What a Difference 80 Years Can Make

 It has been some time since I've compared front pages of the New York Times from eighty years apart.  The eighty year cycle is key to the whole Strauss-Howe framework for history, as you know--but because we haven't gone through and successfully resolved a great crisis in 2026, as we had in 1946, this comparison illuminates the enormous differences between that time and ours.  Yesterday's front page, which I will get to in due course, seemed such an acute portrayal of where we now that I was moved to do the comparison again.  The first thing to note, as in other comparisons, is how much more news the 1946 front page contained.  It includes fifteen different news stories and a world news summary in eight columns; yesterday's six-column page has six stories, and teases for twelve more at the bottom of the page.

Two three-column headlines dominate the October 5 page.  On the left, inflation, fueled above all by skyrocketing meat prices and shortages, is the story. Mayor O'Dwyer of New York has asked President Truman to ask the FBI to investigate the "meat famine" in the city and allow imports from Argentina.  A second story under the headline reports that the Office of Price Administration, a holdover from wartime that was about to go out of business, was allowing restaurants to raise their prices on meat dishes by fifteen percent.  A third story reports that a different agency, the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, had been unable to agree on an alternative to the current wage-price stabilization plan, which was failing.  Then as now, inflation was perhaps the most serious domestic issue the country faced, and it was much more serious then.  The explosion of consumer demand and shortages raised prices by 18 percent by the end of 1946, compared to an estimated 3.7 percent this year.  That was the biggest reason for the Republican landslide in the congressional elections that were just a week away, and which, interestingly enough, did not make their way onto the October 6 front page.  A similar story is playing out this year on a lesser scale. 

The three-column headline on the right also has contemporary resonance: "Truman Again Prods Britain on 100,000 Palestine Visas; Backs Jewish State Plan."  Truman said that the proposals of the Jewish Agency for Palestine for "a viable Jewish state in control if its own immigration and economic policies in an adequate area of Palestine instead of in the whole of Palestine."  Eighty years later, as I have pointed out, the Israeli government seems to be executing a plan to extend the borders of that state to what was then the whole of Palestine.  A second story reports that the Attlee government in Britain had immediately rejected the proposal, which had generated intense Arab opposition.  Four other foreign stories, only one from wire services, occupied the rest of the three columns on the right.  An international Italian Economic Commission announced that Italy would have to pay $225 million in war reparations to Yugoslavia, Greece, and Ethiopia--a figure that the great power Council of Foreign Ministers, including those of the US, the USSR, Britain and France, would have to approve.  Another London story reported the creation of a new Ministry of Defense to coordinate Britain's three services.  In China, an unidentified force of Chinese had attacked a US Marine supply depot, and in Yugoslavia the Tito government had arrested an American United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation official as a spy.

Between the two big headlines, a Honolulu story reported the first leg of a non-stop B-29 flight from there over the North Pole to Egypt, which had already reached Alaska.  Below that, the Times reported on a speech by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in Buffalo, New York. Fresh from his service as a Nuremberg prosecutor, Jackson warned that "there could be no permanent peace unless minorities everywhere were to have at least a minimum of civil rights."  In a related story from Tennessee, an all-white jury had acquitted twenty-three of twenty-five Negroes[sic] "accused of participating in the disorders at Columbia, Tenn., last February 25, in which two Negroes were killed and four white policemen were wounded."  And in local news, a strike meeting of sailors from the merchant marine had ended in violence blamed on Communist members, and five armed men had robbed more than $1,000 from an office of Colonial Airlines.

Yesterday a foreign story of a different kind occupied the top right-hand side of the Times front page. It told how presidential envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have spent a good deal of their time in the Kremlin talking to Vladimir Putin about a big US-Russian energy deal involving a major donor to President Trump.  These talks have gone parallel to their efforts to stop the Russia-Ukraine war, which have gone nowhere.  Such a deal, sources say, would be a big step towards the easing of sanctions against Russia and a warming of Russian-American relations.  Two domestic stories take up the rest of the top of the page.  The first, on the left, deals with by far the biggest Times story of the last week, the lawsuit filed by a former Cornell student against seven young men for allegedly sexually assaulting her two years ago, and the way in which the case was originally handled by Cornell and local authorities.  The second, datelined Phoenix, Arizona, tells in detail of US teenagers there who are making money reselling guns to representatives of the Mexican drug cartel.  Below those two is a lighter-than-air story about the city of Philadelphia's first parallel parking championship and the contestants who have already developed an online following by posting pictures of the tight spaces they have maneuvered into.  The fifth story is about an AI algorithm which claims to measure a patient's risk of getting breast cancer from a single mammogram.  And the last deals with our forthcoming election from a framework that was not an issue in 1946: "Justices Brace for Disputes from Election," the headline reads, focusing on the Supreme Court.

In the wake of the Second World War, US readers remained keenly interested in global events, whether or not the US was directly involved in them.  They also followed the doings the federal, state and local government closely, and civil rights had already emerged as an important new issue, even before President Truman took it  up in a big way about 18 months later. They counted on the government to do something about economic distress.  Yesterday the two national affairs stories focused on corruption in high places, and the near-certainty of serious disputes over the outcome of our forthcoming elections.  The  Cornell story reflects decades of evolving social mores, and the AI story points to another big change in how we live.  The domestic and international political orders that the US had been trying to create for the first five decades of the twentieth century are gone, and we have not replaced them.  In the last twenty 25 years we have had three very serious crises to cope with: 9/11, the financial crash of 2008, and the COVID epidemic.  The government's failure to handle any of them in an inspiring fashion and the election and re-election of Donald Trump has destroyed faith in our institutions.  I don't when or how it might be restored.

Is higher ed a fraud?

