Thirty years later, the answer emerges

 In 1994, at my 25th Harvard reunion, I happened to meet Bill Strauss.  A lawyer by training and originally a congressional staffer by trade, Bill was now the co-founder of the comedy troupe the Capitol Steps and the other of several books, including Generations: The History of America's Future, co-authored by Neil Howe.  We talked about contemporary politics and I got some of the flavor of his generational thinking.  More importantly, when I returned to Rhode Island, I picked up Generations from the new book shelf at the Naval War College Library and began reading it.  I was so excited that I could hardly sleep for most of a week, and I found my life changed, changed utterly.  A terrible beauty was born.

Bill, who became a close friend until his very untimely death in 2007, later described the writing of Generations.  It began as an attempt to identify different generations of Americans and to evaluate their particular contributions.  In the midst of their research, however, they noticed a similarity between the political climate and generational constellation of the 1850s on the one hand and the early 1990s on the other.   A few more logical steps led them to their key finding. The history of the United States could be broken into 80-year cycles, starting in the early colonial era.  Each cycle concluded with a great crisis: King Phillip's War in the late 17th century, the Revolution and adoption of the Constitution in the 18th (1774-94), the Civil War and its immediate aftermath (1860-68 or so), and the Depression and the Second World War  (1929-45).  In each case, the crisis ultimately created a new United States, based on new values and institutions that endured for about 60 years.  As the generation that had been young adults during the crisis died off and the post-crisis generation began to come into power, those values and institutions began to crumble.  The crisis, an era of intense and sometimes violent political conflict, determined the shape of the new era to come.  In the last two crises of the Civil War and 1929-45, a particular strong leader--Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt--emerged to lead the nation and redefine its values.  Now Bill and Neil (as I have been calling them for nearly thirty years) predicted that something similar would happen between 2004 and 2024.  Shortly after I got to know Bill, they amplified that prediction in another book, The Fourth Turning--their synonym for crisis--that appeared in 1997.  History has vindicated that prediction, and on Tuesday we found out where history was heading.

As I have mentioned here many times, the publication of The Fourth Turning also led to the establishment of a remarkable online forum to discuss, and expand upon, its conclusions.  Another seven years later, in 2004, I started this blog.  Both have allowed me continually to refine my ideas about generations and "turnings" (the roughly twenty-year periods into which they divided each 80-year saeculum) and to assess where we were in the cycle.  When 9/11 hit--and this can be well documented on the archived online forum if anyone wants to--Bill Strauss assumed that this was the beginning of the crisis.  This has been hotly debated for many years since, especially after the financial crisis of 2008.  I am now quite convinced that the crisis actually began about ten months earlier, during the 2000 election controversy, but it really got going after 9/11 and it has been persisting--albeit in slow motion, in comparison to the earlier crises--ever since.  Now we know where it was going.

In 2001 and again in 2009, two presidents--George W. Bush and Barack Obama--had the opportunity to step into the role of the "Gray Champion," the generic term Bill and Neil used for history's Lincolns and FDRs.  Bush, I am convinced, consciously tried to do so.  I do not think that he had read Generations or The Fourth Turning, but I definitely think that Karl Rove had, and the speeches that Rove helped Bush draft for the whole of his presidency dripped with the rhetoric of previous crises.  Bush promised a worldwide crusade for democracy that would end terrorism and reshape the world, using American force to remove any hostile regimes that might pose a danger to the United States. (We must remember that we did not in 2001 regard Russia or China as threats.)  He explicitly echoed the rhetoric of the Second World War and the Cold War.  In the first two years after 9/11 our entire political establishment and most of the country lined up behind him as he announced the impending invasion of Iraq.  He also seized emergency powers, as Lincoln and FDR had, to deal with terrorism. His administration had every intension of following up the Iraq invasion with similar strikes upon the other members of his "Axis of evil," Iran and North Korea.  Two blind spots, however, doomed this project and ultimately turned the nation against Bush and what he stood for.  First, he tried to fight a global war on the cheap, cutting taxes instead of raising them and buying new military arguments that technology could take the place of manpower.  Secondly, the overthrow of regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq led to nothing but chaos.  Nonetheless, he created a new military-industrial-intelligence complex, and his successor Barack Obama continued much of the war on terror and the regime change policy himself, with new disasters in Libya and Syria as a result.  A similar policy has now brought the Biden administration to the brink of war with Iran in alliance with Israel.  None of this has done any good for the American people or the broader world, which now faces completely different threats.

Meanwhile, the abandonment of the New Deal's very successful effort to regulate financial markets and check the growth of wealth that had begun in the 1970s and accelerated under Reagan had led under Bush to a speculative catastrophe in the housing market and the greatest crash since 1929--exactly 79 years later.  That allowed the Democrats to regain both houses of Congress and then, behind Barack Obama, the White House.  He entered office with freedom of action comparable to that that Roosevelt had enjoyed in 1933--but he failed to use it.  The Democratic Party had abandoned the New Deal tradition, and Obama's advisers repudiated it as well.  They claimed to restore the economy "from the top down" instead of "from the bottom up," and substituted the Federal Reserve Board's massive infusion of credit, buying up worthless assets, for FDR's big public employment programs.  Obama made health care his biggest domestic priority, and although he passed it, it could not go into effect until 2013.  And, reflecting his own iron grip on his emotions, Obama failed to mobilize the nation's anger against the financial community--as FDR had--and allowed Republicans to mobilize it against him instead.  And so it was that just eighteen months into the Obama presidency, on July 5, 2011, I wrote what was until now the most important post that I have ever done here.  I could see that Obama was not going to undertake another New Deal, and that the era of corporate supremacy would continue into the High that would follow the crisis.  It was clear by then that he was about to lose the House of Representatives because he, unlike FDR, and failed to provide real relief to the American people in the first year and a half of the crisis.  And so he did, and he never regained it.

