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.

1914 again

 Having decided to discuss the Middle East once again, I reviewed the two posts I made last October, only weeks after the Hamas attack on Israel triggered the war.   The first analyzed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather pessimistically, arguing that neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian leadership really wanted peace and a two-state solution in the long run, and suggesting that under the circumstances, they had a responsibility to try to keep the level of conflict as low as possible.  It occurs to me now that talk of a two-state solution has been designed to do that.  The Israelis have however continued to wage a remarkably destructive war that has left most of Gaza uninhabitable while hundreds of thousands of Gazans--if not more than a million--move their tents from one camp to another.  The Israeli government does not seem to want a cease fire, even though its military leadership recommends this.

Meanwhile, as a long New Yorker article by Dexter Filkins shows, a new low-level conflict between Hezbollah and Israel continues along the northern border.  Hezbollah immediately began firing rockets into Israel in solidarity with Hamas, and Israel immediately began striking back.  Tens of thousands of Israelis and Lebanese have had to abandon their homes along the border.  Everyone seems to agree that Hezbollah would stop this particular campaign in response to a cease-fire in Gaza, but its long-term threat would remain.  And they now, I think, have the capability to threaten the existence of Israel.  I do not mean that they could destroy Israel, but they apparently have so many sophisticated rockets that they could make large parts of Israel look the way Gaza looks today if they fired them all off.  Israel would in turn destroy much of Lebanon, but the damage Hamas could inflict, it seems to me, would decisively undermine the ideological foundation of the Jewish state: that it provides unique safety for the Jewish people.  So many Israelis, it seems to me, would decide that the Zionist experiment had failed and would emigrate to the West that the survival of the nation would be called into question. 

The underlying problem, as I wrote then, is the failure of much of the region to accept Israel's existence.  Here some history tells a very sad story.  About 40 years ago, a young Israeli diplomat named Nimrod Barkan explained some of the diplomacy of the early Jewish state.  Facing the unremitting hostility from the Arab states that surrounded it, Tel Aviv had cultivated relationships with the largest non-Arab states in the region:  Ethiopia, Iran, and Turkey.  The last two of those nations were also allies of the West.  Beginning in the 1970s, of course, Israel made peace first with Egypt and then with Jordan, and more recently it established diplomatic relations with some Gulf states.  Iran, however, went totally over to anti-Zionism after its Islamic revolution in 1979, and has become the patron of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.   Turkey has also become more Islamic and is now a declared foe of Israel.   And Iran has provided both with the missiles that have put the Israeli population under permanent threat and could in fact destroy a good deal of the country.

In my opinion, Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to the Congress left no doubt that he feels that Israel, with the help of the United States, should remove this threat through wars with Hamas (ongoing as we speak), Hezbollah (threatening to become total at any moment), and Iran itself.  Meanwhile he has made Gaza uninhabitable while Israeli settlers, often backed by the Israeli Army, continue to squeeze the Arab population of the West Bank into smaller and smaller territory.  And that brings me to the analogy I drew in the second post last October between the current situation and the European situation in 1914

My analogy, which disturbed some readers, cast Israel as the 21st-century counterpart of Austria-Hungary, a state of the second rank threatened by its neighbors and by internal conflict with ethnic minorities.  The Israeli situation is in some ways just as precarious, since the Arab and Israeli populations of the territory from the Jordan River to the sea are nearly equal, and Israel is split between left- and right-wing Israelis in the same way that Austria-Hungary was between Austrians and ethnic Hungarians.  Israel reacted to the Hamas attack the way Austria-Hungary decided to respond to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, by trying to crush the source of the attack.  It did so with the backing of the United States, just as Austria-Hungary did so with the backing of its ally Germany.  War broke out almost immediately in July-August 1914 because the Germans, for their own reasons, were more than willing to risk a European war.  The United States has tried unsuccessfully to get Israel to halt its war in Gaza because it fears a wider war involving both Hezbollah and Iran.  Israel is however continuing to provoke those nations with assassinations, and Netanyahu, to repeat, talked in Washington as if he would welcome general war.

Iran does not seem to want that war, all the less because it has a new president who reportedly wants better relations with the west.  Yet I am afraid that if the war does break out, the United States will come in on Israel's side.  A few years ago an excellent Frontline documentary showed that the United States and Iran were perilously close to a strike on Iran's nuclear capability during the Obama administration.  It seems that if full-scale war between Iran and Israel broke out, the United States would side with Israel and might well join in the fighting itself.

We should remember that the 1914 crisis was the last of a number of disputes between Austria-Hungary, backed by Germany, and Serbia, backed by Russia.  Crises over the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908-9 and over Serbian expansion in the Balkan Wars in 1912-13 did not result in war because cooler heads prevailed in all the major capitals.  They are not prevailing in Israel now, however, and things could change at any moment within Hezbollah and Iran.  The major powers, including Russia, seem to be trying to preserve the peace, but the danger of general regional war is very real, and that in turn could easily escalate into world war.

Academia and Journalism Again

 I've talked a lot about what has gone wrong both with academia and journalism in recent decades.  In recent weeks, I have run across two spectacular examples--one from each of those professions--that really make my point.  

About six weeks ago, Lawrence D. Bobo, a professor and dean of social sciences at Harvard, published a very controversial op-ed in the Harvard Crimson, arguing for limits on criticism of university adminsitrators (like Lawrence D. Bobo) by faculty and staff.  I had some sympathy for his position--I agree that it is better not to have intra-university fights in public--but like almost everyone else, I rebelled against the idea of formal limits on expression or punishments for violating them.  Bobo attacked some colleagues, including Larry Summers, for encouraging donors and politicians to intervene in university matters.  I on the other hand want to discuss some other very revealing parts of his op-ed. Here are four key paragraphs.

". . . .it is critically important that faculty play a role in educating students about the history and nature of social protest — its successes and failures, when it is ethical and when it is not. Boycotts, teach-ins, sit-ins, walk-outs, and marches are venerable tools for expressing grievances and pressuring institutions.

"Students should learn about the premises that guide and undergird non-violent direct action protests. They should learn about making strategic choices of targets and proper or allowable modes of engagement. They must also learn from the example of heroic figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman John Lewis to recognize and accept the fact that breaking the law is likely to involve consequences, including the risk of arrest.

"Modern student protest appears less and less likely to target major non-University events, businesses, or government bodies. Rather, they’re comfortably situated in the confines of college campuses, directing demands for change at university administrators and boards of directors.

"While this certainly draws in media attention, it is flawed. Targeting protest at those charged with a pastoral duty of care for their students and an indirect-at-best relation to the protesters’ core grievance considerably removes these efforts from the inarguably heroic actions of college students who burned draft cards in protest of the Vietnam War, registered black voters in Mississippi or Alabama, sat in at segregated lunch counters, or joined marches for women’s liberation and gay rights."

Born in 1958, Bobo was in elementary school during the great protests of the mid to late 1960s, but these remarks essentially try to institutionalize the spirit of that time.  Now of course, any political history of any era should include the history of mass protests, but Bobo evidently wants to make the technique of mass protests an essential part of college curriculums.  This clearly implies, first of all, that society suffers from profound injustice, and secondly, that we cannot rely upon established democratic processes to fix it.  It encourages the idea, so dear to 60s activists, that institutions are inevitably corrupt and that virtue only exists outside them among oppressed groups. 

