal government--must be stopped by any means necessary.  That was the war cry of anti-Vietnam protesters sixty years ago and that spirit has stayed alive.  That is why some people refuse to consider that taking away individual federal district court judges' ability to stop national policy around the country might in principle be a good idea.  It is also why some people, including some readers of this blog, think that even a post like this one, that tries to see what is happening objectively and dispassionately, is somehow giving aid and comfort to the Trump administration and letting our side down.

This morning's New York Times leads with a piece by Peter Baker arguing that Trump wants to return to an earlier America. The piece uses many standard progressive arguments, repeatedly suggesting that nostalgia for the 1950s is misplaced because it ignores racism, McCarthyism, and sexism--even though the 1950s defeated McCarthy in ways that we have not been able to defeat Trump, and the civil rights movement was nearing its greatest triumphs.  In the second half of the piece, Baker does much better, recognizing that Trump's policies are realizing conservative programs that have grown up over many decades.  He could have gone even further and acknowledged that Trump's hostility towards windmills and energy-saving lightbulbs reflects the views of the fossil fuel industry, whose power Democrats have never been able to curb.  And Democrats might also ponder, I think, that the federal government that they created, which promoted their values and transferred billions of dollars to institutions that reflected their values such as universities, would inevitably sooner or later fall into hostile hands that resented what it did and wanted to cut it back.  For decades before 1941, Professor Roger Merriman of Harvard taught the introductory history course there, emphasizing that periods of growing centralization and authority inevitably gave way to periods of decentralization and chaos.  Our own period of greater political authority appears to have peaked around 1965, and its decline has now accelerated.  New generations, I think, will have to find new ways to make the values that so many of us care about count.  And eventually things will turn back in the other direction again.

An Amazing Book

 Last week I spent two three-hour flights reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, an account of her six years working at Facebook, aka Meta, from 2011 to 2017.  Combined with the whole Trump phenomenon and with Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, which I have already reviewed here, it taught me an enormous amount about big tech, our corporate climate, our new ruling class, and the state of our world.  Born in New Zealand around 1980, Ms. Wynn-Williams worked in the New Zealand diplomatic corps and for an international nonprofit before joining Facebook to help it develop relationships with governments around the world.  She also happens to be a terrific writer, who begins the book with two rather striking anecdotes: a disastrous encounter between her boss Mark Zuckerberg and several heads of state in Panama, and the shark attack she suffered as a child that nearly killed her because of an undetected perforated colon.  She joined Facebook, she explains, believing idealistically that its ability to reach billions of people around the world could do a great deal of good.  By the time she was fired in 2017 she had discovered that Zuckerberg and his senior team care only about money and power, and that they will cooperate with any government to increase their share.  Meanwhile, she endured appalling treatment from many of her bosses, including sexual harassment which led to her discharge after she reported it.

I am not going to summarize the book from start to finish.  It is very detailed, makes many interesting detours into Wynn-Williams's personal life, and, unfortunately, lacks an index, which would make a reviewer's job a good deal easier.  It occurs to me that publishers are probably dispensing with indices because those who read electronically don't need them.  Instead I am going to discuss the main things that I learned from the book about one the institutions that is transforming social, emotional, economic and political life all over the world.

Let me begin at the top, with Zuckerberg himself.  I define a dysfunctional family as a family in which one member is a god whose needs invariably take priority over all the other members.  Meta fits that definition, and Zuckerberg is the god.  He keeps very irregular hours and generally refuses to make any appointments before noon--even, as Wynn-Williams discovered, with heads of state.  Everyone around him focuses on keeping him happy.  He cannot stand to hear any bad news.  Nor is this all. Like most people, I imagine, I got my image of Zuckerberg from Jesse Eisenberg's portrayal of him in Aaron Sorkin's film, The Social Network.  That Zuckerberg was clearly a sociopath, but he was also very smart and had real charisma.  I did not see those qualities in Wynn-Williams's portrayal of  him (and I believe that she never mentioned the movie.)  Like Trump, his self-image seems to be all out of proportion to his actual abilities. He also has enormous difficulty handling the ordinary details of life, and once caused a crisis in a visit to Peru when he came to an airport terminal without his passport.  He blamed his staff for the mistake. Once, on a long plane ride, Zuckerberg asked Wynn-Williams to play two board games with him, and she--knowing her boss--makes him stipulate that she does not have to let him win.  When she does win, repeatedly, he accuses her of cheating. This is how Trump plays golf. 

This leads me to one of the biggest revelations in the book, one which apparently never made its way into the media.  Zuckerberg in 2016 did not think much of Donald Trump, but Facebook, Wynn-Williams argues convincingly, played a critical, active role in getting him into the White House.  Facebook employees, she says, worked directly with Trump campaign officials to explain how they could use Facebook to identify and reach potential voters in the same way that advertisers use it to reach potential buyers.  The company itself devoted enormous resources to use the election to increase its reach and influence.  The whole Russiagate affair, one could argue, simply distracted us from a much more important election story.  

