Some comments on tariffs

 Yesterday I was talking about Trump's tariffs with my wife, and it suddenly occurred to me that the way that President Trump has structured the discussion of them makes no sense.  The United States currently has a trade deficit of about $1.13 trillion a year, but one cannot understand it by looking at bilateral trade relationships with other countries and the EU.   A trade deficit comes from importing too much of something and exporting too little of something else, and nearly every commodity can be bought or sold from a number of countries.  This morning an economist makes the same point in the New York Times. Meanwhile, I had gone to the web and found some of the statistics I was looking for: a breakdown of imports and exports by major categories, showing what commodities contribute the most to our deficit.

There is literally nothing on this list that the US does not both import and export, and I have not been able to find statistics on the total production of various entries in the United States, which would help as well.  Still the figures tell a remarkably simple story.  First of all, four categories of goods generate 81 percent of our trade deficit:  machinery, nuclear reactors and boilers (24.7 percent); electrical and electronic equipment (24 percent); vehicles other than railway or tramway (21.9 percent); and pharmaceuticals (10 percent).  US exports in those categories total $ 704 billion, but their imports total $1.621 trillion,  The leading car exporters to the United States are Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and Germany, and the administration has dropped new tariffs against Canada and Mexico (whose plants, I believe, are mostly American brands) for the time being.   I haven't found country-by-country data on electronic imports, but they seem to come mostly from the Far East--Japan, China, South Korea, and Taiwan--with some from Europe.  I don't think that any televisions are made in the United States any more, although I could be wrong.  Imported machinery --the single biggest item in the deficit--comes from other industrial powers.

Net on the list are nine items that account for between 5.6 and 1.9 percent of the overall deficit: furniture, unspecified commodities (??), articles of apparel, toys, games, and sporting goods, iron and steel articles, footwear, rubber goods, and beverages of all kinds.  Most of those items, I suspect, come from Asia.  Raw aluminum, iron and steel add another 2.4 percent.  No other commodity accounts for as much as 2 percent of the deficit.  

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, the only industrial product for which the US has a substantial export surplus is aircraft and spacecraft.  The surplus is $98.3 billion, compared to our deficit of $279 billion in machinery.  Our three other leading export surpluses are cereals (that is, grains), equal to 1.9 percent of our trade deficit; oil seeds and fruits at 2.4 percent of it; and "mineral fuels, oils, and distillation products," at 6.1 percent.  

Now it should be obvious, it seems to me, that tariffs designed substantially to reverse our trade deficit should focus on the imports that are primarily responsible for that deficit: machinery, electronics, vehicles, and pharmaceuticals.  Of those four categories, pharmaceuticals look to me to have the best chance of rapidly substituting domestic for foreign production--and I don't know how many jobs such a substitution would be likely to create. The other three would take years to substantially expand production, as well, in many cases, as expertise which we may no longer have.  If the US really set a goal of expanding production in those areas--and I am not saying that it should--wouldn't it make more sense to pass a small tariff on those goods now that would gradually increase for a period of years, thus making domestic production more profitable in the long run?  Such a policy would also have inflationary effects, but it could increase domestic production in various industries.  

As the Times op-ed notes, however, these tariffs appear to have been imposed without any serious analysis to back them up.  They could provide leverage to reach new agreements with individual countries, but what objective will those agreements have and how could they achieve it?  And that leads me to a different set of reflections on what President Trump seems to be trying to do--another occasion where the dreaded Hitler analogy is simply unavoidable.

I don't know how many people realize now that the Second World War occurred because both Germany and Japan wanted to create huge self-sufficient empires.  Hitler wrote and talked about this frequently and at length, as I discussed in my first book, Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War.  The future, he thought, belonged to superstates on the scale of the British Empire, the United States, and the USSR.  Germany needed much more territory not only for raw materials, but above all for food.  During the 1930s, I found, Hitler and his collaborators found ways to keep Germany fed--barely--while substantially reducing imports and spending precious foreign currency mainly on critical raw materials.  They also tried to use synthetic oil to make the country self-sufficient in energy until they could conquer the oil fields they needed in Russia.  Hitler deeply resented dependence on international trade, in part because he thought that Jews controlled it.  The Japanese and the German economies were both hurt badly by the after-effects of the First World War, which led to overproduction of many commodities, and by the Depression, and that gave the idea of autarky more appeal. 

It turned out, of course, that their plans were doomed.  They were strong enough to unleash wars with Britain, the United States, and the USSR, but totally unable to match their production of key weapons, leading to their complete defeat.  I don't think Trump's plans have anything to do with preparation for war, but I think that his attempts to escape from dependence on the world economy are equally doomed to failure.  Once again an egotistical political leader thinks that he can rewrite the laws of economics, and finds himself in a position to do so.  He too is likely to be disappointed, with fateful consequences.

How we got here and where we are going

 This article has gone up in the Boston Globe this morning.  With their permission I am reproducing it here in full.

 The 1997 book that prophesied a revolutionary on the scale of Trump

Thinking of American history in terms of generations helps explain our current breakdown — and how long this new era may last.

By David Kaiser Updated March 21, 2025, 3:00 a.m.

David Kaiser taught history at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, the Naval War College, and Williams College from 1976 to 2013. He is the author of 11 books, including “States of the Union: A History of the United States Through Presidential Addresses, 1789-2023,” and writes the blog historyunfolding.com.

In January 1997 I reviewed a new book for The Boston Globe: “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy,” by William Strauss and Neil Howe. The book broke US history down into 80-year periods, each of which included four “turnings” that were generally about 20 years long. They called the great crises of US history “fourth turnings”: the era of the American Revolution and the Constitution (1774-94), the Civil War (1860-65), and the Depression and the Second World War (1929-45). Doing the math, they predicted another such crisis in the first 15 years or so of the 21st century. In that crisis, as in the previous ones, new leadership would mobilize the nation to accomplish a great task and renew the bonds between the people and their government.

I, a historian, was one of very few professional academics who took an interest in what Strauss and Howe had to say, and I began using their framework in my own work. Their critical insight, the idea that set their work apart, was that even the most stable domestic and foreign orders and the values that underlie them will die off along with the generations that created them. That leaves an intellectual and even emotional vacuum that someone inevitably comes along to fill.

