Europe and the United States in Times of Crisis

 Sometime during the 2000s--I think it was around 2005, but it could have been a little later--I was invited to give a talk at a conference in Berlin.  (I have forgotten the details.)  The Bush Administration was already turning away from the legacy of the New Deal, and I already doubted that Democrats would be able to reverse that trend.  I gave a talk reflecting some of themes of my article on the great Atlantic crises of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, which I am linking here.  It focuses on the interplay of political developments in the United States on the one hand, and Britain, France, and Germany on the other.  In the crisis of the late eighteenth century, the United States invented modern democracy, while Britain emerged with an even stronger aristocracy and France and other continental states mixed monarchy with bureaucracy.  In the crisis of 1854-71 (approximate), the victory of the North in the Civil War not only preserved democracy in the United States--the goal Lincoln defined throughout the Civil War--but gave democrats in Europe a tremendous boost, creating governments incorporating universal male suffrage (or something fairly close to it) in Britain, France, and Germany.  The 1929-45 crisis of the twentieth century continued that process an created an alliance of democratic nations based on the rights of labor and welfare states.  By the time I gave my talk in Berlin, the United States was clearly moving in a very different direction at home, and I urged my European audience to make sure that their nations preserved the democratic welfare states that had grown up in the last half century or so, no matter what happened across the Atlantic.

Late last week the Trump Administration issued its first National Security Strategy.  These documents can be very important.  In 2002 the Bush Administration issued one announcing that the US government would wage preventive war against any hostile state threatening to acquire nuclear weapons.   That strategy was implemented in Iraq--where it turned out that the nuclear threat no longer existed--and the Bush Administration had hoped to implement it against Iran and North Korea as well. This year the Trump Administration, working with Israel, did execute it against Iran.  There are many interesting aspects to the new Trump Administration strategy.  A key section on the Balance of Power is equivocal and somewhat self-contradictory, pledging on the one hand to "prevent the global, and in some cases even regional, domination of others," while adding, "The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations."  The section on the Western Hemisphere defines a "'Trump Corollary' to the Monroe Doctrine"--"We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere"--which adds nothing new to traditional policy, and it says nothing, mercifully, about the President's stated desire to make Canada the 51st state, and doesn't refer to the "Gulf of America" or to possible regime change in Venezuela.  It reaffirms a US military commitment to Taiwan.  The most striking portion of the strategy document discusses the subject of my Berlin talk: the political relationship of the United States and Europe.

In astonishing words, the strategy document flatly rejects key policies and beliefs of all the major contemporary European governments and calls explicitly for their replacement by Europe's new rightwing parties.  This begins with a discussion of Europe, the US, and the Russia-Ukraine War.  While declaring a goal of enabling Ukraine's "survival as a viable state," it also rejects allowing Ukraine in NATO and blames the Europeans for the continuation of the war within a most original analysis of where Europe is and where it is going.  (Since I last posted two weeks ago the Trump Administration has backed away from its pro-Russian demands upon Ukraine, but we cannot predict what will come next.)

"Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP—down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today—partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness.

"But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.

"Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.

"This lack of self-confidence is most evident in Europe’s relationship with Russia. European allies enjoy a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure, save nuclear weapons. As a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine, European relations with Russia are now deeply attenuated, and many Europeans regard Russia as an existential threat. Managing European relations with Russia will require significant U.S. diplomatic engagement, both to reestablish conditions of strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass, and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states."