        Some weeks ago, an article alerted me to a new academic novel, Lords of Serendipity, by an English prof named Randy Boyagoda.  He works now in Canada but originally came from Sri Lanka, where a good deal of the novel takes place.  Spoilers ahead! The main characters are:

        Jack Bayern, a middle-aged widower who teaches Introduction of Statistics for Non-Majors at the mythical Arcadia Tech University, which might be MIT, but I can't tell.  Jack has a daughter Katrina who is a freshman at Haven, one of the most elite schools in the Northeast. which her late mother also attended.  Jack is teaching extra sections to pay Katrina's tuition.  Katrina has a roommate from Sri Lanka called Cham, a young woman with quite a back story of her own.

         Young Allard Hamburger, a statistics grad student, is the senior Teaching Assistant in Jack's course.  His mother Patricia Hamburger conceived him out of wedlock with a professor named Martin, an astronomer, who refused to drive her to the abortion clinic where she planned to end the pregnancy. Instead she had Allard, gave up her doctoral studies, and eventually went to work at "student research services" at Haven, which is located deep in a forest.  After years of helping students, Patricia is about to be replaced by a chatbot.  Allard knows that his father, whom he has never met, is a professor at a leading university, and he is building a multi-million dollar nest egg by charging foreign students--and only foreign students--for altering their grade to a minimally acceptable 76. 

        Near the beginning of the book, Allard gets a visit from another Sri Lankan, Adi Bhopal, who paid him for a 76 several years earlier.  He now wants to go to grad school and needs a better grade, and asks Allard to sign on to a complicated scheme to give him one.  Allard refuses.  Bhopal has a side hustle of his own: tutoring would-be foreign students at American colleges from Sri Lanka and elsewhere who dream of getting into a western university and transforming their lives.  One of his tutees is a young Sri Lankan girl named Devi from a poor family there.  She knows him as Johannes.  Bhopal/Johannes commits suicide after Allard refuses to help him.  Devi perseveres on her own, but without success.

        Both Jack and his daughter fall afoul of the PC police.  In the opening meeting of his course, Jack uses an incident involving a bird of prey and a squirrel to make a point about different disciplines, and makes a veiled reference to the work of J. K. Rowling, who, in case you didn't know, is persona non grata among the woke because of her transphobia.  That leads to a threatening visit from a Dean, but he survives.  Katrina and her roommate Chan take part in a Christmas Gaudy, a play, which activist students try to turn into a pro-Palestinian demonstration.  When they try to continue the play as planned, they are invited to leave their dormitories.  The real theme of the book, however, is fraud.  Jack Bayern is the kind of old-school academic who cares about doing things right--the reason his career has never gone anywhere--and he is unlucky enough to uncover two cases of it.

         First, the suicide of Adi Bhopal leads Jack to examine the grading history in the introductory statistics course, and he discovers the extraordinary number of foreign students who received a 76 from Allard Hamburger--something which, he knows as a good statistician, cannot be a coincidence. The administration refuses to look into the matter any further or take any action.  Then, by a series of coincidences worthy of David Lodge, Jack and Professor Martin, the distinguished astronomer, find themselves working at, or with, a newly renovated university in Sri Lanka, which is being transformed by lavish funding from China.  Martin claims that his team has found a way to predict where black holes will occur, and Jack and a couple of enthusiastic grad students get the task of checking his statistical methods.  Jack finds that Martin must have been falsifying his data, that there is no other way that he could have gotten the results that he did. Once again he wants to blow the whistle, but he eventually loses his nerve, partly because he needs his new salary to keep his daughter at Haven.

I could not dismiss this last climax as over the top, because of another book I had read recently and reviewed here: How to Rule the World, by recent Stanford graduate Theo Baker.  Working for the Stanford newspaper, Baker uncovered an equally serious fraud that had helped make the career of Marc Tessier-Lavigne, whom he eventually forced to resign (with a handsome severance package) from Stanford when he revealed it.  That fraud related to false data claiming to point towards a newly identified cause of Alzheimer's disease, which, if accurate, would have been worth perhaps billions of dollars.  There are professors, as the history of academia shows, who become almost too big to fail. 

The vast expansion of US higher education in the 1960s, I believe, outran the supply of really outstanding intellects.  A critical mass of mediocrity turns dedicated and original academics into outsiders, and makes way for careerists who learn by the time they are 40 that they really don't enjoy academic work that much.  Many of them become administrators, the class that now runs every major university along strict business and public relations principles.  The Ivy League and its competitors depend now on a steady stream of money from Wall Street and the tech sector, and their main function within our society is to provide the young talent that keeps those sectors going.  To attract the maximum number of students and convince their parents to pay enormous annual sums, they must keep them happy during their college years, which is why A- has become the default bad grade at most of them, and assignments have been cut back so much.  Since everyone gets the same grades, they have become irrelevant, and bright young students spend more time networking.  We need another realistic novel focusing on the top administrators and trustees of an elite school.  It could also make a great movie.

23 years of posts--a summary

 One of my sons got AI to read every post in this blog and summarize it.  I think every regular reader will enjoy the results--I certainly did. There is only one reference that I do not understand--I will have to look it up.  Here it is:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M6ZgIXvBTMPUswNTjJn9q1jKlKhTz-hd/view?usp=sharing

How much is Trump responsible for?

 I spent the last week in Paris, which for me makes for days of restaurants, movies, bookstores, and museums.  When I was living in Cambridge and its environs in the 1970s this area was a lot like it, but it isn't anymore.  The break allowed me to think more clearly about the state of our own nation, and to perhaps get a better look at the great, ever-changing forest of American history, zooming backwards from that one orange-colored tree that so dominates our lives.  Yes, our country is in a terrible mess, and yes, we have a president who is truly, in his own way, beyond compare.  But how much of it is exactly his fault, and how many of our current misfortunes can we trace directly to him? It's an interesting question.