Bobo does balance his deep belief in protest with an attempt to protect universities against it, but to do so, he ignores a lot of what happened in the late 1960s.  Not content to protest against the Vietnam War--more often than not, without burning their draft cards--students in those days turned against anything that smacked of war on campus, such as the ROTC program at Harvard, which was abolished for several decades beginning in 1969, a most unfortunate step.   Most importantly of all, he is endorsing the idea first stated in the SDS Port Huron statement of 1962, and recently repeated by historian and former Harvard president Drew Faust in her memoir:  that universities are the best place to begin sweeping social changes, and thus should be judged by their contribution to them.  That has given professors, particularly in the humanities, a license to structure their courses around their preferred political causes, rather than basing them on what has happened and what has been written in the past, or on preserving and extending the western tradition, which has become a target of intellectual and social change.  And those developments have completely alienated one whole political party from universities as they now exist, with increasingly significant consequences.  It is also largely responsible, in my opinion, for the eclipse of the humanities as major pillars of the college curriculum.  

And on the journalistic front, my new exhibit comes, almost inevitably, from the dean of US op-ed writers, Thomas Friedman, who has won three Pulitzer prizes over the last forty years.  Since at least 2002, as Friedman's official biography makes clear, he has explained to us at regular intervals how the world's problems--and especially the Middle East conflict--could be solved if everyone were as smart as he is.  He is still boasting of his advocacy of a broad Arab-Israeli peace deal in 2002, despite its failure ever to happen.  Early this week, he fantasized that Benjamin Netanyahu in his speech to a joint US session of Congress might adopt the Friedman program in toto, including an immediate cease fire deal in Gaza and an agreement with Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for "credible, good-faith negotiations [with the Palestinians] with the explicit goal of a two-state solution, with mutual security guarantees."  This would also pave the way, he wrote, for a broad alliance against Iran.  

Netanyahu gave his speech yesterday to rapturous appaluse from every Republican and a good many Democrats.  He spent so much time on the idea of the anti-Iran alliance that I wonder whether Friedman had some advance information about it.  But he said nothing whatever about a two-state solution.  He insisted that Israel must retain security control over Gaza when the war is over--that is, sovereignty; he declared that Jerusalem must never again be divided; and he said nothing at all about the West Bank, where settler terrorism and gradual ethnic cleansing have accelerated since October 7.  Friedman in his column repeated the myth that Netanyahu doesn't dare offer peace to the Palestinians because of the "crazy far-right members of his cabinet," rather than admit that Netanyahu isn't interested in any such deal himself.  Even before October 7, Netanyahu presented the UN General Assemby with a map of the region that showed the entire territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean as part of Israel.  Friedman suggested that Netanyahu offer a two-state solution to the Palestinians between July 28 and October 27, when the Knesset will not be in session, and his coalition will not be able to overthrow him.  I would advise Friedman not to hold his breath.

The great expansion of universities in the post-Second World War period vastly increased the size of our professional intellectual class, which includes both academics and journalists.  This new class has arrogated themselves the role of Plato's philosopher kings, whose superior wisdom would give them the right to govern the rest of us.  Simultaneously respect for elected officials has fallen to the vanishing point.  And sadly, when the world refuses to obey the dictates of our many Bobos and Friedmans, they simply take this as evidence that the rest of humanity, sadly, is not yet as smart as they are.

The Fall of the Demoratic Establishment

 A new Democratic establishment has ruled the party almost unchallenged for the last 32 years, beginning with Bill Clinton.  Its prophet was Gary Hart, who nearly defeated the last candidate from the earlier Demcratic establishment, Walter Mondale, for the nomination in 1984 by explicitly repudiating the New Deal legacy and appealing to young yuppies instead of industrial workers and their families.  Bill Clinton, the first new Democratic president, governed as a fiscally responsible Republican, working with a Republican Congress for most of his term.  The Democrats have become the party of the meritocracy, and our meritocracy of professionals sees itself every bit as entitled as any aristocracy ever did.  The increasing importance of social issues, including women's rights and gay rights, increased the Democrats' sense of moral righteousness even as it cut them off from large segments of the population.  Meanwhile, their strength among Hispanics, the fastest-growing segment of the population, convinced them that demography would keep them in power for the indefinite future.  

The first indication of weakness in the new establishment came in 2008, when Hillary Clinton, the establishment's designated candidate, crashed and burned against a fresh face, Barack Obama.  Coming to power in the midst of the greatest financial crisis in 80 years, Obama could have set the country on a new course and revived some of the principles of the New Deal, but he turned out to be an establishment acolyte, as his appointment of Larry Summers showed.  He agreed that the economy had to be rebuilt from the top down, not from the bottom up, and his failure to do much for the unemplyed in his first two years cost him the Congress.  He also essentially adopted George W. Bush's strategy in the war on terror, ramping up the war in Afghanistan, orchestrating more disastrous regime change in Libya and in Egypt (twice), and eventually resuming the war in Iraq.  The establishment got another brief shock in 2016, when Silent generation leftist Bernie Sanders outpolled Hillary Clinton in the initial primaries, but the DNC managed to ensure her nomination.  Then it turned out that the blue wall was vunlerable, and the Republicans, who had turned on all their establishment candidates, beat the Democrats, who had stuck with theirs.

The election of Donald Trump, I now believe, had a dreadful effect on the Democratic Party and its media supporters.  It increased their feeling of moral righteousness ot a whole new level and persuaded them that they deserved victory merely by virtue of not being Trump.  It also encouraged them, both before and after 2020, to rely on legal processes to ruin Trump's career, no matter what the mass of the American people felt about him.  Trump's worst enemy as president, in actual fact, was himself, and he did enough to alienate the public, particularly after the pandemic struck, to make him vulnerable in 2020.  The Democratic nominating process in 2020 has been understudied, in my view, and exactly how Biden managed to be nominated is not yet entirely clear. As I have mentioned many times, his own earlier attempts to win the nomination, in 1988 and 2008, had ended in disaster, but the vice presidency earned him new name recognition and access to leading Democratic donors that now served him well.  He was lucky that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren divided the left wing vote in the early primaries, and that Kamala Harris bailed out before the first primary, leaving him in position to pick up the black vote.  By the time of the South Carolina primary he was overwhelmingly the establishment candidate and he cruised to an easy victory.  And he won a solid electoral college victory thanks to wins in six key close states.  After Trump tried and failed to overturn the election result and underwent a second impeachment, everyone seemed to assume that the Trump threat was over.

Once in power, Biden issued a string of executive orders reflecting the concerns of "progressive" Democrats, mandating diversity, equity and inclusion programs throughout the federal government and supporting transgender rights.   In his first three years, 66 percent of his federal judgeship appointments were women and 66 percent were nonwhite.  He continued the Trump strategy of fighting the economic effects of the pandemic with unprecedented infusions of federal money, and he had no strategy when high inflation followed.  He and his immigration czar Harris did nothing for a long time to reduce illegal entry into the country, and they have done nothing to alleviate the worst housing crisis since the end of the Second World War.  His infrastructure bill has yet to show many results, and his bill to deal with climate change--disastrously renamed the Inflation Reduction Act--passed only after he made significant concessions to the fossil fuel industry.  And for all the talk of the 2022 Congressional election as a victory for the Democrats, the Republicans actually won the national popular vote for House candidates by 3 percent, and were therefore somewhat unlucky to emerge with such a small majority.  Last but not least, his near-total support for the Netanyahu government in Israel has cost him support among Arab-Americans--key in Michigan--and young people.