The document rejects "writing off" Europe in favor of changing the direction of European politics so as to prevent "certain NATO members" from becoming "majority non-European" within decades. It specifically recommends "cultivating resistance to Europe's current trajectory within European nations."  This can mean only one thing: promoting the advent to power of the new right in Europe, including Nigel Farage's Reform Party in Britain, Marine Le Pen's National Rally Party in France, and the Alternative for Germany led by Alice Weidel.  In previous eras the US government resisted the advent to power of Communist parties in states like Italy and Germany, but never before has it endorsed the victory of opposition parties.  And the question, it must be said, is whether the Trump Administration might be on the side of history in setting this goal.  The latest opinion poll in Britain shows the Reform Party with 31 percent support, compared to 20 percent for the Conservatives, 14 percent for the governing Labour Party, 18 percent for the Green Party and 11 percent for the Liberal Democrats.  In France Jordan Bardella (who has replaced the convicted Le Pen) and the National Rally Party show 36 percent support, more than the next two more traditional candidates combined (Emile Macron cannot run again.)  In Germany the latest poll shows the Alternative for Germany with 26 percent support compared to 25 percent for the Christian Democratic Union and 36 percent total for three left wing parties, the Socialists, Greens, and Left Party.  (All polls listed in Wikipedia.) The traditional German parties in particular have been pulling together to try to keep the AfD (its German acronym) out of power, drawing public criticism from Vice President Vance early this year.  The National Security Strategy effectively endorses those parties as candidates for national leadership in our oldest allies.  The prospects of Farage and the Alternative for Germany still look pretty bleak to me, but the National Rally is solidly established as the second leading party in France and the Macron government has become very unpopular.  

This could turn out to be parallel to the last two great Atlantic crises, when Europe did follow the US lead.  The Trump Administration is leading a revolt against our bureaucratic state, based upon impartial principles, to create a non-regulatory government dedicated to helping enterprises of all kinds thrive in return for their financial support. Bureaucracy is indeed stronger in continental Europe, at least, than it has been in the United States, and it is drawing the same kind of resentment. That was what led to Brexit just a few months before the first election of Donald Trump.  

I learned many decades ago to distinguish a nation's government from its people, as the diplomatic documents of the early and mid-20th century invariably did.  The Trump Administration--the government of the United States today--has already lost popularity among the American people and they may well repudiate it in 2024 and 2026, but not before it has made drastic changes in our government's relationship to our society and to its foreign policy abroad.  It has officially embarked upon a completely new course in Europe.  I hope that European governments will rise to the occasion as most of them failed to do 90 years ago.

The Munich moment

 After a year of wildly oscillating statements from President Trump regarding the Russia-Ukraine War, Trump, acting through his personal envoy Steve Witkoff, has definitely emerged as the Neville Chamberlain of our time.  It's time to review the historical parallel.

In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles took significant territory away from Germany and awarded it to Poland, while other treaties left the German-speaking regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in a new vastly reduced Austria and in the new state of Czechoslovakia, which was dominated by the Czechs, its largest ethnic group.  In the wake of the treaty France attempted to play the role that the US played in Europe beginning in 1948--it signed alliances with Poland, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia in an attempt to contain the new Germany within its new borders.  Great Britain held aloof from those alliances.  It took 14 years for a new German government, Hitler's, to embark upon the mission of undoing the Versailles treaty borders.  After five years of rearmament, Hitler managed to bring Austria into the Third Reich through political pressure.  He then demanded better treatment for the German minority in Czechoslovakia--a pretext to create a conflict with the Czech government that would allow him to attack and destroy that nation and bring both the German and Czech-inhabited parts of it into Germany.

France, sadly, knew that they could not fight on behalf of Czechoslovakia without Britain.  Neville Chamberlain had taken over as British Prime Minister in 1937.  He desperately wanted to avoid another European or world war, and by the end of that year he had made clear to Hitler that he would allow changes in frontiers to prevent one.  He sent a British cabinet member to mediate between the Czech government and its German minority, but Hitler had ordered the Sudeten German leader to keep raising his demands so that they could not be satisfied.  With  Europe on the brink of war in September 1938, Chamberlain flew to Germany to meet with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and agreed to the German annexation of the border territories inhabited by Germans.  Chamberlain then persuaded the French and the Czechs to agree to this as well.  Two more meetings at Bad Godesberg and then Munich--where Hitler met with Chamberlain, Mussolini, and the French Premier--led to that result.  The border territory also included the Czech fortifications and what was left of Czechoslovakia was defenseless. Six months later, Slovakia seceded and Hitler took over and annexed the rest of what is now Czechia.  That territory sat out the Second World War, and when the Allies won, a restored Czech government expelled its three million Germans into Germany.