Trump cannot reasonably be blamed for the transformation of our economy over the last fifty years or so.  He was not even a key figure in making it happen, nor does he seem to me have benefited much from it before he entered politics.  The New Deal era began to die in the 1970s.  The Republican Party had never really favored it, although Eisenhower and Nixon had lived with and even expanded upon some of its achievements, but by 1976 Ronald Reagan, who believed that government was the solution not the problem, was very nearly the dominant figure in the Republican Party, and he definitely took it over four years later.  Something parallel had happened among the Democrats, where the new generation of 1974 had run against big government and special interests and had begun to replace the economic issues of previous decades with social ones.  Reagan introduced long-term peacetime fiscal irresponsibility into American government in order to make the rich richer, and the deregulation of financial markets began.  While Gordon Gecko was about as old as Donald Trump, he looms in retrospect as far more of a harbinger of things to come, since he worked in finance, not real estate.  George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton each took major steps to cut Reagan's deficits, and by 2000 Clinton had created a significant federal surplus, but George W. Bush immediately returned to Reagan's permanent deficits, while allowing financialization to run wild and create the housing bubble.  Barack Obama in 2009 might have revived some of the principles of the New Deal in response to the 2008 crash, but he chose not to, convinced that there was nothing fundamentally unsound about our new system.  He did cut Bush's deficits substantially--as every Democratic President since JFK had done--but he was the last Democratic president to do so.  Trump cut taxes again and the deficit ballooned again, exploding to unprecedented heights during the COVID response, and Biden did not reverse the damage.  The deficit in Biden's last fiscal year, 2024, $1.83 trillion, was nearly twice as high as the deficit in Trump's last pre-pandemic year, 2019, when it was just $984 billion.  Meanwhile the share of the richest 1 percent and ten percent of our nation has grown steadily, while the lower half of the population has been stuck at the same level.

Trump has claimed to repudiate the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, but even this is only a half truth.  The end of the Cold War under Reagan ushered in a new idea of American indispensability and supremacy, celebrated publicly by both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama.  More specifically, 9/11 unleashed an unprecedented era of American imperialism, marked by attempts to replace hostile Middle Eastern regimes with cooperative, friendly clients.  Begun by George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, these attempts were continued by Obama in Libya and in Syria--but none of these initiatives left the target nation better off or turned it into a reliable friend of the US.  And now, two years into his second term, Trump has embarked upon what is turning into the biggest catastrophe yet, the attempt to complete the neoconservative agenda by removing or crippling the Islamic regime in Iran.  That was already orthodoxy among the Republican leadership thanks in large part to AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby. Mitch McConnell had done everything it could to try to stop Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, and essentially recognized Benjamin Netanyahu, not President Obama, as his the spokesman for his preferred middle eastern policy.  And it was Biden, not Trump, who allowed Israel completely to destroy the Gaza strip and leave its population homeless after October 7.

Writing in 1997, Bill Strauss and Neil Howe had argued in their book The Fourth Turning that during the next twenty years, a great crisis would allow a new president to mobilize the nation, solve critical problems, and build a new political consensus as FDR and Lincoln had done.  Their list of possible crises included (but was not limited to) a terrorist attack, an economic crisis, and an epidemic.  All three have now come to pass, and the first two at least did produce a broad surge of renewed patriotism, but Bush II and Obama failed to deal adequately with the first two, and the third one divided the country more than ever.  Trump understood one key point.  Disastrous consensus economic and foreign policies and the failure to respond effectively to these crises had utterly discredited the leadership of the two major parties, leaving an opening for a nationally known demagogue like himself.  A large plurality of Republicans and a near-plurality of the country voted for him in 2016 not in spite of his opposition to consensus positions but because of them.   

Trump in his second term, however, has made two kinds of changes that no one else would have made.  To begin with, in foreign policy, he has treated the nation's oldest friends as enemies and even expressed designs upon the territory of Denmark and Canada.  In Ukraine he has abandoned the role of the defender of nations against aggression that the US played for most of the twentieth century.  And while the war against Iran was already part of the neoconservative playbook, he has waged it with unprecedented fecklessness, taking no account of what was going to happen, blindly following the advice of Prime Minister Netanyahu against the views of much of his own team, and doing unprecedented harm to the world economy.  He has also crippled our foreign policy establishment, eliminating USAID and ignoring the State Department, while private citizens, including his own son-in-law, take over the most important diplomatic assignments without any oversight, and all the while using this role to build up their own economic power.  We have never seen anything remotely like this before.

And at home, Trump has purposefully, consciously degraded our entire political process in an equally unprecedented fashion.  I am not merely referring to his election denialism, but to the whole tenor of politics as he practices them.  He constantly uses contemptuous language towards the whole opposition party, towards media critics, and towards anyone who gets in his way.  This is exactly the kind of language that Washington and Jefferson, who occupied the White House at the beginning and the end of an equally contentious era, warned us against.  No president--including Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War--ever used language like his towards opponents before.  Trump also has no understanding of or respect for our Constitution and how our institutions are supposed to work.  The whole idea of bureaucracies applying rules impartially is anathema to him--perhaps because he is such a chronic rule-breaker himself--and he has filled the most sensitive positions with flunkies who understand that their job is to reward his friends and punish his enemies.  He has found numerous ways to use the presidency to make money for himself.  And now he has offered every adult American $5,000 for their votes in the upcoming election.  

Strauss and Howe showed that from 1774 to about 1794, from 1861 through 1865, and from 1933 through 1945, the United States established and then re-established confidence in our institutions and in ourselves by mobilizing effectively to deal with great national problems.  They expected their (and my) generation to produce a new Lincoln or FDR who would do the same.  According to the 80-year rhythm that they identified, that process should have been completed by now.  I expect Trump to leave office in January 2029 if not sooner.  He might be replaced by someone equally disruptive.  The two parties don't seem likely to select very impressive candidates in 2028 either, and I expect at least one tech mogul to try for the White House then.  But no matter who wins, I can't at this moment imagine how they might create some new national consensus comparable to the ones that emerged from our previous great crises.  Entropy and fragmentation may have gone too far.