And sadly, Biden's sense of entitlement has now taken over his life, making it impossible for him to acknowledge that he is no longer fit to be president, and thus needs to end his candidacy.  Like Trump,. he now casts himself as the one indispensable man.  According to a source deeply involved in Democratic politics, he will not even talk to anyone now who wants him to drop out of the race.  The assassination attempt on Trump has taken the spotlight off of his decision, and the clock is ticking.  Biden's insistence that he should--or must--be the candidate insults both the candidates who could replace him and the Democratic electorate as a whole.  We can, and need to, field a competent candidate.  Yet he may not get one.  And every day that passes increases the odds that if Biden does drop out, he will give way to Harris--another establishment darling who has never demonstrated real appeal to the American people, but whom much of the Democratic elite believes deserves the White House because she is a black woman.

74 percent of the nation feels--correctly--that Biden is too old to be president.  He trails in nearly every poll in big states, and additional states such as New Hampshire and possibly even New York are coming into play.  The Democratic elite is too sclerotic, it seems, to do what has to be done--despite the laudable efforts of Hakeem Jeffries to make it happen.  And despite all the Democrats' apocalyptic rhetoric about Trump, I honestly don't think they care that much whether they win or lose.  They are part of our wealthy elite and will still survive and prosper.  Apparently, they still need at least one more hard lesson.

Explanation

 I returned from a European vacation on July 3, planning to do a blog on the Supreme Court's immunity decision.  Unfortunately I tested positive for COVID on July 6 and it took nearly an entire week for me to feel alive again.  (I was never seriously ill, but I was seriously uncomfortable.) I'm still having sinus problems.  There is much to talk about, obviously, and I should have something new within a few days.

The Democratic Debacle

 It is still too early to know what the outcome of the post-debate controversy about President Biden's candidacy for re-election will be.  On the one hand, no leading Democratic politician has yet called for him to step down--a sad contrast in my opinion to 1974 when, for different reasons of course, prominent Republicans abandoned Richard Nixon.  On the other hand, stories indicate that leading donors--once again, a constituency that the White House is more likely to respect--still believe that the party needs a new candidate.  I am taking a moment, however, to say that the behavior of Biden, his family, and above all the people around him and the DNC leadership disgraces the Democratic Party.  They seem motivated by a feeling of total entitlement, with no regard for the fate either of the party or the country.  If they succeed in getting Biden renominated, they will deserve his defeat, no matter what it turns out to mean for the country.

Three quarters of the population, polls show, think that Biden is too old to continue n office.  The debate proved to most of us that they are right.  But he and his family and his staff don't care.  They simply repeat their mantra that the nation has to re-elect him in order to prevent the catastrophe of a Trump victory.  I agree that the Trump victory will be a catastrophe, but it does not follow that we have to rally around Biden now to avoid it.  Instead, it makes it all the more essential to come up with a stronger candidate than Biden to prevent it.  

From Bill Clinton through Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and now Biden, Democratic leaders have combined neoliberalism on the economic front with progressive stances on social issues and lip service to New Deal principles, confident that this proves them more virtuous than the Republicans.  This will be the third election in a row in which they assume that the nation must prefer them to Trump.  There is however no such mandate.  A new poll now shows Trump a few points ahead in New Hampshire--and let us not forget that a simple switch in New Hampshire to Al Gore would have given him the White House without Florida.  Evidence from New York also suggests that Trump may do considerably better in the popular vote in blue states, and thus in the nation as a whole, this time.

Throwing the Democratic nomination open now would take over the news cycle from the issues of Biden's age and Trump's latest outrage, a most welcome event.  The country would love to see some new blood in the race and watch the spectacle of candidates fighting it out, perhaps even in multiple ballots, which last occurred in 1952.  Do not forget that Abraham Lincoln, who was not even a true national figure in early 1860, emerged from such a battle in the Republican convention of that year.  But today, I read, the Biden forces want to give him the nomination via DNC ballot even before the convention meets. They originally made this plan to meet a deadline fixed in Ohio, but Ohio has lifted that deadline  The only reason to use a DNC vote now is to quash opposition to Biden before it can get off the ground.

The moment of national crisis that Strauss and Howe first predicted thirty years ago is here.  It requires us all to think first of the fate of the nation, not of ourselves.  The Biden White House is failing that test.

How we got here

 The catastrophe of last night's debate is simply one more milestone in the gradual collapse of the American political system as it developed from the 1930s through the early 1960s.  We cannot go back and redo these decades, and the collapse may get worse before it gets better.  Yet we perhaps experience some catharsis by tracing the tragedy, just as we must face more and more death as we grow older, all the while knowing that life will continue.

How did Donald Trump become a candidate for president in the first place eight years ago?  Our professional politicians became complacent and lost touch with the American people.  Neither party seriously opposed the changes instituted by Ronald Reagan and consummated under Bush I and Clinton: the tax cuts on the rich, the failure to control spending on elections, and the collapse of the effective regulation of Wall Street.  Meanwhile, the influence of television on elections replaced well-thought out prose with images as the currency of politics.  We stopped paying much attention to what the average politician said--something that never happened in the age of radio.  Trump understood slogans and sound bites, and he made his reputation as a reality TV host.  Neither Jeb Bush nor Marco Rubio nor Hillary Clinton could, as it turned out, defeat him.  Clinton also suffered because of Barack Obama's very sluggish response to the financial crisis, his failure to do much about the changes that had brought it about, and his adoption of most of George W. Bush's foreign policy.  The Republicans nominated their outsider, Trump, in 2016, while the party establishment defeated the Democratic outsider, Bernie Sanders. Trump won.

And how did Biden become the next president?  Here I must return to one of my well-worn themes--the catastrophe of the modern vice presidency and its effects.  Hubert Humphrey, George H. W. Bush, Al Gore, and Joe Biden had all tried for their party's nomination and failed dismally at least once, and Walter Mondale had never tried for his at all.  Yet each of them, after subsequently being chosen as vice president, immediately became the front runner for the nomination in the next election.  The vice presidency (and Hillary Clinton's eight years as first lady) earned each of them the necessary name recognition and the access to leading contributors that they needed. The two most successful Democratic politicians since John F. Kennedy--Bill Clinton and Barack Obama--did NOT win the nomination because they had been vice presidents.  They relied on real personal appeal.  

Exactly how Biden became the front runner in 2020 after two disastrous showings in Iowa and New Hampshire is not clear to me.  Uncle Google tells me that two books have been written about that campaign, but I can't check them now.  I do suspect that Kamala Harris--another disastrous presidential candidate who became vice president and heiress apparent--dropped out before the New Hampshire vote, after threatening Biden's standing with black voters, in exchange for a promise of the vice presidency.  James Clyburn, another venerable member of the Democratic establishment, swung the mostly black Democratic vote in South Carolina for Biden, and he was on his way.  He won the election because a bare majority of the country was sick of Trump. Now, if he stays in the race, he will probably lose it because the nation is sick of him and knows he isn't up to the job.  He will also lose because he, like Clinton and Obama, assumed that the free market would indeed fix the economy.  Richard Nixon in 1971 imposed wage and price controls because he knew that inflation threatened his re-election.  Biden looked helplessly on while inflation destroyed his approval rating.  

Something else has changed in the Democratic Party in the last 60 years.  Harry Truman in 1945 called for national health insurance, and in 1948, for civil rights legislation.  Faced with a conservative coalition in Congress, he could not bring either of those proposals even to a vote--but he stuck to them for the rest of his presidency.  They became part of the Democratic program, and Kennedy and Johnson eventually got them through.  Bill Clinton gave up his health care plan after one Congress's worth of failure.  Obama's cap-and-trade proposal suffered a similar fate.  Biden has balanced some environmental initiatives with new opportunities for the fossil fuel industry.  No one believes that the Democrats can accomplish much anymore.

