Ask and ye shall be given

 Nearly two weeks ago, when I concluded a post that referred to George Orwell and Animal Farm by wondering whether a parallel satire might be written about the present day, my old friend and college classmate the critic George Scialabba pointed me towards Lionel Shriver's new novel, Mania.  The library quickly coughed it up, and I read it pretty quickly.   It was the first of Shriver's many books that I had read.  This post will inevitably contain some spoilers but I will leave plenty of suspense for future reasons.  Mania isn't going to sell like Animal Farm did, but it is in my opinion a very telling satire--and so far the msm's reaction to the book is rather revealing as well.

I must say that while I liked the book, I was not bowled over by Shriver's writing.  She can be very funny, but she takes her time about everything.  The book runs to nearly 300 pages and I think 200 might have done the job just as well. Animal Farm has only 144 pages.  The book is an alternative history of the first quarter of the 21st century, written in the first person by a non-tenured literature professor at a mythical Pennsylvania university named Pearson Converse.  (I'd love to believe that "Pearson" is an homage to the great muckraker Drew Pearson, but I'd be surprised as well as delighted to find that Shriver knows anything about him.)   She has a partner, three children, and a lifelong "best friend" who figure very prominently in the narrative.  Raised as a Jehovah's witness, she became a hopeless contrarian, and therefore could not surrender to the ideological fad that swept the country (in the novel) in the early years of the century:  the Mental Parity movement, closely associated with the idea of Cognitive Equality.   Described by its mythical founder as "the last frontier of civil rights," the movement holds that no one is really more intelligent than anyone else, and that the illusion that some people are smarter is just a pretext for the oppression of the many by the elite few.  This has led to very significant changes in language, education, politics, and even in medical care, and has had severe consequences for the protagonist and her entire family, including her two brightest children.  Meanwhiles, her best friend, a television reporter, achieves new fame and fortune by climbing on the bandwagon.

Mania has already received mostly unfavorable reviews from Maureen Corrigan in the Washington Post, Anthony Cummins in The Guardian, Laura Miller New York Times.  While they recognized "cognitive equality" as a new form of wokeness, none of them seemed to share my view that it is an obvious stand-in for anti-racism, extreme feminism, and agitation for transgender rights.  More importantly, they did not acknowledge that those very real movements--along with a general decline in our educational system--have had exactly the same consequences in real life as cognitive equality does in the book.  That will be my topic today.

To begin with, the idea of cognitive equality, seasoned with the moral absolutism with which we have become so familiar, has in the world of Mania led to major changes in the English language.  Words like "stupid," "intelligent," "sharp," "profound," "idiot," "genius," and so on now represent thoughtcrime, and cannot be used in any context, as for instance to describe a sharp knife.  This has happened in our time.  Because slave owners described themselves as masters, the faculty heads of Harvard residential houses are no longer called masters--even though that title has a long academic history here and in Britain that had nothing whatever to do with slavery.  "People who can become pregnant" is now preferred in many quarters to "women" in deference to transgender ideology.  "Slave" has been replaced by "enslaved person," and "slave owner" by "enslaver," even though very few American slaveowners ever turned a free person into a slave.  Here, obviously, I could go on and on, but I don't really think I need to.

In other many other instances, however, I don't need to resort to parallelisms, because developments in the fantasy world of Mania and the one I've been living in for decades are identical.  "I'm supposed to stop focusing on traditionally towering figures of history. John Locke, Adam Smith, Rousseau. . .The point is, in my courses, I'm now meant to celebrate all the historical figures we've customarily overlooked."  That has been the watchword of the American historical profession for 40 or 50 years, and explains why, as Fareed Zakaria recently remarked, a white male who wrote about presidents would have no chance of getting tenure at most universities today.  And Locke, Smith and Rousseau are completely unfashionable, not because they were very smart, but simply because they were straight white males.  On another page, Pearson (the narrator) complains that the AP courses that her son would normally be taking have now been abolished.  School districts in California and in Cambridge, Massachusetts have dropped Algebra I for eighth graders, which allows students to take calculus as high school seniors, because so few black and Hispanic students found their way into it.  (Cambridge has recently reversed that decision.)  When Pearson insists to her friend Emory that "it's a fact," "not an idea," that some people are smarter than others, Emory replies, "According to you."  Postmodernism abandoned the concept of objective fact decades ago.  

And sadly, the thought police we encounter in Mania have real-world equivalents as well.  Pearson has to undergo some re-education on her job after she tries to assign The Idiot to her literature class, because the word is, of course, forbidden, and a few orthodox students turn her in to the dean.  Something very similar has happened to a tenured professor whom I know, who had to give up a very popular course in which he had stepped over linguistic boundaries (in a quotation) for a year.  She also gets visits from Child Protective Services who worry that she is steeping her own kids in false ideology.  In real life, parents in several states have lost custody of children after they refused to accept the child's desire to transition to a different gender.  

And last but  hardly least, the nomination, election, and now very possible re-election of Donald Trump proves that an obvious lack of intellectual distinction is no bar to highest office, and may even appeal to a significant number of voters.  That reflects the anti-intellectualism of the right, but the changes in the humanities that have favored ideology over creativity and judgment reflect an at least equally powerful anti-intellectualism on the left.  At one point in the book, Converse also notes that MacArthur genius grants are now being given to people of no intellectual distinction.  That too as happened with respect to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Ibram X. Kendi, none of whose writings, in my opinion, display exceptional intellectual ability.  It is even more interesting to compare the list of the first crop of MacArthur Fellows, selected in 1981, to the group selected in 2023.  

There is another critical aspect to our own crisis today that Shriver's work leaves out.  We still have very smart people who get very good educations--but what do they do with their lives?  A very large number of them reach the top positions in finance and industry--and there, because of another set of intellectual and legal changes, they focus all their brains and their energy on short-term economic gain.  That is why Boeing, for instance, can evidently no longer be trusted to build safe airplanes, and why our health care system is more and more corrupted by the profit motive.  That, however, is clearly a matter for another book.

I have been fascinated by greatness in a number of different fields all my life.  In 2017 I published Baseball Greatness, which used statistical analysis to identify the greatest baseball players of all time.  About 19,000 men had played major league baseball at that time--and many times that number had tried and failed to make the majors.  But out of those, my methods identified about 100 of them--less than one-half of one percent--who were demonstrably far superior to all the rest.  I see no reason to doubt that a similar percentage of individuals in any complex field of endeavor are capable of extraordinary achievements, but our whole society has indeed rebelled against that idea. This vast social change has happened much more slowly than the revolution in Animal Farm, but it may have equally fateful consequences. 

Podcast discussion of the JFK assassination

 A new generation is hard at work muddying the JFK waters, and I managed to get on to this podcast discussion of the case earlier this month.  The host, Lorien Fenton, began with a 23 minute rant on her favorite subject, UFOs, but if you start at 23 minutes, the discussion is not bad, and I had no trouble trying to inject a good dose of reality into the situation.  While my interlocutors didn't agree with a lot of what I said, we were all unfailingly polite.  Paul Bleau, the other guy, has distributed several surveys to JFK researchers.  I'll have another important post, a book review, up by this weekend at the latest.

NOTE:  Getting to the audio may be a little more complicated than I thought.  Here are the instructions.  The date of the video was April 8.  Note:  read carefully as you go along, the instructions provide the username and password you need to log in.  You don't create one.

Finally, if you like the interview it is yours to share! A few days after the interview log onto https://Revolution.Radio, click on the "Archives" button. Follow the instructions to log in. Then scroll to "The Fenton Perspective" and click on the folder, then scroll to the date of our show. (Should be the latest/last entry). Download the file.

More on States of the Union

     I have recorded and posted this seven-minute video about my new book, States of the Union, on youtube.  If you like it please pass it on to anyone you know who might be interested--and feel free to post comments! Thanks.  

Our intellectual elite

 In 1937, the left wing publisher Victor Gollancz brought out George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier--an account of life in a British mining town and a political manifesto--as a selection of the Left Book Club.  My father, then in the mist of his Oxford Rhodes Scholarship, evidently belonged to the club, and I still have the orange paper-covered copy that he received.  The book included so many attacks on left wing orthodoxy and upper-class intellectual fads that Gollancz and his two colleagues on the club selection committee decided that Gollancz himself would add an introduction definitely disassociating the club from some of what Orwell said.  He commented, quite rightly, that while Orwell on the one hand professed is own belief in "Socialism,"  he held very traditional views on diet, family life, and other issues.  Gollancz blamed these views on his class background--just as a contemporary critic would blame such views on race and gender.  "Mr. Orwell calls himself a 'half-intellectual'," he wrote, "but the is that he is at one and the same time an extreme intellectual and a violent anti-intellectual."  Orwell was my first serious intellectual interest and I wrote my undergraduate thesis about him, and I see now, 55 years later, that the same could be said of me.  

A few months ago, following a respected friend's recommendation, I started listening to Cafe Insider, the podcast of the former New York US attorney Preet Bharara.  Bharara has a calm, very engaging delivery and does interviews very well, and he brings his legal expertise to various issues of the day, particularly the pending cases against Donald Trump.  Last week he interviewed the journalist Evan Osnos, who has written a recent biography of Joe Biden that apparently includes a lengthy analysis of the coming election.  (I haven't read it.)  That interview, available here, strikes me as a perfect example of what is wrong with our current intellectual elite, whose flaws may return Donald Trump to the White House in nine months.  I'm not attacking Bhrara and Osnos personally here.  I'm citing them as prime examples of the chattering class, center-left version.