That, however, is not all.  After the election, when senior Facebook leadership realized how much they had helped Trump, one of Wynn-Williams's bosses, Elliot Schrage, wanted the company to issue what amounted to an apology.  In a subsequent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit (the occasion of the aforementioned trip to Peru), Wynn-Williams noticed that various important heads of government were treating Zuckerberg much more respectfully--because they now understood how  much Facebook could do to influence their own electoral fates.  And  Zuckerberg, Wynn-Williams explains, was inspired by Trump's victory to believe that he could reach the White House himself.  He immediately began scheduling appearances in key primary states during 2017, and told her that his annual personal challenge for 2017 would be to visit as many states as possible during the year. He simultaneously began talking about transforming the media landscape by wiping out established media institutions.  He made stops around the country during 2017, but by the end of that year Wynn-Williams was gone from Facebook and can't tell us what happened to his political ambitions during the next three years.  I suspect they will revive in 2028.

Facebook from its beginning obsessed about increasing its clientele--which I have to admit includes myself.  The clientele allowed it to secure advertising revenue, which it has increased by giving advertisers what they want.  This, we learn, includes letting them know when teenage female users are showing anxiety about their appearance, for instance by deleting a selfie.  Having made every user emotionally involved with the whole world's reaction to them, Meta not only feeds their addiction to attention, but helps corporations profit from it.  And that is why, as Wynne-Williams tells us, top Meta executives brag about keeping their own children away from Meta.  Like the oil companies reinforcing their coastal buildings against flooding, they know what they are doing. And at the same time, Meta has tried to get China to open up its social media market by supplying the government with tools to track dissent among its people--a real marriage made in hell.

Meanwhile, Wynn-Williams's personal story answered some long-standing questions of mine about corporate America, and especially about the roles of women in high positions.

I have been struck in recent years by the spread of a certain type of corporate female in popular entertainment such as Yellowstone:  women determined to show that they can be just as ruthless and abusive as any man.  I am not referring to Beth Dutton on that show--she was sui generis--but to several other women representing corporate interests.  These and other such portrayals struck me not only as over the top, but as echoes of older, mysogynistic stereotypes of ball-busting women in the workplace.  To judge from Careless People, however, such female managers do indeed exist, and exhibit A is Zuckerberg's long-time second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg.  Her ego is so sensitive that when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel declines to meet with her, another female subordinate tells Wynne-Williams not to tell Sandberg about it--and when Sandberg does find out, she throw a long-running tantrum.  After Wynne-Williams's first child is born and begins making demands on her time, Sandberg virtually orders her to order a Filipina nanny.  And on trips on the company jet, Sandberg invites subordinates--both female and male--to take naps with her.  Thinking about all this, I am inclined to think that it's not surprising that women in power can be as abusive as men.  Such abuse, I think, reflects insecurity, and women in my experience suffer from at least as much job performance anxiety as men do.

And meanwhile, Wynne-Williams' own life during these tumultuous five years is a case study in what some feminists have called "having it all."  She has a husband, an attorney, who agrees to tailor his life to hers when her bosses insist that she move to the Bay Area, and gives birth to two children during her Facebook years.  Her determination to breast feed after the first birth despite a heavy work traveling schedule leads to many painful complications which she details at length, and she seems to accept the idea that she is entitled to no special consideration while raising an infant.  Then the birth of her second child nearly kills her when she begins hemorrhaging uncontrollably and goes into a coma for weeks--only to return to work before she is fully recovered.  And meanwhile, she endures inappropriate sexual remarks from her boss, Joel David Kaplan, a lawyer, one-time Supreme Court clerk, veteran of the Brooks Brothers riot that stopped the Miami recount in 1992, and official in the Bush II administration.  A Harvard graduate Sandberg (though not Zuckerberg, who dropped out), he seems surprised one day when Wynne-Williams has to tell him that Taiwan is an island.  Eventually she complains officially about her treatment, and that leads to her dismissal.   According to Wynne-Williams, she had been trying to arrange her departure for some time because of unhappiness with the way things were going, but a mixture of financial and emotional pressure, it seems to me, kept her in place until she took the action that provoked her dismissal. I will live it to every individual reader to draw whatever lessons they can from this part of the story, which is hardly a unique one.

It seems that Wynne-Williams still had some obligations to Meta after her dismissal, and the company forced her accept arbitration over whether she had defamed them.  The arbitrator banned her from promoting the book--which nonetheless reached the top of the New York Times best-seller list early this year.  It is no longer there.  On April 9 last, Wynne-Williams testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, whose members included chairman Josh Hawley of Missouri, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Marcia Blackburn of Tennessee, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.  Hawley and Blackburn are fervent Magaites and Blumenthal and Klobuchar are liberal Democrats, but every member shared Wynne-Williams' anger over Facebook's relationship with the Chinese government, about Zuckerberg's denial before congressional committees of much of what she had said, and about the exploitation of teenage angst practiced by Meta and advertisers.  It turned out, indeed, that a bill to stop that last practice had overwhelmingly passed the Senate last year, only to fail in the House after intensive lobbying by Meta.  I have not watched the video of the hearing but it is available online.

I am most struck, as I conclude this lengthy post, by the increasing dominance of a particular personality type in American life.  Gordon Gecko in Wall Street exemplified that type forty years ago, and the actor Michael Douglas was shocked at the hundreds of strangers who said they had been inspired by his performance.  Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg all combine the same mixture of overdeveloped ego, abusive behavior, and extraordinary entitlement, and it has worked for them all.  That could not happen if that archetype didn't somehow appeal to large segments of the US public--including some of our best-educated young people.  Wynne-Williams represents a completely different type, and I thank her and wish her and her family well in years to come for having done so much more my education.

