A Comeback at NYRB

 I have been reading the New York Review of Books since the late 1960s, and I think I started subscribing in the early 1970s.  That was the era of its founding editors, Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers, and for several decades it featured numerous articles by critical liberals like my old friend Stanley Hoffmann, Theodore Draper, Hannah Arendt, I. F Stone, and many more.  Such authors wrote frankly and often brilliantly about the failures of the United States government without arguing, like so many of my contemporaries, that it was by nature hopelessly imperialistic, racist, and corrupt.  Epstein and Silvers both died some time ago, and in the last decade or more--and particularly since 2020--I had to admit to myself that I was only renewing my subscription because I couldn't exile such a long-term family member from my house.  The cultural and political criticism in the NYRB became increasingly woke, and I wasn't impressed by the Irishman Fintan O'Toole, who has become their leading political writer.  Recently, however, I have found more to like in the issues that have arrived on my doorstep, and I want to discuss two articles in the September 25 issue, at least one of which is available online to anyone.

None of the articles related directly to the Trump Administration.  The events of the last few weeks have told us a lot about where it is going.  President Trump has publicly ordered the Attorney General of the United States, Pam Bondi, to indict James Comey, Letitia James, and Adam Schiff, and has replaced his previous appointment of the US Attorney in Eastern Virginia with one of his personal lawyers, a woman with no prosecutorial experience, to secure the Comey indictment just days before the statute of limitations will rule it out.  Donald Trump evidently regards the federal government as another corporation that he has managed to take over, every employee of which has the duty of rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies.  The Justice Department is now his personal legal firm.  Some of his subordinates are thinking about using the RICO Act to prosecute any important institution, such as George Soros' foundation, that has given financial support to left wing projects.   60-90 years ago, when Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party were vastly expanding the role of the federal government in American life, some conservatives warned that "a government big enough to give you everything you need is a government big enough to take away everything you have," and leading universities are now learning that lesson the hard way.  And for reasons known only to himself, Trump has given Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the power to undo important parts of the public health revolution that has saved so many lives over the last century and a half. He is eliminating the regulatory role of the federal government, disrupting our economy with tariffs, and pushing for more and more deportations of immigrants.  Yet in the midst of this, a review by one Mark O'Connell of a new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, enlightened me about other equally momentous developments that hadn't crossed my radar.

Alexander Karp is the CEO of Palantir Technologies, which he founded in 2003 along with Peter Thiel, one of the founders of Ebay.  Zamiska is one of his in-house lawyers and did the actual writing.  Born in 1967 to a Jewish father and black mother in Philadelphia, Karp met Thiel at Stanford,. and initially wanted to become a social theorist.  He is now the highest-paid CEO in the world (he made $6.8 billion last year) and evidently one its most important social engineers.  Palantir was developed to use information technology to meet the enormous new intelligence needs of the Bush II administration after 9/11.  According to the review, $2 million from the CIA helped to finance it.  During the first Trump administration it worked closely with ICE to build datasets of illegal immigrants to plan raids and deportations, and after October 7, 2023, Karp, a strong supporter of the Israeli government, secured a contract from the Israeli government to plan the war in Gaza.  The Technological Revolution is apparently a manifesto pointing the way to a new role for Silicon Valley firms like his own.  They should, he argues, abandon the woke ideology that dominated much of the industry for the first 20 years of the century and provide AI and other military and political tools to the government to save western civilization in its ongoing struggle with geopolitical rivals.  That presumably refers to Russia and China, but the review, at least, never specifically identifies them.  In any case, the Ukraine war has proven that every major nation has to begin building up a new arsenal built largely on drones and AI, and that has led to new contracts between the federal government and Palantir, as well as other leading technology firms.  I was astonished to find this new information in the review: "In June the US Army launched something called Executive Innovation Corps, which it described in a press release as “a new initiative designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation.” Under the program, four high-level tech executives were commissioned into the army reserve as lieutenant colonels. The four new officers were Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar; Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth; OpenAI’s chief product officer, Kevin Weil; and Bob McGrew, an adviser at Thinking Machines Lab who was formerly OpenAI’s chief research officer."  Some industrial executives came to Washington to help supervise war mobilization during the First and Second World Wars, but I don't recall any being commissioned. 