Early in the interview, Bharara posed the question that dominated the discussion.

"Logic and common sense would dictate that if three or four years ago, we were in the throes of the pandemic in a very serious way, lots and lots of people were dying, there were lots of lockdowns, people were unhappy, the economy was uncertain, now, fast-forward three years, the pandemic still persists, but it is not what it used to be, the economy is thriving, and the pandemic and all of its associated harms, and ills, and catastrophes are a thing of the past, why wouldn’t the mood of the country be ebullient, and why wouldn’t the guy who was at the helm during that transformation, whether he was deserving of it or not, why wouldn’t he be lifted up and hoisted up on the shoulders of Americans who would be praising him to the heavens? If I had told you three years ago that this is what America would look like three years later, wouldn’t the logical conclusion be that he was going to roll into re-election?"

"Yes, is the answer," Osnos replied.

I would suggest, to begin with, that things are not really that simple.  Yes, the pandemic as a serious medical threat is over, but our authorities bungled certain aspects of it in ways that are having long-term effects.  The decision to shut down the nation's schools has created a new achievement gap and increased chronic school absenteeism greatly.  As for the economy, as Bharara and Osnos acknowledge later, while unemployment has fallen to remarkably low levels, inflation has been a big problem during most of Biden's term.  And a broader question looms.  When we say in 2024 that the economy is booming, what does that really mean?  Yes, the stock market has hit new highs, but that doesn't make much difference to the bulk of the population.  Young people in our major metropolitan areas are facing the worst housing crisis since the late 1940s, and the government is doing very little about it.  Inflation has at least neutralized many wage gains.  Things are fine for the upper quarter (approximately) of the population, and those are the people whom our intellectual elite knows  And they assume, as we shall see, that the rest of the country has some obligation to share their views.  Osnos, to be fair, does acknowledge that the economic picture is mixed.

A little later, Bharara argues at length that Biden should be able to take more credit for preventing a recession--because Larry Summers and virtually every economist was certain in 2022 that one was coming.  "Clearly," he says, "it’s the case that a determination as to whose fault something is or who gets some credit for something is within the province of the voter, and they can decide logically or illogically to lay blame at someone’s feet or give credit to someone. On the other hand, it is up to the candidate, in this case, Joe Biden, to seize the microphone and take credit, whether it’s deserved or not, for things that, traditionally speaking, any politician worth his salt would’ve taken credit for."  As it happens, however, I don't think that Biden deserves any particular credit for avoiding the recession any more than he deserves any blame for the inflation that occurred.  I also doubt that our leading economists really understand exactly what has increased unemployment or raised prices over the last few years.  Our economy has been out of the control of our political leadership for a very long time, and I think that the average American knows that.  And given that the American people no longer trust either party to make that much of a difference in their lives, it is natural for them to express their dissatisfaction by voting against the party in power.  The is what they have done in every election but one since 2006, in which either the White House or at least one house of Congress changed hands.

 Neither Bharara nor Osnos, meanwhile, ever mentions the immigration issue at all.  Illegal immigration has again surged under Biden, and applying Bharara's maxim, it would appear that he is the logical person to blame for this.  And indeed, many voters are blaming him, including nonwhite voters assumed to be part of the Democratic coalition, but who are now trending in the other direction.

 Here I will digress for a somewhat unrelated point:  it drives me crazy to hear pundits claim, as they often do, that the 2022 congressional elections were a victory for the Democrats because there was no "red wave."  In fact, they lost the House of Representatives, making any further progress on domestic issues nearly impossible, and having terrible consequences for foreign policy.  More importantly, the Republicans actually won the popular vote for the House by three percentage points--a margin which would have been expected to give them a much larger majority than they actually got.

Late in the interview, Bharara finally brings up the question of Biden's age--and Osnos,. who talks throughout like a Biden campaign manager, not a journalist, gives another typical center-left response. 

"I think you see that certainly showing up in poll numbers, that people just look at Biden and that is their question, the Biden world bet[sic]. And it’s a big bet, but it is a substantive one is, that it’s not just about age, yes or no, it’s age versus crazy. To tie it back into that point we were talking about before, Preet, that’s what it is. It’s age versus crazy. Okay. Sure, there’s no question that Joe Biden is older than he was, and you see it, you feel it, this gets to the innumeracy of our politics. You just read it, like one animal to another, Joe Biden is older, yes. But that is a different thing than, is his mind intact? Is his decision-making record defensible? And compare it to the alternative.

"The oldest Joe Biden line in the world happens to be truer now than it’s ever been in his career, which is, 'Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.' And we now know who that alternative is. So that’s where the age question becomes more complicated than just, is he too old to do this job?"

Biden, Osnos says, is running for re-election because he thinks he deserves it based upon his record--but the bottom line, in which so many Democrats believe, is that the electorate has no option but to vote for him because he is running against Trump, whom they have defined as un-American and impossible. And what if it turns out the country does once again elect Trump?  Osnos has his answer ready.

"I think some of this has to do with a basic orientation of the politics of the right as it is today, which is that it is fundamentally nostalgic in nature, it is about seeking to reclaim, or rebuild, or recover things that have been lost. And those things are basically forms of power, and they’re cultural power. Let’s be blunt about this, Preet, it’s about a certain white male dominated conception of the United States, and it is one that was largely intact for a very, very long time, and now feels to a lot of people on the right as if it is going away, and Joe Biden is the head of a party in a movement that represents that. And so that’s what they’re talking about. And they can lump into that bucket all kinds of things, they’ll say that it’s about getting rid of the right to bear arms, or the right to raise your children with the curriculum that you want.

"In some ways, it’s a kind of endlessly adaptable thesis, but that’s really what it’s about. And I really come to the belief that when we talk about freedoms being taken away on the left, that’s not abstract to people. I was having conversation with friends just in the last couple of days, if you’re a woman who’s looking at the state of abortion rights in this country, and you see them being taken away one by one in state after state, that’s a really specific thing that you can identify. On the right, it is a more atmospheric declaration."

Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" comment might have lost her the election, but it lives on in the words of Osnos.  People are voting for Trump not because of high housing costs or uncontrolled immigration or the impact of free trade on jobs, but because they believe white males no longer dominate the culture--something that most white males never did.  Among the Democratic elite, blaming opposition on racism and sexism and homophobia is a way of saying, those people don't deserve to be listened to anyway.   And there is plenty to worry about in blue state K-12 school curriculums, too, even among those of us who believe that all Americans deserve equal rights.

To repeat: I have enjoyed Preet Bharara's podcasts and will continue subscribing, but I think that the tone of this whole conversation was a big part of the problem we face.

Victor Gollancz's devotion to the left wing orthodoxy of the late 1930s and early 1940s eventually cost him very dearly indeed.  He forgave Orwell for The Road to Wigan Pier and published it with his own disclaimer, but he was not so forgiving later, with fateful consequences.  On March 3, 1944, Orwell wrote Gollancz--with whom he was under contract giving Gollancz the right of first refusal on his next three books--about a new manuscript.  "It is a little fairy story," he wrote, "about 30,000 words, with a political meaning.  But I must tell you that it is--I think--completely unacceptable politically from your point of view (it is anti-Stalin.)"  Gollancz replied heatedly that he had in fact disagreed with Stalin and Soviet policy many times, and asked to see the ms.  Twelve days later, Gollancz wrote Orwell again: "You were right and I was wrong.  I am so sorry. I have returned the manuscript to Moore [Orwell's agent.]"  No major publisher would take the book, but it made the career of a minor one, Fred Warburg.  

The book was Animal Farm, one of the best sellers of the twentieth century. I wonder if there is a parallel attack on contemporary intellectual orthodoxy waiting to be written today.

Israel and the United States

 I have hesitated for a long time to write something like this post.  Chuck Schumer's speech the other day pushed me over the edge, because it exemplified one aspect of the American-Israeli problem that no one else seems to want to talk about.  I will get to that in due course, but before I begin, I want to quote a remarkable passage from the autobiography of Zora Neal Hurston.  I am indebted to the podcaster Coleman Hughes for first bringing it to my attention.

“There could be something wrong with me because I see Negroes neither better nor worse than any other race. Race pride is a luxury I cannot afford. There are too many implications bend the term. Now, suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? If I glory, then the obligation is laid upon me to blush also. I do glory when a Negro does something fine, I gloat because he or she has done a fine thing, but not because he was a Negro. That is incidental and accidental. It is the human achievement which I honor. I execrate a foul act of a Negro but again not on the grounds that the doer was a Negro, but because it was foul. A member of my race just happened to be the fouler of humanity. In other words, I know that I cannot accept responsibility for thirteen million people. Every tub must sit on its own bottom regardless. So 'Race Pride' in me had to go. And anyway, why should I be proud to be Negro? Why should anyone be proud to be white? Or yellow? Or red? After all, the word 'race' is a loose classification of physical characteristics. I tells nothing about the insides of people. Pointing out achievements tells nothing either. Races have never done anything. What seems race achievement is the work of individuals. The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. The Jews did not work out Relativity. That was Einstein. The Negroes did not find out the inner secrets of peanuts and sweet potatoes, nor the secret of the development of the egg. That was Carver and Just. If you are under the impression that every white man is Edison, just look around a bit. If you have the idea that every Negro is a Carver, you had better take off plenty of time to do your searching.”