And meanwhile, Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Musk, and others like  them are having more impact on American life--and life all over the world--than Donald Trump ever will.  Our elite educational system now funnels more than half of our most driven young people either to Wall Street or into enterprises like theirs.  They continue to transform how we shop, how we interact, and how we amuse ourselves simply because they can.  AI is now transforming how people work intellectually, and AI and robots will have a tremendous effect on workplaces, with consequences that we cannot foresee.  One of my sons recently rewatched Back to the Future, and was struck by how little life had changed, actually, between 1955, when most of the action takes place, and 1985, when it was set.  The last forty years have been far more transformative, and we have no idea where their changes will lead us in the next 20-30 years.

 

  

Events at home and abroad

In 2023 I attended and participated in a panel at an Old Parkland Conference in Dallas.  (That panel can be viewed here.)  Justice Clarence Thomas spoke at that conference, which was dominated by black centrists and conservatives.  At an evening reception, with a stiff gin and tonic under my belt, I approached Justice Thomas.  I indicated that I was on the opposite side of the political fence from him and had disagreed with many of his opinions, but that I agreed with him about two important issues.  The first was that the concept of "substantive due process" was an invention that had allowed both conservatives and liberals, in different eras, to find things in the constitution that are not there.  (I agree with the results of some decisions based on that concept, such as the gay marriage decision, but I think that they could have been reached on simple equal protection grounds.)  The second was that I agreed with his dissenting opinions that a single federal district court judge should not be able to block a law or policy all over the country.  It was a very polite conversation across party lines, which was my intention.

Last week Chief Justice Roberts's majority opinion endorsed Thomas's view on nationwide injunctions, which have been issued against policies of both Republican and Democratic presidents.  The specific injunctions in question had overturned President Trump's denial of birthright citizenship.  I agree with the judges who issued them that his executive order on that subject is flagrantly unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court made clear that it was not at this time ruling on the merits of the case.  I feel pretty confident that the court will sustain the interpretation of birthright citizenship that it laid down back i the 1890s, and which by the way had been common law since the founding of the republic, long before it had been stated in words of few syllables in the 14th Amendment.  But unlike New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie--who admitted his own doubts about nationwide injunctions in principle, but attacked the specific decision because it allowed Trump's policies to continue in some jurisdictions--I am not willing to reject a decision that I agree with in principle because it has a momentarily negative effect.

Let's be clear about the precise effect of this decision.  Cases can be brought on behalf of particular infants in a given jurisdiction, and a district court judge could issue an injunction reserving their right to citizenship (and to remain in the country) while the case is heard and winds its way through the court system.  The Roberts opinion even invited class action suits that could theoretically apply to all babies born in the US.  But the principle could not be reaffirmed and the administration forced to abandon its policy until a case reached the Supreme Court.  I deeply regret that Trump's policy was issued in the first place, but I can accept the need to wait in order to overturn precedents that have allowed individual district court justices to veto actions by the executive or legislative branch all over the country.   Too many Democrats, including most of their representatives in Congress, have committed themselves to the proposition that anything Trump does must be overturned by any possible means.  I don't think we deserve to win the ongoing political struggle if we can't at the same time stand for generally sound principles.

Now to another matter entirely.

 I am sad to be writing this part of this post.  More and more information confirms what I have suspected for at least a year.  The government of Israel is not fighting in Gaza to get the remaining Israeli hostages back, or simply to destroy Hamas.  It is fighting to make the Gaza strip uninhabitable and to force most or all of the Palestinians to flee to some other territory.  The official explanations for Israeli tactics have never made much sense to me.  The government claims to be striking at Hamas fighters, but we have all known from the beginning that Hamas fighters are living in tunnels underground, and I have never been able to understand how leveling most of the buildings in Gaza could really help get at them.  They have obviously used violence pretty indiscriminately, leading to the deaths of at least 60,000 Palestinians in the last 20 months, most of them civilians.  Within just a few months after the outbreak of the war, Jared Kushner, who has worked closely with the Israeli government, suggested to a Harvard audience that this war, like the recent wars in Iraq and Syria, would lead to the relocations of many thousands of people.  In recent weeks news stories have confirmed this Israeli goal and provided more details about the tactics that Israel is now using to achieve it.

The first piece, written by an academic named Shadi Hamid, appeared in the Washington Post in late May.  It cited a May 11 report in the Israeli centrist newspaper the Jerusalem Post of blunt remarks that Prime Minister Netanyahu made to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.  "We are destroying more and more homes, and Gazans have nowhere to return to. The only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip," Netanyahu said.  President Trump, of course, had already proposed the resettling of the Gazan population in some other territory such as Egypt or Jordan.  Hamid also quotes the Agriculture Minster, Avi Dichter, saying, "We are ow rolling out the Gaza Nakba"--a reference to the forced removal of Arabs from the new Israel in 1948--just a month after the current war began.  A further month after that, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, "what needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration" and looked forward to the day when only 1-200,000 Arabs, not two million, would live there.  More recently Smotrich told supporters that Gaza would be totally destroyed within a few months and the remaining population concentrated in the southernmost part of the Gaza strip.   

Two days ago, the leftwing, anti-government Israeli paper Haaretz published a well-sourced account of what the Israeli Defense forces are doing in Gaza today.  Many readers will have read the almost daily reports of dozens of Palestinians being killed while waiting at new food distribution centers set up by private groups after Israel stopped the international aid effort in Gaza.  The Hamas-dominated Gaza Health Ministry now claims that such deaths have reached 549 people.  Several Israeli soldiers told Haaretz that troops are routinely opening fire on groups of Palestinians waiting for the distribution of aid without either warning or provocation.  I quote from the article:

"It's a killing field," one soldier said. "Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire."