Now, Biden has shown that he does not have the mental acuity we expect as a president.  Not only did he suffer one complete breakdown over Medicare, but he could not credibly explain what he was trying to say about the social security cap.  He let Trump bring him down to Trump's level, so that in the last part of the debate they began arguing about who was the worst president of all time.  Yes, nearly everything that Trump said was false--but is that so surprising?  Our academic elite gave up the idea of truth several decades ago, in favor of the idea that everyone has the right to their own truth based on their own life experience, and that the concept of truth itself is just a political weapon.  If they will not stand for truth, who will?  What does it mean when, as I pointed out here, a former Washington Post executive editor and a former head of CBS news announce that journalism has to move "beyond objectivity?"  

Our system worked when we still valued intellectual integrity and understood the need to control our emotions.  The great attack on those traditions began in the late 1960s and has continued until now.  We can keep them alive as individuals, but the tide is running in the other direction.

In honor of the great Willie Mays, and the United States of which he was such a big part

 To commemorate Willie Mays's death, I refer readers to this post from two years ago.

  And to those baseball fans wondering about how great he really was, I recommend this excellent video.

  Thank you for everything, Willie.

Who runs the Democratic Party?

 At least since the 2022 election, it seems to me, average Democrats have made clear to pollsters that they would prefer a different presidential candidate to 81-year old Joe Biden.  I have written before that Biden's rise to the White House tells a lot about what is wrong with American politics.  During his very long Senate career, Biden combined a cozy relationship with corporate interests--many of whom headquarter in Delaware for legal reasons--with the ability to make appropriately liberal noises on a variety of issues.  He eventually tried twice for the Democratic presidential nomination, in 1988 and 2008, and demonstrated no appeal to primary voters on either occasion.  Then, however, Barack Obama picked him as his vice president.  Like Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, George H. W. Bush, and Al Gore--three of whom had also tried and failed to win their party's nomination for president--Biden immediately emerged as a very serious presidential candidate.  I have speculated before that the vice presidency confers both national name recognition, and access to leading donors.  Being first lady did the same thing for Hillary Clinton.  This week, the New York Times printed a remarkable story enlightening me as to how important donors can be.  

The story focused on Jeffrey Katzenberg, a very successful ex-studio head in Hollywood, described in the piece as "one of the most prolific cash generators for Democratic presidents for a generation." The story, by Peter Baker, does not tell us how he and Biden got to know each other, and it doesn't say anything about Katzenberg's role in the 2020 primary campaign.  Perhaps it was enough that Biden succeeded Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton as the leader of the Democratic establishment.  Both Biden and some of his staffers, we learn, talk to Katzenberg, a dynamo, several times a week.  He helped put together the State of the Union address.  The real point of the story is this:  a number of other major contributors, apparently, shared average Democrats' concerns about Biden when he announced his candidacy for re-election last year.  Katzenburg took on the mission of persuading them that Biden was up to the job, partly by bringing them into the oval office to see him in action themselves.  And that apparently worked.  None of them backed another possible candidate, and none ever emerged.

Before 1960, leading politicians in both parties, not campaign contributors, played the most important role in deciding who their candidates would be.  Franklin Roosevelt carefully cultivated Democratic leaders around the country while he was governor of New York from 1929 through 1932, and that secured him the critical 1932 nomination for president.  Theodore Roosevelt was far more popular than incumbent William Howard Taft in 1912, but he could not overcome the opposition of party leaders and win the Republican nomination.  (The party professionals paid dearly for supporting Taft in that case, as the Democrats won control of the government  handily.)  Richard Nixon owed his career to his cultivation of Republicans around the country.  In 1960 John F. Kennedy had to convince local party leaders like Richard Daley in Illinois and David Lawrence in Pennsylvania that a Catholic could win the election and would not hurt their local parties in order to get the nomination.  These party professionals were in day-to-day contact with ordinary voters.  Today's contributors are not.  The only national politician with a sincere, devoted following among the electorate is, of course, Donald Trump.

Presidential primaries were introduced in some states early in the twentieth century, and by 1932, when Roosevelt won a number of them and lost two others, they had some influence.  They seem to have fallen out of favor between `1932 and 1960, but they allowed Kennedy to prove that he was electable even in overwhelmingly protestant areas like West Virginia, and by the 1970s they had become the mechanism for choosijng almost all the delegates. That was supposed to put the power to select the nominee in the hands of the people, but it hasn't.  The only candidate before Trump who used primaries to defeat the establishment's choice was Barack Obama in 2008 against Hillary Clinton, and even then, the establishment split and parts of it went over to him before the race was over.  Thanks to various Supreme Court decisions, money is more powerful in US politics than ever.

It is hard to believe that Katzenberg's influence does not also extend to policy, and he and Biden reacted publicly to the October 7 attacks in exactly the same way: by condeming Hamas and expressing unequivocal support for Israel.  That, however, is much less important to me than contributors' power to choose party's presidential nominee, based mainly on  how the nominee treats them.  Let me be clear: I do not expect any drastic campaign finance reform to change this situation.  This is where history has taken us.  Following up on last week's post, I have written this one to to change the world, but simply to understand it.  That's a paraphrase of a famous man, and I wonder if anyone will recognize it.

Reflections

 My birthday, which has just passed, always coincides roughly with the end of the academic year, which even though I am no longer living on an academic calendar still always provokes reflection.  There has been plenty to write about in the last two weeks, starting with Donald Trump's conviction in New York, and including the continuing war in Gaza and a story in today's New York Times on the spread of Islamic terrorism in West Africa--a further step in the catastrophe of US foreign policy that began in Afghanistan and Iraq and spread to Syria, Egypt, and Libya under the Obama administration.  The influence of inflatoin upon the election is also very much in the news.  Yet for the time being I seem to have lost my appetite for analyzing these milestones on our uncertain road.  The enterprise of American journalism, like the enterprise of American history--which has taken up far more of my time--has relied from the beginning on the belief in progress and a story which, while full of twists and turns, is always neaded for a happier ending.  I now find this very difficult to believe. In addition, pointing out what has gone wrong has usually had a corollary: suggesting how we might fix it.  I don't have much faith in solutions that I might propose.

Thus, yes, Donald Trump in my opinion was clearly guilty of the offense of which he was charged, and after reading the judge's charge to the jury I thought that the legal argument behind the case was a lot stronger than many continue to argue.  The evidence clearly showed that he falsified records to make it possible for him to win the election.  Yet months before he did so, his nomination had confirmed the bankrupt collapse of the Republican Party,which had not been able to find a candidate that could defeat him.  Shortly thereafter his victory over Hillary Clinton showed that the Democratic Party suffered from the same problem.  And now, eight years later, Trump leads Biden in the polls and has established himself, I think, as the most personally powerful politician in the country since Ronald Reagan.  And the biggest reason, I think, is that he, unlike any established political figure, has exploited the weaknesses of the establishment order that has dominated our politics at least since Clinton.  Recent focus groups show voters favoring him because they think that we need drastic change, and that only he will provide it.  Is that so wrong?  The conviction will not change their minds.  And whether he is guilty of various charges or not, who can deny that the various trials are indeed an attempt by the establishment to do what it has not been able to do in the broader court of public opinion--to eliminate him as a political factor?