I happen to agree completely with that sentiment.  It was popular among minorities, I believe, in 1942 when she published it, and it was very much in the air for the two subsequent decades during which I was growing up.  Martin Luther King Jr. echoed it in his remarks about the content of our character.  The middle of the last century was an era of extraordinary human achievement--technological, industrial, and political.  Men and women focused more naturally on human achievement then.  Now they are focusing more on tribe, defined in various ways.

Now let me quote a very parallel remark from Albert Einstein--to whom Hurston referred--recording his own feelings about his own ethnic and religious group, the Jews.

“For me, the unadulterated Jewish religion is, like all other religions, an incarnation of primitive superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and in whose mentality I feel profoundly anchored, still for me does not have any different kind of dignity from all other peoples. As far as my experience goes, they are in fact no better than other human groups, even if they are protected from the worst excesses by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot perceive anything ‘chosen’ about them.”

If you enjoyed those quotes, you may well appreciate this post.  If you didn't, I doubt very much that you will.  And before I go any further, I happen to be the child of a Jewish-American father and a New England/Midwestern protestant mother.  They raised me without any religion at all, something that I have never regretted.  And that means, as you probably know, that the state of Israel does not recognize me as a Jew or a potential citizen, which I would have no desire to become in any case.  I have never had and never wanted any country but the United States, and I think that the observance of impartial laws--domestically and internationally--is the only way for the peoples of the modern world to live together in peace and happiness.

The decision to create the state of Israel in 1947-48 (six years before Einstein wrote those words, by the way), was an entirely understandable decision.  Jews had lived as minorities for many centuries, often in very cruel conditions.  Zionism had begun in the nineteenth century mainly to provide a new home for the Jews of the Russian Empire (including Poland), who were not regarded as Russian citizens, and who were already immigrating in large numbers ot the United States and elsewhere. (Two of my grandparents were among them.)  Initially Zionism aroused very mixed reactions in the Jewish communities in western nations, many of whom wanted nothing more than to be treated as equals in their current homes.  The rise of Nazism, the Holocaust, and the Second World War obviously changed the calculus.  Almost nowhere in Europe had the Jews been safe from destruction, and the United States had shut off large-scale immigration from anywhere in the early 1930s.  Perhaps in part because they could not welcome Holocaust survivors into their own country, many  more American Jews now became Zionists, and the US government played in important role in the international recognition of Israel after 1948.  No one, however, could force the Arabs then living in Palestine or the governments of the neighboring Arab states to accept the creation of Israel, and they did not.  Israel has lived under military threat for the whole of its 75 years of existence, first from the neighboring Arab states and later from the Palestinian population of the Gaza strip and the West Bank, both of which Israel occupied after the 1967 war.  Israel successfully made peace with Egypt in the late 1970s and Jordan in the 1990s, but attempts to make peace with the Palestinians in the 1990s failed, and the political organization Hamas gradually emerged as the center of Palestinian resistance, winning an election in the occupied territories in 2006 and eventually securing full control of Gaza.  A parallel Shi'ite organization, Hezbollah, developed in Lebanon under the patronage of Iran, which since 1979 has been an avowed enemy of Israel as well.

The creation of Israel was a remarkable political and economic achievement.  It also freed the Israelis from the relative powerlessness that Einstein referred to in 1954, with exactly the results that he seemed to anticipate.  It is easier for weak states to be virtuous than strong ones, as Tocqueville remarked in Democracy in America.  The Israeli government developed very significant military power and used it ruthlessly in 1956 and 1967--when it began wars with its neighbors--and in 1973, when it was attacked.  (I know some readers will dispute my characterization of 1967, when Nasser in Egypt created the crisis that led to the war, but it is not at all clear that war would have occurred if Israel had not begun it.)  In addition, the 1967 decision to occupy, govern, and partially resettle Gaza and the West Bank made the Israelis the rulers of a foreign people, a role that inevitably involves cruelty and injustice.  The current war in Gaza--triggered, of course, by a very cruel attack upon civilians by Hamas--has confirmed Einstein's suspicions.  Given enough power and provocation, any nation--including both Israel and the United States--can do terrible things.  That is human nature.

1967 was also a key date for some elements of the American Jewish community.  As historian Judith Klinghoffer pointed out in her book, Vietnam, Jews, and the Middle East, it deepened the feelings of many American Jews for Israel, and it helped create neoconservatism by convincing certain Jewish intellectuals that the United States had to be a strong presence all over the world because it was one of Israel's few friends.  The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) dated from 1959 but became much more powerful after the 1967 and 1973 wars, and by the 1980s it was using its political power to make it very difficult for elected officials to oppose anything that the State of Israel was doing.  In 2006 Michael Massing wrote the most detailed analysis of what AIPAC had become and the power it wielded that I have ever seen, and I don't think anything has changed very much since then. Massing emphasized that the small number of very wealthy individuals who controlled AIPAC were much more conservative and much friendlier to the Israeli right than the great mass of American Jews were, and that is undoubtedly still true today.  Yet they remain, effectively, the voice of the Jewish community in American foreign policy all the same.

I am not going to review the whole history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the attempts to end it.  I have said before that I doubt very much that the leadership of either side wants a peace that would recognize the rights of the other side--that is, a two-state solution.  The Israeli government offered less than that in 2000, when agreement seemed to be the nearest it had ever been, and we will never know whether that Israeli government, which ruled by a very narrow margin, would have been able to get those terms accepted by its own people or not.  And to the extent that various Palestinian leaders have shown a willingness to compromise, I am not convinced that this was anything more than a strategic move to get something now in order to try to get more later--the same strategy that the Zionist leadership used in 1948 when it accepted in principle the UN General Assembly's partition plan.  I will return later to the question of where that leaves the Israelis and Palestinians now.

The current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has explicitly rejected a two-state solution.  Some weeks before the October 7 attack he displayed a map of the Middle East before the United Nations in which the territory of Israel included the entire West Bank and Gaza.  In addition, several leading members of his government are calling specifically for turning most or all of the Gaza population of about two million into refugees in some foreign land and starting to resettle Gaza with Israelis.  Meanwhile they are once again expanding settlements in the West Bank and allowing settlers to terrorize Palestinians.  And in the five months since October 7, the Israeli air force and army have made most of Gaza almost completely uninhabitable, and are now preparing to finish the job.  I don't see how anyone can rule out the possibility that the Israeli government wants to complete the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza strip, or that it might carry out the same policy in the West Bank later on when a suitable provocation occurs.   And I don't want the US government to support that policy either openly or tacitly.

Senator Schumer's very strong criticism of Netanyahu and his government took courage, but it disturbed me because it reflected a fantasy that occurs among liberal American Jews who oppose what Israel is doing but want to continue to support it.  They tell themselves that Netanyahu does not represent most Israelis, that most Israelis oppose his policies, and even--as Schumer said openly in his speech--that Netanyahu has only adopted those policies to please the extreme elements of his coalition and stay in power.   I do not believe that.  My main source for what is happening in Israel is the liberal daily Haaretz.   It violently opposes everything Netanyahu stands for, and many other Israelis do as well--but they definitely appear to be in the minority now, and the Haaretz writers know that.  Netanyahu is personally unpopular, but were he to resign or be forced out of office, he might easily be replaced by someone whose views and policies were similar to his.  Schumer is apparently one of a number of liberal American Jews--exactly how many, I cannot say--who need to feel that Israel is made up mostly of Jews like themselves.  I do not think that that is true, and I don't think it made any sense for him to demand that the Israeli electorate choose someone else.   George W. Bush demanded the same thing of the Palestinians in 2002--and four years later they elected Hamas.

And what would a responsible Israeli policy look like?  Peace will be impossible unless both sides genuinely accept the other's right to exist.  Violence will continue at least intermittently until that day--if it ever comes.  Israel could in the meantime renounce the policy of making Gaza uninhabitable and stop further expansion into the West Bank--but no Israeli government has been willing to do that for a long time.  What both sides can do, and have done for long periods, is to make every effort to keep the level of conflict at the lowest possible level, even when seriously provoked.   Hamas would be in a much stronger position today, I think, if they had only killed Israeli soldiers on October 7.  Israel had to retaliate for that attack, but not to the extent of killing nearly 30 Palestinians--most of them civilians--for every Israeli who died on that day--a total that continues to increase. Yet having stated those views, I will do what Schumer did not do, and acknowledge that neither side cares what I think or shows any signs of adopting them now.  We are in the midst of a continuing tragedy.  I have found all my life that tragedy, real or imagined, can be cathartic in retrospect.  I don't know if there is any catharsis to be had from ongoing tragedies.

States of the Union

Early in his State of the Union address last week President Biden quoted from Franklin Roosevelt's parallel address on  January 6, 1941.  He repeated Roosevelt's opening words: that this was "an unprecedented moment in the history of the nation."  Never before, Roosevelt said, had the security of the United States been so directly threatened from abroad.  This moment, Biden said, was equally unprecedented: "Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today."  

