Facing the Future

 From 1949, when President Truman appointed my father to be Assistant Secretary of Labor for International Labor Affairs, to 1981, when my father retired, his career depended upon the whims of the American electorate.  When a Democrat won (Kennedy, Johnson, Carter), he received a diplomatic appointment; when a Republican won he had to find something else to do.  That understandably gave him an all-consuming interest in the outcome of the next election, and being who he was, he identified his own fortunes with those of the nation as a whole.  A Republican victory was, by definition, catastrophic both for him and for the nation. and our whole family accepted that view.  

My father's view has now been adopted by the whole intellectual elite of the Democratic Party, which had convinced itself by 2000 that it was the repository of all wisdom and virtue.  I still have never voted for any Republican presidential candidate and have no plans to do so, but I realized a long time ago that I could count on my fellow citizens to share my views.  I have also concluded over the last sixteen years or so that the Democratic Party is now beholden to certain constituencies that have advanced policies that are not only unpopular but disastrous, and that it includes woke elements that essentially reject fundamental ideas of our civilization and think they can replace it with something better.  I have explored that problem in many posts here.  For that reason I cannot regard our current political struggle as a simple battle between good and evil.  It reflects a much broader decline in our political, intellectual and cultural life--one which no one could stop. 

In the current climate anyone who--like me--is trying to accept certain imminent developments as inevitable provokes an immediate backlash.  A good liberal or progressive is supposed to believe not only that everything Trump wants to do is wrong, but that it cannot possibly succeed.  For the moment our leading newspapers are printing story after story about the insuperable obstacles that Trump is bound to confront.  No respectable historian, however--an endangered species, to be sure--can believe any such thing.  History frequently goes wrong for long periods of time.  Humanity has good and bad impulses, neither of which ever completely prevails.  The relationship between reason and emotion changes over time, and emotion has been gaining ground for the last sixty years.  Writing on the eve of a worse catastrophe than anything we have in store--the Second World War--William Butler Yeats kept his sanity by taking a very long view in one of my very favorite poems.  It is in that spirit that I now try to get a handle on what to expect in the next year or so.

Trump and his coalition, it seems to me, are poised to have a first year in office that could only be compared in recent history to FDR in 1933 and LBJ in 1964-65.  This Trump administration will be nothing like the first one, in which he tried to make use of establishment Republicans and senior military leaders.  Eight years later he has a cadre of totally devoted supporters with whom he is staffing the federal government--and make no mistake, some of them are formidable individuals. Watching some of Attorney General-designate Pam Bondi's confirmation hearing, I wondered if we would have been better off with Matt Gaetz.  Bondi is smart, attractive, charismatic, and clearly devoted to Trump.  She is not alone.  Trump's press office runs very smoothly, in sharp contrast to 2017.  And he has used a cadre of Republican intellectuals to plan his first year in great detail, as we shall discover, it seems, on Monday afternoon, as soon as he has been sworn in.  That by the way is not unique.  Biden in 2021 issued an immediate round of executive orders focusing mainly on the two issues that probably brought Trump back into the White House: immigration and DEI programs.   The New York Times also reports today that Trump has planned a massive raid designed to apprehend illegal immigrants in Chicago during his first week.  Meanwhile, Trump also is working with leaders of the tech industry, led by Elon Musk, who have their own plans for reshaping America.  They include drastic cuts in the federal work force, and the elimination of their job protections.

Trump does not, of course, dispose of Congressional majorities as large as FDR and LBJ did, but he may not need them.  Because of his role in the evolution of the Republican Party he has the absolute loyalty of just about every Republican in the House and Senate, who are just as eager as he to set the United States on a completely different path.  And few of them care, in all probability, that majorities of the national electorate oppose much of what they want to do.  Curiously enough, the election victory that may resemble Trump's most closely is John F. Kennedy's in 1960.  Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon with 303 electoral votes to 219 (and 11 for Virginia Senator Harry Byrd, unpledged electors from Mississippi and Alabama.)  A number of key swing states, including Illinois, New Jersey, Minnesota, Texas, and California, were decided by very narrow margins.  Kennedy won 49.7 to 49.6 percent.  This was recognized as one of the closest elections in US history.  Trump  just defeated Harris in the Electoral College, 312-226.  All seven swing states were decided by very close margins.  He won the popular vote, 49.8 to 48.3.  Last week, however, I heard Senator John Cornyn, while questioning Pam Bondi, describe this victory as a "landslide."  It wasn't, but the slim Republican majorities are going to act as if it was.  I won't be surprised if they at least find exceptions to the filibuster rule to get some legislation through the Senate--just as Democratic leaders were suggesting they should do to pass a law codifying Roe v. Wade.  Since Newt Gingrich, more and more Republicans have adopted opposition to the status quo as their fundamental principle, and no respect for existing practices and institutions will hold them back now.