Our establishment's embrace of the global free market, which took its biggest steps under Clinton, with NAFTA, and Bush II with China's accession to the WTO, has probably done more than anything else to discredit it in the eyes of millions of hardworking Americans.  That however was not all.  Barack Obama accepted the view of his Boomer advisers that the crash of 2008 did not reflect anything fundamentally wrong with our economy, and that it could be weathered merely with a massive influx of liquidity from the Fed.  The Democrats abandoned the New Deal solutions of putting people to work to fight unemployment and restructuring mortgages to save homes and farms.  The establishment also relies completely on the Fed to fight inflation.  Inflation has dramatically influenced US politics for generations.  It was the biggest reason for the Republican Congressional sweep of 1946.  It hurt Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and in 1971, Richard Nixon, unlike Joe Biden, saw high inflation as a critical threat to his re-election, and actually imposed wage and price controls.  He eventually lifted them, and further inflation helped bring down Gerald Ford in 1976 and crush Jimmy Carter in 1980.  Biden and the Democrats have been in denial over inflation for three years now and I haven't seen a single mention of possible wage and price controls.  We no longer expect our government to act to help ordinary people against it.  The same is true about our housing crisis, apparently the worst since the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.  Then the federal government took a number of serious steps to encourage the construction of new, relatively low-cost housing around the country.  The housing stock expanded so rapidly that even black Americans, who had to cope with segregation, increased their percentage of homeownership dramatically in the decades after the war.  Now we are hearing nothing from the government about the problem.  In those days the country felt a debt to the young adults who had won the war for us and their families.  Now we have already forced millions of young adults to mortgage their futures just to attend college.  And last, but hardly least, we have lost the common values, the sense of common purpose, and the common identity that in the past allowed us to achieve great things.  

It has been two weeks since I posted something here, and I have very busy weeks ahead.  I may be moved to post again in a week or two, or it may be longer.  Believe me, these observations are very painful to record, but I can't ignore them.  I hope to get to a different place for myself and my faithful readers of 20 years standing, but I don't know exactly where that place will be.  Meanwhile, as Orwell had his garden, I have music, family and friends, and the continuing drama of athletic competition to keep me fully engaged with life.

A commencement address that no one will hear

 Good morning, and a hearty welcome to friends and family who are sharing in this great occasion this year.  And congratulations to all our graduates.

This has been one of the  most difficult years in the history of American higher education, and certainly the most difficult since 1969-70, when protests against the invastion of Cambodia shut down hundreds of campuses and administrators canceled exams to encourage the protests. I myself had graduated from Harvard in the spring of 1969, in the wake of a protest there that had occupied the administration building, led to a violent police bust, and disrupted commencement.  Then, too, the demonstrators had demanded amnesty for evrything they had done, but the administration had suspended some of them and some of them faced charges in court.  Today the protesters demand divestment from any Israel-related enterprise, then they demanded the elimination of ROTC.  The administration caved into that demand, and for decades it was impossible for students to attend Harvard on scholarships while preparing to serve in the nation's officer corps.  That, to me, was a sad and tragic decision.  Yes, we were in the midst of a mistaken and horrifying war, but the country still needed an army and it was a better army, and a better nation, that included Ivy League graduates within it.  But then, as now, a good many students had concluded that that war was not simply a tragic mistake, but the symptom of a hoplessly oppressive society that had to be transformed utterly.  The faculty and administration gave into that view.

Today, two utterly irreconcilable views divide the campus, the faculty, and various parts of alumni community, including some very important donors.  One view argues that Israel, a "settler colonialist" state, has no legitimacy, and that Palestinians should rule the whole territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Some who hold that view, by the way, also see the United States as a settler colonialist state and deny its legitimacy as well, although it is less clear exactly what changes they woul would like to make now to remedy the injustice of the nation's creation.  On the other side, people regard Israel as an essential refuge for the Jewish people and claim an Israeli right to takle all necessary steps to defend their country's security and subdue Palestinian groups such as Hamas that do not accept it and act volently against it.  Both views are based upon near-absolute ideas of right and wrong, and in my opinion, they mirror the views, not of all Israelis and Palestinians, but certainly of the Israelis and Palestinians who now exercise political power over their two peoples.  I have been an historian of international conflict all my life and I have watched the development of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for at least 58 years.  Today, as we finish a year dominated by that conflict, I want to offer you a different perspective on it--one based not upon one particular idea of justice, but upon the facts as I have come to understand them.  And I do so partly because I think that you, our new graduates, will need that perspective as you make your way through life.

The Jewish people originated millenia ago in what we call the Middle East, and apparently settled or resettled in what is now Israel after a period of captivity in Egypt.  They established their Kingdom, their written language, and their religion there, although they were conquered a few centuries later, first by the Babylonians and then by the Romans.  Judaism then gave birth to Christianity, perhaps the source of its greatest worldwide influence.  The Romans apparently scattered the Jews around the Mediterranean in the early Christian era.  Then, a few centuries later, Islam arose further East, and eventually conquered and conversted the whole southern shore of the Mediterranean as well as most of the Middle East.  Eventually it conquered the Byzantine Empire as well, both in Asia and parts of Europe, and for several centuries it occupied Spain and Portugal.  Jewish communities suffered discrimination  in Christian and Muslim communities alike during the Middle Ages.  By the end of the Middle Ages, the largest Jewish communities were in Poland and Russia.

In the 18th and 19th centuries nationality began to replace the hereditary right to rule as the organizing principle of Europe.  Where did that leave the Jews?  They might in theory become equal citizens of the new nations in which they lived, as they eventually did in western Europe and above all here in the United States.  That option did not appear to be open, however, to the much larger Jewish populations in Russia and Russian-ruled Poland or in Austria-Hungary.  A good many of those Jews immigrated to the United States and elsewhere, but millions remained.  And among them, in the late 19th century, the dream of Zionism was born--the idea of re-establishing a state of Israel in the Holy Land where they could live.   During the First World War, leaders of the international Jewish community secured the support of the British government for a "Jewish national home" in Palestine--a province of the Ottoman Empire--and the new League of Nations endorsed that idea after the war, while reaffirming the rights of the existing Palestinian population.  Britain secured a League mandate to rule Palestine

It immediately became clear within Palestine that the Muslim Arab population would not accept the idea of a Jewish national home, and periodic outbreaks of violence between Jews and Arabs began.  Meanwhile, nationalist political movements in Poland, other Eastern European nations, and eventually in Germany became strongly anti-Semitic, arguing that Jews had no place in their communities.  The Soviet Union treated its millions of Jews better than Tsarist Russia had, but also stopped emigration for them.  As conditions for Jews became harder in Europe, the United States and other western nations restricted immigration, and the British eventually put limits on immigration into Palestine to mollify the Arabs.  Then came the Second World War and the Holocaust.  Those events left the Zionists in Palestine determined to create a new state of Israel, which they did in 1948.  In retrospect that decision was very understandable.  Six million Jews, the vast majority of them from Poland and Eastern Europe, had just been murdered by the Nazis.  The United States maintained strict immigration quotas against them.  The western European nations had not been able to protect them against the Nazis.  In addition, the creation of Israel and the decolonization of much of the Arab world left the Jews there living in hostile evironments, and they immigrated en masse into the new state.