What makes a radical?

 It took several months, but a copy of Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young, the autobiography of Zayd Ayers Dohrn, the son of late 1960s Weathermen Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, found its way to me via the local library consortium this week.  [I will continue to use Weathermen as a gender-inclusive term--not least because they themselves did.] It took me just two days to read through it.  Zayd, now hearing 50, is an academic himself (I will use his first name to avoid confusion with his mother.)  He has written a very well-researched book about his notorious parents, drawing on long talks with them and their co-revolutionaries and family members, as well as on very copious FBI files.  Despite some minor splits which only someone my age would be likely to catch--James Chaney, who was murdered along with Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman in 1964 in Mississippi, was a local Mississippi man, not another student from the North, and the Book of the Month Club in the 1950s did not distribute paperbacks--he does a good job of recreating his young parents' student world.  He is also very frank about their underground activities, tentatively identifying his mother as one of two bombers of the Capitol Building in 1970 (she would neither confirm nor deny) and detailing their peripheral involvement in other famous crimes, such as the prison break that sprung Timothy Leary in California.  They were not charged for any of these crimes after turning themselves in in late 1980, because the FBI had had to close the cases after its own wrongdoing during investigations had come to light.   His mother did have to spend some months in prison not long afterwards because she had helped create fake IDs that were used in a bank robbery in New York in 1981 in which several people were killed, but the court ordered her release after she refused to talk.  Subsequently both of them re-established careers as a lawyer (Dohrn) and teacher (Ayers), remaining politically active in Chicago, and eventually becoming acquainted with Barack Obama. 

As I have mentioned many times, I saw the emergence of the New Left first hand in the late 1960s as an observer and a critic.  Two of my best college friends became deeply involved with it--although not in any illegal activity.  Both abandoned its views within a few more years.  Steve Kelman, who was one year behind me, captured the atmosphere of that time brilliantly in his early memoir, Push Comes to Shove.  Neither Kelman nor I, for different reasons, ever bought the radical line of the SDS.  He was a proud Norman Thomas socialist.  I was, first of all, a proud liberal Democrat even after I turned against the Vietnam War, and secondly, a student of Orwell, who had handed in his dissertation on the development of Orwell's thought just a couple of weeks before the Harvard SDS occupied University Hall.  The SDS reminded me too much of the totalitarian movements Orwell had polemicized against.  I was also influenced by the social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew.  I took his extraordinary course in race relations in the fall of 1968, and he talked at some length about the damage that the Black Power movement--to say nothing of the Black Panthers--had done to the civil rights movement.

I am not going to narrate the various activities of Ayers and Dohrn in any great detail, fascinating though they were, but I will talk about their early lives and the key turning points in their revolutionary careers, in order to try to get at the question I have been intermittently wondering about for 60 years: why, exactly, did a significant number of my contemporaries decide, within just a few years, that our country and its elite were irretrievably evil, and any and all possible means needed to be used to try to overthrow its government and society?  And why do significant numbers of young people still adopt such views today, even though there is no violent underground now?

Neither Dohrn nor Ayers, unlike a number of other leading student revolutionaries, were Red Diaper babies whose parents had been communists in the 1930s or 1940s.  Dorhn's father was the children of Jewish immigrants who had married two Protestants (the first one died young), changed the family's name from Ohrnstein to Dorn, and struggled with some success to reach the middle class.  He was, by his daughter's account, a racist, and voted Republican.  Bernadine, born in 1942, was the first member of her family to attend college, at Miami University of Ohio.  Bill Ayers, born two years later, was well-off--his father ran a large electric power company in Chicago, and was a typical liberal Republican of that era.  He arrived at the University of Michigan in 1963--where the SDS had been founded one year earlier. He tried to join the Freedom Summer project in Mississippi in late 1964 but found that it had come to an end, partly because of the passage of the Civil Rights Act.  He dropped out of college and spent a year in the Merchant Marine. Dohrn's boyfriend had talked her out of going to Mississippi in early 1964, and she had gone to the University of Chicago Law School in the fall of that year. In the summer of 1966 she became involved in Martin Luther King Jr.'s protests in the Chicago area, where King said he had encountered more bitter hatred than he had ever seen in the South.  She joined SDS then. She was beautiful, often provocatively dressed, and charismatic, and she almost immediately became a leading figure in the organization.

Ayers, meanwhile, returned to Michigan in the fall of 1965 as the Vietnam War was heating up, and joined SDS almost at once. After being arrested in a protest, he dropped out again and went to work at the Children's Community School in downtown Detroit. There he met his first love, a young woman from a wealthy family named Diana Oughton, who also became a revolutionary and was eventually blown up with two comrades in a bomb factory in Greenwich village in early 1970.  By the middle of 1967, with the Vietnam War getting bigger and bigger, they both quit the school to become full-time activists.

In the summer of 1969 the SDS held a famous national convention in Chicago dominated by a split between the Maoist Progressive Labor Party on the one hand--whose Harvard members had defied a majority SDS vote NOT to occupy University Hall and gone ahead a few months earlier--and a revolutionary faction led by Dohrn, which, according to Zayd, believed that white revolutionaries had to ally with the Black Panthers.  Dohrn and some of her allies then spent several weeks in Cuba which, she acknowledged much later, convinced her that revolution in the United States was still possible. Ayers and others, including Kathy Boudin, daughter of one of the leading left wing lawyers in the US, were now going through struggle sessions to enforce ideological purity and group sex orgies to break down bourgeois values.  The new group became the Weathermen, and eventually the Weather Underground.  Some also began learning how to handle dynamite, and on October 6, a big explosion in a Chicago park that destroyed a statue of a policeman kicked off the Days of Rage, several days of violent protests in which the Weathermen battled the police, who responded with mass arrests.  Two months later, Fred Hampton, the leader of Chicago's Black Panthers, was murdered in the middle of the night during a Chicago police raid.  The Weathermen, including Dohrn and Ayers, decided to go underground and go to war with the government in alliance with the Black Panthers.    Their bombings began in early January 1970, and their most destructive planned bombing--of a dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey, which might have killed dozens of soldiers and their girlfriends--never came off, because the planners, including Diana Oughton, were killed when their Greenwich Village townhouse exploded.  The bombing campaign peaked in 1970-2, including large late night explosions in both the US Capitol and the Pentagon, and tapered off until 1975.  As Zayd explains, the bombs were generally planted during the day by well-dressed young women posing as secretaries, inspired by Muslim Algerians who passed as Europeans and planted bombs in soda fountains as depicted in the film, The Battle of Algiers.  They did take precautions to try to insure that no one would be hurt, setting the bombs to explode late at night and telephoning in warnings.  That was not all.  In 1970 Ayers and Dohrn took $25,000 from friends of Timothy Leary, the former Harvard Professor turned LSD advocate, to organize his breakout from a California prison.  Smuggled out of the country, he eventually reached Algeria and moved in with fugitive Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.  They fell out not long after, and the US government eventually caught up with Leary in Afghanistan.  