Neither I nor anyone else, however, realized how far the alienation of the American people from its bipartisan ruling elite had gone at that time.  Both Democratic and Republican politicians were still living off of the legacies of earlier generations--FDR, Kennedy and LBJ for the Democrats, and Reagan for the Republicans.  They had collaborated in the neoliberal policies of free trade and free markets that had stopped the economic progress of the lower half of the population while enriching the top few percent.  And the depth of their alienation from the voters opened up, for the first time, an opportunity for a complete outsider to upset the political order and move into the White House.

Much has been written about Donald Trump, but not enough of it, it seems to me, from a generational perspective--largely because the nation's editors don't want to recognize a fellow Boomer.  He (like George W. Bush before him, as I pointed out in one of my very first posts on this blog) is in key ways an archetypal Boomer, very reminiscent of the violent student radicals who first brought Boomers to the nation's attention in the late 1960s.  Like most of us, he owed his comfortable childhood to the successes of our parents' generation and specifically to his own father.  Like the protesters, he showed from the beginning of his career a complete contempt for established principles and ways of behaving.  Confronted by any opposition, he simply shouted it down, and he would never, under any circumstances, admit that he was wrong.  He turned himself and his name--not his buildings--into his product.  And he made a career of saying outrageous things--a key tactic of the student protesters who violated every language taboo as a means of disrupting society.  He started his presidential campaign in 2015 in exactly that way, and within less than a year he had wiped out the entire Republican establishment.  Using the same tactics in the general election, he won a narrow victory over Hillary Clinton, who like Kamala Harris embodied one of the principles of the new Democratic party: that gender and race were in themselves critical qualifications for high office, because women and minorities had earned high office to make up for centuries of oppression.

Trump in office repudiated three key tenets of status quo politicians: that immigration was good, that free trade benefited the US, and that we had a right and a duty to affect all critical conflicts overseas and to spread democracy.  None of those stances, as far as I can see, cost him any popularity among average Americans.  Because he was an outsider, he somehow grasped what no establishment figure ever has:  that much of our population no longer accepted much of what the establishment believed.  And he would almost surely have been re-elected in 2020, I think, had it not been for the third great crisis of the last 24 years, COVID.  The nation under his leadership took the critical step in combating that crisis, the development of an effective vaccine, but we were now so divided that the experience of the pandemic only made our divisions worse. Despite COVID, Trump very nearly did win re-election. When he lost, he violated yet another taboo, trying to subvert the electoral process and provoking an insurrection that led rioters inside the Capitol.

The election returned the Democratic establishment under Joe Biden--who had repeatedly failed to emerge as a national leader in his own right before becoming Vice President--to power.  The establishment now assumed that Trump had discredited himself among the voters by violating establishment taboos, and that they could safely ignore him.  When it began to be clear that he remained a threat, they turned to the criminal justice system to try to eliminate it.  Trump however had used his four years in office to pack the federal courts and the Supreme Court. Lower court judges have stalled or even tried to halt prosecutions against him, and the Supreme Court has now endorsed Richard Nixon's theory of the presidency--that presidents cannot, by definition, break the law in the execution of their duties.  A large portion of the population--at least 50 percent, as it turns out--views those prosecutions as politically motivated and unfair--and there is, I think, more than a grain of truth in those accusations, particularly as regards the New York state trial that convicted him.

Trump did threaten American democracy in November, December and January 2020-21, but the threat failed.  He had plans to threaten it again this year, but it turns out that he did not have to.  He has won a convincing victory fair and square, both for himself and for the Republicans in the Senate and in Congress.   And despite the loud wails of progressive op-ed columnists that have already begun, he did not win based on racism and sexism.  He won because, yet again, an administration had proven deaf to the needs of hundreds of millions of Americans--in this case, the need to combat inflation effectively--and had tried to insist that as responsible adults they had no alternative but to vote for Kamala Harris. Instead, 51 percent of them--including larger numbers of Hispanics and black Americans--voted for Trump, and large numbers stayed at home instead of voting for Harris.  To understand that vote we must put the question of threats to democracy into historical context.  Both Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt were accused of such threats, and of actually becoming dictators, at least as loudly and widely as Trump has been.  It is the nature of fourth turnings, when everything is up for grabs, for presidents to need, and use, emergency powers--something for which the Constitution even provides.  Their opposition always reacts violently.  People like myself endorse what Lincoln did and attack Trump because of their objectives.  But we are less than half of the electorate now.  Ironically, a New York Times headline this morning explains the result thusly: "Democracy Fears Lost Out to Everyday Worries."  The headline is wrong.  The CNN exit polls found that 35 percent of respondents thought democracy is "somewhat threatened" and 38 percent pronounced it "very threatened."  But they also found that of that 73  percent of the electorate, 37 percent--half--voted for Trump!  They hate our establishment for treating Trump, who has expressed many of their resentments as no one else could, as a threat that must be stopped by any means necessary.  In that very real sense, Tuesday's election was a victory for democracy--the rule of the people.

Trump is now, without question, the most significant American political figure of the twenty-first century.  He has reshaped American politics and will indeed reshape American government.  As much as anything else, he, with his Republican acolytes, want to go back 140 years and undo the first major reform of the post-civil war era, the creation of an independent federal civil service selected on merit and protected from political pressure.  He wants to further reshape our economy with new tariffs, and he wants to deport at least ten million immigrants whom our economy really needs.  He will also lift or avoid any new regulation of financial markets, including the new crypto market--steps that will surely lead at some point to yet another crash.  He has both a whole plan and a team-in-waiting to execute plans that may well change the federal government beyond recognition.  Elon Musk's emergence as a critical supporter and collaborator is tremendously significant--it unites Trump with one of the most powerful Silicon Valley disrupters and the newest, fastest-growing sectors of the economy. And as to what he will do in foreign policy, and what consequences it might have, I do not dare speculate.  His first challenge will be Benjamin Netanyahu's explicit desire--stated clearly months ago before Congress--to get the United States to join in a war with Iran.  That may turn out to be a hard sell, because Trump is a sincere isolationist and very risk-averse. Only time will tell.