I now must try to summarize about 75 years of Arab-Israeli conflict.  It has been marked, I think, by irreoncilable goals.  Most of the surrounding Arab states refused to accept Israel, immediately went to war against it, and refused to conclude a real peace treaty with it.  Decades later, after wars in 1948-9, 1956, 1967, and 1973, Egypt, and eventually Jordan, made peace with Israel--but the Palestinian population of hte territoy that became Israel never did.  Most of it was driven out of Israel in 1948-9 and has lived in refugee camps in Gaza, Jordan, and Lebanon ever since.  The 1967 war left Israel in control of an additional large Palestinian population in the West Bank, and also began a long-term Israeli attempt to add much, or all, of the West Bank to Israel itself.  Both the Jewish population of Israel and the Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank have continued to increase, and they are now approximately equal.

The Israelis and Palestinians have never been able to make peace, in my opinon, because they have irreoncilable goals.  Both peoples include many individuals who would welcome a two-state solution and peace, but such individuals have never predominated among their peoples.  In the early 1990s, Yitzak Rabin,  a former Israeli military leader and hero of the original war of independence in 1948, became Israeli prime minister and reached agreements with Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Authority, or PLO, providing for Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and the possibility of an eventual Palestinian state.  Rabin,. however, faced bitter opposition from Israeli factions who regarded the West Bank as an indissoluble part of Israel and dreamed of replacing its Arab population with settlers, and one such person assassinated him.  His successor tried to conclude a new agreement with Arafat but could not do so, and we will never know if he could have sold such an agreement to Israel as a whole. Meanwhile, the Palestinians used their limited self-rule to build up military capabilities in the West Bank and eventually unleashed the second intifada, a terrorist campaign against Israel itself.  Later, Hamas supplanted the PLO as the Palestinians' effective political authority in Gaza and began building military capabilities there after the Israelis withdrew from it.  That allowed them to mount the attacks of last October 7.

The Israeli government now argues that it cannot agree to a Palestinian state as long as it seems that the Palestinians will simply use it to prepare further attacks against Israel--and I must say that the history supports that view of what will happen. But on the other hand, the current Israeli government also apparently rejects peace because it wants Israeli control of the whole territory "from the river to the sea" as well.  Some members of the present government are openly calling for forcing the population of Gaza to become refugees in some other country, and clearly have similar plans for the population of the West Bank--and the Israeli military campaign in Gaza is, in fact, making the whole territory uninhabitable, with consequences that we cannot foresee.  

Where does that leave US citizens, the US government, and indeed, the whole international community?  Here I have my own perspective.  To all of you--and especially to those of you who have protested on one side or the other, except for the Israelis and Palestinians among you--let me suggest that we aim for some humility.  We cannot solve the problem, frankly, because neither side really cares what we think.  They are dedicated to their own irreoncilable goals which preclude a peaceful solution, and if anything is to change, it must change, first among them.  In these tragic circumstances--and they are tragic--foreign governments, it seems to me, can play one important role.  They can insist,in word and deed, that given their irreconcilable goals, both sides have a responsibility to keep the conflict at the lowest possible level, simply to allow their peoples some security and the opportunity to live their lives.  This, in the current crisis, they have failed to do.  Other previous US administrations did this after wars in 1956 and 1973 and during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s, and I regret that the current administration has not done the same.  Yes, the Israeli government had a right and a duty to retaliate for the terrible attacks on October 7, but no right, in my view, to kill more than 30 Palestinians, most of them civilians, for every single Israeli who died that day, or to level most of the buildings in an area in which two million people live.

And to the US citizens among you I point out that our forefathers did found a nation on principles that have allowed people of every race and religion to live together on a footing of relative equality.  Yes, it took centuries to turn the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution into reality for all--but we never stopped trying and we eventually succeeded in doing that.  And that effort, as Lincoln argued, kept the hope of such a world alive elsewhere.  Because we are human we are not perfect--but I believe we must keep our original dreams alive, lest we, too, sink into endless conflict, and perhaps even into collapse and disunion.

The protests of the past year, like the ones I lived through as an observer in 1969-70, assume that a vision of absolute justice can solve anything.  Such a view denies the essentially tragic character of human existence, as recognized by the ancient Greeks, by Shakespeare, and by the greatest of modern historians.  My own education and my own life have taught me a good deal about such tragedy.  Yours may  or may not have done the same for you--but life will do so in due course.  You will find that heroism and tragedy are inseparable and that the noblest goals can still have terrible results--both as citizens of your nations, and in your own life.  That is why now, as you receive your diplomas, your education is only beginning.  Good luck with it, and thank you.

Our Competing Aristocracies

         In August of 2017 I devoted a long post to journalist Jane Mayer's superb book Dark Money, which had appeared a  year earlier.  While I hope readers may go to it and read the whole thing, I am gonig to quote the first few paragraphs here.

"Last weekend I finished Dark Money by Jane Mayer, which appeared last year.  It was marketed, largely, as a history of the involvement of the fossil fuel magnates Charles and David Koch in American politics over the last few decades, but it is much more than that.  I intend in what follows to summarize what I found in the book, but from a slightly different perspective than Mayer’s, and without much of any attention to the voluminous, and fascinating, personal data that she provides about the Kochs and other financiers of our new “conservative” political movement.  Instead I am going to treat the book as the first draft, as it were, of a genuine political history of the last 40 or 50 years—because it explains more about where we are and how we got here than anything else that I have ever read.   Mayer leads her readers through the story in rough chronological order, and I recommend the book to everyone.  I on the other hand am going to try to identify its major features in an effort to explain how we got to the miserable point at which we find ourselves.

"Charles and David Koch are the most striking example of extraordinarily wealthy Americans who have had an outsized impact on the politics of the last forty years—and whose impact is reaching a new peak right now.  They followed in the footsteps of their father Fred, who in the 1950s was one of the founding members, along with candy manufacturer Robert Welch, of the John Birch Society.  Nothing illustrates what has happened to American politics in my lifetime in more striking fashion than this.  The ideas of the John Birch Society, a group of fanatically anti-government lunatics who in the 1950s identified Dwight D. Eisenhower as a member of the international Communist conspiracy, are now the single most influential set of ideas in American political life. Their main tenets are an unlimited faith in free enterprise and a conviction that government attempts to moderate the negative impacts of capitalism are simply a power grab designed to establish dictatorship.  And because of the success of their political movement, their fortunes have grown by orders of magnitude over the last few decades.

"In addition to the Kochs, the superrich political elite has included John Olin, a chemical manufacturer; Richard Mellon Scaife, a scion of a Pittsburgh family prominent in banking and industry; and Harry Bradley, another Birch Society acolyte who ran the Allen-Bradley Electronics Company in New York.  In the middle of the twentieth century, when marginal income tax rates topped out at 91%, these men had all taken advantage of a provision in the tax code—first used by the Rockefeller family—to create a “philanthropic” foundation to shield substantial portions of their enormous income from taxes.  Unfortunately, the definition of philanthropy has been broad enough to include the subsidy of a particular ideology—and ultimately, direct intervention in politics.  That one tragic flaw in our tax code has reshaped opinion and redistributed power at every level of American government.