A broader comparison of the two addresses makes a broader point.  They were given at crucially different moments in the two presidents' tenures.  FDR had just been re-elected for the second time by an impressive margin; Biden faces a very tight struggle for his own re-election.  The comparison suggests that they were speaking to very different nations, whose common political system was working very differently.  The differences raise profound questions about our future.

Television had just been invented and was not yet operating regularly in 1941.  Roosevelt's speech was broadcast on radio and printed in its entirety in  many major newspapers.  It began with a nine-paragraph summary of the country's relations with the rest of the world since 1789, insisting that " the United States as a nation has at all times maintained clear, definite opposition, to any attempt to lock us in behind an ancient Chinese wall while the procession of civilization went past."  Then he proclaimed a worldwide threat to "the democratic way of life" all over the world--"assailed either by arms, or by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still at peace."  Victory by the unnamed "assailants" on four other continents would threaten the Americas with overwhelming force. A "dictator's peace" would bring "no security for us or for our neighbors." The American people, he said, had to assist democratic forces now fighting around the world, and to increase their own armaments production dramatically.  He referred to the lend-lease program he had put forward in another broadcast a few weeks earlier to supply warring nations with critical opinion without requiring payments in cash or in debt obligations.  He talked in some detail about the industrial requirements of massive new arms production and the need to move more quickly in several areas. He called for higher taxes to pay for all this.  He mentioned that his opponent in the recent election had not disagreed with him on the basic principles of foreign policy, and like most presidents delivering their annual address in the first 160 or so years of the nation's history, he never referred to Republicans or Democrats.

All this, he continued, allowed the nation to "look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms"--freedom of speech, "freedom of every person to worship God in his own way," "freedom from want," and "freedom from fear"--the right to live in a world of reduced armaments that would no longer allow any nation to undertake aggression against others.  "This nation," he concluded, " has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory."  The joint session responded during his speech with periodic, polite applause.

Biden's speech reads very differently.  Roosevelt talked in short paragraphs; Biden talked mostly in one-liners.  He began by listing not one, but three major problems: Putin's aggression in Ukraine, threats to democracy at home, and the attack on abortion rights and even IVF in various states.  He asked Congress to approve aid to Ukraine and promised to sign a bill restoring Roe v. Wade as the law of the land if Congress would pass it.   

Then came the bulk of the speech: a long list of Biden's accomplishments, as he sees them, with respect to the economy.  The American people, he announced, "are writing the greatest comeback story never told." Following in the footsteps of his predecessors, he referred to progress in employment, unemployment, small business creation, health insurance, the racial wealth gap, inflation, infrastructure construction, the trade balance, chip production, lower drug prices, the Affordable Care Act, and clean energy. He praised the achievements of unions and bragged about standing on a picket line.  Then he turned to the future.

Biden called for lower prices for insulin and other drugs, and promised cheaper housing costs and rents.  He called for "the best education system in the world," as every president at least since George H. W. Bush has done,  more preschool opportunities, and cheaper college and more college debt forgiveness. Then he called for higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy and the restoration of the pandemic-induced child care credit. He announced cuts in credit-card fees and new requirements for stating prices accurately. Then he turned to border security, and blamed the Republicans for failing to pass a recent compromise bill, referring, as he did thirteen times, to his "predecessor."  He called for new voting rights protections, opposed banning books, and told transgender Americans, "I have your back."  He talked about new steps to reduce gun violence.  Returning to foreign affairs, he tried to strike a balance between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza and talked about measures taken against the Houthis in response to their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. And in conclusion, he briefly reviewed his own long life in politics and asked the American people to "build the future together."

The reception of his speech was very different from that of FDR in 1940.  Democrats constantly interrupted with raucous cheers and applause, while Republicans sat stony-faced and occasionally heckled him.  Vice President Harris contributed to the atmosphere by repeatedly rising to her feet while applauding.  FDR aimed his words at the whole nation, threatened by war, while Biden generally aimed his at various Democratic constituencies and drew the maximum possible contrast between the two parties.  It would have been very hard to draft a speech that could actually have bridged the gaps between our parties--perhaps as hard as it would have been for Lincoln on March 4, 1861. Roosevelt also faced lots of very bitter opposition both in Congress and in the country, but he could ignore it because he had just been elected for the third time by very impressive popular and electoral majorities. Much of the Republican Party, including his opponent in the late presidential election, Wendell Willkie, agreed with him about aiding other nations--particularly the British--and preparing for possible war. Fortunately for the United States and for the rest of the world, the nation in 1941 was capable of united action on a scale we could never match today.

Roosevelt also talked throughout the speech about general principles and broad currents of history.  Biden focused on emotional specifics, reinforced from time to time by the identification of illustrative individuals sitting in the gallery.  And Biden could not have put forward four principles like FDR's four freedoms, because even their language has become controversial.  Freedom of religion, which all Americans in 1940 understood as the right to practice their own faith, now has an entirely new meaning, one endorsed by Supreme Court majorities.  Freedom of speech is under attack in many Democratic-leaning institutions.  All this raises a profound question.   My new book shows how the success of the  United States in its first 200 years may well have depended on certain measured forms of discourse, on a belief in the nation's institutions that transcended partisanship, and on attempts to keep emotions under control.  We are about to find out whether the American experiment can survive without those habits.

p.s.  A serious family medical emergency delayed the appearance of this post.  Fortunately I can report that the patient has weathered her crisis and is definitely on the mend now--although full recovery will take some time.

Elite higher education--an undergraduate's view

 I went to college in the late 1960s and to grad school from 1971  to 1976--both at Harvard.  I taught there from 1976 through 1980.  I described all these experiences in great detail in my autobiography,  A Life in History, linked at right.  The great changes that have transformed higher ed began, really, in my senior year in college, and I watched them spread throughout the country during my own teaching career from 1976 through 2013.  I have written a good deal here and elsewhere about those changes, but nothing I have experienced depressed me quite as much as an article in the current Harvard Magazine--the alumni magazine--by a current undergraduate named Aden Barton entitled, "AWOL from Academics."

Let me summarize for the moment the key features, as I see them now, of the undergraduate education that I received.  First, we all had to read and enormous amounts of text.  One of my favorite courses--taught by a visitor from Chicago--was entitled "Dostoevsky, Camus, and Faulkner."  The reading included three of Dostoevsky's four major novels; three novels by Camus; and two long, demanding works by Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury and Light in August--and some shorter works by Dostoevsky and Faulkner as well.  The Slavic Department also offered a Dostoevsky course which assigned essentially all the works of Dostoevsky. In the same year, I took a course, International Politics, 1919-45, taught by Ernest May, who became my dissertation adviser, and my lifelong friend Sam Williamson.  That reading list included two general works on the diplomacy of that tumultuous period, and major books on the US, Britain, France, Germany, the Far East, and the USSR.  Almost no one did all the reading in all their courses--I certainly didn't--but we still got a lot out of it.  And crucially, grade inflation had not really begun.  Only 9 percent of grades were straight As, another 13 percent were A-s, and 48 percent were some sort of B,  30 percent of grades were C+ or lower.  A B was a good grade that no one was ashamed to get, and many people felt they had gotten a tremendous amount out of courses in which they could manage more than a C+.  Reading Period was another key aspect of the educational experience.  Classes began in late September (a wonderfully civilized time) and continued for twelve weeks, but exams didn't happen until late January.  Reading period, during which classes generally did not meet, took up about three weeks of January, and gave us all a chance to catch up on reading that we had not done.  I learned what I was capable of during my first reading period, and I know many other people felt the same way.

Reading period was nearly abolished about twenty years ago.  According to the administration, Harvard students complained that while all their friends at other institutions had finished their exams before Christmas vacation, they had not.  Faculty who had gone through Harvard College protested that decision but other faculty outvoted them and accused them of being driven by nostalgia.  Now the entire fall term lasts from the day after Labor Day until about December 10, including just four days of reading period, and exams last from December 11 through December 20.  The winter recess lasts a month and the spring term begins on January 20, with a similar calendar.   And something else has changed.  Half a century ago, the three-hour final exam was another critical Harvard ritual, requiring students to display what they had learned over the last four months in cogent essays.  Far fewer courses even give exams today.

And last but hardly least, the role of various disciplines has been dramatically altered. I found writing my autobiography that Harvard and Radcliffe graduated about 270 history majors in 1965, and 45 in 2017.  Humanities majors (which do not include history at Harvard, where it counts as a social science)  were just 12.5 percent of graduates last year, compared to 22.1 percent in the School of Engineering and Applied Science (a relatively new innovation), 28 percent in other science majors, and 37.2 percent in the social sciences.  

Let me now turn to this article, "AWOL from Academics," by an undergraduate named Aden Barton, that just appeared in Harvard Magazine.  The average college student, she reports, spent about 25 hours a week studying in 1960, but only 15 hours a week in 2015.  Many students, she says, now treat academics as a very secondary preoccupation. "This fall, one of my friends did not attend a single lecture or class section until more than a month into the semester. Another spent 40 to 80 hours a week on her preprofessional club, leaving barely any time for school. A third launched a startup while enrolled, leaving studying by the wayside."  Data from a Crimson senior survey, she says, "indicates [sic] that students devote nearly as much time collectively to extracurriculars, athletics, and employment as to their classes."