The peaceful defeat of the USSR in 1991 corresponds to the defeat of Germany in 1918.  The USSR gave way to a much-reduced Russia, shorn of the Baltic States, Belarus, the Caucasus and Central Asian republics, and most of all, Ukraine, which surrendered its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees, but never managed to join NATO.  Russia, like Germany after 1919, suffered very severely economically from its defeat and the collapse of its regime, and it took just 8 years, not 14, for Vladimir Putin, a man dedicated to restoring Russia's former greatness, to take power.  Putin began, we have learned, by staging a fake terrorist attack that killed dozens of Russians as a pretext for resuming the war against Chechnya.  He managed to turn Belarus into a satellite and briefly bring a pro-Russian leader to power in Ukraine.  That government, however, fell, and in 2014 he simply annexed Crimea--an excellent parallel, it now occurs to me, to Hitler's Anschluss with Austria.  He also started a rebellion in eastern Ukraine, and in 2022 he invaded Ukraine without warning.  At that moment I suggested here that NATO should seriously consider getting into the war then and there.  I am not aware of a single other person to make that suggestion, but NATO, led by the United States, provided Ukraine with critical economic and military aid, and Finland and  Sweden joined NATO.  Ukraine quickly rolled back the initial Russian gains but could not mount a successful counterattack and now is very slowly giving ground in a war of attrition.  An invasion of Russian territory around Kursk--an excellent strategy--unfortunately had to be abandoned.

As peace has been discussed, the key issue has become clear: will Ukraine remain an independent nation?  Russia insists that it must not--and the deal that Witkoff has drafted gives into that demand.  The deal gives Russia all the territory that it has occupied, and more.  It would require Ukraine to change its constitution so as to renounce NATO membership and forbid NATO troops from entering Ukraine.  It will severely limit the size of the Ukrainian army.  Like the Munich agreement, it includes only the vaguest security guarantees for what will be left of Ukraine.  If Ukraine accepts it, it will take only a few years for Russia to destabilize its government and proclaim the need for Russian troops to restore order, as Hitler did in what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.

Donald Trump, playing the role of Chamberlain, has given Ukraine one week to accept the deal.  The rest of NATO finds itself in the role of France in 1938.  If it tells Ukraine to fight on, as the Baltic States and Poland, at the very least, certainly want to do, it will have to assume the responsibility of providing all necessary assistance, which will not be easy.  They will also have to assume the risk of war with Russia.  Whatever decision the British, French and Germans make, this is a turning point in modern European history.  There is no longer a United States government across the Atlantic willing to help with their defense.  

An odd mixture of people, it seems, will support the 28-point plan to end Ukrainian independence.  Here is historian Niall Ferguson, drawing the ire of former chess champion and activist Gary Kasparaov:

"The best is the enemy of the good. Contrary to recent press speculation, the draft 28-point plan for peace in Ukraine is in fact a reasonable basis for negotiations. Journalists can gripe about it as they griped about the 20-point Gaza plan. But wars are not ended by op-eds."

This is not too surprising.  Ferguson bizarrely established his reputation as an historian with his book The Pity of War, which argued that Britain in 1914 should have allowed Germany to win the First World War.  A lifelong resident of different parts of Oceana, he now seems willing to share the world with Eurasia and Eastasia and abandon the 1945 dream of a world of truly independent states.  That is also the policy of the current government of the United States, which has no respect for sovereignty within our own hemisphere.

Ukraine, unlike Czechoslovakia in 1938, has made it clear for four years that it has what it takes to defend its independence, and has fought heroically under very impressive leadership.  Russia also lacks a quick path to victory, as long as Ukraine gets enough assistance.  Sadly, the United States has abandoned the role that it played for a century.  This is a danger and an opportunity for the great nations of Europe.