It will have occurred to many readers that one question remains.  How has Trump, who has a very tenuous grip on reality, cannot absorb real information, and relies on intimidation to get himself through every situation he faces, won the allegiance of the American people?  Why has he not paid a penalty for his complete absence of self-restraint, both personal and political?  I have two answers.  First--trite though it may sound--there is a little bit of Donald Trump in all of us--as Sigmund Freud, among others, certainly understood.  All of us have chafed to some extent under traditional emotional and legal restraints and at some level have dreamt of denouncing them and letting ourselves go.  And indeed, that I think is why the media can't wait to headline Trump's latest outrage.  His rants are a new form of pornography--one apparently of which the public never tires.

More importantly, the loosening of those restraints--personally, culturally, intellectually, and politically--has been perhaps the biggest mission of the whole Boom generation since it reached young adulthood in the late 1960s.  Its first great political victory was the elimination of the military draft, that compelled young men to surrender two years of freedom--and perhaps their lives--for the common good.  They liberated the arts from restrictions on subject matter and language, and tore down successive strictures against various forms of sexual behavior.  They cut taxes and continued ending economic regulations.  They have legalized various forms of gambling.  They destroyed the respect for facts and traditions in my own profession of academia, with fateful consequences.  And under Bush II, they arrogated to the United States to undertake any war anywhere in the world that served its idea of a greater good.  Too many Boomers in too many fields have not allowed anything to stand in the way of what they wanted.  Seventy years ago, a giant of an earlier generation whom I had the great good fortune to meet, Edward R. Murrow, concluded his broadcast on the evils of another demagogue, Joe McCarthy, with a chilling quote from Shakespeare: "The fault, dear Brutus, was not in our stars, but in ourselves."  So it is again.  What my generation has done was only human.  The self-restraint which, as the Founders realized, was essential to make the American experiment work, had weighed upon too many generations for too long.  It could not, human nature being what it is, endure indefinitely, and it didn't.  It had indeed gone too far in some ways, and humanity has benefited from loosening some of those restraints.  Now it will fall to future generations to re-establish some of those restraints and enable us to live together and solve new problems in the large, cooperative communities which their vast numbers now need to survive.

On the eve

 I am not going to predict the outcome of Tuesday's election, despite a temptation to do so.  I have relied throughout the campaign on Nate Silver's analysis on his substack.  His model shows tiny gains on Harris's part over the last few days, but Trump still has a marginally higher percentage chance of winning--a gap that is really irrelevant since we are having this election only once, not at least 100 times.  A coin flip, in effect, will determine the winner.  At the same time, Silver's simulations find a good possibility that whoever wins may do so by a comfortable margin in the electoral college, because most of the seven swing states may well go the same way.  That would be blessing.  We are now in the position of a combat soldier facing two more months of a hazardous tour of duty or a patient awaiting the results of a biopsy or CT-scan that will determine whether they have a fatal disease.  Those situations, like this one, are so anxious that those involved would honestly prefer any outcome--even the worst one--to the continuation of their uncertainty.  I feel that way about the election, and it would be easy to write a few paragraphs on the probable sources or consequences of either a Trump or Harris victory to pretend that it didn't exist--but it does, and I am determined to live with it for about three more days, and maybe more.

The current New Yorker, however, includes a fascinating article by Nicholas Lemann on what the Biden economic policies are actually accomplishing, and how little political difference they have made.  I must have begun reading Lehmann in the late 1970s and I am now shocked to discover that he had only just graduated from college at that time, and that he is actually seven years younger than I am.  He has always been interested in the lives of ordinary people.  He runs down the major pieces of legislation that passed during Biden's first two years, and he argues (most debatably in my opinion) that they may have been more significant than what Lyndon Johnson managed to do.  He focuses on the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better Act, eventually passed as the disastrously renamed Inflation Reduction Act after Joe Manchin rejected it in its original form.  Those acts are reshaping parts of the American landscape with transportation improvements and new factories to build microchips, electric cars, and clean energy technology.  Politically, however, they seem to have had no impact whatever, partly because Kamala Harris never talks about them.  Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has been the administration's point man traveling the country to inaugurate new projects, but the media, as far as I can see, ignores him.  This, as Lemann mentions at one point, contrasts with FDR, whose measures had an immediate impact, and who spent a lot of time traveling the country to speak at the dams and bridges and other projects.  That is why the Democrats increased their Senate and House majorities in both 1934 and 1936.   

It does seem that great things nowadays take a lot longer to accomplish than they did in the middle third of the twentieth century--if they can be accomplished at all.  Compare the interstate highway system to the California high-speed rail project, for instance.  The marketing failure, however, is another matter Joe Biden spent 36 years in one of the safest Senate seats in the country, working behind the scenes.  He failed in two attempts to market himself to the American people as a presidential candidate before becoming vice president.  More importantly, successive Democratic presidents from Clinton onward have spent their political capital on one or two pieces of legislation during their first two years--usually getting one of them, in Biden's case getting three--only to lose the House of Representatives in the midterms, and with that, any chance of doing anything further.   Obama got Obamacare, but it took another three years to roll it out, and the roll-out was a public relations disaster.  Biden in his first few years did nothing about the issue the voters cared about most--inflation.  Rather than focus on their actual accomplishments, Biden and then Harris made Donald Trump the biggest issue in the campaign, continually repeating that his election was an entirely unacceptable outcome--even though half the country obviously disagrees.  Harris has emphasized this even more in the last few days of the campaign, while promising, like Clinton, Obama and Biden before her, to help the middle class.

Two things, it seems to me, are hurting the Democratic establishment in our era.  The first is the sense that their policy proposals are so obviously right that they don't have to explain them to the nation.  That was how they handled NAFTA and other trade agreements, and Obama's finance-friendly, "top-down" approach to recovery from the Great Recession.   The second is the rise of Trump, which has convinced them that not being Trump should secure their victory.  That strategy failed in 2016, barely succeeded in 2020, and has a 50-50 chance of succeeding now.  Balancing that, perhaps, are the Dobbs decision and new red state abortion laws, which have given the Democrats what looks like a winning social issue.  