I predict that the immigration issue will create the biggest crisis of the next four years, a crisis in federal-state relations.   States like California and Illinois are prepared to do whatever they can to block large-scale deportations of illegal immigrants.  The Trump administration may use this as attempt to destroy much of their authority and discredit them completely.  I don't understand exactly how or why the Democratic Party decided to defend the millions of people who have entered the country illegally.  I certainly agree that the United States needs most of those people and that our immigration laws should be changed, but I don't think that acting as if our laws were irrelevant was the way to handle the situation--and it is clear that the Democrats have paid a huge price for that move.  Deportations may not be popular, but active state resistance to them, I suspect, will not be popular either.  The failure of the establishments of both parties to deal with the issue has led us to this point.

This administration will on some fronts do some good.  The elimination of DEI bureaucracies and programs from the federal government is not merely desirable, but necessary.  Some major corporations have begun doing this as well, and even colleges and universities may be forced to do so.  DEI wastes money promoting destructive ideologies.  Similarly, in the first Trump administration, the Department of Education rewrote the guidelines on sexual assault proceedings in colleges and universities to give the accused their basic American rights. The Biden administration rolled back those changes.  Nor do I think that DEI programs are doing anything but harm within the US military--although I cannot say of my own knowledge exactly how far they have gone there.

I cannot predict what will happen in foreign policy.  We will know one thing within a couple of months.  Pressure from Trump, which shocked many Israelis, has in fact led to the cease-fire agreement in Gaza--but the key moment will come in 40 days when stage one of the agreement is over and the Israeli government has the option to resume the war.  Trump might tell them that they cannot do so--while agreeing in return to a joint strike against the Iranian nuclear program.  There is some evidence, too, that the Russians and Ukrainians both expect to be forced into a cease-fire shortly.  What will come of Trump's blustering about the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland, remains very unclear.  And a new crisis could arise at almost any moment: China continues to escalate its military pressure on Taiwan, and Xi has just declared that reunification must take place.

The administration will try to get the government out of the business of regulating the economy--especially its newest and fastest growing sectors. That could be catastrophic.  Cryptocurrencies are likely to boom, and a bust could send us into another severe recession.  We don't know what the effect of tariffs might be.  There are areas, such as chip production, where the Biden administration took major steps down the Trumpian road towards self-sufficiency, and these will probably continue.  In short, there are serious constituencies for much of what Trump wants to do.  He has provided the emotional demagoguery and leadership--yes--to bring them into a powerful coalition, and it is already changing the United States.

A Bonus Post

I have already seen the movie A Complete Unknown and enjoyed it very much.  It took more than a week, however, for me to be reminded of one of the funniest things I have ever seen on youtube, which is highly relevant to the movie.  Enjoy.

Adams and Jefferson and us

 It was more than 40 years ago, I am sure, that I first purchased a one-volume paperback edition of the complete correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  Its 614 pages are actually two very different books, separated by a brief interlude.  The correspondence begins in the midst of the outbreak of the American Revolution, but really gets going in 1786, in the time of the Articles of Confederation, when the two men took over the new nation's most important diplomatic posts, Adams in London and Jefferson in Paris.  They wrote frequently until they both returned to the United States in 1789 to become Vice President and Secretary of State in Washington's administration.  During that administration they became the leaders of the rival Federalist and Republican parties, and an unfortunate provision of the original constitution made Jefferson Adams's vice-president in 1797, after Adams had won the electoral college over him.  They did not exchange a single letter until Jefferson was about to succeed Adams in 1801, and none afterwards for nearly a dozen years.  The volume includes seven letters between Jefferson and Abigail Adams in 1804, occasioned by the death of one of Jefferson's two legitimate daughters.