"Now I have rarely been impressed by any of the ideas coming out of the new Right during the last few decades, but like many liberal Democrats, I suspect, I have assumed that conservative intellectuals had honestly come by their ideas.  I am not suggesting now that they have lied about them, but Mayer leaves no doubt that the entire new right wing intellectual establishment was created from the ground up by the handful of major benefactors listed above.  Both the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation—the two centers of conservative “thought” in Washington—were originally funded largely by Richard Mellon Scaife. The Bradley and Olin Foundations were also powers behind the Heritage Foundation, and the Kochs have been involved as well.  I have always thought of the Cato Institute as a nest of principled libertarians—partly because it tends to oppose foreign interventions—but it turns out to have been started by Charles Koch.  Charles Murray was an unknown writer before the Olin foundation adopted him and subsidized his first book, Losing Ground, arguing that social programs were hurting the poor.  (Spoiled, perhaps, by success, Murray went a bridge too far when he and Richard Herrnstein argued in The Bell Curve that black people were intellectually inferior to whites.)  And I was amazed to learn from Mayer that the Bradley foundation gives four annual awards of $250,000 each to leading conservative journalists, activists, and intellectuals. Winners have included George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Sowell, Ward Connerly, Heather MacDonald, Shelby Steele, Victor Davis Hanson, John Bolton, William Kristol, Paul Gigot, Michael Barone, Jeb Bush, Harvey Mansfield, Edwin Meese, Roger Ailes of Fox News, General John Keane, and Charles Murray."

I certainly think that I was on to something then, but I have suddenly realized that this was only half of the story of what has happened to our political life.  I discovered the other half in 2022 book by a much younger conservative journalist, Luke Rosiak, entitled, Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education. Now, while I haven't met either Mayer or Rosiak face to face, I suspect I would enjoy dinner with Mayer much more.  Rosiak is a rather angry early middle-aged man whose prose drips with contempt; Mayer is more of an old school journalist.  But Rosiak's book, like Mayer's is so exhaustively documented and carefully footnoted that there is no question but that he has also identified a very important presence in our political life.   The right wing foundations that Mayer documented turn out to be only half of the story.  

The power of foundations, as Mayer and Rosiak both point out, stems from a particular provision of the tax code that allowed some of America's richest families to escape the very high income and inheritance taxes of the middle of the twentieth century.   The Rockefellers and the Fords were among the first to escape inheritance taxes by turning much of their fortunes over to charitable foundations named after themselves.  And although Rosiak's book focuses on various serious problems within the US public educational system, the biggest lesson I drew from it is that the Ford, Rockefeller, John T. and Catherine MacArthur, Gates, Kellogg,  Annie E. Casey foundations and the Open Society Foundation founded by George Soros are playing at least as large a role in American life as the Koch, Scaife, Bradley and Olin foundations that Mayer focused on.  They, however, are run by left wing, largely woke bureaucracies, and their grants have created whole infrastructures of educational and public policy activists who are providing K-12 curriculums for schools based on woke ideas and pushing for radical changes in schools, especially in our largest districts, in the name of "equity."  Our new gilded age has become a struggle between two groups of billionaires, one left wing and one right, in which the views of average citizens play a very limited role.

The Ford Foundation, Rosiak reports, provided about $60 million in funding for racial equity issues a year between 2011 and 2020, and announced a further $180 million increase in 2020.  The MacArthur Foundatin indirectly subsidized the career of Nikole Hannah-Jones when she worked at Pro Publica, and has funded the Pulitzer Foundation, which has distributed curricula based on her historically inaccurate 1619 Project to school districts around the country.  The foundations, Rosiak shows, have many links to teachers unions, whom serious educational reformers--the ones who run effective charter school networks--now regard as the biggest obstacle to necessary changes.  (I know this because one of my sons worked for one of those networks for more than a decade.)  The Ford, MacArthur and Soros foundations have joined with the National Education Association to fund FairTest, which lobbies to limit the use of standardized tests in schools on the grounds that they are discriminatory.

Rosiak, himself a parent of school age kids, spends a long chapter on the disastrous decision to shut down schools during the pandemic, one that has inflicted damage upon a whole generation that seems likely to last for a long time.  He also shows how the educational establishment used that crisis to implement many other changes that activist groups--funded by the foundations--have been pushing.  These included easier grading systems that make it almost impossible for students to fail, a de-emphasis on standardized tests (a policy also adopted by many colleges, although some are now reversing it), and an end admissions standards to elite high schools based solely on standardized tests--the practice that turned schools like Boston Latin, Stuyvesant High School and the Bronx High School of Science, and Lowell High School in San Francisco into the highest-achieving schools in the country, public or private.  Such policies, new racial advocates argue, are "inequitable"  by definition because the produce student bodies composed mostly of Asian and white students.  I read Rosiak quite carefully, and I don't think he ever mentioned another activist demand:  that the teaching and administrative staffs of inner city schools reflect the demographic makeup of their students as closely as possible.  I have heard this demand frequently voiced by Boston area activists on my local NPR stations, on the grounds that "children of color" can only get the education they need from "educators of color."  Not coincidentally, NPR is very heavily supported by the foundations that Rosiak lists.  

On another front, Rosiak discusses the widely held view, particularly among liberals, that public education in the United States promotes inequality because it is financed largely by local property taxes, and thus, poorer communities spend much more per children than rich ones.  He presents some data showing that this simply is not true, and I can now corroborate that based on data from my own state of Massachusetts.  Boston, the city with by far the largest number of poor students in the state, spends $28,882 per pupil per year, one of the highest figures in the state. Cambridge, which ranks 134 out of 341 cities and towns in per capita income,. spends the second most, in the state, $36,712 per pupil.  Brookline and Wellesley, two of the wealthiest suburbs, spend nearly as much as Boston, more than $25,000 per pupil each, but Newton and Lexington, whose schools seem to have the best reputations of all, spend just  $16, 804  and $22,736  per student, respectively.  I suspect that the cost of education in Boston is so high for the same as it is at Harvard University--administrative bloat. These are, obviously, fragmentary data, but it does seem that the correlation between per-pupil spending on the one hand, and wealth and educational achievement on the other, is not nearly as strong as many people tend to think.

And although Rosiak doesn't mention this, the MacArthur Foundation also uses its renowned "Genius Grants" to reward its favorite intellectuals in the same way that the Bradley Foundation, as I mentioned above, rewards prominent conservative thinkers--but on a much larger scale.  The Bradley Foundation awards are one-shot gifts of $250,000, while the MacArthur grants are worth $800,000 over five years.  The foundation began awarding these grants in 1981, and their rosters are a kind of history of the last 43 years of US intellectual life.  In the first five years, winners included political scientist Seweryn Bialer, literary critic Harold Bloom,  historian Henry Louis Gates, Political Scientist Alexander George, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable, novelist William Kennedy, novelist Cormac McCarthy, historian James A. McPherson, novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, filmmaker John Sales, and poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren.  Since 2015 they have included Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Homeric translator Emily Wilson, historian Ibram X. Kendi, and interdisciplinary scholar Imani Perry.  They now include far fewer scientists than they originally did.  Of the 20 2023 winners, 2 are white males and three are white females.

I am proud to have read both Mayer's and Rosniak's books.  One was written primarily for liberals, the other for conservatives, but both paint very convincing pictures of the intellectual and political power of great wealth, protected by the tax laws and dispensed by foundations without any public accountability at all.  They are a very important part of the new aristocracy which controls so many aspects of American life, and none of them seems to care very much about what is good for average Americans.  

 

Historical perspective

 I grew up, I think, at the climax of the Enlightenment, which had begun several centuries earlier.  By Enlightenment I mean above all the idea that human reason could improve human life, economically, medically, and politically.  That was, as my new book shows quite clearly, the idea upon which the United States was founded, and the idea which our greatest presidents tried to sustain amidst changing circumstnaces, including a civil war fought over slavery, a great depression, two world wars, and a worldwide ideological struggle between communist dictatorship and capitalist democracy.  The ideas of the Enlightenment did not create a utopia, partly because science, in particular, allowed humanity to do both good and evil on an unprecedented scale.   On the one hand, advances in medicine, food production, and industry mutliplied the world's population again and again.  On the other hand, advances in military technology, culminating in the atomic bomb, allowed for unprecendented levels of destruction, and still threaten the complete destruction of civilization.  And last but hardly least, humanity has never really managed to substitute reason for primal emotion.  Those two critical aspects of human nature have remained at war, and what distinguishes the period roughly of 1750-1968 is that reason, on the whole, had the upper hand, and that kept the dream of the Enlightenment alive.