Dohrn, Ayers, and eventually their children remained on the run throughout the 1970s.  The government had to drop most of its cases against the Weathermen because of misconduct on its own part, and Dohrn and Ayers turned themselves in in 1980.  They were not charged with any further crimes. During the rest of the 1970s, however, underground Weathermen assisted the underground Black Liberation Army in carrying out bank robberies and other crimes.  They often provided white female drivers for getaway cars, whom the police were unlikely to stop.  Dohrn worked for a while an upscale baby clothing store in Manhattan, where she would ask for driver's licenses from customers who wrote checks, memorize and write down the data, and give it to underground figures who would use it to secure copies of the licenses that could be used to rent cars for robberies.  One such car was used in the robbery in Nyack, New York in 1981, in which one security guard and two policemen were killed.  The perpetrators were caught immediately, and served long sentences. Dohrn's connection to the crime was discovered but she was not charged.  The government jailed her for months to try to compel testimony, but she would not talk, and eventually a judge had to release her.

I turn now from this narrative, based on Zayd's far more detailed account, to the question of why.  My answers are speculative, based literally on decades of reading and thinking about these issues. 

Adolescence involves developing one's own world view, and Jean Piaget pointed out that many adolescents easily fall for sweeping explanations of what makes the world work.  In addition, I am now convinced, many of us carry around the effects of trauma that we have literally inherited from our parents, often without even knowing what their source was.  The trauma makes one feel that he or she must have done something terrible to warrant it.  It can also leave one with enormous unresolved anger. All these elements, in my opinion, played into late 1960s activism.

The Vietnam War  was indeed a terrible mistake that inflicted enormous cruelty on the people of Indochina. took the lives of about 58,000 young Americans, and crippled others for life.  My question, however, is why so many young people not only opposed it, but also eagerly concluded that it proved that the whole of American society was irretrievably imperialist, racist, and unjust, and that any means could properly be used to bring it down.  Following the late Alice Miller, a German Jewish psychoanalyst, I am convinced that this world view temporarily relieved its adherents of their own guilt, which they had suffered without any idea of where it came from.  It also allowed them violently to express their anger.  I saw that anger first hand in many Harvard demonstrations, and it was terrifying.  This may also explain why the SDS and the Weathermen both began terrorizing their own members, forcing them in struggle sessions to admit terrible ideological error, as Dohrn herself eventually had to do while underground, confessing to accusations of sexism herself.  Because they had no idea where their guilt and rage come from, they had to keep finding new targets upon which to vent it.  And some of them eventually decide that only by resorting to illegal violence can they prove that they are actually worthy people on the right side of history.

The Black Panthers--who have now been mythologized beyond recognition even in the mainstream media--also exemplified` this, I think, and they played a key role in the splits in the SDS.  They were waging a generational fight against their older generations, who had endured so much and worked so patiently to overcome legal segregation.  The Panthers distinguished themselves by their willingness to resort to violence, especially against the police, and the white radicals accepted their self-image as the only true representatives of the black urban population.  That is why they continued to help them carry out robberies after they had all gone underground.  The white radicals were looking for absolute virtue, and they chose to identify it with the Panthers because the Panthers claimed to be fighting racism.  It is easier for many people--and here I speak from personal experience, too--to feel pain on behalf of other people than on their own.  It is also easier to locate virtue among people that one does not know very well, and one of the enduring left wing legacies of that period is the idea that virtue can be found only among the oppressed.  That is the key to wokeness.  Indeed, in Zayd's book one finds the direct ancestors of nearly every major tenet of contemporary leftism. The ideas of white privilege and intersectionality, which had not yet been named, come up again and again.  There was a period in the late 1960s when any blow against society and its values suddenly became heroic, and Dohrn herself fell victim to this when she expressed some admiration for the daring of the Manson family. 

Despite the Vietnam War, the society that many of my contemporaries rebelled against was healthier in many ways than ours today.  It had made several decades worth of dramatic progress against racism and against economic inequality--the latter of which soon came to a screeching halt.  That however made no difference.  To me, the whole radical revolutionary movement illustrates a disease to which modern society remains vulnerable.  I have not written this  post to suggest how things might have been different or how recurrences might be avoided, but merely to provide a different perspective on why it breaks out, and to suggest that it undeniably grows out of very real aspects of human nature.

False premises

 It's an irony of my life that while I wanted as much or more than anything to belong to some kind of larger institution that shared my values, I have instead become more of an intellectual lone wolf every decade.  So it is what while I have for the last 12 years subscribed to the same newspapers that I did through the 1970s, I continually find myself taking issue both with their opinion pages and their reporting. Two noteworthy examples of this popped up during the last week.