Nearly half a century of neoliberalism has left much of our population in a precarious economic state.  I have been struck by the complete failure of the government to even try to affect inflation--quite a contrast to our last bout with inflation in the late 1960s and all through the next decade, when Nixon may have saved his presidency by imposing wage and price controls.  Lemann shows that Biden did take some long-term steps to improve the lot of ordinary Americans in the heartland--but those steps had to be highlighted and sold.  The administration preferred to fill its favorite newspapers with headlines about Donald Trump's legal problems, which have not captured the country's admiration.

Portrait of our intellectual elite in the midst of crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

More on States of the Union

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

How a new elite thinks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you, General Mattis

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

Sunday, November 03, 2019

The Impeachment Debate--a Barometer

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

I decided to participate in question time.

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

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

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

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

Update

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

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

The crippled United States government

 Regardless of who wins the election, politics will continue to divide the United States into two nations defined by their hostility to one another.  The Democrats are very likely to win back the House of Representatives, while it will take a miracle--a Democratic victory in Montana, Texas, Florida, or Nebraska--for them to stop the Republicans from taking control of the Senate if Harris wins, and a double miracle if she loses.   In either case the filibuster rule in the Senate will kill the chances for any piece of legislation.  Trump's career as a presidential candidate will probably end if he loses--the more likely outcome at this point, but only to a very marginal extent--but Trumpism will still rule the Republican Party and J. D. Vance will be the heir apparent.  The situation has already wrecked our international position.

We would need a re-evaluation of our foreign policy even if one party really enjoyed a consensus.  Men and women like Anthony Blinken have had their entire careers in the post-Cold War era, and Joe Biden's career was less than half over when Communism collapsed..  As major addresses by every president confirm, the US foreign policy establishment in that era has assumed that everything it wants must occur.  Catastrophic outcomes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and the rise of a hostile China and Russia have done nothing to shake that view.  That perhaps is why Biden committed himself to supporting Ukraine while repeatedly delaying or refusing to provide weapons and tactics that would give Ukraine a better chance of winning, and why he has ruled out US intervention from the beginning.  He is accustomed to the idea that the word of the United States is law, and now, it isn't.

Nowhere does this problem loom so large as in the Middle East.   For nearly an entire year, the Biden administration has pretended that the Israeli government can be persuaded to see the current war the way the United States government sees it.  Yes, Israel had every right to retaliate for the October 7 attacks, but the US government still proclaims that the region needs a two-state solution, which in my opinion none of the parties want now.  Almost two weeks ago, an Israeli peace activist named Hagai El-Ad published an op-ed in the New York Times  arguing that the Israeli government is pursuing the long-term goal of driving every Palestinian out of both Gaza and the West Bank.  If that is true--and I think that the evidence indicates that it is--the United States government would have to impose significant restraints upon Israel to make peace in the Middle East possible.  (I am not suggesting that the Israeli government is the only or even the bigger obstacle to peace--I have written before that I do not believe that Hamas or Hezbollah wants peace either--but it is one obstacle.)  The US government did that under Eisenhower in 1957, when he insisted that Israel withdraw from the Sinai peninsula; under Nixon and Kissinger in 1973-4, when it forced the Israeli government to accept a cease-fire and begin disengagement talks with Egypt and Syria; and Ronald Reagan successfully pressured Menachem Begin to cut back military operations in Lebanon in 1982.  Biden has made his opposition to much of what Israel is doing clear during the last year, but he has never taken effective action to stop it.  Why  not?

Part of the reason is American politics.  Nearly twenty years ago the power of AIPAC over American elected officials of both parties became a subject of public controversy in the US, but it has faded from view even though AIPAC is more powerful than ever, using its influence and money to mount primary challenges against any Democrat who opposes Israeli government policy, such as Andy Levin of Michigan.  That influence is further magnified by the impending election, which Democrats feel they must not lose, and the closeness of the race, in which the marginally most likely scenario sees Harris winning 270-268 in the electoral college. The same political split delayed help to Ukraine for several months.  If Trump does return to the White House, the US government will probably renounce its world role altogether.

And as in the case of immigration, foreign policy is an area in which Trump has benefited from facing both political and actual reality.   I showed in States of the Union how carefully presidents from Truman through Reagan built up and sustained the Cold War consensus--which they did not interpret to mean that the US government had the power to decide any conflict on earth, or spread democracy everywhere.  That consensus has fallen apart among the public as it has failed to deliver results in one crisis after another.  We have not spent one-tenth of the time analyzing our failures in the Middle East since 9/11 that we spent re-evaluating Vietnam, but the more recent catastrophe is surely more significant than that first one turned out to have been.  The public knows what Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Rodham Clinton refuse to admit, that the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya were total failures.  That is why Trump's open repudiation of the post-1945 consensus has not cost him very many votes.  

In both foreign and domestic policy, the Democratic elite remains utterly convinced of its own righteousness and the evil of the other side.  That characterization denies a lot of Democratic responsibility for our economic and other ills, and the public knows it.  And that is a big reason that Kamala Harris's best-case outcome is a very narrow victory indeed, probably without control of the Congress.

An Historical Masterpiece

 Perhaps a month ago I came across a reference to a book about the writing of the Constitution, The Framer's Coup, by one Michael Klarman.  (More on him much later.)  It took a couple of weeks to get the book, published in 2016 by the Oxford University Press, from the local library system.  It includes 631 pages of text and 181 pages of endnotes.  It is probably the single best work of American history published in the 21st century, and its appearance received almost no notice in the national press.

Klarman, now in his mid-sixties, was not trained as an historian, and apparently learned the historian's craft by reading books similar to his own.  As he explains in his introduction, he decided to tell the story of the creation of the constitution in the founders' own words, and that is exactly what he did.  He freely lets his admiration for many of the key players shine through, and he provides lengthy biographical footnotes about some of the lesser-known ones.  Some of his conclusions in my opinion bow to contemporary trends in history, but those trends have militated against even attempting books of this nature, and he paid no attention to that.  Few historical cohorts have been studied or published about more thoroughly than the founders, of course, and he used a large team of skilled research assistants to find what they thought about what they were doing.  That is the way real history needs to be written, and I will try to summarize what I learned from this book.