The soldier added, "We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there's no danger to the forces." According to him, "I'm not aware of a single instance of return fire. There's no enemy, no weapons." He also said the activity in his area of service is referred to as Operation Salted Fish – the name of the Israeli version of the children's game "Red light, green light"

Several other soldiers confirmed all this, detailing incidents in which Israeli sources opened up artillery fire on waiting groups of Gazans.  And another veteran fighter described another Israeli tactic.  "Today, any private contractor working in Gaza with engineering equipment receives 5,000 [roughly $1,500] shekels for every house they demolish," he said. "They're making a fortune. From their perspective, any moment where they don't demolish houses is a loss of money, and the forces have to secure their work. The contractors, who act like a kind of sheriff, demolish wherever they want along the entire front."  Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz have denied these accusations, calling them "blood libels," but there were too many sources in the Haaretz article to dismiss, and the numbers of dead speak for themselves.

Meanwhile, since October 7, 2023, Israeli settlers and the Israeli army have escalated their pressure on Palestinians in the West Bank, which Smotrich promised to annex within the next year or so.  Israeli heavy equipment routinely begins raids into refugee camps by tearing up paved roads, and settlers are trying to empty more and more territory of Palestinians.  

Israeli supporters within the United States have continued to argue that Israeli tactics in Gaza are a necessary response to October 7, and that Hamas and the Palestinians have brought all this upon themselves.  They have not reassessed their position in light of these revelations, and I don't think that they will.  And I am not writing this piece in a the belief that I or anyone else can stop what is happening.  A recent poll of the Israeli people found 82 percent of respondents in favor of driving the Palestinians out of Gaza, and the Trump administration will not stand in the Israeli government's way.  This looks like the climax of almost 80 years of struggle between the Israeli government and the Palestinian population--intermittently backed by various Muslim governments in the region.  And Jared Kushner, sadly, was right: we do live in a new age of ethnic cleansing and population transfers, in Myanmar, in Sudan, and in the Middle East.

Israel, Iran, and International Politics

 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, many began to dream of an international order based on peace and law.  The United States government took the lead in some respects.  The US government claimed a very large indemnity from Great Britain for shipping losses at the hands of the Confederate raider Alabama, and it submitted it to arbitration, with British consent,. and won a large award.  It signed numerous treaties with foreign powers promising to submit other disputes to neutral arbitration.  The same impulses led to the creation of the League of Nations after the First World War and the United Nations at the end of the Second World War.  Both institutions attempted to ban aggressive war, leading self-defense as the only legitimate reason for conflict.  

Atomic weapons posed new challenges.  In 1946 the US government proposed at the new United Nations that they be banned, with atomic facilities put under international control, but the USSR refused the offer and developed its own atomic weapons instead.  That led to high-level discussions of a possible preventive war in the United States.  The US government regarded the USSR as a totalitarian nation bent on world conquest, like its enemies in the Second World War.  That war had taught some that only total military defeat could remove such a threat.  Cooler heads prevailed, however, and the US government eventually concluded that nuclear deterrence could keep the peace among heavily armed adversaries.  By the mid-1950s, nuclear weapons had become the only real guarantee of a nation's sovereignty, and Britain and France were developing them as well.  China followed suit in the 1960s and has now been joined by India, Pakistan, and North Korea.  And Israel had apparently developed atomic weapons sometime during the 1960s, although the Israeli government never seems to have tested one and has never formally admitted possessing them.    During the 1960s the Soviet Union and the USSR also tried to restrict and even eliminate nuclear weapons by negotiating the Nonproliferation Treaty.  Non-nuclear signatories to the treaty (which some states refused to sign) promised not to develop nuclear weapons, while nuclear states promised to work to eliminate them.  Although the US and the USSR drastically reduced their arsenals after 1989, Ronald Reagan was the only president who seems to have shared that goal, and he never took concrete steps to make it happen.

Israelis created the State of Israel in 1948 despite the hostility of Palestinian Arabs and neighboring states.  Although they held their own in their War of Independence and decisively defeated enemy armies in 1956 and again in 1967, they too apparently concluded that they needed atomic weapons to safeguard their independence.  According to some accounts, the Israeli government was preparing to use them in the early days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when things were going very badly on the ground.  Instead, they regained the initiative on the battlefield.  In one key respect, however, the Israeli government attitude towards nuclear weapons has differed from that of the two original superpowers.  Rather than rely on their own nuclear weapons for deterrence, they have concluded that they cannot allow any hostile nation even to develop them either.  Many years ago I read that the Israelis had assassinated Egyptian nuclear scientists, and French authorities apparently suspected that one such assassination had taken place in France in 1980.  Menachem Begin's government unilaterally destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.  Israeli governments claim a right to take any military action necessary to stop a hostile nation from developing nuclear weapons.