I knew by the mid-1970s that something had gone very wrong in American political life in the late 1960s, and that the nation had lost the capacity to focus on the common good, partly because of the Vietnam War.  By the 1980s I had come to accept that we had lost something, and I did an interview late in the Reagan era that showed that I had shed many of my youthful illusions.  (I still have it, but I would have to retype the whole think to link it, and I don't think it's worth the trouble.)  The fall of Communism and the return of the Democrats to power under Clinton seemed to promise a brighter future.  Then, around 1995, I read Generations and suddenly saw the past, the present, and the future in a new light.  The erosion of civic order that had begun in the late 1960s, Strauss and Howe taught me, was a reucrring phenomenon, which had been followed in the 1860s and the 1930s and 1940s by a rebirth of unity in pursuit of new, inspring values.   They confidently expected to see something similar in the first fifteen years or so of the new century, and I welcomed that hope myself.

In fact, between 2001 and 2020, the nation experienced not one, but three crises of the type that they had predicted:  9/11, the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession, and the COVID pandemic.  None of them, however, had the regenerative effect that they had predicted.  George W. Bush, probably encouraged by Karl Rove, tried to mobilize the nation on behalf of a generational crusade to spread democracy through the Middle East, but he couldn't bring himself to ask the mass of the population for a real sacrifice via a draft or tax increases, and his goals were as unachievable as our parents' were in Vietnam.   Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner--Boomers all--persauded Barack Obama that there was nothing wrong with our economy that a massive infusion of liquidity couldn't cure.  Donald Trump tried to ignore the pandemic at first, and he and Biden dealt with its economic effects with another massive infusion of cash that tended to benefit industry and local government.  Meanwhile, teachers unions insisted on closing schools, a step whose disastrous effects may persist for a decade or more.  These repeated failures and an extraordinary growth of tribalism have left us with a polarized, divided electorate, which has transferred the control of either the White House or at least one hosue of Congress in eight of the last nine national elections and is very likely to do the same again this November.

Meanwhile, two new ideologies have replaced the idea of using reason to advance the common good.  The first was, very simply, the profit motive and the revolt of our economic elite against the New Deal order, whose prophets were Milton Friedman and Lewis Powell, whose famous memorandum, written just before he went on the Supreme Court, called for an attack on the regulatory state and a rebirth of the values of free enterprise.  The second, which began in academia but has now spread to many of our important institutions, was the tribal revolt against the idea of equal justice and equal opportunity for all, which new ideologies branded as nothing more than an excuse for the domiation of straight white males.  Any presidential candidate who genuinely sought to build a new majority coalition would have to take on at least one of those ideologies, and probably both of them--and no such candidate is on the horizon.  The spread of those ideologies made the kind of regeneracy that Strauss and Howe counted on impossible, and that, in turn, establishes the late 1960s as a critical turning point in world history.

The age of the Enlightenment, I believe, was an heroic age.  Its spirit encouraged both journalists and historians to see public affairs as a story of progress, and perhaps to try to use history and journalism to further progress.  Journalists and historians, by and large, now use their platforms to push their own ideology, which they identify with progress.   Unfortunately, I believe, on many fronts, the era of progress has come to an end, and academics and journalists, with rare exceptions, are simply promoting an ideology--or at times, their own superior wisdom--rather than facing facts.  They still claim to have the answers that will make our lives better, but the mass of our people have learned the hard way that they no longer do.  

The gap between ideology and reality is also behind much of the growing division over the Middle East.  Both supporters of the Israeli govenrment and of the Palestinian revolt believe that their cause must triumph because it is just, and this blinds them to the real tragedy of two peoples of roughly the same size claiming the right to control the same piece of land.  This is the kind of tribal conflict which Enlightenment principles cannot solve, either.  Yes, a two-state solution would reflect those principles--but the political authorities on the two sides reject one, and I suspect that majorities of their constituents do, as well.

This fall will mark the twentieth anniversary of History Unfoolding.  Much of it, particularly for the first six years or so, was written in the Enlightenment spirit--in the belief that better ideas could make a difference.  I am trying to let that idea go now, and it isn't easy.   We live in a tragic era rather than an heroic one now, and I no longer expect to live to see a great rebirth, even if I can live to be 100.  Yet as the great German historian Ranke tried to tell us nearly 200 years ago, we must accept all human history as reflective of some divine plan--as he put it--or as Thucydides said, as reflective of human nature.  We can value the eras that have made civilization and modern life possible even in a long era of entropy and decline, and we can keep certian non-monetary, non-tribal values alive in our own lives.  Some day new generations will revive the Enlightenment values in all their glory, bulding on the 18th and 20th centuries as those times built on antiquity.  And meanwhile, as Orwell once said, the earth continues to revolve around the sun.

1969 and 2024--more thoughts

 More parallels are emerging between the campus protests of 1964-70 and today's.  (The great Berkeley protest began in the fall of 1964; not until 1968 was there a second comparable one, at Columbia; Harvard followed in 1969, and all hell broke loose in the spring of 1970.)    Rather than edit the weekend post I decided to put them into this new, short one.

To begin with, these protests, like those, are increasingly focusing on a specific demand.  In 1968-70 those demands included the elimination of ROTC from campus, the creation of black studies departments, and an end to university expansion at the expense of surrounding communities.  The Harvard protesters secured the end of ROTC, tragically, and the creation of black studies in some form in 1969.  Today the popular specific demand is divestment from any Israeli enterprises.  I will be very surprised if any university gives into it.

Meanwhile, a second familiar demand is coming into play: that students receive no punishment for demonstrations and encampments.  That was called "amnesty" back in the 1960s, and the demand marked a significant break with the idea of civil disobedience as articulated by Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.  Civil disobedience recognized that civilization depended on laws and punishments, and its practitioners willingly accepted punishment for breaking laws that they thought were unjust.  The student radicals on the other hand demanded that they go free because their causes were just.  That demand has resurfaced on campuses today, and Columbia's administration is now offering to meet it, provided that protesters pledge not to violate university rules for another year.  I suspect that the protesters will refuse.  

And last but not least, administrations that call in law enforcement to break up demonstrations or encampments, now as then, risk alienating much larger numbers of students and faculty.  A Harvard Crimson editorial has already demanded that punishments play no role in the settlement of current disputes, but college presidents are bowing to pressure from the House committee, in particular, and suspending students for defying them.  And having put up this post, I have just learned that Columbia protesters in Palestinian garb have occupied Hamilton Hall, the administration building their elders occupied back in 1968--and thereby forcing the administration to escalate again.

All this reflects two of the enduring achievements of the radicals of the late 1960s.  The first was the idea of the moral superiority of the young, the idea of the nation's youth as the sole repository of goodness in a corrupt society.  Their second closely related idea was a complete disregard for established procedures, or indeed for the need of any regular procedures, to make decisions and settle disputes.  Colleges are now very unlikely to try to undo these ideas because they need their own students so desperately, and have given up the idea that they are offering a vitally important product--education--which students may accept or decline as they wish.  I could easily be wrong, but I am not aware that there has ever been a serious protest at one of the St. John's colleges--perhaps because students know they are there to learn.