Grade inflation is another big, fateful change.  In academic year 2020-21, the most recent for which I can find data, 79 percent of grades awarded were As or A-s--compared to 22 percent in 1965.   Aden Barton provides an example of the results of this practice.

"Indeed, three of my friends and I took a high-level seminar one semester, and, although we knew hundreds of pages of readings would be assigned each week, we were excited about the prospect of engaging with the material. As time went on, the percentage of readings each of us did went from nearly 100 to nearly 0.

"In the final class, each student was asked to cite their favorite readings, and the professor was surprised that so many chose readings from the first few units. That wasn’t because the students happened to be most interested in those classes’ material; rather, that was the brief period of the course when everyone actually did some of the readings.

"Despite having barely engaged with the course material, we all received A’s. I don’t mean to blame the professors for our poor work ethic, but we certainly would have read more had our grades been at risk. At the time, we bemoaned our own lack of effort. By that point in the semester, though, many other commitments had started requiring more of us, so prioritizing curiosity for its own sake became difficult.

"And therein lies the second reinforcing effect of grade inflation, which not only fails to punish substandard schoolwork but actively incentivizes it, as students often rely on extracurriculars to get ahead. Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education, made this point in a recent New York Times interview, saying that 'Students feel the need to distinguish themselves outside the classroom because they are essentially indistinguishable inside the classroom.'”

Barton works at the Crimson, and in fact some students in every generation have made that their first priority, but this kind of thing is much more common now.  One new innovation is pre-professional clubs, which apparently get students thinking about what they are gong to do after college instead of what they  might be doing while they were there.  Their attitude towards courses becomes purely instrumental.  A Russian Studies professor named Terry Martin put it this way.

"Professor Martin, for example, wrote to me in an email that 'students today…want to please, they want to understand what is expected of them in the course and to fulfill those expectations (as a general rule).' But that approach “comes at the cost of intellectual curiosity for its own sake and intellectual originality and even boldness.'

"Martin told me that he used to get more essays 'where the student was trying to ‘jerk your chain,’ i.e., write something that completely contradicts what you’ve been teaching,' but this is no longer as common. That certainly resonates with my own experiences. When approaching essays, I often automatically start by thinking about what my professor or teaching assistant wants to hear, rather than what I want to argue or what I have authentically learned.

"Instead of becoming wholly careless towards classes, then, students are often incredibly intentional about earning the (easy) A, at the cost of true or genuine curiosity. One of my classmates last semester, who is one of the more academically oriented people I know, told me that to get the best grade on an important essay, he simply 'regurgitated the readings' without thinking critically about the material."

There is, I think, a simple reason why nearly every faculty member has given into grade inflation.  The dirty secret of higher ed nowadays is that both the faculty and the administration are terrified of student opinion.  They are now charging 3-4 times as much as they did in the 1960s--adjusting for inflation--and they want to give kids their money's worth in terms of credentials.  As numerous incidents in various campuses show, they take their students' feelings incredibly seriously.  I was recently on a zoom with a well-known academic, a believer in the humanities, who inadvertently made that clear too. Yes, he told us, he told his students that Thomas Jefferson was a great thinker and founder of democracy, but also a "noxious racist."  Challenged on that term in the Q & A by a listener who agreed that every slaveowner was evidently a racist but questioned the term "noxious racist," he replied that he had to put it that way because that was what students expected to hear.  I do not think educators can do their job properly if they are afraid of their students.

There is much more in the article, and I recommend that you all read it in full.  Harvard has given up the mission that drew me and my contemporaries to it:  the cultivation of our minds and our exposure to the great worlds of the ancient an dmodern worlds. These problems are hardly unique either to Harvard or to elite institutions, either.  The humanities are nearing extinction in many schools, and only a few small colleges such as the St. John's colleges and Hillsdale are offering a distinct product focused on the humanities.  This means that the intellectual traditions I learned from are dead.  New institutions like the University of Austin might revive them, but finding faculty who could actually return to traditional approaches would be extremely difficult.  I realize that I have drawn enormous emotional sustenance from participating in those traditions all my life, and their disappearance is as painful as the loss of a dear friend.  Eventually I do believe new generations will rebuild them, but that may take a very long time.

 

Wealth inequality--causes and consequences

 According to Wikipedia, five states and at least four cities have taken steps to consider reparations for black Americans on the grounds that their relatively lower levels of wealth are due to slavery, segregation, and discriminatory economic policies.  Measured in the aggregate--which is how nearly everything having to do with race is measured nowadays--the wealth gap is indeed very large.  The Brookings Institution reports that median black wealth was $44,890 in 2022, compared to $62,000 for "non-white Hispanic" households, $285,000 for white households, and $536,000 for Asian households.  Many would argue, presumably, that black Americans have a greater claim to reparations than Hispanics--who certainly have suffered from discrimination--because most of them descend from slaves and their families have been in the United States for so much longer.  Using different statistics, I would like to suggest that the use of median values (or for that matter of mean values, which I have not seen) presents a very  misleading picture of the distribution of poverty and the problem of inequality in the United States.  Those problems are very real, but evidence suggests that they do not have a primarily racial cause and cannot have a primarily racial solution.

According to this table which I found online, the poorest ten percent of households in 2020 had negative or nearly zero net worth.  the poorest 40 percent had $100,000 or less of net worth, and the poorer half of our households had $200,000 or less in net worth.  I now want to refer you to Figure 3 on this page maintained by the Federal Reserve, which shows the racial share of these portions of our nation's households.  The graph I am using is the lower left one of the four graphs in that figure.  It is relatively small and I have to estimate values to some extent, but nothing I say will be wildly off.  Bear with me. After working with this graph for about an hour, I realize that it doesn't tell me exactly what I would like to know: the racial distribution of households in the lowest 10 percent of the population, the lowest 20 percent, etc.  Instead it shows the distribution in discrete percentiles, from the first to the 100th, of the income distribution.  I wish I could find the data I really was looking for, but I can't.  Still, the discrete points on this one will tell us a lot.

Let's begin with the 10 percent of households that are either in debt or have no or almost no net worth.  In the tenth percentile, about 45 percent of those households are white--the portion shown in blue on the graph.  About 33 percent of them are black,  about 18 percent of them are Hispanic, and about 4 percent ar Asian.  The bottom 10 percent households totaled about 12.9 million households or 33 million people.  If we assumed that the figures for the tenth percentile were valid for the whole poorest one-tenth of households in the country,  we would put the number of white Americans living in those net worth-less households was 14.9 million, compared to 11 million black people, 5.9 million Hispanics, and about 520,000 Asians.  Looking at the graph, however, it is clear that the percentage and thus the number of white households in the lowest five percentiles was significantly higher than in the 10th. (The poorest several percentiles owe many thousands of dollars each.) Thus, it seems clear that of the bottom 10 percent of the wealth distribution, more than half of them are white.

Let's do the same exercise for the 64 million households in the bottom half of the wealth distribution, 80 percent of whom own $100,000 or less and another 10 percent between $100,000 and $200,000.  Looking at the graph, you can see that the white share of households reaches 50 percent around the 17th or 18th percentile and grows to over 70 percent by the 50th.  I can't do a real calculation of the exact number of white, black and Hispanic households in the lower half of the population, but it looks as if about 60 percent of them are white, with perhaps 21 percent black and 16 percent Hispanic.   Interestingly enough, at the 50th percentile the shares of black and Hispanic households approximate 15 percent, which according to the graph to the right is also quite close to their total share of households. That means that the lower half of the income distribution includes 38.6 million white households, 13.5 million black households, and 10.3 million Hispanic households.  That translates to about 98 .5 million white people, 34.5 million black people, and 26 million Hispanics.

Now it seems to me there are at least two ways of looking at the inequality problem in our society.  Going back to the beginning of this post, we find that the median net worth of black, white and Hispanic households in the United States are $285,000, $44,890, and $62,000.  That sounds like being white is an enormous disadvantage and being black is a crippling disability.  The principle reason for those disparities, however, is the overwhelming dominance of white households in the upper reaches of the income distribution.  If we focus on the people who really need help--the lowest decile with negative or zero net worth, and the next 40 deciles with very little--we find that more than half of them turn out to be white.  That raises some very important historical questions.

It is now a liberal commonplace that slavery, segregation, and discriminatory policies have caused income inequality between the races in the United States.  That would imply that those factors are the reason that about 11 million black Americans live  in households with no assets and 34.5 million black Americans have less than $200,000 in assets (and 80 percent of them have less than $100,000). That interpretation, however, leads us to another question:  why then do 14.9 million white Americans find themselves with negative or 0 net worth, and another 83.6 million have less than $200,000?  Slavery and discrimination cannot be the cause of that.  I can imagine two possible explanations for this.

The first is essentially a riff on the common conservative explanation for minority poverty--that it is a matter of culture.  One could argue that while slavery, segregation, and public policies are what have made black and Hispanic people poor, poor white people must suffer from serious cultural deficiencies.  Actually there is good evidence that poor people of all races now suffer from the same social pathologies. Charles Murray has been attacked for some of his writings about black people, and at times, I think, with good reason--but I was very impressed by his book Coming Apart, which is about poor white people, not poor black people, around metropolitan areas.  He found that in the last decades of the last century their attitudes, values, and ways of living had become increasingly dysfunctional, including breakdowns of family life, drug use, and aversion to work among many young males.  The illegitimacy rate among white people is now higher than the rate among black people when Moynihan wrote his famous report in 1965, and there are more white single parents now than black.  It doesn't make any sense, in my opinion, to racialize these problems.  Millions of blacks and Hispanics are not suffering from them, while millions of white people are.