Events have now confirmed their predictions, even if they are not unfolding as inspirationally as Strauss and Howe expected. The United States is experiencing the climax of a crisis that will transform our country, its government, and its role in the world. And Strauss and Howe’s framework of generations and turnings still provides the best framework for understanding where we are.

We can understand this by analogy with the last crisis: the Depression and the Second World War.

How the New Deal order arose

The Civil War had created a new elite composed of Northern and Midwestern businessmen, and their views dominated the nation for more than 60 years. The Carnegies, Morgans, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and the rest built new industries and new infrastructure, paying immigrant labor subsistence wages. New ideas of economic justice arose during the Progressive Era, but corporate dominance survived into the 1920s.

By 1929, however, a new generation with different values was taking power, and under Franklin D. Roosevelt, they radically changed the role of the federal government. The New Deal strictly regulated the financial community, raised top marginal income tax rates well above 50 percent, made the government the employer of last resort, passed Social Security, regulated wages and hours, and recognized and defended the rights of labor. FDR also mobilized 10 million young Americans from the GI or “greatest” generation to fight and win the Second World War, and the United States emerged as the leading world power and the leader of new institutions like the United Nations after 1945. The GI generation, which included every president from John F. Kennedy through George H.W. Bush, generally remained committed to those principles for most of their adult lives. Faced after 1945 with the threat of communism around the world, they committed the United States to defending every bit of free territory.

But as their generation eventually fell from power, both the values of the 1933-93 era and the bond that Roosevelt and his successors forged between the government and the people eroded. Neither the silent generation (born 1925-42) nor the boomers had the same respect for authority or commitment to an egalitarian economy.

In 1996, Strauss and Howe looked forward to a catalytic event that would allow a transformative president to form new bonds with younger generations — particularly millennials, a term they had coined in a 1991 book. In “The Fourth Turning,” they listed a number of events that might trigger the next great crisis, just as the election of Lincoln triggered the Civil War and the stock market crash ushered in the Depression and led to FDR’s victory.

We have experienced a few of the kinds of events they predicted — 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID pandemic — but successive presidents failed to deal with them effectively or use them to create a new national consensus.

                                   The missed opportunities Trump exploited

George W. Bush after 9/11 explicitly proclaimed that the nation was in a crisis comparable to the Second World War. The United States, he explained again and again, had to go to war to remove dictators and spread democracy to protect us from nuclear terrorism and move the world into a completely new era. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to overthrow hostile governments, but he did not bring back the military draft to get the whole population involved in his crusade, and he cut taxes instead of raising them. Worst of all, his ambitious team ignored the problem of setting up new governments in nations of tens of millions of people. Both wars had become unpopular by the time Bush left office, and both ended in disastrous failure.

When Barack Obama took office in 2009 in the midst of the worst economic collapse in 80 years, a Time cover explicitly compared him to FDR in 1933. Roosevelt had immediately eased the citizenry’s three biggest problems — bank failures, unemployment, and home foreclosures — with legislation targeted at those ills. He thereby increased his congressional majorities in 1934 and passed new measures, including Social Security. Obama accepted his advisers’ view that the system remained fundamentally sound and that recapitalizing major financial institutions must be the country’s top priority. He failed to mobilize the nation’s anger against the financial interests responsible for the crash, as Roosevelt had. As a result, he lost his majorities in the House and later in the Senate, and with them went any hope of further transformation or any renewal of the American people’s confidence in their leadership.

So it was that Donald Trump, businessman and entertainer, easily defeated a field of Establishment candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and narrowly beat the Democratic heir apparent, Hillary Clinton, in the general election. Trump was our first president with no experience in public service at all — a measure of how low the prestige of our governmental leadership had sunk. He argued that both party Establishments had betrayed average Americans. He spent much of his first term battling with the Establishment of his own party, and he too failed the test of the great crisis that struck his administration: the pandemic. That probably cost him his reelection. Joe Biden, however, lacked the energy to form a real bond with the American people and failed to deal with the inflation that made his administration unpopular. Kamala Harris lost a close but undisputed election to Trump, and the Republicans emerged with control of both houses of Congress.

Donald Trump now leads a coalition of interests that have long opposed key aspects of the post-1945 order. Much of the business community never completely accepted the New Deal, and in the 1970s it began a long counteroffensive that has undone the regulation of the financial community, rolled back the rights of labor, and built a network of think tanks and foundations dedicated to smaller government and free markets. The Federalist Society has recruited, trained, and helped put in place hundreds of new federal judges who would endorse that agenda. The religious right, angered by Supreme Court decisions on school prayer and abortion, is another major element of that coalition. The fossil fuel industry relies upon Trump to keep increasing its production, and the pro-Israel lobby has won him over to all-out support of right-wing Israeli governments. In a remarkable turnaround, the working class has become majority Republican. And Trump’s coalition now includes a number of young tech billionaires from Silicon Valley who believe that they can use the computing power of AI to transform virtually every feature of economic life around the world. All these actors reject key aspects of the post-1945 order, and most have worked for decades to overturn it. Now their time has come.

Trump and his coalition want to kill off the idea that the federal government should protect the environment, guard against monopoly, regulate financial markets, and protect the rights of labor. They want to deport millions of immigrants. They also are renouncing US responsibility for fighting famine and disease overseas or protecting an international order with stable frontiers and security for all nations and peoples, such as the Ukrainians. Trump’s loyal, dedicated team — most of it relatively young — will never stand in his way. Elon Musk and his acolytes are trying to destroy the bureaucracy that FDR created.

Strauss and Howe anticipated that a boomer leader would eventually fill the vacuum left by the disappearance of the previous generation of American leadership. They could not anticipate either that Trump would be that man or exactly what he would do. Trump is clearly the most important American political figure of the 21st century thus far, with a devoted following that no one else has been able to match. He has taken advantage both of the Establishment’s specific failures and of the general disregard for authority and precedent that has characterized the last 60 years of American life. He is now reshaping our government, our society, and our role in the world according to alternative values that various constituencies have been promoting for several decades.

This transformation is parallel to what happened under the New Deal, but we are now going in the opposite direction. The values of our mid-century order are being eclipsed. This is not where many of us wanted history to go, but I have learned not to argue with history.

Democrats tried for too long to live off the legacies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, even as they helped destroy the New Deal economic order. They now see Trump as a usurper promoting evil principles and threatening democracy. That is exactly how Republicans saw FDR. The battle between selfish greed on the one hand and respect for the good of all on the other never ends.