Last Tuesday, in the New York Times, the venerable Thomas Friedman told Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the victorious Democratic candidate for Senator in Michigan, how he should change his position on Israel and Palestine so as to win the election in the fall.  Astonishingly enough, he recommended that the candidate adopt Friedman's own position in favor of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, and endorsing "the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state."  Criticizing Hamas, Friedman blames them for wrecking the Saudi peace initiative that he has personally taken credit for for 24 years, a proposal for peace with Israel in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, by starting the second Intifada.  Any solution except a two-state solution, Friedman says, "is a geopolitical loser for America and a loser for Palestinians, Israelis, Arab Americans, Jewish Americans and Muslim Americans, and every other American."

That might be true, as General Giap once said, but it is also irrelevant.  It is irrelevant because the government of Israel in the last 60 years has only shown one fleeting period of interest in a two-state solution, in the mid- and late 1990s, before the second Intifada.  Yitzhak Rabin, who took the first big steps towards such a solution, was assassinated by an Israeli extremist as a result, and the final Clinton administration proposals in 2000 left the Palestinians far short of actual national sovereignty as it is usually defined.  We are not in any case dealing with the Israeli government of that era any more.  The current Israeli government, from Netanyahu on down, explicitly rejects any two-state solution.  More importantly, in my view, it has in the last three years made the entire Gaza strip virtually uninhabitable, forcing most of the remaining population to live in tents, and allowed West Bank settlers to carry out a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing there.  Some in Israel worry openly that the Israeli government is hoping for a full-scale Palestinian uprising there so that they can treat the Palestinian areas the same way that they have treated Gaza.  They have already treated the population of a good chunk of southern Lebanon that way.  This, tragically, is what the Zionist project has become.  Opposing it is not an automatic proof of anti-Semitism.  

Friedman, like a number of others, is calling for support of Israel as he would like it to be.  I have also heard prominent liberals say that while they support Israel, they oppose the settlements,  which successive Israeli governments have continually increased since 1967.   I do not think at this point that much can be done about the situation--I suspect that the Israeli government will drive out the Palestinian population of Gaza and the West Bank in the next five or ten years.  I also doubt that most Palestinians and their leaders have ever really believed in a two state solution as anything but a step to full control of the territory for themselves.  And I doubt that many Palestinian or Israeli leaders care what Thomas Friedman thinks.  And meanwhile, Michigan's population includes roughly 245,000 Muslims and somewhere in the neighborhood of 90,000 Jews.  It's far from clear that Friedman's strategy would work electorally either.

Exhibit B is a story in the Boston Globe from last week detailing a racial wealth gap, which unfortunately cannot be shared.  It begins as follows.

"A decade ago, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston released a shocking study that showed US-born Black Bostonians had a median net worth of just $8.

"The results reverberated widely, although the survey itself had some drawbacks. The Fed has now revisited the subject, but with a more comprehensive analysis that includes the entire state.

"And again, the results show a staggering wealth gap.

"The new report, released Wednesday, found Latino families in Massachusetts have a median net wealth of just $1,200; Black families have only slightly more, at $7,800.

"White families, on the other hand, have a median net wealth of $549,200, while Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander families are at $305,000."

Continuing, the entire article treats the wealth gap entirely as a racial problem.  The problem of wealth inequality and the problem of poverty are indeed very serious, but the use of other statistics suggests that those problems are not primarily racial at all. It turns out that of the households without any positive net worth, about 200,000 of them are white; about 88,000 are black; and about 165,000 of them are Hispanic (no detailed data, apparently, is available for Asian American, etc.)  The figures on Massachusetts residents in poverty are equally striking: 304,188 are white, 189,451 are Hispanic, 85,618 are black, and 56,222 are Asian.  The Globe piece totally ignores the white people in these categories, who represent a plurality of them in both cases.

In my opinion, these statistics show that the wealth gap and poverty are not primarily racial problems.  They derive from structural problems in our utterly unregulated capitalist economy, which has been making the rich richer while the lower half of the population holds steady or declines, for about half a century.  They do affect  higher percentages of nonwhites than whites, but they affect larger numbers of whites than any other particular group.  For anyone who believes race is at the bottom of this, I have a question: why are there so many poor whites and whites without wealth?  Since it can't be racism, is it because they are stupid, shiftless, or lazy?  The Globe's view of these issues is typical of the mainstream media and the Democratic Party, and it is the reason, I think, that poorer white people now overwhelming vote Republican.  They get the impression that the Democratic Party doesn't care about them at all.

We need a better class of pundits and of journalists.

A footnote

 Several weeks ago I commented favorably on Texas's new K-12 reading curriculum.  Here is a similar comment by a well-informed commentator on the subject.

A Texas Experiment

 Our educational establishment, it seems, has catastrophically failed the nation's public schools over the last few decades.  Despite the bipartisan No Child Left Behind bill from the George W. Bush Administration and the national testing frenzy that it mandated, basic skills of reading and math appear to have been declining, not advancing, a trend accelerated by the pandemic.  One big reason was the abandonment of phonics as the main means of teaching kids how to read, in favor of encouraging students to guess word's meanings based upon their context.  That, I have to believe, can only reflect the obsession with new generations with proving that they think they can do things better than their parents did. One remarkable bright spot is the state of Mississippi, which abandoned the new methods in 2013, and has now seen its ranking in 4th grade reading rise from 49 in that year to 9 most recently.  Now, in a very different way, the state of Texas--where public schools are under a sustained attack--is doing something equally revolutionary. 