Why Mamdani?

 I personally believe in highly taxed and regulated capitalism, not thorough-going socialism, and I regret that Zohran Mamdani has not abandoned all of the very woke positions he took a few years ago when they were so fashionable.  I would however have voted for him if I lived in New York City and I think his election is an important milestone in American life.  Far more than the career of Bernie Sanders or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, his victory in the nation's largest city reflects the political impact of the economic changes of the last few decades.  He may not have the best solutions to the problem in mind, but he is determined to face it head on.

Back on May 2, 2014, when I was nearly a year into retirement and No End Save Victory had just come out, I published the first of four blog posts here on Thomas Piketty's new book,  Capital in the 21st Century.  Reviewing what I wrote, I was struck by the breadth of his research, his knowledge of history, and his intellectual ambition, but most of all by the simple mathematical insight around which he had built the book.  Under capitalism, he showed, the natural tendency is for capital to grow more quickly than the economy as a whole.  I have never read Marx's original Capital but I have the impression that Marx had said the same thing, and he was right.  Piketty showed, too, that the United States and other western countries had overcome this tendency in the middle of the 20th century thanks to the consequences of the two world wars and the Depression, which had led among other things to almost confiscatory high marginal tax rates.  That era came to an end just as I was reaching adulthood, however, and the natural tendency of capitalism took over, making the rich richer while the lower half of the population stood still.  And that trend has had extraordinary economic and political consequences.

It makes perfect sense, therefore, that Mamdani won half the vote in the world's most capitalistic city.  Although the financial and real estate barons of New York are losing ground relative to the tech giants of the West Coast, they still dominate much of economy and our politics.  The crisis in higher education over the last two years has shown that they are the  ultimate authority over our universities as well, and they have enormous influence over some aspects of US foreign policy.  The economy those elites created helped give us Donald J. Trump.   Their wealth has pushed real estate prices in New York and other major metropolitan areas to undreamed of heights.  When I read Piketty, I had bought the property I live in in suburban Boston less than two years earlier, and Zillow tells me that it is now worth more than twice as much as it was then.  At that time the median US household income was $53,657.  Today it is $83,730, leaving my property considerably less affordable than it was then.  If one corrects the current median income figure for inflation, it becomes $61,206 in 2014 dollars--an increase of 1.27 percent per year.  During that period GDP growth has averaged 2.52 percent a year--almost exactly twice as much.  The rest of that GDP growth, presumably, has been turned into capital, which is held by relatively few people. Piketty was right.

Hysterical financial interests are now warning that the superrich will leave New York because of Mamdani's victory.  I am only speculating here, but I am not certain that would hurt the average New Yorker.  It could depress the housing market, but that is what New York needs to make it more affordable.  When the superrich ran General Electric and General Motors they created more ordinary jobs when they did better, but now it seems the superrich are at least as likely to reduce ordinary jobs as to create them--a trend that will become clearer as AI and robotics make new advances.  (See Bezos, Jeff.)  At least since Reagan we have been hearing from the leadership of both parties that economic growth benefits us all.  The lower half of the population knows better.  

And not only the lower half.  Harvard and MIT assistant professors can no longer afford single-family homes around here.  Two-career professionals see one salary eaten up entirely by childcare.  Etc.  Mamdani built his campaign around a simple message:  our economy is making life impossible for too many of us, and this can't go on.  That is the message that Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refused to emphasize, and the problem they did nothing about.  Donald Trump, meanwhile, inhabits a fantasy world in which we have no inflation (it's 3 percent, not 0, at the moment), and job creation is at undreamed of levels (it is actually quite slow and getting slower.)  He will do nothing about the underlying problem.

For a long time now I have been pessimistic about the growth of the new aristocracy and its consequences.  The trends we have lived with for the last half century may well have gone too far to reverse now.  But I am glad that the electorate of our largest city resoundingly delivered the message that this must not go on.  I don't know what Mamdani will actually be able to do to try to reverse the trend, but I wish him well.