The Republicans enjoy small congressional majorities, but Trump has unprecedented control over them. The Supreme Court will side with him on at least some key issues. Neither the media nor academia has nearly enough prestige to stand up to him successfully. Whether or not he does the United States and the world any good, he may keep more than half the country on his side just by making a series of decisive moves, as his three immediate predecessors failed to do. And the United States will probably emerge from the Trump era with a very different set of political and economic values, just as it did following the Civil War and the Second World War. History suggests that new values will prevail for decades.

History gives us every reason to believe that the nation will eventually change direction again, but this fourth great crisis in our national life seems to be ending with a Republican victory and the consolidation of a new Gilded Age. The generation that will effectively challenge it may just be beginning to be born.

Centralizaton and its consequences

 Back in 1960, during the first presidential election that I could really follow closely, I saw candidate Richard Nixon interviewed on Face the Nation or Meet the Press.  He was asked about federal aid to education, a major campaign issue, fueled both by the competition with the USSR and the failure of school capacity to keep up with the baby boom, resulting in double sessions in many parts of the country.  Democrats favored federal aid both for school construction and to pay higher teachers' salaries.  Republicans opposed at least the latter step, arguing that federal aid would  lead to federal control.  One of the interviewers, as I remember, asked Nixon why it would necessarily lead to federal control.  He replied that "if you look at the history" of such programs, that was what you would find.  I think I asked my father--an exact contemporary of Nixon's--whether that was true, and he assured me that it was not.

It turns out that Nixon was right.

President Kennedy couldn't pass an aid to education bill in his term, because a Catholic Democrat from New York on the House Rules Committee refused to accept it if it didn't include aid for parochial schools.  Lyndon Johnson did pass such a bill in 1965, the year of the Great Society.  It included a provision allowing the government to withhold aid from any district that practiced racial segregation.  Federal spending on both K-12 and higher education has grown enormously in subsequent decades, reaching $174.9 billion on higher education and about $110 billion on K-12.  A great deal of the $174.9 billion that goes to higher ed apparently goes to a relatively small number of research universities, which cannot survive without it in their current form.  The federal government also finances student loans, which reached $83 billion in the last fiscal year, and keep higher education alive.  

Before turning to the impact of the Trump administration, I want to suggest that these funds have appear to have made both K-12 and higher education in this country worse, not better.  Even in 1965, when I entered college and the great society began, faculty at elite universities were taught to value research over teaching, and that trend has gotten much worse since research can bring in large amounts of money. I taught at Carnegie Mellon, where the administration taught faculty that grant proposals were the most important part of their job, in the 1980s, and I saw how the availability of federal research funds corrupted the institution.  Federal money--much of which goes for overhead, meaning that it can in effect be spent on anything--allowed faculties to expand and specialize, while administrations grew exponentially, to the point where they now outnumber faculty members at major institutions.  Almost every college and university in the nation has given up the idea of offering a distinct educational product.   A recent article by an undergraduate at Harvard in the Crimson reveals that the General Education program--the centerpiece of a Harvard education in my time--totally lacks the kind of fundamental course that dominated it sixty  years ago. Grade inflation has made performance in class almost irrelevant.  On the K-12 front, the bipartisan experiment that began under the Bush II administration, No Child Left Behind, has failed.  Test scores in basic skills have been falling in all demographic groups--a trend worsened (but not started) by the disastrous decision to close schools during the pandemic.  Meanwhile, as I believe I have pointed out before, the evidence that more money will improve public K-12 education is dubious.  Here in Massachusetts the Cambridge and Boston school systems--two of the largest and poorest--spend far more money per pupil than many of the wealthy suburbs, yet do worse on test performance.  I have not had the time to research other parts of the country.

The Trump administration regards the K-12 and higher ed educational systems as strongholds of leftist ideology--and it is far from wrong.  It wants to punish them by denying them funds, with potentially devastating effects.  To cite one well-publicized example, Columbia University has about $1.3 billion in federal grants and contracts annually, about 20 percent of its total $6.6 billion budget.  The loss of that money would put an end to Columbia as it now exists.  The same is true, almost certainly, of Harvard.  In the 1960s the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, as it then was, withheld federal funds from some southern school districts to force them to desegregate.  Now the Trump administration is apparently gong to withhold funds to force them to drop DEI programs, deal differently with demonstrations, and even change their curriculums.

How can these institutions respond to a loss of all these funds?

Those of us who have felt for a long time that American education was on the wrong track can fairly view this as an opportunity.  Harvard and Columbia and other similar institutions,. public and private, could do themselves a great favor by laying off more than half of their administrative staff.  DEI offices are only one part of this problem and by no means the biggest one.  Harvard now has ten vice presidents.  Their titles and salaries are Vice President for Alumni Affairs and Development ($884,000), Vice President and General Counsel ($740,917), Vice President and Chief Information Officer ($554,000), Vice President for Human Resources ($497,000), Vice President and Secretary of the University ($498,000), Vice President for the Harvard Library ($415,000--the only vice president concerned in any way with academic affairs), Executive Vice President ($625,000), Vice President for Public Affairs and Communications ($543,000), Vice President for Campus Services ($287,000), and Vice President for Finance ($680,000).  None of those positions existed 60 years ago, when I and my classmates began our far superior undergraduate education.  All of them presumably have staffs.  Harvard also has more varsity teams competing in  NCAA sports--about 45--than any other college in the country, and clearly spends much more money on athletics than it used to.  These are areas--along with research--that could be cut.  The faculty could once again be required to spend more time teaching and the humanities and social science faculty could be required to teach broader, more general courses of the kind that set the tone of the university in decades past.  That would be the hardest change to make, however, since generations of faculty have now been taught either that such courses are beneath them or that they served as instruments of white male supremacy.

In K-12 the solution to our problems has been found.  Certain urban charter school networks such as Achievement First, where my son worked for about fifteen years, have shown that uniforms, long hours, discipline, and academic demands upon their pupils can generate astounding results. Some hoped that charter schools would provide models for public education, but instead, school systems and teachers unions have treated them as enemies and fought their expansion.  In my opinion, had either higher education institutions or school systems done their jobs better in recent decades, they would not be in the vulnerable position that they are in now.  