The writing of the constitution was not an intellectual exercise designed to enshrine particular political principles, but rather an attempt to design new governmental institutions that could save the experiment of the United States from complete collapse.  The government established by the Articles of Confederation, which had almost no executive or judiciary, had failed to govern, with disastrous consequences at home and internationally.  Finance was the biggest problem.  Both the states and the central government emerged from the revolution with enormous debts, and the national government had no taxing power to raise the money to pay its own.  It had to beg the individual states for money, and the states, with their own problems, frequently refused to provide it.  Some of the states had begun to pay their debts in paper money that they printed, which had rapidly depreciated, driving gold and silver out of circulation.  That violated provisions of the peace treaty of 1783 with the British, and was losing all respect for the US from the European powers.  The British had refused to withdraw from forts on the US western frontier in retaliation, cutting off Americans from the lucrative fur trade.  

That was not all.  Having lost most of its trade with the British empire after independence, the new nation needed to conclude commercial treaties with other nations, but the Confederation required unanimous consent among the states to ratify any treaties, and differing interests meant that that was never forthcoming.  In the last years of the Confederation John Jay, acting as Secretary of State, caused a crisis by suggesting that the US might give up navigation rights on the Mississippi as part of a commercial treaty with Spain.  States were imposing tariffs on each other to raise their own revenue.  And last, but hardly least, public order was beginning to break down.  Trying to raise the money it needed, the Massachusetts legislature in 1786 had imposed several new taxes which farmers claimed that they could not pay.  Five western Massachusetts counties began Shay's rebellion, refusing to pay taxes and forcing the courts to adjourn rather than foreclose on indebted farms.  Rebels eventually formed military units and tried to seize the Springfield arsenal.  They were defeated, but the annual elections of 1787 produced a new legislature that gave the rioters much of what they wanted.  The leaders of the earlier revolution--Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, John Adams, and others--discussed these events in correspondence and agreed that they demanded changes in the government.  Led by Madison, they persuaded most of the states to send delegates to Philadelphia for the constitutional convention.

I came away from Klarman's book focused on one particular explanation of how the constitution turned out as it did.  The key players believed that the nation needed a much stronger central government to survive--a government with full taxing powers, the power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, the power to coin money and define legal tender, and the capacity to negotiate and ratify treaties that the states and the population would have to observe.  In my opinion, they had correctly identified the key features of a state that could survive against both foreign and domestic threats.  They could only secure these provisions, however, by satisfying delegates who either feared that any strong central authority would become a tyranny, or worried that that new authority would benefit other parts of the country at the expense of their own.  Since for example southerners opposed tariffs because they thought they would hurt their agricultural exports while northerners wanted them to protect nascent industry and raise necessary money, it was impossible to please everyone.  The federalists (as they were already properly called well before their political party was formed)  got what they wanted above all by agreeing, after by far the longest and bitterest debates of the convention, to equal representation for large states and small in the Senate.  That critical concession, as we shall see, not only saved the convention itself, but also got the ratification process off to an excellent start, when several small states immediately approved the new document.  In my opinion, the leading federalists kept their focus where it needed to be: on the establishment of a strong central government for its own sake, as the sine qua non of the survival of the new nation.  They also had strong views about economic questions, about the desired extent of true democracy, and in some cases, about slavery, but only the economic questions, it seems to me, could really be compared in importance to the fundamental political ones that had led them to Philadelphia in the first place.

With respect to those economic questions, Klarman, I think, substantially vindicates the great 20th-century historian Charles A. Beard, who shocked the nation during the Progressive Era with his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution.  In a key provision, Article I Section 10, the Constitution prohibited states from coining money, making anything but gold and silver legal tender for debts, or passing any law impairing the obligation of contracts, that is, arbitrarily reducing or eliminating debts. As Klarman notes, critics in the 1950s essentially refuted Beard's implied claim that the founders were trying above all to help themselves, since many of them held government securities which were only redeemed at face value thanks to the Constitution and the policies that Alexander Hamilton implemented under it.  But Klarman's book makes it very clear, it seems to me, that Article I Section 10 and other provisions were indeed designed to allow our already-capitalist economy to function, which inevitably meant, as Thomas Piketty demonstrated a decade ago, that it would tend to increase the wealth of the already wealthy.  Klarman does not ask whether the inflationary policies of some of the state governments could have worked in the long run--a question that goes far beyond the history he was trying to write--but he makes clear that many antifederalists continued to favor them and that their opposition had to be overcome to secure ratification, as it quite narrowly was.  The antifederalist argument in favor of inflation as opposed to "sound money" came up again more than a century later when agrarian interests called for "free silver," another inflationary strategy that doomed the Democratic Party to minority status when William Jennings Bryan ran on it in 1896.  Franklin Roosevelt did pursue different inflationary policies to battle the Depression, however, and the nation tolerated some inflation from the late 1940s through the 1970s, after which the Federal Reserve adopted draconian measures to stop it.  That, however, is another story.  Beard was right: key provisions of the Constitution favored dominant economic interests.  That may have been necessary, however, to create a functioning economy at all.

Klarman also demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt that most of the key players had relatively little trust in the mass of the people and inserted many provisions that were designed to control their influence.  The states were routinely re-electing their governments every year, but the convention, after long arguments, settled on two-year terms for the House, six for the Senate, and four for the President.  They rejected forced rotation in office, which many states and the Confederacy had practiced.  A proposal to elect the president by direct popular vote lost by a vote of nine to one, and they created the electoral college.  Yet partly because so many citizens favored more democracy, many key issues remained unsettled and subject to decision by the voters themselves.  Many delegates favored property qualifications for voters and/or office holders, but since these varied so widely from state to state, the final text leaves the qualifications for voting for the House of Representatives up to the states. As a result, universal male suffrage became the default within a few decades.  (Klarman does not mention, I think, one of my favorite points: that there is still nothing in the Constitution to prevent property qualifications for voting, should a state decide to impose them.)    Nothing prevented state legislatures from turning the choice of presidential electors over to the voters either, and by 1860 every one of them but South Carolina had done so.  Delegates who did not want salaries for senators to ensure that they would be well-off men lost that battle, as well.  The framers may have distrusted the common people but the document that they wrote did not freeze them out from political influence for very long.