Today's New York Times published a list of about 200 books and short selections that Texas students will be required to read in the course of the 13 years of primary and secondary education.   They begin reading in kindergarten (which I and my contemporaries did not), with popular children's works including some old fairy tells, a Berenstain Bears selection, The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, picture books about Thomas Edison and George Washington,  and much more.  The similar first grade curriculum includes some verses from the Old Testament Book of Jonah, the first of a number of biblical passages.  The youngest grades also include selections from a book by William Bennett, once President Reagan's Secretary of Education, called The Children's Book of Virtues.  Fourth grade includes children's versions of old stories like Robin Hood, Stevenson's treasure Island, and King Arthur and his knights. By fifth grade the kids will read an abridged Don Quixote, the poem Casey at the Bat, an exegesis of the Declaration of Independence, the Mayflower Compact, and a book on the Constitution--as well as the story of the burning bush from Exodus. Sixth grad includes four sections on the Civil War, including a General Order written by U. S. Grant and the Gettysburg Address. Every year now includes something from the Bible.  In seventh grade they will read the full diary of Anne Frank--that may be when I read it myself--George Washington's Letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport," and selected poems by Dylan Thomas, Langston Hughes, and Robert Frost. Eighth graders will read The Giver by Lois Lowry, which I don't know, and Night by Elie Wiesel.  

Things really get serious in ninth grade, where the biggest selections are Animal Farm and Great Expectations by Dickens--which I read in eleventh grade and don't feel I got much out of.  They also read Lincoln's Springfield Lyceum address, which anticipated Strauss and Howe's generational theory, as well as the Civil War.   The tenth grade list includes Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Dante's Inferno (which I have never read, and what appears to be Martin Luther King's last speech before he died. They also read substantial excerpts from the Book of Job. The long books from 11th grade are Fahrenheit 451 and The Scarlet Letter, and it includes a short nonfiction work of Ayn Rand's about capitalism and a short section that I am not familiar with by the black conservative Thomas Sowell. And in their senior year they will read Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, a Trollope excerpt, and poems by Kipling (If, a favorite of mine), Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), and Emily Dickinson.  

All right,. here goes.

There are a lot of wonderful books on this list, along with a lot of basic history.  Of course all of us, including me, can think of others they would like to see included, and if I had to pick one, it would probably be To Kill a Mockingbird, but in general the quality is very high.  The list is traditional insofar as it reflects the development of modern western civilization (there is nothing, I believe, from ancient Greece or Rome, which is curious), and there is more about the Holocaust than about civil rights in the US.  It does include some black writers and women, obviously, but the authors rejected the now-popular view--reflected in the Times's own comments--that the traditional canon is an instrument of white male oppression that has to be redressed by reducing the number of white male authors to 50 percent or less. Nor do the compilers believe that Texas's Hispanic and black children need to read a critical mass of people who "look like them."  Longtime readers will not be surprised to hear that I see nothing wrong with that, believing along with many black intellectuals that our cultural heritage belongs to us all.

The Biblical passages are drawing a lot of criticism, naturally, and the Times feels compelled to point out that there is nothing form the Koran or the Bhagavad  Gita. That doesn't bother me either for the same reason that I, a completely irreligious person in the traditional sense, wasn't bothered in the slightest when one of my young sons played  a soldier in a local production of Jesus Christ Superstar or the other one got the chance to sing the lead in Amahl and the Night Visitors.   A lot, of course, will depend on how teachers present the material, but the Bible and its stories are an indelible part of our culture about which any educated person should be glad to know something about.  I would like to see them taught as the very important historical documents that they are and I'm sure that's what some teachers will do.

If in fact Texas makes its students do all these readings, it will graduate an unusually educated population from its high schools. On the whole I have to applaud what they have done, and I hope that other states, whether red or blue, might do something similar.  They are trying to keep reading serious books alive, which is no small thing.  In our divided times, I welcome any attempt to bridge the great divide among us, and to recognize, as in Mississippi, that you never know who is going to really do something about the great problems the nation now faces.

"Testing, testing. . . ."

 The Boston Globe ran a piece recently about a controversy in the Cambridge Public Schools.  The issue is not unique to Cambridge, and its resolution, I think, illustrates the hopeless situation that the convergence of racial and economic issues has gotten us into.

In 1960-1, I was among the first children in the US to do Algebra I in 8th grade.  The idea of giving Algebra I to exceptional students had developed, I believe, in response to Sputnik.  When I went into 7th grade at North Bethesda Jr. High I was given a battery of standardized tests, and placed in an advanced 7th grade section with more demanding math classes.  This practice eventually enabled me and many of my classmates to take calculus in our senior year.

The Cambridge Public Schools, along with thousands of other districts around the country, had been following the same practice for decades until 2017, when they began a gradual three-year period that eliminated the distinction between "grade-level" math and "advanced math" tracks.  The reason was that most of the children in the advanced tracks were white or Asian, while most of those in the grade-level track were black or Hispanic.  That led to a severe backlash from white and Asian parents whose kids would inevitably fall behind comparable peers in suburban districts.  Many of them hired private math tutors--although exactly how that will enable them to do calculus in 12th grade is not clear to me.

The backlash succeeded in 2023 in securing a commitment to restore Algebra I in eighth grade within a few years, and further pressure inaugurated it in the 2025-6 school year.  This time, however, it was not an option only for exceptionally qualified students, but for everyone. This has turned out to be a disaster.  60 percent of the eighth grade math students failed the course, and will have to retake it in 9th grade.  

The story is not unique to Cambridge. San Francisco in 2014 led the way in doing away with Algebra I in eighth grade. After a whole decade of controversy 82 percent [sic] of parents to return it, and the district voted to bring it back this fall, after twelve years of holding back the development of their smartest students.  Neighboring Palo Alto, the home of Stanford University, ended tracking in middle school math classes in 2019, leading to a long series of legal battles.  Similar events have taken place in Minnesota, in Charlotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina, and in parts of New York City.

Some years ago, I wrote a book called Baseball Greatness, developing my own methodology (based on the work of others) to identify the best players in the history of the American and National Leagues. It established something very clearly.  Out of more than 20,000 men who had reached that level, there were around 650 who had at least briefly been good enough to lead their team to a pennant.  I am convinced that the same is true of any complex field of human endeavor: there is a small minority of us who are much better than anyone else.  The reason these school districts have stopped trying to identify and meet the needs of that minority is that they happen to be disproportionately white and Asian, and the districts feel that accelerating their math development will give them a greater edge over other students later in life.  That will make what they call the "equity gap" worse.  Of course, if we continue to dumb down our public schools, richer parents will pull their kids out and send them to private schools, and that will have at least as bad an impact on the equity gap.