Meanwhile, as Richard Nixon warned in 1960, our educational systems now find themselves at the mercy of the federal government because of its role as a huge source of funds.  Both party establishments cooperated with this situation for a long time, but now the Republicans reject it, and under Trump are determined to do something about it.  Local school systems and colleges and universities--some of whom probably will not survive--will have to rededicate themselves to their educational function and look for ways to fulfill it more effectively.  They need leadership that will make budget cuts where they most need to be made.  I hope such men and women can step forward.

Reason, Bureaucracy, and History

 The eighteenth century has long been called the age of revolution, often without acknowledging that at least two different revolutions were taking place.  That was the great insight of Alexis de Tocqueville, who described the two revolutions separately in two great books, Democracy in America, about the egalitarian society and representative institutions of the newly formed United States, and The Old Regime and the French Revolution, about the growth of a bureaucratic state in France in the 17th and 18th centuries and the failure of the  French Revolution to stop it.  The relationship between democracy and bureaucracy has changed a great deal over the last 250 years, especially in the United States, and it is entering a critical phase now, with potentially enormous consequences of the US and the world.

Some years ago I wrote a series of posts here about Democracy in America after reading it from cover to cover for the first time.  The search box at the top of this page will lead any interested readers to it.  I had read The Old Regime and the French Revolution much earlier, in the spring term of my senior year in college, with tremendous effect.  It emerged clearly from that book that Tocqueville personally preferred aristocracy to democracy, although he knew, as he had written twenty years earlier in Democracy in  America, that aristocracy was doomed and that democracy--by which he meant above all the legal equality of all citizens--was sweeping over the world.  His model of aristocratic rule was Great Britain, his wife's home nation.  The British aristocracy, he argued, had governed its nation in a public spirited manner, paying the lion's share of taxes through the land tax, allowing commoners to file suits against them in court, dominating local government, and cooperating with the lower classes in various ways.  The Old Regime argues repeatedly that the French aristocracy had behaved similarly in the later middle ages--an argument that I do not think many other historians have endorsed--but that things changed under Louis XIV, who began building a more centralized bureaucracy to govern the nation based mainly on his Intendants, the officials who represented him in the provinces. The French Revolution had tried to institute a democracy based in part on the new US model, but the nation had collapsed into near anarchy within a few years, leading to the dictatorship of Robespierre.  After a confused period in the late 1790s, Napoleon Bonaparte took over and revived the centralization of the Old Regime, with prefects taking the place of royal intendants.  

Tocqueville wrote The Old Regime in the 1850s and noted that the system of centralized administration and prefects had survived for half a century, through several dynastic and regime changes.  It survived all the way into the current Fifth Republic, buttressed by the grandes écoles, the national professional schools that trained young people for it.  Other European nations, led by Prussia and the German Empire that Prussia created in 1871, also had highly developed bureaucracies.    The early American Republic inspired Tocqueville largely because it did not have such a bureaucracy.  Its democratic institutions began at the local level, with New England town meetings, and US citizens constantly formed political associations to pressure their local, state and national officials.  The whole citizenry followed political affairs closely and took part in them.  That, he thought, was what made democracy a living thing.

Things began to change very slowly in the US in the last decades of the nineteenth century.  While the federal bureaucracy remained relatively small, dominated by postal workers and customs inspectors, elected senators and representatives now controlled appointments to it through informal arrangements worked out within the Republican Party in the wake of the Civil War.  The civil service reform movement began to argue for a permanent corps of non-partisan officials who could pass competitive examinations.  The Pendleton Act of 1883 created such a system for a few individuals, and in successive decades more and more of the federal service was brought under it.  In 1921 the Budget Act created a federal budget office, and in 1924 the Rogers Act created the Foreign Service, our first professional diplomatic corps.  The US never developed anything like the French grandes écoles, but an expanding higher educational establishment helped fill the ranks of the new civil service.  As in Germany, France, and to a lesser extent in Britain, the civil service was viewed as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment, trying to use science to promote the greater good.  That idea also had roots in Plato's Republic and its dream of a government ruled by philosophers, literally, lovers of knowledge.

The real explosion of US bureaucracy took place, of course, under Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal.  The new SEC began regulating Wall Street trading, the NLRB provided a mechanism to settle disputes over union registration, the Department of Agriculture began trying to control crop production, and public works agencies supervised huge projects.  The Federal Security Agency, the ancestor of the Department of Health and Human Services, administered social security.  The Second World War and its aftermath created huge new defense bureaucracies, and new agencies sprung up in the era of the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, including the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.  Most Republicans had opposed the New Deal agencies, but by the time of the Nixon Administration Republican leaders were going with the flow.  Barry Goldwater in 1964 had waged the first all-out presidential campaign against the bureaucratic state, and lost overwhelmingly.  In 1971, however, the then-confidential Powell memorandum by future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell laid down a countermanifesto, proposing a political offensive against government regulation of free enterprise.  In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president based upon anti-government rhetoric.

Reagan's bark turned out to be worse than his bite,  but something was changing in public opinion.  With the possible exception of Joe Biden, every president since Gerald Ford--including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama--has complained and joked about the size of the federal government and tried to cut it back.  The size of the federal work force has been remarkably stable for most of the period since 1970, which means that it has shrunk substantially as a percentage of our population.  Meanwhile, bureaucracies have had a decidedly mixed record in other advanced parts of the world.  The most powerful bureaucracy in the world now appears to belong to the European Union.  It administers and regulates a vast territory but it has aroused a great deal of resentment, leading to Brexit and to the growth of rightwing parties all over the continent.  The Soviet bureaucracy--probably the largest and most intrusive in history--collapsed in 1989 and has not been rebuilt.  China still seems to have a very powerful centralized bureaucracy, even though its economy is largely privatized.  The UN bureaucracy numbers more than 35,000 people around the world. In general, it seems to me that state authorities have been losing effective power and influence to private interests, especially here in the United States.