Not surprisingly in a book written in the 21st century, The Framer's Coup devotes a whole chapter to the issue of slavery.  Once again the author delivers the facts so thoroughly and clearly as to allow the reader to draw slightly different conclusions than he, which I did.

The whole revisionist onslaught portraying the United States as irretrievably racist from 1609 until the present depends upon denying reality in several periods of American history, including the 1780s.  The delegates and their constituents obviously held at least three very different opinions about that institution.  The northern states were in the midst of abolishing it--some of them gradually--and some of them regarded it as an unqualified evil that the Constitution must in no way endorse.  Slaveowners in the Carolinas and Georgia, on the other hand, were determined to protect this cornerstone of their economy to the maximum extent possible.  And in the upper south and mid-Atlantic, many, including prominent slaveowners such as Washington and Jefferson, regarded it as a regrettable evil which they hoped and believed would disappear with the passage of time.  In addition, even some of those who defended slavery had come to regard the shipment of new slaves from Africa as barbarous.  

Given these views, it is not surprising that the Constitution provided the Congress with the power to outlaw the importation of slaves--but only after 20 years had passed after the ratification of the Constitution.  Jefferson had the honor of recommending the outlaw of the trade to Congress and signing a measure that did just that, after a long debate, in 1808.  Only the spread of the cotton gin and the admission of Deep South states into the union, along with the growth of a new generation, turned many southern leaders into heated advocates for slavery and paved the way for the controversies that led eventually to the Civil War.

The infamous three-fifths clause, which allowed the slave states to count 3/5 of their slaves as part of their population when congressional seats were apportioned and direct taxes levied, was not, as so often claimed, an attempt to define black people as inferior beings.  The southern states wanted to count them all to increase their representation, and some northern delegates wanted to count only free persons.  Klarman shows that this debate was closely connected to another southern demand: that commercial legislation require a supermajority of perhaps two-thirds in Congress to pass, allowed the southern states to veto any unwelcome measures as they had under the Confederation.  They lost that battle but got the 3/5 clause.  The Constitution did require states to return "persons held to service or labor" to the states where their masters lived--a provision that applied to apprentices and indentured servants as well as slaves.  In addition, the federal power to suppress insurrections could apply to slave insurrections--but on p. 164 Klarman, scrupulous scholar that he is, tells us that no one ever brought up that possibility in Philadelphia, focusing instead on uprisings like Shays's Rebellion.

Two other facts, both brought out Klarman, cast significant light on the founders' view of slavery and its relation to the constitution.  First, while the delegates were sitting in Philadelphia, the Confederation Congress, sitting in New York, passed the Northwest Ordinance, banning slavery in all the unorganized territory north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi.  In addition, when the first Congress met under the Constitution, it passed that ordinance over again, leaving no doubt that the founders recognized a federal right to ban slavery from specified territories.  And secondly--and here is one point where I would have appreciated more elaboration--the northerners steadily and successfully resisted any attempt to get a specific endorsement of the institution of slavery into the Constitution, or even to refer to it by name.  That is why they resorted to circumlocutions--"persons held to service or labor" or "three-fifths of all other persons"--in provisions relating to it.  All this left slavery in the same position that it had already occupied in the British Empire:  legal only where local law and custom allowed it, as in the West Indies.   Despite their reservations about the political capacity of the common man, the framers did not want the word slave in their new charter of liberty.  Indeed, the original Constitution contains no racist or sexist language at all.  The recent biopic of Ruth Bader Ginsburg shows a Supreme Court justice pointing out to her, while arguing a case before the court, that "The word woman does not appear in the Constitution."  "Neither does the word freedom!" she replied, as if to discredit the founding document.  It would have been more telling, it seems to me, for the character as portrayed to reply accurately, "Neither does the word man!"  "Person" was invariably the word the Constitution used to refer to the citizens of the United States--a fittingly universal word if ever there was one.

And here is where I feel a difference of emphasis with Klarman.  "Finally," he writes in his last pages, "the Framers held certain values that are abhorrent to most Americans today.  Most of them accepted that human beings could be held as property, and they believed that African Americans and Native Americans were inferior in various ways to Caucasians.  None of them thought that women should enjoy full political or civil rights.  Most of them doubted that poor people should be permitted to vote or hold political office."  All of that is true, but I still want to credit them for not writing any of those beliefs into the document that they gave us and using universal language that others almost immediately began using to demand rights for the groups that did not yet enjoy them.  And one by one, from poor people to slaves to women, those groups secured them.

Klarman's account of the ratification process is very enlightening.  The Constitution itself prescribed that it be ratified by state conventions, not state legislatures, who were most unlikely to agree to a document that deprived them of so much power and influence.  I don't think he raises the argument--critical in my view--that this also deprived the southern states of the right of secession in 1860-1.  Their people had willingly transferred ultimate sovereignty from their state governments to the new federal one.  The ratification battle was long and difficult, and the final votes in the three largest states--Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts--were very close.  They all decided to ratify, partly because the countryside was underrepresented in the selection of delegates.  Indeed, the ratification process, like the debates over paper money, revealed the split between town and country that has played such a big role in different periods of US history, including our own.  “One can generalize to a certain extent about which sorts of people supported and opposed ratification," Klarman writes (p. 395). "City dwellers, across class lines, overwhelmingly endorsed the Constitution, while backwoodsmen largely opposed it. Small farmers whose land was encumbered with debt were vastly more likely to oppose ratification than were lawyers and merchants, and their objections were frequently stated in class-conscious terms. Westerners were substantially more likely to oppose ratification than were easterners, and northerners supported the Constitution more than southerners. Small states, as we shall see in chapter 6, produced very few Antifederalists relative to large states.”  Those who favored principle over local interest, those who wanted a sound capitalist economy, and those who favored what we now call globalization supported it.   A similar argument about the recent past, present and future is going on today.

Ever since the late sixties our political thought--especially in academia--has become more and more utopian.  Academics criticize every era, including our own, for falling so far short of the perfection that they can imagine.  The framers succeeded partly because they had no such illusions.  They had one overarching goal and knew they had to compromise to reach it.   They would not be surprised that it haws remained difficult to make it work.  