My preferred explanation for the presence of 50 percent of the population with no or very little net worth, however, is simply the evolution of the American capitalist economy since the 1970s.  This is laid out very clearly in a series of charts at this remarkable web site, showing what has happened to income and wealth distribution in the last 53 years, since 1971.  I am going to reproduce one of its most interesting charts, one which deals specifically with race.

The chart shows, remarkably, that average black income as a percentage of average white income rose from 50 percent in 1948 to about 68 percent in 1971--even though for most of that period at least half of black Americans were living  under legal segregation.  From then until 2018, however, that progress slowed.  So did the progress of the whole lower half of the US population, as other carts in the web site show.  Thanks in particular to very high top-bracket tax rates, the strength of labor unions, and a massive housing boom--which helped everyone by increasing the stock of housing so much--GDP gains went in large measure to the lower deciles of the population.   In the last half century they have gone mostly to the very top.  That--not slavery from 1619 to 1865 or segregation from then until the 1960s--is the reason for the tremendous economic inequality that we all face today.

The insistence that began, I think, with Lyndon Johnson, that poverty is mainly a minority problem and that therefore solutions to it must focus on helping minorities, has not only failed to address our real economic problems, but has also had disastrous political consequences.  The whole lower half of our population is very unhappy, and rightly so, with the state of our economy, the life it offers them, and the shrinking chances of improving their position.  Most minority voters blame discrimination for their lot, apparently, and vote Democratic.  But the white voters in the lower 50 percent can't blame discrimination, and they understand how public policies having nothing to do with race--such as free trade agreements and rollbacks of union rights--have hurt their position.  They apparently blame Democrats more than Republicans for this, perhaps because Democrats still claim to be the party of the working class, without doing very much about its plight.  The whites in the lower half of our wealth distribution now vote heavily Republican--and there are far more of them than there are blacks and Hispanics, as we have seen.  In addition, recent elections and polling show blacks and Hispanics trending Republican.

The diversity movement in all our major institutions has, I am sure, increased minority representation within those institutions significantly--but it has done little or nothing for the lower half of the population because it is not attacking the real causes of its problems.  In fact, we all stand or fall together, economically, politically, and the world at large.  We desperately need leaders who can return to that simple creed.

Back to Minneapolis

 In December I posted about the controversy over the death of George Floyd and the guilt or innocence of the police officers who were convicted of his murder, drawing in part--but only in part--on two podcasts  by Glenn Loury.  Their position, which I endorsed to some extent, has been sharply critiqued in a long substack post by Radley Balko, an investigative journalist specializing in criminal justice.  This post focused on the issue of whether the knee that Chauvin placed on Floyd's back, shoulder, and neck was part of an approved Minneapolis police technique.  Balko makes a strong case that while recommended procedures included a brief use of such a technique, they did not call for the sustained use that Chauvin made.  

Balko has now published another post on a much more critical question: what the original medical examiner's autopsy report actually said and what we really know about how Floyd died.  This is also a well-documented discussion that argues, in effect, that a great preponderance of evidence--including evidence from other cases--tells us that Floyd died of asphyxiation caused by Chauvin's pressure on his back and/or neck, but which also confirms the original statements of the medical examiner that his autopsy--the only autopsy actually performed--found no physical evidence of asphyxiation.  A prosecutor named Amy Sweasy Tamburino who spoke to Dr. Baker, the medical examiner, after his death, wrote immediately that Baker told her, “The autopsy revealed no physical evidence suggesting that Mr. Floyd died of asphyxiation,” and that “if Mr. Floyd had been found dead in his home (or anywhere else) and there were no other contributing factors he would conclude that it was an overdose death.”  He also frankly expressed his worries that what he had found did not match the established "public narrative" in the case--that Chauvin had murdered Floyd.  Balko defends Baker's eventual decision that his death was indeed a homicide, however, on the grounds that evidence not related to the autopsy strongly supports it.

The key to this argument is the statement, confirmed by several experts in the field, that one can die of asphyxiation without having one's airway completely cut off.  One can apparently be breathing, but so shallowly that not enough oxygen gets into the body because of pressure on the diaphragm.  This is among other things another commentary on how the public seizes on the most emotional explanation of events.  Tens of millions of people think Floyd died because of pressure on his neck, but although Balko doesn't say this in so many words, his explanation suggests that pressure on his back, leading to pressure on his diaphragm, killed him.  Balko argues that this is a more plausible explanation of Floyd's death than a fentanyl overdose, because the level of fentanyl in Floyd's body was one that an addict could tolerate and because he was not behaving like someone who had overdosed.  This seems to me a strong argument, and, frankly, a conclusion that a jury should be entitled to reach, but because it falls short of a medical certainty--as Dr. Baker's comments made very clear--the controversy will continue forever.

In their last joint appearance Glenn Loury and John McWhorter repudiated, to varying degrees, some of what they said in the earlier podcasts on the case.  I too now wish that I had been more skeptical about the revisionist argument and I have done my best to make u for that here.  One one point, however, I still disagree with Balko.  He thinks that the public reaction to Floyd's death has done good. I don't.  For me, it is part of another great American tragedy.

The end of US foreign policy?

 A well-functioning democracy depends upon a wide area of agreement between the political elite and the average voter.  American democracy functioned very effectively from about 1933 through 1965, and continued to function at least adequately for at least a quarter-century after that.  That applied particularly to foreign policy.  Presidents defined, and the bulk of the public accepted, an enormous, unprecedented role in the world for the United States.  Threatened by the Vietnam War, that consensus re-emerged with somewhat different ground rules in its wake.  During the last quarter century it has completely fallen apart, and the United States may losing the world role that enjoyed for the last two-thirds or so of the twentieth century.

I showed in No End Save Victory how Franklin Roosevelt convinced the American people that they had to prepare for and fight the Second World War.  He saw that war on the horizon by 1937 at the latest and probably a few years earlier, but he discovered that the country was not willing to face up to that possibility.  The fall of France in the spring of 1940 changed everything.  The nation accepted his analysis that a German victory over Great Britain--widely anticipated in the summer of 1940, and a possibility to be reckoned with for at least eighteen months after that--would put the western hemisphere at risk.  The Germans had leapfrogged from Germany into Norway before invading France, and they could use their air power to mount similar operations into Iceland, Greenland, and then Labrador or Newfoundland.  Japan also took advantage of Germany's victory over France and Holland to threaten their Far Eastern possessions, and in September 1940 Germany, Japan and Italy signed an alliance against the United States. In response Congress agreed  to double the size of the Navy by 1944, increase military aircraft production by orders of magnitude, and pass a peacetime draft.  Those measures eventually enabled the United States and its allies to launch decisive offensives against Germany and Japan in the middle of 1944 and end the war a year later.  Meanwhile, Roosevelt also sold Congress and the American people on the idea of the United Nations.

Harry Truman initially presided over wartime demobilization and focused on domestic affairs, but in 1947 he persuaded the nation to make a costly investment in the future of Europe with aid to Greece and Turkey and the Marshall Plan.  Still, the defense budget fell fairly steadily during his first term.  Events in late 1949 and 1950 transformed the situation.  First, the USSR exploded an atomic bomb. Then North Korea attacked South Korea--a move that the entire world assumed had been directed by Stalin.  (It had in fact been approved by him, although it was Kim Il-Sung's idea.)  Governments in both Western Europe and the United States immediately concluded that Stalin might make a similar attack in Europe at any moment, and the US began mobilizing for a possible new conflict on the scale of the Second World War.  The country accepted that this was necessary, and as the Korean War dragged on, the most numerous dissenters asked whether an immediate atomic attack on the USSR would be best.  The big war did not come, but the same view of the Soviet threat persisted into the early 1960s.  Eisenhower shifted the defense budget away from ground and naval forces and towards a greater reliance on nuclear weapons of all kinds, but also expanded US commitments around the world. In 1960 neither Kennedy nor Nixon questioned any of these assumptions.

The Vietnam War soured visible parts of the Boom generation on intervention around the world, and led in 1973 to the end of the military draft.  I have written here before that I believe that to have been a catastrophe--not for foreign policy reasons, but because the drafted military was a great force for unity among our population and did a remarkable job of training uneducated Americans of all kinds for modern life.  The war also persuaded administrations from Ford through Clinton that ground wars had to be avoided or wound up very quickly.  Yet Reagan apparently had the nation behind him when he revived the rhetoric and some of the strategy of the tensest parts of the Cold War, and he was vindicated, of course, by the collapse of Communism under Bush I.