Over the last thirty years or so a new anti-bureaucratic movement has grown up within the Republican Party, fueled by foundations like the Koch brothers' and ideologues like Grover Norquist and foundations like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.  Those interests are now aligned with Donald Trump and Elon Musk and they are mounting an unprecedented attack on the federal bureaucracy, beginning with efforts to eliminate the Agency for International Development and the Department of Education.  They seem likely to reduce the size of our public health bureaucracies and may even try to privatize the post office.  The fate of these efforts will remain somewhat uncertain at least until the Supreme Court rules on various parts of them, but I think they represent a turning point in human affairs.  The Republicans have declared war on the ideal of an educated bureaucracy reordering economic life to promote the common good, and the closely related idea of a national government empowered to keep private economic power within certain limits.  Those ideas date back to the 18th century.  I deeply regret the decline of those ideas, but I also believe that Tocqueville's criticisms of impersonal bureaucracy had a point.  Our public institutions have become unresponsive in many ways, not least because of the influence of private interests exercised through our political system.  Bureaucracies do become devoted to their own self-preservation, if not their own growth.  Our vast state and local educational bureaucracies--probably the ones with the greatest impact on the average citizen--have been doing a very ineffective job for decades and let the nation down badly during  the pandemic.  And bureaucracy and regulations have made it almost impossible for governments of either party to accomplish great things, such as the proposed high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles.  

I doubt very much that the federal government as I have known it all my life will survive this administration.  Even if a Democrat succeeds Trump, they will not have the power to restore it to where it was two months ago, even if they want to.  I cannot possibly predict where this will lead the nation, but I conclude that an important era of modern history is indeed coming to an end.

The JFK assassination documents--what the Trump administration should do

 A couple of weeks ago an editor at a major newspaper contacted me--we have corresponded before, never met in person--and asked if I would like to do an op-ed on the Trump administration's pending release of new JFK assassination documents.  It went through two drafts but he has decided not to use it.  I'm very disappointed because it might actually do some good.  Here is the text.

President Donald Trump, perhaps encouraged by his ally Tucker Carlson, recently ordered the declassification of all remaining records pertaining to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Carlson in 2022 accused the Central Intelligence Agency of involvement in JFK’s assassination and claimed that the agency was still withholding critical documents — an example of the corrupt behavior of the “deep state” which, then as now, in Carlson’s and Trump’s view, works only for itself. Trump is presenting himself as a tribune of the people who will let them see the truth. The new release will probably include some interesting information, but it almost certainly will not transform anyone’s understanding of the assassination.

We must begin with the history of the withheld records. In 1977-1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, or HSCA, led by chief counsel G. Robert Blakey, reinvestigated the JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations. The committee looked at millions of pages of documents from the FBI and CIA. Initially, those documents were sealed for 50 years, but in 1992, prodded by Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-minded film JFK, Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act and set up a review board to look at all the select committee’s documents and release whatever they could. 

The review board did an excellent job, and the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, now holds an extraordinary collection of CIA and FBI documents on topics broadly related to the assassination, including FBI files on major organized crime figures and CIA files on many operations against Fidel Castro. I and several research assistants spent many weeks with those files in the early 2000s, culminating in the publication of my book, The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy in 2008. The HSCA had identified three two organized crime bosses—Santo Trafficante of Tampa and Carlos Marcello of New Orleans—as having the motive and opportunity to kill JFK, and new evidence allowed me to go further, confirming an organized crime conspiracy and identifying some of those involved in it.

The review board did withhold some documents broadly related to the assassination, mainly CIA documents. One must understand, however, that these are not CIA documents that no one else has ever seen. HSCA staffers and the review board saw them but found legitimate reasons not to release them — probably because, even many years later, they might compromise intelligence sources and methods. In short, no new release is going to reveal a sensational CIA officers’ plot to assassinate the president of the United States. The documents may contain important information about other CIA operations, but not that. 

Most assassination specialists have adopted one of two conclusions: either that Oswald and Jack Ruby, who killed him while Oswald was in police custody, both acted alone, or that Oswald was probably innocent and a grand deep-state conspiracy killed Kennedy. The latter group cannot give up the idea that the CIA killed Kennedy over differences in policy toward Cuba — even though the documents that have already been released show that the president and the agency were still working hand in hand to overthrow Castro well into the fall of 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated. 

The Trump administration’s move could fill in some gaps in the record.  There are FBI and CIA files that should have fallen within the purview of the review board in the 1990s but which it never saw. I identified in my research one such CIA file on Eladio del Valle — a former intelligence officer in the Cuban regime overthrown by Fidel Castro — who was murdered in Miami in 1967 and later linked to the assassination.  The CIA refused to release it. I also discovered long FBI files on Carlos Marcello that the review board hadn’t seen, and some of them were released to me with virtually every name in them redacted, making them useless.  Journalist Jefferson Morley has long been seeking the release on CIA man George Joanides, the case officer for a militant Cuban exile group who became the agency’s liaison to the HSCA. The Trump administration should establish a small permanent review board to release documents like these, which could add to our knowledge of the case.  Meanwhile, like the previous releases under President Biden, the unveiling of more review board documents will provide some interesting information without changing anyone’s views.  Adherents of the deep-state theory likely stand ready to argue that the truth has been withheld, no matter what the documents show. 

David Kaiser is the author of American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (2000) and The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (2008).

Missing the forest for the tree

 The tacit alliance between Donald Trump and the mainstream media--both of which enjoy making him the center of attention--is, I think, making it much harder for Americans to understand what is happening to our country, and why.   As I have said many times, Trump has become the leading political figure of our time because the leading professional politicians of both parties had lost the trust of the American people.  Nearly all Republican politicians now seem to understand this and have tied their fortunes tightly to his to an unprecedented extent.  His appeal certainly raises big questions about the state of our whole society.  Yet it should not obscure that his agenda satisfies the interests of a number of powerful constituencies that have been trying to influence American government and American life for decades--and those constituencies are delighted by much of what he is doing.

Foremost among those constituencies, perhaps, are three of the largest sectors of our economy: the fossil fuel industry, our leading financial institutions, and the cyber community.  The fossil fuel industry seems committed to the idea that carbon-fueled climate change is something that the world will have to live with, and is trying very hard not merely to maintain, but to expand, the production and distribution of its products.  Trump supports this effort totally both privately and publicly.  The financial community apparently chafes under even the modest regulatory efforts introduced by the Obama administration after the financial crisis, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which the Trump administration is now tossing into the dustbin of history.  Its subset, the crypto community, has secured the reversal of attempts to regulate this new and obviously unstable asset, and has even recruited Trump into their fold.  The youngest, most aggressive leaders of the tech industry have evidently persuaded the administration not to regulate the development of artificial intelligence.  

Three other constituencies have provided more of the ideology and most of the foot soldiers for our new regime.  The religious right has thrown in with Trump because of his opposition to abortion and gender ideology and has won its greatest victories in many decades.  The Federalist Society has supplied candidates for federal judgeships.  A whole network of rightwing foundations has supported and promoted ideologues dedicated to undoing the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society--the source of Project 2025, the blueprint for what the administration is doing.  All these institutions were important before Trump came on the political scene, but none as yet enjoyed the influence that they have today.