This is, once again, a great work of history--which, sadly, could no longer be written by a professional historian working in a history department.  I have explained here many times that political history of all kinds has fallen out of favor, and celebratory political history about the United States is almost universally condemned among professionals.  Klarman got an advanced history degree at Oxford, but then turned to law.  He has been a member of the Harvard Law School faculty for many years, and his research assistants were law students.  I thank him to trying, like myself, to keep a great tradition alive.  I was also shocked to find that The Framer's Coup did not rate a review in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Review of Books.  The brief review in the American Historical Review confined itself to Klarman's observations on the undemocratic beliefs of the founders.  He deserved better.

As long as governments are run by human beings, no document will ever guarantee us against the abuse of power.  Often the opponents of the Constitution identified dangers that have become all too real.  They successfully called for a Bill of Rights after ratification, and Madison, who had initially opposed one, agreed to it.  Even the Bill of Rights, however, has not, as Jefferson predicted, stopped the government from violating the peoples' rights in contentious times.  A few people noted that the Supreme Court's power to hear cases under the Constitution might make it the most powerful institution of all, and at one time or another Americans on all sides of the political spectrum have deeply resented that power--not least in 2024.  They feared that the president's powers over foreign affairs and the military might make him a dictator.  The framers, I believe, accepted these risks because they thought that the nation had to have a strong central government.  I believe they were correct.  As my last book tries to make clear, their new government accomplished extraordinary things over the next 225 years, and nothing they did prevents us from continuing down that path if we find the will to do so.

Note to readers

    New posts have been delayed while I am reading a long, detailed, and remarkable relatiovely new work of history.  This will lead to a long post, maybe more than one, which should appear later this week. Stay tuned!

           

Some thoughts about the election

 One might argue that I should wait until after Tuesday's debate to post these thoughts, but I am going to go ahead now.  Things could happen in the debate that would change the race, but the vast majority of voters are so entrenched that they may very well not.  Meanwhile, thanks to Nate Silver, whose forecasts I check every day, I have some thoughts that I want to share.

Since August 23, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the race, Trump's chances of winning have been steadily increasing.  He passed Harris (who had leapt over Trump almost as soon as Biden dropped out) on about August 28, his rate of growth has increased this month, and Silver now gives him a 61.5 percent chance of winning the electoral college.  That does not mean, of course, that he's going to win 61.5 percent of the popular or electoral votes, and it hardly guarantees him victory.  Any gambler will tell you that 38.5 percent chances happen all the time.  But it means that if you wanted to bet on the outcome of the election today you would be better advised to bet on Trump, and that it's Harris who has to gain ground now.

The second thing that jumps out from Silver's figures is that this will be one of the very closest elections in the electoral college in our history.  Leaving out the disputed 1876 election, the closest was 2000, when George W. Bush won 271 electoral votes to Al Gore's 267 (one of whom abstained in the actual voting.)  Not only Florida, but also New Hampshire would have swung the election to Gore that year.  Silver now estimates that Trump is likely to win 278 electoral votes to 260 for Harris.  And his projections for three critical swing states--Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania--are almost exactly 50 percent.

And thirdly, it's highly possible that we may repeat the experience of 2000 and 2016, when the Republican candidate lost the popular vote but prevailed in the electoral college.  That will happen in Silver's most likely scenario right now, and he finds that Harris has to win the popular vote by more than 2 percent to have a better than even chance of winning in the electoral college.  That leads me to my first point.

If in fact Harris wins the popular vote but loses the election, Democrats will denounce the outcome as illegitimate.  Because the Republicans have already won twice despite losing the popular vote, leftist Americans now reject the electoral college as undemocratic.  I too would favor replacing it with a two-round popular vote requiring a majority to be elected and eliminating all but two candidates in the second round, as in France, but I would like to push back against the idea that our electoral map gives the Republicans an advantage that they would not otherwise have.  We actually have no idea who would win presidential elections decided by the popular vote, because under that very new rule, the campaigns would be entirely different.  Today the voters in all but about seven states know that their individual vote is essentially meaningless, because one candidate or the other will surely win their state overwhelmingly.   The parties, who know that, don't bother to campaign or run ads in the vast majority of states either.  Perhaps the strongest argument for changing to a popular vote system is that all our votes would suddenly count.  That, it seems to me, would encourage, or even compel, candidates to compete for a much broader spectrum of voters.  It could easily increase the turnout of Texas Democrats and California Republicans in presidential elections.  It would certainly once again force candidates to campaign all over the country.  But we do not know how it would affect the balance between Democratic and Republican votes, and we shouldn't pretend that we do.  And on the debit side, in our current climate, the problem of controversies over voter fraud would get even worse.  Voter fraud could be a hot issue in every state of the union, instead of only in the handful of states that are genuinely in play.  

Because Democrats regard a Trump victory as illegitimate on its face--not because of voter fraud or complaints about voter fraud, but because they reject everything Trump stands for--they have been desperate since 2016 to find some reason that would invalidate it.  I agree that a victory would be catastrophic, but I am trying to be realistic about how it might come about.  The six key swing states--Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania--are an interesting mix.  The first three are sun belt states with increasing populations, while the last three are declining Rust Belt states. Many voters in the first three, one might hypothesize, don't feel they need a Democrat in the White House, and it is well documented that many voters in the last three don't think Democrats in the White House have done them any good.  Many in all of them reject a lot of the cultural positions that Democrats increasingly take. That, I would argue, is why Harris at this moment is in grave danger of losing the election.

If she wins the status quo will continue.  The Democrats are likely to emerge from the election without at least one house of Congress in their hands, and that will make passing any significant legislation impossible. They will not be able to codify Roe v. Wade in federal law--although I am hopeful that the democratic process will secure abortion rights in most of the states of the next few years, which would be a very good outcome.  Harris is rapidly emerging as a neoliberal in the Clinton-Obama mode, which means that inequality will continue to grow.  Her foreign policy is therefore likely to remain conventional as well--even as the American public becomes less and less interested in its world role.  Harris is not the problem, but it's unlikely that she will be the solution.  I'm voting for  her.