Palantir's previous involvement with ICE, of course, suggests that Silicon Valley--once a libertarian bastion--might have a huge role to play in domestic surveillance as well, perhaps stepping into the void left by Kash Patel's evisceration of the FBI as we have already known it.  The purge of hundreds of people around the country from their jobs for having posted unwelcome reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk suggests what might be done along these lines.  And just as I could not have identified Charlie Kirk before his death, I could not have identified Palantir or Karp before I read this review, for which I thank the new editors of the NYRB.  Success in Silicon Valley evidently encourages breathtaking hubris, leading Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, among others, to believe they have the answer to all the world's problems.  I do appreciate that Karp's hubris seems to have encouraged him to explain to the rest of us what is actually happening in the relationship between Silicon Valley and various governments.

The second, equally important review in this issue, by Trevor Jackson, combines Abundance, a well-publicized new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, with Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton.  You may easily have heard of Abundance, which apparently argues that Democrats have to return to the New Deal tradition of building things, rather than spending their time obstructing projects pushed by evil institutions, including governments.  More important, to me, is Overshoot, because it faces a most uncomfortable fact for liberals like myself:  we have evidently lost the war on fossil fuels, whose role in the world economy has been increasing, not diminishing.  I quote:

"Overshoot breaks neatly into two thematic portions. The first is a bleak climate history of 2020–2023. 

"'Already by 2021 the world had seen at least 1.1°C of global warming, six IPCC reports, twenty-six COPs and immeasurable suffering for the most affected people and areas, and yet it generated the largest surge in absolute emissions—the input that directly determines the rate of warming—in recorded history.'

"They anatomize the world-record profits of the five big oil companies, the immense investment (over $5 trillion, they estimate) by banks in fossil fuel projects, and the ongoing global construction of pipelines and gas terminals. Despite all the disasters, all the models, and all the conferences, in 2022 there were at least 119 oil pipelines in development around the world, plus 447 gas pipelines, 300 gas terminals, 432 new coal mines, and 485 new coal power plants. As the historian of science Jean-Baptiste Fressoz showed in his recent book More and More and More, despite the vast quantities of talk and money invested in producing a technological “energy transition,” last year the world burned more coal and more wood than ever before."

I could not have quoted those figures to you but I already knew that this trend, in different ways, has continued to dominate US energy policy as well, and that it is a bipartisan trend.  Yes, the Biden Administration's misnamed Inflation Reduction Act provided a lot of new money for alternative energy and electric vehicle development, but it secured Joe Manchin's critical vote only by promising to increase oil and gas drilling as well.  Europe is a major exception to this picture--it has been reducing greenhouse gas emissions significantly for some time.  That  may account for President Trump's having explicitly attacked the European nations for falling for the "climate change scam" during his recent UN address--he has allied himself with our own fossil fuel industry and wants to destroy their competition.

The authors of abundance, the review tells us, still hope to see fossil fuels eliminated as an energy source, even though they explain that $13 trillion of assets would thereby be lost.  Obviously only Stalinist or Maoist regimes would be able to make this happen--but the authoritarian regimes of Russia and China, which are no longer anti-capitalist, don't seem to be too worried about climate change either.  I think that if and when the consequences of climate change become bad enough to demand action, some form of geoengineering to block some of the sun's rays is much more likely than a real turn away from fossil fuels.  As I hope you have come to understand, my main goal these days is to face reality, and this review helped me do that.

The September 25 issue also includes a review of several new books on abortion by my Harvard contemporary Linda Greenhouse; a review of two new biographies of the black 1950s tennis star Althea Gibson; a review of two books on free speech by Kwame Anthony Appiah; and not one, but two reviews of Sam Tannehaus's new biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., by the political scientist Mark Lilla--who is one of the best remaining representatives of the intellectual tradition that initially dominated the New York Review--and Osita Nwanev.  I have read two of those four pieces as well and will get to the other two.  My subscription is safe once again.