A Tale of Two Op-eds

 Hundreds of miles north of me, a controversy is raging over the U.S. Senate candidacy of Graham Platner, a 41-year old Millennial who is running for the Democratic nomination to oppose Senator Susan Collins next year.  Platner, an ex-Marine and an oyster farmer, had been effectively pitching an economic program focused on the working class when two disturbing stories broke.  First, more than ten years ago, on reddit, he had made a number of offensive comments, including homophobic ones and ones that questioned the extent of sexual assault in the military.  Secondly, it turns out that while in the Marine Corps he acquired a skull-and-crossbones tattoo similar to the Nazi Death's Head, which he has only just covered up.  Meanwhile, the  Democratic Governor of Maine, Janet Mills, who will turn 78 at the end of this year, has also entered the race as the establishment Democratic candidate.  During the last week this situation triggered two very different op-eds by regular contributors to the New York Times that tell us a lot about splits inside the Democratic Party.

The first op-ed, by Tressie McMillan Cottom, aims more at senior Democrats who have stood up for Platner than at Platner himself.  The controversy over the posts and tattoos, she writes, should have ended up "as just another weird little political story in an extraordinary political moment in American history," except that "several prominent Democrats took time out of their remaining days on God's green earth to lecture Democratic voters on learning to forgive"--specifically Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.  This, she says, is a problem, because "This country is being ruled by a powerful minority that espouses deplorable minority views that polling shows a majority of voters in this country disagree with.  This is a big problem.  It is also the same problem as a guy wearing a Nazi tattoo." She continues:

"I cannot swear to know the minds of men like Murphy and Sanders. But, were I a betting person, I’d wager someone else’s riches that they know racism and xenophobia are inextricably linked to America’s inchoate understanding of class politics. They know that “working class” has become a powerful political totem of its own — a discursive sleight of hand used to separate out white voters’ concerns as more legitimate, more materially grounded, more important than other voters’ concerns."

In other words, even to refer to a "working class" that is by definition interracial--instead of simply focusing on "marginalized groups"--marks one as a panderer to racism.  She continues: "Their rhetoric — and the conventional wisdom that flows from it — suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base. The conceit at the heart of that belief is that poor white people are too racist, and too uniquely ignorant of their racism, to vote in their best interests. Therefore, Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class." The only way to prove that one is a real Democrat is to put "Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor" people first. And ramming that point home, she adds, " If the Democratic future requires us to exchange our discomfort with casual Nazism to advance a political agenda, I am not interested."  

The second column, which appeared yesterday, was written by Michelle Goldberg. She makes clear that she was initially anticipating writing a column similar to MacMillan Cottam's, but after talking to some people in Maine, she decided she had to do some good old-fashioned reporting and travel up there to see Platner in action for herself. She interviewed him at length and researched his Reddit posts, some of which suggested that leftists arm themselves against Fascism and even identified with Antifa--not the kind of thing a real neo-Nazi would write.  And she attended one of his wildly popular campaign events, which are filled with voters who warm to his insistence that the Democratic Party had to return to the traditions that had given the nation Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  Only such an approach would ever help the many ordinary Mainers who are losing out in our new economy.  He also urged the audience to begin talking to their neighbors, the only way that a real counter-movement to MAGA (which carried one of Maine's two Congressional districts and one electoral vote last year) could grow.  

MacMillan Cottam, it seems to me, focused so intently on using the power of "marginalized groups" to purge the Democratic Party of those with a different approach that she forgot a critical point: the main job of a candidate is to get elected.  By that I do not mean, as she suggested, that a Nazi-style tattoo would be more likely to attract than to repel white voters.  Goldberg found that very few of Platner's listeners seemed to be interested in the controversy at all.  I do mean that downplaying racial issues makes sense in a state that is 91 percent white, 5 percent biracial, 2 percent black and 2 percent Hispanic might make sense.  And last but not least, when Democrats face a choice between a 42-year old candidate and a near-79 year old one, the choice should be almost automatic.  That is why I will vote for Seth Moulton against Ed Markey (who is a year older even than Governor Mills) next year.  I no longer get any kick out of being represented by people my own age.  