The US government adopted the same view under the George W. Bush administration. A new National Security Strategy declared that the United States would take preemptive military action to stop any dangerous nation from developing weapons of mass destruction, and the Bush Administration justified the invasion of Iraq in 2003 on those grounds.  I heard from well-informed people that they had planned to do the same in Iran and North Korea, but such plans went on the back burner, apparently, when it turned out that Iraq wasn't developing nuclear weapons after all.  Successive US administrations declared that Iran must not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon, and during the Bush II and Obama administrations, when Iran was developing the capacity to enrich uranium, the Israeli government pressured Washington to make a joint attack to destroy its nuclear facilities.  In 2008, as I discussed here, the Israeli historian Benny Morris called upon the US to join Israel in such an attack, and threatened that Israel might have to use nuclear weapons of its own to destroy the key Iranian facilities if Washington did not join in.  Washington apparently refused, and eventually the Obama administration joined Russia, China and the EU and negotiated a deal under which Iran limited its uranium enrichment to levels that would not allow it to build a bomb in return for the lifting of economic sanctions,  In a sign of things to come, Republicans unanimously opposed that agreement, and Mitch McConnell invited Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to address Congress opposing the agreement.  When Donald Trump came into power he withdrew from the agreement, and Iran ramped up its enrichment again.

Israel's conflict with Iran, its Hezbollah proxy in Lebanon, and its Hamas ally entered a new phase after the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.  To begin with, the Israeli government apparently decided to respond to that attack by making the Gaza strip uninhabitable and driving out most of the Palestinian population, as leading Israeli officials now admit.  It also escalated the rocket war against Hezbollah, apparently with considerable success.  And now, after two months of new US negotiations failed to reach agreement with Iran, it has launched pre-emptive strikes on that nation (its own words) to try to destroy its nuclear capability.  Iran has retaliated promptly with salvos of ballistic missiles.   I do not know whether Israel can achieve its military objective of destroying Iran's enrichment facilities, some of which are buried deep underground.  As of today, only 24 hours into the operation, it has not tried to hit the Iranian stockpile of already-enriched uranium.  In contrast to the attack on Iraq, however, it has hit targets in Iran not related to the nuclear program, such as energy installations and apartment buildings.  Why is not clear.

We do not know how far Israel is willing to go--a critical question since Israeli governments have apparently talked about using nuclear weapons against Iran in the past.  The Israeli government may be hoping to induce the US government to give it its most powerful bunker-busting conventional bombs to use against Iranian facilities by threatening the use of its own nukes.  It may also hope that these initial strikes, and perhaps more strikes on Teheran itself, might convince the Iranian government to give up its nuclear program altogether, as the Trump Administration has been asking it to do.   President Trump has just announced that he would like to see the war stop now, but he does not seem at all likely to force Israel to stop it.  The US government evidently knew that the Israeli attack was coming and did not try to stop it. The Trump administration has also  hinted that we might join in the defense of Israel.

This much is clear: the dream of a world ruled by law and diplomacy has faded into the background.  Human nature being what it is, it never had much chance of success, but such dreams remain essential, I think, to keep humanity headed in the right direction.  The end of the Cold War, it turns out, has moved us in the wrong direction, feeding US and Israeli dreams of world or regional hegemony imposed by force, and Russian and Chinese dreams of regaining lost territories.  Israel has revived the project of using force to prevent hostile states from acquiring nuclear weapons, rather than relying on deterrence.  The Israeli people seem to support that policy.  We don't know where it will lead. 

Great Minds Think Alike

 This morning, Ken Jennings, the all-time Jeopardy champ and current host, has an op-ed in the online New York Times that says essentially what yesterday's post said from a different perspective.  Enjoy.

The challenge of being the United States

 A few months ago I started a new historical project:  a study of controversies over slavery from the constitutional convention of 1787 until the outbreak of the Civil War.  I have already read through about half a dozen secondary works on various particular controversies--works that once again testify to the one-time strength of the American historical profession, now fallen on relatively barren times.  I am struck as I have been over the last few decades at how much technology has made research easier nowadays.  Nine times out of ten, when a secondary work that I am reading cites an article or even a primary source, I can have the original source on my screen within a few minutes.  Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people are taking advantage of these opportunities because they haven't been trained to do serious historical research, and I am not sure that any publishers are willing to publish them, anyway.  In any case, such research has always been more pleasure than business for me and this is turning out to be no exception.  Boiling the material down to a reasonable length will be hard, but I have solved problems like that before.  Meanwhile, I am learning an enormous amount not simply about different views of slavery but also about the fundamental dilemma that we Americans have struggled with since 1787.

Our constitution reflected the values of the Enlightenment in many ways, some of which contemporary observers prefer to ignore.  Despite the actual difference in legal status between free people and slaves and men and women, the founders used "persons" throughout to refer to all the nation's inhabitants.  They began with a promise of a "more perfect union," and their ratification process allowed the people of the nation, acting in statewide conventions, to transfer ultimate sovereignty from the states to the new national government.  And, using their recently devised state constitutions as a model, they codified procedures designed to carry out all the major functions of a government.  The constitution immediately became the ultimate source of authority when conflicts over governmental power arose.  Almost immediately, however, the inescapable flaw of such a system emerged.  Words require people to interpret them--and our history shows that political partisanship continually leads men and women to argue that even the simple words of the constitution do not mean what they say.

The first crisis along these lines occurred during the administration of John Adams, when Congress passed and Adams signed the Sedition Act in 1798.  The Bill of Rights had been ratified only a few years earlier, but that act made criticism of the President and his administration a crime, and several opposition leaders were tried under it.  Fortunately Congress allowed it to expire in 1800.  I was even more struck, however, by what I have just read about John C. Calhoun and his theory of nullification, which South Carolina tried to deploy to invalidate federal tariffs in 1832.  I have discovered that my high school textbooks gave an inadequate account of that crisis.  While South Carolina bitterly opposed the tariff, the real issue involved was the possibility of federal action against slavery, which militant South Carolinians wanted to rule out. Calhoun laid out his argument at For Hill, South Carolina, on July 26, 1832, in an address you can easily find in full, as I did, on the web.