Bismarck in the White House?

 The Kingdom of Prussia in 1862 was experiencing a constitutional crisis.  After centuries of bureaucratic absolutism, the kingdom in 1848 had survived a revolution and the King had granted a constitution giving the Parliament or Landtag the power of the purse.  Now the government had proposed a reorganization of the military to downplay the role of reserve troops, who included many politicians, and increase the term of service for conscripts.  A majority in parliament refused to pass an annual budget until the government yielded on the army issue.  

The Prussian King William, a conservative, appointed the noble diplomat Otto von Bismarck, who had no national political experience, as Prime Minister.  Claiming that the constitution could not possibly be interpreted to prevent the government from functioning, Bismarck said that if the Landtag refused to pass a new budget, he would continue taxing and spending based upon the budget from the previous year.  He exerted pressure on the civil service, which included a good many supporters of parliament, to conform to his views, making political loyalty a requirement for promotion.  He began subsidizing friendly newspapers and had the king sign an edict allowing the government to shut down opposition newspapers.  In the next year he called new elections, only to see the parliamentary opposition return a greater majority.  An aggressive foreign policy gave Bismarck a way out of his domestic impasse.  In 1864 Prussia and Austria fought a successful war against Denmark, and in 1866 Prussia defeated Austria and Bismarck created a new North German Confederation dominated by Prussia.  Then, for the first time, the Prussian Landtag retroactively legitimated his four years of government without an agreed budget.

The United States, I believe, is about to go through something similar.  Article I, section 8 of our constitutions gives the Congress the power "to borrow money on the credit of the United States,"  and this month the debt ceiling has to be increased to keep the government running.  Minority leader Chuck Schumer, under heavy pressure from some of his fellow Senators and from the House, has decided to take advantage of the filibuster rule to refuse to increase it unless the Republicans agree to undo provisions of the "big, beautiful bill" relating to health care, in particular.  These include the repeal of new Medicaid eligibility restrictions and forthcoming reductions of subsidies for insurance under Obamacare, which may deprive millions of Americans of health insurance.  

The chances of the Administration and its congressional allies giving in to these demands, in my opinion, are the same as the chances of Bismarck giving in to the Landtag, that is, zero.  I don't think the President is going to give up major portions of his signature achievement to a minority within the Senate--and if the same controversy were taking place with the roles reversed, I don't think that I would want a Democratic president to give in, either.  Unless the Democrats cave in at the eleventh hour, that leaves two possibilities.  The first is that the Republican Senate leadership will find a way around the filibuster rule so as to pass the continuing resolution on a simple majority vote.  Majority Leader John Thune has already done this with respect to several other important issues, some budget-related, in recent months, and this is probably the most likely outcome.  The second possibility is that Trump, like Bismarck, will simply disregard the plain language of the constitution and claim authority to borrow the money to keep the government going whether Congress passes a continuing resolution or not.  That would surely provoke a court challenge, but the Supreme Court has always been reluctant to intervene in disputes between the executive and legislative branches.

The wars Bismarck fought, both for foreign policy reasons and to secure his position at home, created a new domestic consensus within Prussia and ultimately within Germany as a whole.  Trump does not seem to have any intention of fighting a war of sufficient scale to do that, even if one were readily available.  I expect the US eventually to emerge from its current crisis with some new consensus established, but I can't as yet see exactly how that will happen.

A Reichstag Fire

 Shortly before President Trump's inauguration, the activist Christopher Rufo wrote a piece warning that violent leftwing groups in the District of Columbia would try to disrupt the event, and tying such groups to a network of leftwing organizations.  That disturbed me because it sounded as if Rufo, and perhaps allies within the new administration, were hoping for something like that to occur so that it could take drastic action against opponents.  I was not particularly surprised that nothing happened.   Tonight, it seems, senior administration officials have briefed leading press outlets warning that the administration is going to use the assassination of Charlie Kirk in exactly this way.