The New York Times opinion page seems to be evolving.  MacMillan Cottum's piece would have appeared in 2020 or 2022, but I don't think that Goldberg's would have.  That's a step forward for the paper, and for the country.

An American Tragedy

 I define a dysfunctional family as a family in which one member is a god.  Such a member can be a father whose career takes them all over the world, or a mother obsessed with what the world thinks of every member, or a severely disabled or prodigiously talented child.  In each of those cases, and in others as well, the needs of all the other family members tend to give way to the chosen one's.  From 1789 onwards, the president of the United States has been, in a profound emotional sense, the father of our national family, and our emotional health depends partly on his.  We have never had a president like this one.

In relatively good times our national family functions relatively well, although like any human institution it never functions perfectly.  In such times it respects boundaries--boundaries between different branches of the government and between the government and individual citizens.  Simple courtesy, which demands that officials refer even to their political opponents with respect, is another such boundary.  The national family depends above all on a recognition of a common family interest that requires each of us, at one time or another, to sacrifice for the common good and accept that we cannot always have our own way.  And it requires respect for a relatively impartial legal system that will try to identify and punish the genuinely guilty according to relatively neutral standards.  

Our current president has built his whole career on the principle that he is unique among men and women, the best at anything he tries his hand at.  That is why he cheats at golf and proclaims his every achievement to be the greatest of its kind.  From the beginning of his career as a developer he focused on building up his image, and major media outlets cooperated because he was good copy.  At a certain point, his businesses began to fail, but he compensated by building up his brand.

Four Trump real estate properties in Atlantic City had all filed for bankruptcy by 2004, when The Apprentice first aired.  Trump seamlessly transitioned from a genuine entrepreneur who kept making bad choices, to an actor playing the role of a managerial genius to an audience of tens of millions.  The show was carefully scripted  to make him look omniscient and omnipotent, the self-image he had already created for himself.  Ratings, not the performance of the winners he picked, were its only measure of success.  Meanwhile, a big chunk of the US public got to know him every week.

I have written many times that Trump's spectacular rise in 2015-16 could never have happened if the political leadership of both parties had not lost touch with the great mass of US voters.  Only that allowed Trump to wipe the floor with a list of traditional Republican candidates and narrowly defeat Hillary Clinton in the electoral college. Trump adopted the role of savior of the country from the threats of immigration and leftist ideology.  The media establishment and the Democratic Party fought back by declaring  his election illegitimate, and the pandemic allowed Joe Biden to defeat him in 2020.  Biden failed however to restore a real bond between the president and the American people, and Kamala Harris promised nothing but more of the same.  Trump improved his standing among several key groups of voters and won both the popular vote and the electoral college.  Meanwhile, a coterie of younger Republicans planned a drastic scaling back of the federal government, a complete rejection of policies designed to halt climate change, a new crackdown on illegal immigration, and an all-out attack on certain popular ideologies that had come to dominate American universities, the mainstream media, and a growing number of corporate boardrooms.

In nine months back in power Trump and his subordinates have demonstrated a total disregard for American legal and constitutional norms, and even for the very idea of a general good which the government is supposed to serve.  The president regards the whole federal government as his own corporation, which exists for the purpose of enriching its stockholders--the economic interests that back him--and punishing his enemies.  He has staffed the highest levels of the Justice Department and certain key US Attorneys' offices with lawyers who have worked for him personally and ordered them to indict political enemies, which they are doing.  He has ordered federal troops into Democratic-led cities against the will of their mayors and governors.   He is withholding approved funds for large infrastructure projects in blue states, and he is trying to force universities to accept federal ideological controls.  He has no respect for any public official who disagrees with him, and his subordinates are purging various parts of the federal bureaucracy of people who think for themselves, including some who supported him at earlier stages of their careers.  He seems to believe, like Louis XIV, that he is the state, and he is turning the White House into his own Versailles.  Meanwhile, he is promoting himself as the greatest leader who has ever lived, who creates a booming economy, ends wars all over the world, and eliminates crime in major cities within a few weeks.