Now in point of fact, the founding fathers' overriding goal in Philadelphia in 1787 was to create a much stronger federal government as an alternative to the chaos they were living through thanks to the Articles of Confederation.  That document had given each state one vote in the confederation congress, and any important measure required the unanimity of all.  The founders instead created a bicameral legislature specifically designated to pass legislation relating to all the major functions of government.  It created an executive branch led by a president to enforce those laws.  A new federal judiciary was given original jurisdiction "all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority,"  And crucially, Article VI declared, in presumably unmistakable words,  "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."  Tariffs--the explicit source of the nullification controversy--were customarily part of the taxing power given to Congress, whose explicit authority to regulate commerce with foreign nations confirmed their legality.

Yet faced with the explicit issue of a high tariff and the threatened issue of national slavery controversies, Calhoun invented new constitutional meanings out of whole cloth.  First, without mentioning Article VI's supremacy clause, he denied that the people of the states had surrendered state sovereignty to the federal government.  They had, it is true, ratified the constitution--but he insisted that they reserved the right as states to call the federal government to account any time that they believed it had exceeded its powers.  He also denied the clear authority of the federal judiciary to decide cases under the constitution.  To maintain liberty, he claimed, the people must have means of defense against a hostile majority that might take control of the whole federal government. "By nature," he said, "every individual has the right to govern himself; and governments, whether founded on majorities or minorities, must derive their right from the assent, expressed or implied, of the governed, and be subject to such limitations as they may impose. Where the interests are the same, that is, where the laws that may benefit one will benefit all, or the reverse, it is just and proper to place them under the control of the majority; but where they are dissimilar, so that the law that may benefit one portion may be ruinous to another, it would be, on the contrary, unjust and absurd to subject them to its will; and such I conceive to be the theory on which our Constitution rests."  The only way to maintain the equality which Calhoun posited between the states on the one hand and the federal government on the other was to allow both to be the judge of their powers and exercise a veto on acts of excessive power by the other.  That specifically meant that a new state convention could declare an act of Congress unconstitutional and refuse to obey it--as a South Carolinian convention did in 1832, only to back down the next year after Calhoun, then Vice President of the United States, had helped arrange a tariff compromise.  This he called the power of "interposition" of a state between an unjust federal government and its citizens.

Calhoun, it seems to me, was trying to keep the spirit of the Articles of Confederation alive, even though the constitution had created a completely different system, and even though, in my opinion, there is nothing in the constitution that remotely justifies his view.  Yet under the constitution all Americans remained free to debate its meaning, and ideas like Calhoun's were sufficiently common in the South as to bring about secession and the Civil War after his death.  Even in our own time southerners like the historian Shelby Foote have claimed that the founding fathers assumed a right of secession which, as Lincoln properly pointed out, cannot be justified by the words that they wrote.  And 122 years after the nullification crisis some leading southern politicians revived the doctrine of "interposition" to argue that states did not have to comply with Brown vs. Board of Education because the Supreme Court had overstepped its authority.  They did not prevail.

So far I have mentioned three instances, in 1798, 1832, and 1954, when Congress or state governments have refused to recognize the plain language of the constitution and its traditionally accepted meaning.  Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has at times done so as well.  Perhaps the most notorious case of this was the Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which Chief Justice Taney claimed that black people could never be citizens, even though there was nothing to suggest that in the constitution and they had in fact been citizens all over the country since its founding.  In 2008 I argued in a post here that Justice Scalia's 2010 opinion in Heller vs. District of Columbia, which first defined an individual right to bear arms not stated in the Second Amendment, was almost as dubious--and yet its argument has now been extended in a subsequent decision that could take away the rights to regulate gun ownership that states have exercised for most of our history.  Income taxes had been regarded as part of the taxing power since the founding of the Republic and the government had imposed one during the Civil War, but the Supreme Court suddenly defined them as unconstitutional in 1894, leading twenty years later to a constitutional amendment.  The present Supreme Court has eroded the first amendment's prohibition of an establishment of religion beyond recognition.  

The Trump administration is making many absurd claims about the meaning of the constitution, starting with the explicit denial of birthright citizenship, which is stated in the fourteenth amendment as clearly as anything could be.  Its idea of the "unitary executive," bound in all things to obey the president, is equally dubious in light of history.  The administration has now put these issues squarely before our court system now on many fronts.  I think it is likely to prevail on most immigration issues--although not on birthright citizenship--because the rights of aliens have been severely limited throughout our history.  Perhaps its most consequential steps so far relate to the elimination of various parts of the federal government that have been established and funded by acts of Congress, as well as President Trump's assertion of absolute authority over all federal civil servants.  The question is whether, to paraphrase Orwell, the court in at least sum of these cases will conclude that 2 + 2 can equal 5, if the chief executive so insists. In the past, the Supreme Court has corrected some of its worst decisions, but the demography of the current court suggests that its more recent mistakes will lst for quite a while.

When one reads the writings and speeches of 19th-century Americans, as I have been doing, one recognizes men and women to whom language meant a very great deal.  Since sounds and images could not yet be transmitted, the words the only way in which they could convey thoughts and experience, and reading was by far the most common form of entertainment.  I think that a successful democracy needs a society and a leadership that respect the actual meaning of words.  Such respect has diminished in recent decades, partly because my own profession has increasingly denied that words have any fixed meaning at all.  In so doing they, like demagogic politicians, have opened the door to authoritarianism.  Our functioning democracy depends, I think, on allegiance to something beyond ourselves.  Truth is such a thing.  We need it.