After the fall of Communism the military downplayed possible war with other great powers and much of the military was significantly downsized--but every President from Bush through Obama endorsed the idea that the United States was now the only superpower and had a unique responsibility to shape events around the world.  Until 2001, foreign policy generally remained a secondary issue.  After 9/11, however, George W. Bush called upon the nation to embark upon a new crusade comparable in scope and duration to the Second World War to defeat terror and eliminate hostile regimes around the world.  Barack Obama toned down the rhetoric but did not abandon his assumptions, temporarily withdrawing all American troops from Iraq but increasing the effort in Afghanistan.  But by the time that Bush left office in the midst of a financial collapse, the public had lost interest in this new mission--and in 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency as the first candidate bluntly to challenge all the assumptions of post-1945 American foreign policy.

Partly because Trump continued to rely on establishment figures in leading national security roles for some time, he did not pull away from major involvements overseas until the very end of his term, when he began, but did not complete, the withdrawal from Afghanistan.  He did however repudiate or  undermine Obama's most important diplomatic initiatives--the Iran nuclear deal and the normalization of relations with Cuba.  Trump has now run the Republican party for eight years, however, and House Republicans have now blocked aid to Ukraine, which is fighting for its life as a nation.  The national security establishment still believes in defending free nations against aggression, including both Ukraine and Taiwan (whose status as a nation is less clear), but that establishment, led by the president, has abandoned the hard work of persuading the country that it is right.  Like our journalistic and academic establishments, our foreign policy establishment believes so deeply in its own righteousness that it treats any opposition as the opposition's fault.  

Yes, our eight decades of presumed responsibility for what happens all over the world has led us into terribly destructive, divisive mistakes, and we have often betrayed principles such as national sovereignty that we claimed to stand for.  But it did allow most of the industrialized world to thrive in peace.  It also gave the  nation something it desperately needs: the sense of a common mission to which we can all contribute.  The end of that role will mark the end of an heroic era in US history.

Has wokeness peaked?

 Whenever one uses the term "woke" or "wokeness" in public, some people will argue that those terms are either meaningless or that they are conservative dog whistles--even though plenty of woke people use them.  Before getting to the topic of this post I want to try to define it.

Wokeness in my opinion can be defined both specifically and generally, and I will begin with some key specifics relating to three categories: race, gender (that is, relations between men and women), and gender identity.  The woke position on race holds that racial oppression is a key founding aspect of American life that persists to this day.  Such oppression, it holds, is the only reason why white people have more money and power than black people and Hispanics.  (Certain other minorities are now doing better than white people.)  Apostles of wokeness like Robin DiAngelo argue that white people don't even understand their own contributions to racism and need training on this point.  Wokeness favors large-scale reparations to correct for centuries of oppression.  It also regards the criminal justice system as a conscious strategy to lock up black men.

Regarding gender, wokeness holds that the oppression of women by men is fundamental to our society in the same way, and that it, like racial oppression, relies largely on stereotypes of male and female behavior.  As with race, this view holds that oppression is the only reason for different average outcomes in men's and women's lives, such as the underrepresentation of women at the top of the corporate hierarchy or in STEM.  

And as for gender identity, the woke position is that being a man, a woman, or something different from either one--a "non-binary" identity--is a purely emotional concept, not determined by the body with which one has been born.  Going further, its proponents argue that anyone who rejects the gender normally represented by their body has the right to change their body to match their preferred gender, if necessary, and should be encouraged to do so, even before the ages of 18 or 21.  

Moving to the more general, woke people tend to regard the whole intellectual, social and cultural apparatus of western civilization as an oppressive machine, because it has promoted a different set of ideas about race, the role of the two sexes, and the issue of gender identity.  This tends to discredit any ideas about almost anything that anyone had before about 1968, when the ideas behind wokeness began to break into the mainstream.   And last but hardly least, the woke believe that their views are the only moral views on any issue that they care about, that therefore, that other views and those who hold them are simply oppressors with no right to a public platform to express themselves.  For the record, I am coming to believe that that part of wokeness--its desperate attempt to silence any critics--reveals an unconscious suspicion that the ideas to which its adherents have dedicated their lives might not be true  after all.  Opposing views, in my opinion, do not frighten people who are confident of the truth that much.

Now when I returned to the Boston area in 2012, I was delighted to begin receiving both the New York Times and the Boston Globe on my doorstep every morning--but in the intervening years I have wondered on many days why I bother, since they both have included so much woke content, strongly influenced by the above assumptions, so often.  This peaked, of course, during the racial controversy of 2020, when a long-time New York Times editor lost his job for greenlighting an unwoke op-ed on urban rioting by a United States Senator. Coincidentally I just discussed the influence of wokeness at another major newspaper, the Washington Post, last week.  Today, however, the opinion sections of both my daily papers feature very unwoke articles on two of the three critical topics that I identified above--suggesting to me that their editorial leadership might have realized that the pendulum has swung much too far in one direction and that opposing views now have to be given more weight.

The Globe piece is written by a great favorite of mine, the podcaster Coleman Hughes, who, I believe, is only twenty-seven years old.  He grew up in the very integrated community of Montclair, New Jersey, with a black father and a Puerto Rican mother, and entered Columbia University around 2014 or so.  He was appalled by the wokeness of much of the education he received there, began writing for Quellette, and now is a very successful podcaster to whom I have been listening to for about four years, and which now numbers 173,000 subscribers.  He combines wide-ranging curiosity and a very logical mind with an extraordinarily even emotional keel, and he has introduced me, via his podcast, to many interesting younger people such as Katie Herzog and the twitter sensation Aella,  The Globe piece is adapted from his new book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.  That book is a new manifesto, putting forth both a severe critique of the woke racial view and a powerful alternative one.  Authors such as Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Ta Na-hesi Coates, he argues, claim that race is nothing but a social construct, yet insist upon making it the foundation of their world view and of public policy.  He calls them "neoracists," and I hope that word catches on.  And typically, this child of western civilization recognizes that human beings naturally separate themselves into groups, but also prescribes the antidote which can enable us to live together and thrive. I quote:

"Humans have an inbuilt tribal instinct — a tendency to identify strongly with a group, to aim empathy inward toward its members and suspicion and hatred outward. That tendency appears to be baked into each of us at a biological level. That is our 'hardware.' The question is whether we use our 'software' — cultural ideas, early childhood education, political discourse, art, media, entertainment, and so forth — to amplify our natural tendencies or tamp down on them. The neoracist mindset, wittingly or not, amplifies them."

And here, he quotes two prominent thinkers from the past in support of his view of colorblindness as an ideal:

“'The significant thing about a man is not his specificity but his fundamentum, not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin but the texture and quality of his soul,' King said.

"Likewise, on the subject of interracial marriage, King objected to the term itself. 'Properly speaking,' he wrote, 'races do not marry; individuals marry.'

"Another great antiracist, Zora Neale Hurston, author of the classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, opposed any concept that would subordinate individuals to groups. 'Races have never done anything,' she wrote in her autobiography. 'What seems race achievement is the work of individuals.' Notions like race pride, race consciousness, and even racial solidarity, she argued, are fictions that people accept because they appeal to base instincts."

It's great news that the Penguin Group, one of our largest publishers, has taken The End of Race Politics on, and its also good news that the Globe decided to excerpt it.  That hardly indicates a revolution in the Globe editorial offices.  The same Ideas section includes a column by perhaps its most woke columnist, Renée Graham, protesting attacks on Representative Cori Bush of Missouri and other black women as racist and sexist.  "For many Republicans," she writes, "this policing is about shaming and silencing Black women. These attacks have less to do with what or how something is said. The perceived offense is when Black women dare to speak at all or bring their full selves into corridors that have historically been spaces dominated by white men."  But I was genuinely surprised to find Hughes's piece in the paper all the same.  The times may be a-changin'.

The New York Times piece that caught my eye today is by an opinion writer, Pamela Paul--although it is very well-researched and well-reported.  "Ad Kids, They Thought They Were Trans," it is entitled. "They No Longer Do."  This is not the first time that Paul or the Times  have questioned the new ideology of gender and its application, but it is by far the most forthright.  Paul distinguishes the "gender dysphoria" that some people have felt from earliest childhood from something newer, which she calls "rapid-onset gender dysphoria."  This reflects the view which I have heard powerfully articulated by both Katie Herzog and Coleman Hughes that social contagion, much of it through social media, is largely responsible for the explosion of gender transitions among young people in the last decade or so.  And many of these young people--including some who have had major surgery to "affirm" their new chosen gender--now feel they had made a mistake.  Several witnesses told her they transitioned because it seemed easier to change their gender than simply to acknowledge that they were gay.  This is a very important point:  because most educated older Americans accept gay people completely, they assume that children and teenagers feel the same way, but self-acceptance for gay ones may still pose big challenges.  Many other kids questioning their gender are suffering from autism or depression.  These are not new ideas, and many parents have reacted skeptically when their teen-agers suddenly announce that they have decided that are living in the wrong body.  What is shocking and well-documented in the article, however, is that the American medical establishment appears largely to have been converted to the idea that teens suffering from gender dysphoria are at risk for suicide and should be encouraged to take medical steps to "affirm" their new view of themselves immediately.  European countries, including the UK, have become more skeptical.  I checked Twitter quickly, and Paul's piece has unleased violent opposition as well as a good deal of praise.  As with the Globe, this is only one piece.   If the New York Times ever found the courage to renounce the 1619 Project I would be far more impressed.  But both of these pieces confirm a place for forthright, systematic unwoke arguments in leading newspapers, and in the crazy world of 2024, that is good news.