When Jefferson left the White House in 1809, he, like Adams, had lost most of any popularity he had enjoyed.  Three years later, in early 1812, Adams, then 77, re-opened the correspondence by sending Jefferson a book of lectures given by his son John Quincy Adams, who was now a member of Jefferson's party and had served in the Madison administration as Minister to Russia.  Jefferson was then 68 and the correspondence continued--with Adams contributing about two thirds of the letters--until shortly before they both died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  Finally picking up the book recently, I decided to begin that last chapter in their correspondence, while planning to tackle the earlier periods subsequently.  They promise a fascinating account of the diplomacy of the first, deeply flawed phase of our national history from 1781 to 1789.

I have now made my way from 1812 until the middle of 1816.  The letters are fascinating, not least in what they do not discuss. They include almost nothing about the progress of the War of 1812, although Adams in 1814 mentioned that he had become deeply unpopular in Massachusetts for supporting that war, which had harmed New England very badly and led in that year to talk of secession.  They say just as little about other contemporary political controversies or elections.  Religion occupies the most space of any topic in the correspondence so far.   Both men were Unitarians in the literal as well as institutional sense: they regarded Christ's teachings as the finest guide to human behavior ever written, but they denied his divinity and rejected the authority of all the great religious institutions that had been built around it.  They shared pride in the 18th century which had tried to elevate reason over faith.  Yet between 1812 and 1815, they observed momentous developments in Europe which cast some doubt on their shared gospel of human progress.  They were delighted in 1814 by the fall of Napoleon, but distressed to see the old order reassert itself in the Congress of Vienna, which divided whole nations like Poland among the victorious conservative powers.  Jefferson also commented that there was really nothing to choose between Napoleon and the British government that had helped defeat him, since neither seemed to care about anything but their own power.  When Napoleon returned from Elba in early 1815 they thought he still enjoyed the support of the French nation, but he lasted, of course, only 100 days before Waterloo.  Then the Bourbon dynasty returned to the throne again.  The two men began to wonder where history was going, 

Jefferson on January 11, 1816, commented on the impact of the ideas of the 18th century on European politics.  "With some exceptions only," he wrote, "through the 17th and 18th centuries morality occupied an honorable chapter in the political code of nations."  He regarded the partitions of Poland as an unfortunate exception for which the "barbarous government" of Russia was chiefly responsible.  "How then has it happened," he continued in reference to the last three decades, "that these nations, France especially and England, so great, so dignified, so distinguished by science and the arts, plunged at once into all the depths of human enormity, threw off suddenly and openly all the restraints of morality, all sensation in character, and unblushingly avowed and acted on the principle that power was right? . . .Whatever it was, the close of the century saw the moral world thrown back again to the age of the Borgias, to the point from which it had departed 300 years before"--and, he might have added, with vastly greater forces at their disposal.  

Adams replied on February 2.  "I can only say it present, that it should seem that human Reason and human Conscience, though I believe there are such things, are not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human enthusiasm. . . .You ask, how it has happened that all Europe has acted on the Principle "that Power was right"  I know not what Answer to give you, but this, that Power always sincerely, conscientiously, de tres bon[sic] Foi, believes itself right.  Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, beyond the Comprehension of the Weak; and that it is doing God Service, when it is violating all his Laws."

My entire life as a student of history has taught me that Adams was right, and I have seen how power can persuade itself of the justice of its aims again and again in  my own country, first in Vietnam, then in the Middle East.  With war raging in Ukraine and the Middle East and threatening over Taiwan, the noble dream of a world ruled by law, as promoted by both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and embodied now for 80 years in the United Nations.  And a parallel drama has played itself out in our domestic affairs.  It has taken half a century since the Powell memorandum for corporate America to convince itself that its power must serve the interests of all, even as its insatiable greed drains more wealth and income from the mass of the people every year.  

Yet I believe that the conflict between reason and passion is more complicated than Adams made out.  Both have a profound appeal to human nature--but neither ever wins a final victory over the other.  Reason has now been retreating for more than half a century and passion may have more terrible victories yet to win.  Eventually, however, passion's excesses, I think, will lead to a new round of restraint based upon reason--domestically, in foreign affairs, and even personally.  This has happened many times before.  That eternal conflict remains the source of what progress we have been able to make, and ensures that every victory and every defeat will always be incomplete and only temporary.  That, I have decided, is where real hope for humanity and progress must come from.