And now for something completely different

 Confession time:   since the tv show Survivor premiered around 2000, I doubt that I have missed half a dozen episodes.  I enjoy competition and strategy, and the show at different times has been a bond between me and both of my sons.  There are things about the show that have driven me crazy.  In particular, when one person is obviously the outstanding contestant physically and as a person, he almost never wins, because other contenders are so desperate not to have to compete against him at the end.   On the other hand, there are few more dramatic scenes on television than when a contestant who thinks he is on top of the Survivor world is blindsided and voted out.  Wokeness hurt the show for a while around 2020, but that era seems to be over.  And this season, which ended last Wednesday with the victory of young lawyer Kyle Fraser, featured some very interesting new departures that might, repeat might, say something good about where our society is heading.  There are obviously spoilers coming, but I would be amazed if I had any readers who 1) haven't watched the show AND 2) still have plans to do so.

The changes involved two relationships--not romantic ones this time--between two pairs of characters: firefighter Joe Hunter and Ph.D. candidate Eva Erikson--the other two members, with Kyle Fraser, of the final three--and Fraser and software engineer Kamilla Karthigesu, the last of the final five, who lost the fire challenge to Eva.  Eva described herself throughout the show as autistic.  I don't know a lot about autism and I'm not going do dispute her self-diagnosis, but she did not show what I think is a common symptom of autism, a lack of empathy--she had a keen sense of what made other people tick.  She has however a tendency towards emotional meltdown that was very much on display on the show especially in one of the first and the last episodes.  In the midst of one of the first episodes--maybe even the first, I'm too lazy to check--she collapsed and began sobbing uncontrollably.  

Joe, the fire captain, stood out from the beginning not only as a physically strong person, but as the kind of rock-solid guy you would want as your army sergeant.  And when Eva collapsed, Joe, who was not even on her tribe, walked over to her and began comforting her.  She eventually snapped out of it.  In the second, post-merge phase of the game, they became the core of the alliance that dominated the proceedings, and which also included Kyle.  They trusted each other completely and rewarded one another's trust.

Eventually--although no one ever said this in so many words--we learned what had moved Joe to help Eva in her distress.  Joe told the audience and some of his fellow players that several years ago, his sister had been killed by her domestic partner.  He had fought with his sister on the telephone on the night before she died, and he felt tremendous guilt over that and over his failure to protect her.  I think he must have seen his sister in Eva's distress, although he never said so.  And in the last episode, he came to her help again.  Kyle had won the last challenge among the last four contestants, which gave him the right to pick which of the other three would automatically go to the end with him.  The other two would face off in a fire making challenge, which has become one of the most dramatic events of every season.  He picked Joe, because, he said, he had told Joe that he would do so if he won that last challenge.  Keeping one's word, needless to say, is not often a priority among Survivor contestants.  That left Eva to face that challenge with Kamilla.  Using their permitted tools--a machete and a piece of flint, which seems actually to be magnesium--they both began practicing their fire building, and Eva melted down again.  This time her emotional collapse was complete--sobbing and writhing on the ground (which the producers unfortunately did not show.)   Drawn by her cries, both Joe and Kyle went to her and offered to surrender their automatic spots in the last three to her and enter the fire challenge themselves. She steadfastly refused, and eventually got a grip on herself and managed to make a practice fire.

The second relationship between Kyle and Kamilla was fascinating in a different way--it was a secret.  They formed an early alliance but spent as little time together as possible.  All these contestants, it seemed, had been watching the show since childhood and had learned a lot about it.  Tight couples usually become targets because the emotional support they give each other is so valuable.  Kyle and Kamilla provided each other with a lot of key intelligence and also orchestrated a clever coup against another contender in one of the last weeks.  And then, on the eve of the final immunity challenge that would put one person in charge of the game, they had an amazing conversation.  Kyle told Kamilla that if he won, he would NOT select her as the second automatic final three contestant, because in the final jury vote (the jury is composed of the last 8 people to be eliminated), the same people would want to vote for both of them, their votes would split, and the third contestant--either Joe or Eva--would win.  And Kamilla, to my amazement, didn't complain at all--she said she completely understood and implied, I think, that she would have done the same thing.  

The fire challenge did not disappoint.  Kamilla, who entered it as a favorite, could not get a fire going at all, while Eva progressed rapidly and soon had a real blaze going that seemed certain to reach the string suspended a few feet above the fire, burn through it, and win her the challenge.  But on the verge of victory, her fire was checked by gusts of wind, and fell way back.  Suddenly Eva began to melt down hysterically again--but everyone, even Kamilla, encouraged her to hang in there.  Kamilla did get a fire going but it never really took off, and Eva managed to build hers back up and burn through the string.  Kamilla became the eighth and last jury member.

At the final tribal council Eva announced that she was not simply a hockey referee, but a Ph.D. candidate at Brown, and Kyle admitted that he was a lawyer, not  a teacher.  This implied that Joe, a 45-year old fire captain from Sacramento with a wife and family, would in the long run need the $1 million first prize more than either of them.  (AI tells me that Sacramento fire captains can make as much as $140,000 a year, but average $81,000.)  Such people usually get voted off before the end because the other contestants fear their appeal, but Joe had not.  Yet in the final vote, Kyle got 5 votes, Eva 2, and Joe only 1.  I think that more than anything else, that vote was generational.  Most of the contestants were Millennials or Gen Z, and Joe was only one of two late-wave Gen Xers, the second of whom provided his only vote. 