I have just finished teaching an old favorite book, Doctor Zhivago, for the first time in many years.  At the climax of the book Zhivago, whose life has been upended by the Russian revolution and civil war for several years, reflects on history.

"He reflected again that he conceived of history, of what is called the course of history, not in the accepted way but by analogy with the vegetable kingdom. In winter, under the snow, the leafless branches of a wood are thin and poor, like the hairs on an old man's wart. But in only a few days in spring the forest is transformed, it reaches the clouds, and you can hide or lose yourself in its leafy maze. This transformation is achieved with a speed greater than in the case of animals, for animals do not grow as fast as plants, and yet we cannot directly observe the movement of growth even of plants. The forest does not change its place, we cannot lie in wait for it and catch it in the act of change. Whenever we look at it, it seems to be motionless. And such also is the immobility to our eyes of the eternally growing, ceaselessly changing history, the life of society moving invisibly in its incessant transformations.

"Tolstoy thought of it in just this way, but he did not spell it out so clearly. He denied that history was set in motion by Napoleon or any other ruler or general, but he did not develop his idea to its logical conclusion. No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshipped for decades thereafter, for centuries."

We cannot understand what is happening if we ignore the changes in our national forest which grew slowly over five or six decades.  Business interests in the 1970s adopted the ideas of the Powell Memorandum and embarked upon a long-term attack on the regulatory state that the New Deal had created.  Academics starting in the same decade and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s replaced the story of the advance of western civilization with a history of oppression and resistance based on race, gender, and sexuality.  Financial manipulation and advertising replaced manufacturing and engineering skill as the motor of our economy.  The press set itself up as the ultimate arbiter of good and evil, the role that the framers reserved for our political leadership.  And our educated elite not only assumed more and more power, but also used that power to benefit itself at the expense of the more than half of the population that does not graduate from college.  Entertainers eclipsed politicians as national figures, opening up the opportunity which Donald Trump took advantage of.

Most of all, I think, the 1960s marked the beginning of a general revolt against more traditional authority of all kinds--moral authority, legal authority, political authority, and even the authority of custom.  That is the only reason that Donald Trump, who has spoken about real and presumed enemies in utterly unprecedented ways since he entered politics, could have gotten such a hearing.  Richard Nixon's tapes revealed an inner world quite similar to Trump's. Nixon too divided the world into allies and enemies and spoke frequently of setting various parts of the federal government on particular enemies and firing any civil servant who seemed to countermand his will--but both Nixon and the men around him knew that he had to moderate these impulses in real life and hide them from the American people.  Trump has not found that to be necessary.  We have for the first time a president who rejects our political and constitutional traditions, but he could not have come to power if so many of us had not lost interest and confidence in our political system first.  There is no point in assigning blame for what has gone wrong, because we cannot rewrite history and magically undo the changes that took place so gradually that we could not see them at the time.  Two centuries of an enlightened experiment in government are giving way to something very new all over the north Atlantic world.  I turn again to Zhivago and to another paragraph from the same part of the book.

"As he scribbled his odds and ends, he made a note reaffirming his belief that art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence. And his own ideas and notes also brought him joy, a tragic joy, a joy full of tears that exhausted him and made his head ache."

Boris Pasternak, the author of Zhivago, had translated several of the most important Shakespearean tragedies.  The United States, like Russia in 1917-21, is now in the midst of a tragedy of our own, one that began, I think in the mid-1960s, as I suggested in American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War.  Any joy must come from reverence for the great things we achieved together, the knowledge that every great nation pays for its greatness in this way from time to time, and the confidence that this will not be the end of history or of progress.