Trump has also allied himself with AIPAC, now our most important foreign policy lobby, and with the conservative Jewish donors who fund it.  During the first Trump administration the late Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino owner, apparently bought the movement of the US Embassy in Israel to Jeruslaem with a $20 million contribution to a pro-Trump super Pac.  Trump has fallen into line with Benjamin Netanyahu's goals, has demanded the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza strip, and may shortly endorse the annexation of the West Bank.  The president seems to have plans to replace or at least balance our traditional European and Asian alliances with understandings with Russia and China based upon mutual recognition of spheres of influence.  Twenty years ago those policies would have enraged prominent neoconservatives--then a pillar of the Republican Party--but neoconservatism has given way to neo-isolationism in the Republican Party now.

None of these powerful constituencies care much about Trump's unprecedented expansion of executive authority, his extraordinary grant of power to Elon Musk and his team, or his purge of the federal bureaucracy because he is giving them what they want.  And the federal courts may ultimately bless most of what he is doing because so many of them--including the Supreme Court--now have Republican majorities.

And what of Trump's popular support?  So far it is more than holding firm.   Polls so far show a small plurality of voters approving of what he is doing--a better showing than he ever made during his first term.  His immigration policies and his attack on DEI are popular.  Everything depends,  however, on the economy.  He has no plan to stop inflation, his tariffs had far less institutional support and may contribute to it, and financial deregulation is almost certain, in my opinion, to lead to another economic crisis.  To judge from Kamala Harris's campaign, however, it does not seem likely that the Democratic Party is going to propose much of a new economic agenda, except to oppose further tax and spending cuts.

Trump's assault on the executive branch strikes many of us as a usurpation of the Constitution and a threat to our democracy.  That is how many Americans saw Lincoln and Roosevelt, who presided over other great turning points in US history, as well--but their supporters defended them because they believed in what they were doing.   So far approximately half of all Americans approve of what Trump is doing, as well.   The same condition that allowed him to become president--a broad loss of faith in our institutions--is allowing him to take extraordinary actions now.  This, for better or for worse, is how history works.

Old questions, new answers

 This week I have read a remarkable new book, We Have Never Been Woke, by a sociologist named Musa Al-Gharbi.   Al-Gharbi was born sometime in the mid to late 1980s, it appears, to a black father and a white mother, both of whom were serving in the military.  He grew up and went to college in Arizona. To judge from the autobiography he posted on his web site, he has been a deep thinker all his life.  His twin brother was killed in the military in Afghanistan in 2010, and Al-Gharbi emerged as a critic of US Middle Eastern policy and eventually converted to Islam himself.  In 2016, when he was around 30, he began graduate school at Columbia as a sociologist, and he earned his Ph.D. seven years later with a dissertation of extraordinary scope and relevance.  That dissertation has now become We Have Never Been Woke.  

This book is intellectually ambitious, readable, and based upon extraordinarily wide reading in social science literature.  Its bibliography lists about 1500 sources, which he uses with great economy.  Its subject is our educated elite, the people who make our educational, governmental, medical, financial, literary, artistic, industrial, and high-tech institutions.  He calls this elite "symbolic capitalists."  They are, he estimates, about two-thirds Democratic, and concentrate themselves in a number of "symbolic hubs," including the Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and D. C. metropolitan areas, as well as Chicago, Atlanta, and perhaps Houston and Dallas.  (The book doesn't pay too much attention to red states or conservative elites.)  He sees wokeness as the dominant ideology of symbolic capitalists, characterized by a focus (or obsession) with oppression based on race, gender, and sexuality.  He apparently reacted to the extremely woke environment of Columbia (which also had a huge impact on the somewhat younger Coleman Hughes) like Gulliver among the Lilliputians.  He was as we shall see affected somewhat by wokeness, but he saw himself essentially as an outsider who could see through it.  Interestingly enough, he not only identifies himself as a symbolic capitalist but uses the pronoun "we" to refer to them throughout.

The woke elite, Al-Gharbi argues from many perspectives, are hypocrites.  While they claim to side with the oppressed, they dominate the upper economic reaches of our society and now hold power over most of our institutions.  Most importantly, their actual impact upon society as a whole does nothing for the lower economic half of the population, regardless of its race, gender, or sexual orientation.  They speak a language that is inherently offensive to the majority of the population that has not secured at least a B.A. degree.  They live in the least egalitarian metropolitan areas in the country, and often resist measures--such as efforts to construct more affordable housing--that would actually help the less well off.  They have, of course, promoted the globalization of our economy that has taken away so many good working-class jobs.  He argues that much of the new economy, including Amazon, Uber and Lift, and Door Dash and Grub Hub, exploits poorly paid workers--many of them immigrants--to make the lives of symbolic capitalists easier and more convenient.  Those workers, he argues, serve their economic betters the way that servants did in earlier eras--but masters took more responsibility for the lives of servants in those days than they do now.  

Symbolic capitalists' control of the media--and, he argues, their dominance on social media--have allowed them to portray themselves as egalitarian.  That, Al-Gharbi thinks, relies on a misreading of economic data.  Occupy Wall Street, a key episode in setting the tone of the 2010s, focused on the top one percent of our economy, but he focuses on the top 40 percent, which includes most of our college educated population and which has also been making gains while the lower 50 percent stagnates.  And, echoing the point that I have made for years, he notes that the diversification of that top 40 percent, which now includes far more women and nonwhites, has done nothing for the bottom half--and the bottom half knows it.  