An announcement--and an account of contemporary journalism

 More than two weeks ago I discussed recent events at Harvard, the war in the Middle East, and my new book States of the Union with Glenn Loury of Brown University and the Manhattan Institute.  The discussion went very well, and the production staff enhanced it very effectively with still photos and one critical video clip from 1963.  You can watch it here.  Enjoy!

Last week I read Collision of Power, retired editor Marty Baron's account of his leadership of the Washington Post from 2013 through 2020.  Baron had previously edited the Miami Herald and the Boston Globe, and was immortalized by Liev Schreiber's laconic, low-affect portrayal of him in Spotlight, the Oscar-winning film about the Globe's investigation of Catholic clergy sexual abuse.  People who worked for Baron have confirmed that the portrait was dead on.  Baron is a Boomer, born in 1954, and the only Boomer ever to run the Post's newsroom.  Like me, he evidently learned the classic values of his profession at an early age and stuck to them while his profession moved in a different direction.  By the end of his tenure at the Post, the book makes clear, he had clearly lost that battle.

The Post, like most major newspapers, had been losing money for some time when Baron because Executive Editor, and not long afterwards, the Graham family, which had owned the paper since the 1930s, sold it to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.  (As Baron repeatedly points out, Bezos, not Amazon, owns the Post now.)  A year or so later Bezos replaced Katharine Weymouth of the Graham family as publisher with another Boomer, Fred Ryan, as publisher, breaking the last link with the past.  Bezos emerges from the book as a most interesting character.  Like Baron, he is a man of few words who expresses his own opinion clearly and bluntly.  While he and Ryan weighed in critically on lots of business decisions--including the staffing of the Post--he never, Baron makes clear, tried to affect news coverage or opinion writing at all.  He re-oriented the paper towards paid digital subscriptions, which grew very impressively under Bezos's tenure, and digital advertising, and the paper began once again to show a profit.  He backed up Baron in the continual four-year battle with Donald Trump from 2017 through 2020, even after Trump began threatening (idly as it turned out) to retaliate against Amazon.  Bezos has a lot in common with Gilded age (and Gilded generation) figures like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who created similarly gigantic fortunes.  He is obviously his own man.  

Confronted with the unprecedented challenge of a president who described the media in general and the Post in particular as corrupt enemies of the people, Baron stuck to the principles of traditional journalism.  "We are not at war, we are at work," became his  mantra.  Rather than engage Trump on his own terms, he wanted the Post to remain a bastion of objective reporting, publishing only stories that would pass the same verification tests that generations of Post journalists had used in the past.  The specific stories he discusses in some detail are the documents leaked by Edward Snowden that revealed the scope of NSA surveillance of Americans; Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn's misstatements to the FBI about contacts with the Russian Ambassador, which led to his conviction for lying and his pardon by Trump;  sexual misconduct allegations that led to the defeat of Roy Moore in an Alabama Senate race, and similar allegations which did not keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court.  Meanwhile, the paper continually pointed out that Trump was lying about almost everything that he did.  Baron also chronicles the retaliatory steps that Trump took against the Post and other media outlets, including a whole private investigative effort that uncovered embarrassing social media posts by various journalists, some of whom resigned as a result.  Trump also took a $10 billion [sic] Pentagon contract for cloud services away from Amazon and tried to give it to Microsoft instead, a plan he was unable to execute before the Biden administration took office and parcelled the contract out to various tech giants.  Reporters meanwhile became subject to constant online threats, and some of them had to hire private security.   We shall inevitably see more of that this year, as Trump seems certain to secure the Republican nomination and make even more indiscriminate use of incitement than he has in the past in his all-out attempt to get back into the White House.

With Bezos behind him, Baron coped pretty successfully with Trump's attacks.  In the final chapters of the book, however, we find that he was less successful in dealing with an entirely different threat to his values: the contrary attitudes of much of his own staff, which emerged in connection with controversies over reporting on sexual harassment and in the summer of 2020 after the death of George Floyd.

As Baron repeatedly makes clear, much of this conflict stemmed from entirely contradictory ideas about the role of reporters and whether they should allow their personal political views to influence their reporting.  He had been raised to believe in objectivity--and idea of an impartial, evidence-based search for truth,  which could only succeed if reporters were willing to follow facts wherever they led.  That ethos also forbade reporters from publicly expressing their own political views, which would obviously cast doubt on their objectivity and cost them the trust of a broad, bipartisan public.   At least two new pressures now called these views into question.  First of all, in the digital age, clicks measured success, and reporters' social media accounts--especially on Twitter--could generate more clicks for the paper, increasingly a matter of life and death.  Secondly, reporters--who, as Baron never mentions, had generally been educated at elite institutions where many professors had abandoned the idea of objective truth decades ago--increasingly accepted the idea of knowledge as political and wanted to privilege knowledge that favored their favorite causes over knowledge that did not.  For many, especially those for whom gender or race were critical issues, that was not simply a right but a duty.

Now the Post under Baron broke some important stories of sexual misconduct, and it made at least one very important contribution to reporting on race--the database of police shootings which it updates annually.  Baron describes how that database was established, but he does not mention that it has not in many ways substantiated the popular progressive view of such shootings.   Every year it shows that the majority of victims of police shootings are white, and that shootings of unarmed nonwhites are a tiny fraction of the total.  Regarding sexual misconduct cases, Baron tried to insist on the same verification standards that he always had. Two specific cases of disputes with reporters that Baron describes in great detail illustrate an unbridgeable gap between his values and those of some younger reporters.

The first, a black reporter named Wes Lowery who had also worked for the Globe, who had in fact been the leading figure in starting the police shooting database.  In a long series of tweets, Lowery began blasting the mainstream media for  coverage of Trump and Tea Party Republicans because it did not specifically refer to them as racists.  He also made personal attacks on individual journalists.  Baron tried repeatedly to get him to observe the Post's official social media policies, which called for more restraint, but he refused to admit that he had done anything wrong.  "Generations of black journalists, including here at The Washington Post," Lowery wrote during one exchange, "have served as the conscience not only of their publications but of our entire industry: their authority derive from the experience navigating the world while cloaked in black sink; their expertise earned through their own daily journalism.  Often those journalists have done so by leveling public criticism of both their competitors and their own employers.  News organizations often respond to such internal and external pressure."  A few months after those prophetic remarks, Lowery left the Post to take another job.

A second controversy involving a female reporter, Felicia Sonmez, got much worse. Sonmez in her interviews with the Post had identified herself as "a survivor of sexual misconduct."  While working in Beijing for the Wall Street Journal, she had accused a fellow reporter from the Los Angeles Times of sexual misconduct, even though her own account of the incident acknowledged her consent to sexual intercourse.  (This can be found on pp. 377-8 of Baron's book, to whom I refer any skeptics.)  The reporter was forced to resign as a result,. but Sonmez publicly complained that the Times had not done enough.  Eventually, the Post editors decided that she could not report on sexual abuse cases because she was continuing to tweet about her own and others so provocatively, inevitably casting doubt on  her objectivity.  She was eventually fired in 2022 after Baron's departure.   Many younger reporters from various demographics obviously believe that certain causes are sacred, that they must be pursued by any means necessary, and that traditional rules simply serve the interests of straight white males.  And now, as Baron mentions, even one of predecessors as Post executive editor, Leonard Downie (whom he does not name), has gone on record, along with former CBS News chief Andrew Heyward, stating that the news business should abandon the outmoded concept of "objectivity," which so many of its younger members reject.  Baron, like me, remains an apostate.

And despite his skepticism about these cases, Baron in the last year of his tenure sympathized fully with the black staffers at the Post who demanded more representation, particularly among top management, in the wake of George Floyd's death.  That, too, we are now learning, was an event that needed more skeptical journalism.  We really do not know whether Floyd really was murdered or whether he died of a combination of heart disease and drugs--the medical examiner's original conclusion.  The angry journalists who confronted Baron wanted the immediate hire of more black editors and refused to wait for vacancies to emerge.  Baron would  have liked to oblige, but as he explains, Bezos and publisher Ryan had adamantly insisted on keeping the editorial staff small.  After Baron left at the end of 2020 the paper reversed itself and did hire a significant number of new editors. 

Baron also brings up another perspective for dealing with such controversies.  Do institutions such as newspapers or universities actually have a higher purpose that is bigger than any individual's interest?  In today's modern world, we might restate that question as follows:  Are objective journalism and objective history really anything but excuses for straight white male privilege?  To that I would answer with a resounding yes--and I would add that impartial principles and higher purposes are the only things that PREVENT institutions from serving the interests of particular groups.  Yes, human nature being what it is, reason, impartiality and objectivity will always struggle with raw emotion--but that battle need not be lost, as well as individuals will still fight it.

One more critical data point, unfortunately, shows that keeping Baron's spirit alive is probably impossible now.  The Post, as I have mentioned, returned to profitability during his editorship, and other major publications did well during those years as well.  That, we can now see, was because Donald Trump was president.  The bitter emotional controversies and the rage that he triggered increased clicks and subscriptions in a way that the actual business of government cannot.  Now the Post is in the red again.  The ideas of rationality and objectivity depend for their survival on a broad commitment to them within the population.  Such a commitment is, I believe the foundation of our legal and political traditions, as well as our journalistic and academic ones.  And that commitment may have been lost.