An historical parallel had already been on my mind.  On February 27, 1933, four weeks after Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany, a Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe set the Reichstag--the German parliament--on fire, and it burned to the ground.  Just one day after the fire the German president, Paul von Hindenburg, issued a decree suspending freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the right of habeas corpus within Germany, as the Nazi government blamed the German Communist Party and warned of an effort to take over all Germany.  Meanwhile, neutral observers inside and outside of Germany concluded that the Nazis had actually set the fire themselves.  One week later Hitler's coalition won a bare majority in Parliament, and the new Reichstag essentially ceded all its powers to Hitler a few weeks later in the Enabling Act.  Thousands of anti-Nazis were arrested and sent to concentration camps.  The Nazis arrested and tried three communist leaders, as well as van der Lubbe, for the fire, but the German courts had not yet lost all their independence and the three leading communists were acquitted.  Decades later, a new generation of German historians concluded that Van der Lubbe had in fact set the fire all by himself, just as he had claimed.

Tonight's stories suggest that the administration will use Kirk's assassination the same way--albeit with even less excuse.  Tyler Robinson, the young man arrested for killing Kirk, clearly has no ties to any leading leftist organization, and despite the regrettable statements of the Governor of Utah, no clear evidence of his political views has yet been released.  Interestingly enough, already an online chorus has proclaimed that Robinson is an acolyte of Nick Fuentes, another right wing influencer who has been feuding with Kirk, but there is no evidence for that either.  Nor can the situation in the United States with respect to violence really be compared to Germany in 1932-33, when the Nazis, the Social Democrats and the Communists all had uniformed militias including hundreds of thousands of men who had battled each other in the streets for years, with significant loss of life.   Yet senior officials have told reporters that the administration may try to take the non-profit tax exemption away from George Soros's Open Society Foundations [sic] and the Ford Foundation on the grounds that they support left wing groups that carry out violence against conservatives.  They may also try to charge them under the RICO law, and President Trump has talked about designating ANTIFA--which has little or no organization--as a terrorist group.   I would not be surprised if the administration also tried to designate any protesters on behalf of Palestinian rights as terrorists, since many conservatives already identify such protesters as Hamas supporters.

As Donald Trump has found out himself, the government can impose huge burdens on anyone that it chooses to accuse of a serious crime, even if the target is never convicted.  Cases against leading foundations could stay in the news for years, providing ammunition for Republican attacks and, in necessary diverting attention from the economy.  Meanwhile, Trump has already proven that he does not object to political violence on his own behalf by pardoning all the January 6 rioters.  He isn't interested in toning down our political debate, only in reserving the strongest words and actions for his enemies.  Already he is treating Kirk like a national hero who was killed fighting a foreign war.

We are in difficult times.

The Revolutionary New York Times

It took me some extra time to get to the newspapers this morning because my paper carrier had manged to toss them into a spot from which I could not see them from the second floor of the old Victorian where my kitchen and living room are. Yet the wait was worth it, and I think this edition of the New York Times has real historical significance. It essentially proclaims a war of that venerable newspaper against the current administration--and I expect the administration to strike back. The lead story in the front section describes a failed SEAL team operation against North Korea in 2019, designed to plant a listening device that could listen in to the conversations of Kim Jong-Un. The operation had to be aborted when the SEALS encountered a North Korean fishing vessel and fired on it, killing everyone aboard. The Biden administration did brief Congressional leaders about the episode after it came into office--the Trump administration never did. Everything about the operation is still classified, and I will be surprised if the Department of Justice does not open an investigation of the Times for violaton of statutes about classified material. 

 The decision to publish reflects the ethos that grew up during the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal--that any secret should be published. This has contributed enormously to our loss of respect for elected leaders of every party. The MSM in the 1970s began setting itself up as the ultimate authority on what government should not do, and what Americans should and should not think about it. That was the role the founding fathers tried to reserve for elected leaders. It's a role that Donald Trump is working very hard to regain. 