I think Al-Gharbi has an excellent sense of where the United States is today, but his grasp of the last century of US history seems to me much shakier.  He uses another term, the Great Awokening, which appears to have been coined by another left-center skeptic, Matthew Iglesias, to refer to the spread of the oppressor-oppressed model since around 2011.  That  seems to me very accurate, but he moves onto shakier ground when he tries to identify three previous Great Awokenings in the 1930s, the late 1960s, and the early 1990s.  I don't think that the New Deal had the same focus on race and gender, even though it benefited both black Americans and women substantially.  It was based specifically on narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor and assuring everyone a decent life.  The late 1960s are indeed a precursor to what we have experienced more recently, insofar as they saw the beginning of the repudiation of the ideas of meritocracy and the claim that American society was fundamentally racist, sexist and imperialistic that has now blossomed.  Those ideas did break into public consciousness in the early 1990s under the name of "political correctness," but the country as a whole was moving in a different direction.   I also disagree with his analysis of where these movements came from.  Every one of those eras, he claims, saw the educated class threatened by economic developments that limited its opportunities, and it tried to seize the moral high ground to regain its position.  Al-Gharbi often thinks like an economist: he thinks almost all behavior is motivated by very real self-interest.  I do think that the self-interest of women and nonwhites, especially in academia, has a lot to do with the spread of woke ideas in the last 20 years.   But as I have often written here, I think all this is part of a general rebellion against authority of all kinds--political, social and intellectual--that began in the late 1960s and has allowed for all sorts of left- and right-wing ideas that would have been written off as crazy in the  mid-twentieth century to flourish.  And last but not least, the many hundreds of scholars whom he lists in his bibliography do not include William Strauss and Neil Howe, who might have opened his eyes to different perspectives.

It is because symbolic capitalists--our college-educated elite--have done so little for the lower half of the economic order that Al-Gharbi concludes that its dominant ideology--and it is dominant among them, as we shall see--must serve a different purpose.  That purpose is simply to make its adherents feel morally superior to their foes, and therefore entirely deserving of whatever they have.   It also allows them to view their opponents--Trump voters--as moral reprobates, "deplorables," as one might say.  Yes, he admits, Republican elites are more culturally conservative and pro-free market than Democratic ones--but both elites and more pro-free market and culturally liberal than the average American.  Interestingly enough, he cannot give up the woke idea of white privilege, but he seems to admit that wealth bestows much more advantage on Americans than skin color, and he mentions the critical, much-ignored fact that a plurality of poor Americans are white.  (That is why I do not believe that white skin, in and of itself, confers any privilege at all any more.)  Citing numerous studies by others, he notes that many of the nonwhites benefiting from affirmative action are either from immigrant families or families that are already well-to-do.  He points out again and again that woke ideology is much less popular among the poor--of all races--than the well-educated.   The vast majority of Hispanics reject the term Latinx, which, like ritual "land acknowledgements" on web sites and at public events, simply signal that the speaker belongs to the morally elect.  He also cites studies showing that tribalism is a more powerful force among those who have been to college than those who have not, and that they are now less likely to change their minds in response to discovering facts that contradict their opinons.

In one of his more arresting sections, Al-Gharbi turns to the influence of woke ideas--including critical race theory--in schools and colleges.  I was glad to see him make the obvious point that while K-12 schools do not teach the intellectual history of critical race theory through the works of Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw, their curriculums often reflect the conclusions of critical race theory.  But then he points out that the biggest controversies over CRT in the classroom have involved either elite private schools like Dalton and Horace Mann in New York, or schools in very wealthy suburbs like Loudon County,  Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.  And why, he asks, have these schools adopted these curricula?  Because they exist to feed students into the Ivy League and other elite institutions, whose admissions offices are actively recruiting social justice warriors who can talk the talk.  That does not, however, mean that those schools are actually educating their students to change the economic foundations of our society.  In fact, a recent study reported in the Boston Globe used linked in to find that more than half of Harvard graduates now go into consulting, finance, or information technology.

Some major newspaper columnists like David Brooks have quoted Al-Gharbi recently, but the New York Times has declined to review We Have Never Been Woke.  The Washington Post published a favorable review from a graduate student, which drew hundreds of outraged comments from woke readers, many of whom repeated the standard progressive talking point that "wokeness" is a right wing code word designed to fight social change.  I am delighted that Al-Gharbi is now an assistant professor at SUNY Stoney Brook and I think he can be one of the leading social scientists of his generation.  And I don't think it's coincidental that he has mixed ancestry, just like Coleman Hughes (whose parents black and Puerto Rican) and myself (whose parents were old-line WASP and first-generation American Jew.)  Many of us who grow up without a clearly defined ethnic identity seem to emerge with a frightening tendency to think for ourselves.

Al Gharbi never quotes or paraphrases Benjamin Disraeli's famous passage about "the two nations," but he might have.  His book was finished before the last election, but its results--and the findings of the CNN exit poll--confirm to me that his basic portrayal of the divide within our nation is accurate.  The real divide in our country is between the  approximately 45 percent who have at least a BA degree and the 55 percent who do not.  43 percent of the respondents in the CNN exit poll of voters had college degrees, and 56 percent of them voted for Kamala Harris while 42 percent voted for Trump.  57 percent of the respondents lacked those degrees, and 56 percent of them voted for Trump, as opposed to 43 percent for Harris.  Harris won 53-45 among white voters with degrees and lost by a two to one margin among white voters without them.  In my opinion, the lower economic half of our population--including growing numbers of Hispanics and black Americans--agrees with Al-Gharbi that the educated elite is dominated by a hypocritical ideology that is doing nothing for anyone but themselves.  And that, in my opinion, is the biggest reason that Donald Trump and the Republican party now control the entire federal government and have set about eliminating the influence of that ideology, while making the economic divide in the country wider than ever.

Analyzing the Gaza war

I taught in the Strategy and Policy Department of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island,  from 1990 until 2012.  That department, when I joined it, was by far the most sophisticated center for the study of warfare in the world,  It had developed--and continued to evolve--an extremely effective method for analyzing wars, based in large part on the works of two theorists, Carl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu.  I cannot say, unfortunately, that we ever had much impact on American foreign policy and strategy.  Shortly after I joined the department several of my new colleagues did go to Washington to discuss certain aspects of strategy in the first Gulf War, which ended quite successfully.  I am sorry to report, however, that no one asked for our advice after 9/11, as far as I know, and that all but three members of the department (among them, myself) supported not only the war in Afghanistan but the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In that same year, a civilian professor at the Air War College, Jeffrey Record, published a courageous article questioning the premises and strategy of the "war on terror," which expressed many of the doubts which some of us felt.  The Bush Administration, however, set its own course.