Survivor is, above all, a high-stakes game, and no one makes it onto it without understanding that winning is the goal.  This year, however, winning was not the only thing that mattered.  Joe in particular made that point by helping Eva, and Kyle and Kamilla understood that there tight bond could only go so far.  In general the contestants showed more mutual respect than I ever remember seeing before.  The sample is much too small to conclude that values are changing in society at large--but I hope that that might turn out to be the case.  I am sorry that Joe didn't win, but the others were worthy.

A podcast interview

 Several weeks ago I was contacted by a young man named Eddie Carson, a dean at a private school in Vermont.  Somehow he had come across my autobiography, A Life in History, and had also become a fan of historyunfolding.  He invited me for an episode of his podcast and we taped it last week.  Here it is!

More thoughts on how we got here

 Testifying before the congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair in 1987, Secretary of State George Schultz repeatedly declared, "Nothing is ever settled in this town."  History suggests that humanity has a deep yearning for certainty, for a resolution of certain fundamental questions, and for a guarantee of a stable future.  Yet history also shows how illusory all that is.  Somehow my life has prepared me for what is happening to the United States now.  By 1983, when I wrote a 20th anniversary piece in The New Republic looking back at the Kennedy years, I felt that our political system had been on a wrong track for over a decade.  In the next thirty years I saw the decline of my own profession and intellectual life in general, and now a near-contemporary of mine, backed by battalions of eager ideological warriors, is undoing the government and many parts of the world that I grew up in.  That, I am convinced, reflects another cornerstone of human nature--a tendency of certain younger generations to rebel against conventional wisdom, regardless of how wise it was.  And last but not least, every human institution, no matter how praiseworthy and inspiring at the moment of its birth, seems to grow old, lose its vitality, and become easy prey to those who can imagine a world without it.

I have pointed out here several times in the last 20 years that the historian Henry Adams made a related point well over a century ago in his presidential address to the American Historical Review dealing with the future of history as a science.  Historical science, he argued, could reach one of three obvious conclusions about the future of humanity.  First, it might decide that mankind would adopt socialism.  Secondly, it might eventually conclude that earlier generations were right and adopt a religious view of the past, present, and future.  And lastly, it might conclude that mankind would not change, and that evils like war and economic exploitation would continue.  Yet any one of those conclusions, he thought, would arouse determined opposition among powerful elements of our society.  I think that is a good analysis of what has happened over the last sixty years or so, not only in the historical profession but in society as a whole.  And increasingly, new forces are not merely attacking the conclusions of the historical profession, but the whole idea of science as a guide to politics and life.

Under Trump this seems to be clearest with respect to public health.  My maternal grandmother died in 1923, when my mother was ten, of postpartum strep, then known as childbed fever.  Within ten years, sulfa drugs could cure that frequently fatal illness, and penicillin followed within another decade.  As a child I read several books about the great medical discoveries of the past century, and I was in the first cohort of kids to receive the Salk vaccine---although I acquired my immunity to mumps, measles and German measles naturally.  I lived to see the end of smallpox.  Now more than three generations of younger Americans have grown up under the intellectual authority of the medical profession, and enough of them have rebelled to lead to the appointment of our most prominent vaccine skeptic as Secretary of HHS.  Significant numbers of parents refuse to vaccinate their children, and we are experiencing a measles epidemic that has killed three children so far.  

I don't think there is any legitimate excuse for this particular rebellion, but I do see plenty of evidence that we can't trust our highly educated population to do the right thing.  American medical care is now organized for profit, not simply to cure disease and save lives.  That is why big pharma has failed to develop desperately needed new antibiotics, preferring to research drugs that people will have to take for much longer periods of time.  And good science constantly encounters powerful enemies.  We all know that the processed food industry is poisoning us, but even Michelle Obama essentially caved in to the industry when she tried to make school lunches healthier.  It also seems that the fossil fuel industry has succeeded--and not only under Trump--in committing us to a continued, major role for it in energy production.  I keep wondering if that industry has secretly concluded that global warming is something that we will all just have to live with.  

Industry however is not the only institution to abandon the use of knowledge for the common good.  The same thing has happened in universities.  Identity-based ideologues have joyfully transformed literature and history over the last few decades, crippling their university enrollments and leaving themselves vulnerable to the counterattack that the Trump administration has begun.  Administrators have replaced scholars as the most numerous and influential university officials.   And K-12 education has apparently slipped even further, valuing students' self-esteem more highly than the pursuit of truth.

The modern bureaucratic state bases its power on superior knowledge of what we need.  Human nature being what it is, millions inevitably resent those claims even when the knowledge they rely on is true, and even more when it does not intuitively make sense.  Donald Trump, who has never shown much respect for anyone else's opinion, has exploited that resentment brilliantly.  The Democratic Party seems trapped in a defense of a status quo which obviously has serious problems.  Eventually, I am sure, the pendulum will swing back in the other direction and we shall begin restoring respect for truth--but for the time being, to paraphrase Orwell, millions are so sick of  hearing that 2 + 2 = 4 that they are willing to believe they equal 5, if only for a change.  That is part of the rhythm of history.