 Then I turned to Sunday Opinion, the section which, as I have pointed out, was in the 1950s and 1960s called the News of the Week in Review and later changed to the Sunday Review. That section leads with head shots of every single Democratic Senator (the Times does not, apparently, deign to address Republicans), and a long piece by Millennial Ezra Klein demanding, essentially, that the Senate Democrats take advantage of the filibuster rule to shut down the government in a few weeks and keep it shut down until Donald Trump abandons major policies and practices of his administration. The Democrats, he says, should say something like this: "Trump won the election. He is the legitimate president. But the government has to serve the people and be accountable to the people. ICE can conduct legitimate deportations, but there can't be masked agents roaming the streets refusing to identify themselves or their authority. The Trump family cannot be hoovering in money and investments from the countries that depend on us and that fear our power and our sanctions. There have to be inspectors general and JAGs and career prosecutors watching to make sure the government is being run on behalf of the people rather than on behalf of the Trump family." And one reason that Klein favors this confrontation is that he does not think that the Supreme Court will stop Trump from doing the things that he does not like. 

 Klein doesn't mention that the Constitution provides not one, but two ways of dealing with an incompetent, authoritarian or corrupt government. The first, of course, is through elections--which have defeated Trump only once in three tries, and which have given Republicans control of Congress. The second is impeachment, trial, and removal, which failed twice against Trump during and after his first term and which is impossible now, with Republicans barely in control of the House. (And new impeachments after a possible Democratic victory in 2026 would be as futile as the earlier ones.) He does acknowledge, at length, the unpopularity of the Democratic Party and the weaknesses of its congressional leadership. But his whole argument seems to me to boil down to this: No possible measure against Trump can be omitted, because he is doing things that I and people like me oppose. 

 I agree that Trump and his family have embarked upon an unprecedented in-office quest for private gain, I oppose almost everything that he is doing, and I don't think he is competent to be president--but he is, and his party controls the Congress and the Supreme Court as well. They can do what they are doing within the framework of our government, and they may maintain the support of a majority of the American people. And that is not all. 

 The founders left us a wonderful blueprint for a democratic government in which no one would exercise absolute power, but they understood that that blueprint depended upon the citizenry to work in practice. It is not working, in large part, because both sides have abandoned any loyalty to established procedures and rules of fairness, as the redistricting controversy shows. And those like Klein who want to bring the federal government to a halt should ponder another provision of the Constitution, the one that gives Congress the power (by simple majorities) to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in time of invasion or rebellion, as the public safety may require it. I think there are people in the Trump administration looking for a pretext to use that power, and they might do it, as Lincoln did in 1861, without waiting for congressional authorization. The founders did not prefer anarchy to order, and we have to ask ourselves if anarchy would really serve anyone's interests now. And major media outlets might start asking themselves if their job is really advocating routes to a better future, rather than reporting accurately about the present. 

 And last but not least, the section includes a long piece by the high priest of the church of the op-ed page, Thomas Friedman, who has been telling the whole world how to solve all its problems for several decades. Drawing heavily on the ideas of an A.I. specialist named Craig Mundie, who co-authored a book on the subject with the late Henry Kissinger, he paints an alarming and probably accurate picture of the impending ubiquity and autonomy of A.I. systems--but assures us that he has the solution, a very Kissingerian one. The U.S. and China, he argues, must collaborate to create A.I. regulators--themselves a form of A.I.--that will insure that their systems will work to the benefit of all mankind. And they simply must do that, he argues, because it is the only way out. That is why, Friedman has now told us for at least three decades, the Israelis and Palestinians must make peace, too--but somehow, it never happens. 

 I am not optimistic about the immediate future of the nation or the world, because its current state owes so much to developments that have been going on for decades. And to younger readers especially, I say that the real problem of the next few decades is not to avoid various catastrophes, but how to deal with them emotionally. We all eventually deal with terrible events such as the deaths of loved ones, and ultimately, of course, of our own. Denial does not solve this problem. Politics are failing us, but they do not alone make life worth living even in the best of times. We all remain very fortunate to be here on earth. Please do not regard posts like this one as prophecies of ultimate doom.