I was reminded of all this a few days ago when I listened to the latest episode of my friend Glenn Loury's podcast. Glenn, who has repeatedly raised doubts about Israel's war in Gaza since it began, and  his regular partner John McWhorter were joined by Matthew Cockerill, a Ph.D. student in history at the London School of Economics who was a referee for a study of the bombing of Gaza for a London outfit called Air Wars that tracks ongoing air campaigns in the Middle East, and Eli Lake, a journalist and podcaster specializing in national security.  The two guests took up almost all the air time and argued vehemently over what Israel has been doing.  Like so many contemporary analysts, however, they did not dig deeply into the questions that we in the Strategy and Policy Department trained our students to focus on.  As a result, I don't think either one of them shed much light on what is going on in Gaza, or why.

We live increasingly in a world of moral absolutes, and Cockerill and Lake both made moral and legal arguments about what the Israelis have been doing.  Cockerill, relying on the Air Wars study, claims that the Israelis in October 2023--the first month of the war--killed more civilians and  more women and children than any other foreign air campaign (thus omitting the Assad regime's campaign against its own people in Syria) in the 21st century.  He attributes that to Israeli tactics and claims that it amounted to murder under the laws of war.  Lake in response argued repeatedly that Israeli tactics simply reflected their new goal of "eradicating Hamas," and that Israel naturally responded with tremendous force to the shock and horror of the October 7 Hamas attack that killed about 1200 Israelis and abducted several hundred more.  That attack, he said, gave Israel PTSD.  They essentially repeated these arguments for more than an hour, and in so doing, in  my opinion, failed to raise the most important questions about what is going on and why.

We taught at Newport, following Clausewitz, that a successful war requires a clear political objective and a military strategy that will in fact accomplish that objective.  Both Lake and Cockerill seemed to believe that Israel's objective was the eradication of Hamas as an effective military force and political entity.  For reasons that I shall make clear shortly, I am very skeptical that that really is the objective.  One reason for my skepticism was stated by Glenn Loury in the middle of the podcast, when he noted that developments since the cease-fire have made it clear that the Israelis have not come close to eradicating Hamas.  They have killed some of its senior commanders and a good many fighters, but Hamas emerged from hiding in its tunnels as soon as the cease-fire began and clearly remains in full control of Gaza.  Intelligence estimates, moreover, state that Hamas has recruited enough new members to make up for the losses that they have suffered--a finding similar to what developed during the Vietnam War, when the enemy always seemed to be able to make up for its huge losses.   The objective of eliminating Hamas also conflicted with the objective of securing the return of the hostages.  That could only happen, as it now has, via an agreement with Hamas, since it is Hamas that holds the hostages.

There are, it seems to me, only two possible realistic objectives for Israel in this war, which is part of the broader struggle with the Palestinians for all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.  The first objective is the one that the Israeli government has pursued for most of the last 24 years or so, to acknowledge that peace is probably impossible but to keep the conflict within reasonable bounds.  That policy involved retaliation for any terrorist attack.  Israeli retaliatory attacks have consistently killed more Palestinians than the Palestinians managed to kill Jews, but they were still limited in scope, until October 2003.  Meanwhile, some elements within the Israeli government and Israeli society continued to expand the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.  Now, the Netanyahu government has abandoned that objective.

Regarding the Israeli adoption of a completely different strategy after October 7, I cannot accept Eli Lake's argument that this simply reflected the heat of the moment, or PTSD, occasioned by those attacks.  Clausewitz in one of his most important passages acknowledges the role of emotion in war--particularly among the people of a nation at war.  He makes clear, however, that the task of the political leadership of the nation is not to give in to passion, but to base its decision on reason--that is, on a realistic calculation of what any particular military action can achieve.  This was also the failure of the Bush administration in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Unfortunately, in this case I am not convinced that the Israeli government simply gave in to passion.  I think this particular Israeli government has adopted a new objective: to use their bombing campaign to make Gaza uninhabitable and drive most or all of the Palestinian population out of it.  I do not regard this as a campaign of genocide, that is, an attempt to murder the whole Palestinian population, but I am increasingly convinced that it is a campaign of ethnic cleansing, and that those behind it--both the extreme elements of Netanyahu's coalition, and Netanyahu himself--intend to follow it up with a similar campaign in the West Bank, where the pressure on the Palestinian population has already intensified.  I am not saying that all Israelis want this.  Many Israelis would gladly have lived in peace alongside Palestinians in the Gaza strip, and many (although probably not as many) would also give up the West Bank for peace.  Such Israelis are now however in the minority, and alongside them have always lived those who have dreamed of a Zionist state from the river to the sea, or even one including the east bank of the Jordan River as well.  Meanwhile, I am not convinced that the Palestinians as a group and their leadership have ever wanted real lasting peace either.  Too many people on both sides still seek a solution that will exclude the other.

The reduction of Gaza to rubble has not destroyed Hamas, and it made no sense to expect it to. Hamas, we have all known, lives in deep tunnels which the bombing could not reach.  We can't rule out the possibility that the Israeli leadership was ignoring this obvious fact--other governments have carried out equally illogical bombing campaigns.  But in any case, the Israeli leadership obviously knew that they were making the territory uninhabitable, and that they did not object to that result.  Perhaps, in fact, they welcomed it.

Netanyahu and his government, moreover, may now have a critical ally in their quest to expel the Palestinian population of Gaza: President Donald Trump.  Interestingly enough, in a talk at Harvard's Kennedy School four months after October 7, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner referred to the possibility of moving the civilian population of Gaza into Egypt during Israeli military operations and appeared to suggest that they would not return. Yesterday Donald Trump spoke openly of convincing the Jordanian and Egyptian governments to take nearly two million Gazan refugees into their countries and acknowledged that Gaza has now been reduced to rubble.  Trump seems to be ushering in a new world in which great-power violence will redraw various maps.  The Russians will emerge with at least a good chunk  of Ukraine, the United States will regain the Panama Canal zone and perhaps annex Greenland (I doubt the latter possibility), China may take Taiwan, and Israel will create the Middle East map that Netanyahu displayed before the UN before October  7--one without any Palestinian entity at all.

Netanyahu has been quoted as having told former President Biden that Israel in Gaza was only doing what the United States had done to German and Japanese cities during the Second World War.  He may soon point out that the western allies cooperated in the expulsion of more than ten million Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe after the Second World War.  The Israeli historian Benny Morris has already argued that the United States owes its existence to the dispossession of the Indians. Jared Kushner, in a talk at Harvard a  year ago, noted that millions had been displaced by conflicts in Syria and Iraq.  The whole post-Second World War international order was designed to move us into a new era in which such things would not take place.  We may have to accept that at least for the time being,  it has failed.

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.