The Trump Campaign

 When you watch Donald Trump at one of his rallies these days, you see that his heart is no longer in it.  He looks old, tired, and eager to be somewhere else.  Two days ago, an interesting op-ed in the New York Times gave me a possible explanation for this.

The author of the piece, Juleanna Glover, a mid-wave Gen Xer, is described by her Wikipedia entry as "an American corporate public affairs consultant, tnrepreneur, former Republican lobbyist and political strategist."  She now runs an agency that advises leading Silicon Valley companies.  She has looked into the accounting, such as it is, for contriobutions to Trump's campaigns in 2020 and again this year.  Of the $780 milion that the Trump campaign spent in 2020, she reports, nearly $516 million was spent by a freshly created company, American Media Consultants, which has never provided an itemized accounting of what happened to the money.  Trump's daughter-in-law Lara Trump was reported to be the first president of the company, and Jared Kushner and a deputy of Lara's husband Eric helped set it up and run it.  Last March, the AP reported that Trump had made a fundraising agreement with the Republican National Committee that diverted contributions to the Save America PAC, which has been paying Trump's legal bills, then estimated at $76 million over the last two years.  Another private company, Red Curve Solutions, has apparently received $18 million that it used to pay Trump's legal bills.  So far, a deadlocked Federal Election Commission has failed to investigate any of this. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign's advertising spending seems to be lagging way behind his opponent's.

It seems to me quite possible that Trump does not really care very much about becoming president again, and that he undertook this campaign mainly to keep campaign contributions coming in, much of which are apparently being diverted to other purposes.  Ironically, the legal cases against him, which some undoubtedly hoped would drive him out of the race, may have influenced him to go on with it.  (To be fair, Glover also reports that the Biden campaign spent a much smaller amount on Biden's legal bills relating to the discovery of classified documents in his home.)  It is sad that this story had to be broken by an op-ed writer rather than a team of reporters at the Times or any other major newspaper, but now the door is open.  I hope more reporters will walk through it.

The Fast Moving Election

 The Democratic Party was on death ground in July after the disastrous presidential debate, and the party leadership rose to the occasion.  Led once again by Nancy Pelosi, they forced Joe Biden, who had a less than 30 percent chance of defeating Donald Trump according to Nate Silver, to withdraw.  Kamala Harris, as I think I made clear, was not my favorite candidate, but the party instantly coalesced around her and she has risen to the occasion.  Her delivery of her acceptance speech was oustanding, and as Nate Silver (of whom more later) has pointed out, she almost entirely omitted gender or race from her presentation and said nothing about sexual orientation or gender identity.   I personally see a certain appropriateness to her nomination.   Indian-Americans are now the most successful ethnic group in the United States per capita, and her Indian-American mother, she made clear, was by far the biggest influence on her young life, and taught her the lesson that earlier generations of immigrants took to heart: don't complain, just achieve.  I have noticed Indian-Americans popping up in all sorts of powerful positions in recent years and Kamala Harris is now the most distinguished of those.

The problem that she still faces, however, emerges from an op-ed in today's New York Times by James Pogue, based upon conversations that Pogue has been having with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut.  Since at least 2016 the Democrats have presented themselves as the party of the status quo threatened by Donald Trump and a Republican revolution.  The status quo has been very good to the professional classes that dominate the Democratic Party, but it has been much less good for ordinary Americans regardless of race, gender, and sexual orientation, and they know it.  Harris is now talking vaguely about recreating an "opportunity society," but that strikes me as another way to emphasize education as the road to advancement, even though education is getting worse, not better, while continuing to saddle young people with large debts.  Trump now seems to be self-destructing and becoming even shriller and more bitter, and it could be that the nation is sufficiently sick of that part of our policies to abandon him in significant numbers.  That, however, is not happening yet.

I now subscribe to Nate Silver's substack and get his daily election forecast.  Yesterday's forecast gives Harris only a very marginal edge--a 53.2 percent chance of winning the electoral college, compared to 46.6 percent for Trump.  That means that out of 100 simulations of the election based on all the data at Silver's command, Harris won 53--and that is only a tiny bit better than your chance of winning a coin flip.  Among battleground states, Trump has a more than 60 percent chance of winning Georgia and North Carolina--which, to repeat, doesn't mean he will win 60 percent of the votes there, and certainly doesn't rule out a Harris win in those states--while Harris has a better than 60 percent chance in Wisconsin and Michigan, despite her problems with Arab-American voters there.  Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania are virtual tossups, with Trump barely ahead in Arizona and Harris barely leading in the other two.  This projects overall to a 281-257 electoral vote majority for Harris, which would shift to 276-262 for Trump were he to win Pennsylvania, as he easily could.  That's why Silver still regrets the choice of Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro  All these figures could change a great deal ten or eleven weeks, but as it stands now, Trump certainly might still win, and any Harris victory would be close enough to set off another round of post-election disputes for which Trump supporters have been carefully preparing.

The Pogue article encouraged me because Chris Murphy, now only 51, sounds like he might turn out to be the younger successor to Bernie Sanders that we definitely need.  Apparently such Democratic skeptics can only be elected in very small states, which is one reason we are lucky to have some (and they are by no means all Republican, including Vermont, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Hampshire.)  Essentially he is recognizing the fundamental point that Thomas Piketty stressed a decade ago:  that under unregulated capitalism, capital grows faster than the economy as a whole, thereby making the rich richer while most of the rest of us stand still.  Harris knows that inflation and housing shortages are hurting ordinary Americans but is only putting forward vague, potentially palliative solutions to these problems.  We appear to lack both the intellectual and political requirements to build the several million new houses that we need in the way that we did after the Second World War, and we have trusted the Fed to control inflation since the mid-1970s.  Our current era, as many have noted, resembles the Gilded Age, and it took more than half a century for the values of the Gilded Age to give way to those of the New Deal. It could take that long again.  If Harris can defeate Trump, however, it may mean that our politics have at last hit bottom.