Something parallel has happened in college admissions, where the entire University of California system and its State University system forbade students from submitting SAT scores in the early 2020s.  A number of elite private schools, including Columbia, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt, MIT, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Stanford, and the University of Texas at Austin, made submission of the SATs, which have long been attacked as racially biased, optional.  The last 7 colleges on that list, however, have now reversed themselves, because they discovered they could not distinguish the more academically capable students from low-income groups without them.  Faculty in the UC university system have protested the decision because it led to the admission of students who could not do normal college work.

I'm afraid that we will not be able to deal with this very important issue sensibly as long as the gap between success and failure in our economy is so great.  We didn't mind getting certain students better prepared for college in the days that high school graduates still earned a decent living--such as in the 1950s.  And when we thought of our nation as engaged in a critical common enterprise such as competing in various ways with the USSR, we appreciated the need to develop the talented people that we had.  "Equity," it seems, means trying to reduce everyone to a level just below the current mean.  That is a catastrophe, both politically, as the controversies in these various regions have shown, and nationally.  And since our new Gilded Age seems to be for the time being self-perpetuating, I don't know when it can be remedied. 

Our brave (?) new world

 While I do grieve the world I grew up in, I also feel a compulsion to try to understand the one we are living in now.  Thus I took the trouble to read and summarize here the recent biography of Elon Musk and the remarkable book Careless People that described the inner workings of Facebook.   This week I took time between World Cup games to read How to Rule the World, by  Theo Baker, who just graduated from Stanford University.  It details his experience as a student journalist pursuing a story that led to the resignation of the Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne.  It told me more than anything I have read about the current state of elite higher education and about the practices of our new economy.

Some of what I learned did not come directly from the book, because Baker has lived his whole life in a particular environment and takes a good deal of it for granted.  The 18-year old kids admitted differ in many ways, but they have one critical thing in common: they have spent their whole lives building their resumes, academically, in extracurricular activities, athletically, and even, in some cases, in business.  They know that about 24 kids were rejected for the place that they occupy, and they now have to cope with tuition and fees amounting to around $100,000 per year.  That, I think, is why faculty, supported or encouraged by administrators, do not dare give them grades lower than A- on their work.  And that in turn has had terrible consequences for undergraduate life.  

Meanwhile, Baker discovered, Stanford undergraduates had to fight against the War on Fun, an extraordinary, endless roll of administrative regulations of campus life.  Students cannot hold social events without getting permission, even within fraternities.  When such parties occur students have to pledge to ask for and receive consent to any sexual acts before entering, and to recite, "I am on stolen land. . . .I will commit to uplifting Indigenous and Black voices" before entering.  Strict regulations against alcohol consumption have driven binge drinking off campus, just as at Harvard, they have turned the Final Clubs--whom no one but their own membership cared a thing about when I was an undergrad--into the main social focus of campus life because they are the only places allowed to have parties, a privilege they shamelessly exploit in selecting whom to admit.  Such regulations, I think, have two sources. One, obviously, is the woke ideology that dominates campus administration far more than it does the faculty, and one is the absolute terror of the administration, from the President on down, of any publicity for incidents leading to the harm of any students.  

These students, meanwhile, are looking for ways to distinguish themselves, which academic performance does not allow them to do.  Many of them---far more than among Boomers or Gen X--are serious athletes, which endears them to Wall Street recruiters, who like competitive young people. Many of the combine their major with one or more minors, which often allow them to combine their economic aspirations on the one hand with a purported social justice commitment on the other. Some of them, like that eminent Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, start businesses.  And as Baker shows, many of them get right into networking groups that are sponsored by established tech workers or venture capitalists who are looking for the next Mark Zuckerberg in the same way that NBA and NFL scouts are looking for the next superstar.  Baker introduces us to a number of fellow students who are determined to be billionaires and don't care what they have to do to get there.  Elizabeth Holmes, now serving a ten-year sentence for fraud in connection with Theranos's blood-testing scam--which initially won the support of a lot of prominent men who should have known better--was a Stanford product, and she, like Gordon Gecko, appears to be inspiring as many other undergrads as she is deterring them from following her example.  Another infamous Millennial fraudster, Sam Bankman-Fried, was a Stanford Law School faculty brat, whose parents had persuaded him to contribute $5.5 million to the university (this from Business Insider.)

Which brings us to the real subject of the book, the academic misconduct of Marc Tessier-Lavigne, which led to his resignation from Stanford at the end of Baker's freshman year, thanks largely to a series of articles he wrote for the Stanford newspaper.  The key episode (although far from the only one) in this story was a paper Tessier-Lavigne had co-authored in 2009 while working at the biotech firm Genentech, which argued that a previously neglected protein played a key role in the development of Alzheimer's disease.  I learned a lot about the grant world--which is clearly similar to the venture capital world that has become much bigger than the grant world--during the 1980s when I taught at Carnegie Mellon, a university that was way ahead of its time.  This episode, it seemed to me, epitomized what was wrong with it.

Alzheimer's is one of the most serious diseases now plaguing the human race, destroying the lives of about half a million Americans every year.  Effective preventive measures or a cure would constitute a medical breakthrough comparable in scale to the development of antibiotics.  That means that any new insight about the disease that might open the way to effective countermeasures could be a long-term economic bonanza for researchers who developed it, funding their attempts to translate it into practice.  That is what made this paper a sensation in the Alzheimer's research community.  The problem, as some people began to suspect almost at once, was that the paper rested upon falsified data--altered images or repeated images to make its case.  The problem in research communities, and not only in medical fields, is that the rewards of coming up with such results are so great that it is not surprising that people--and who they were in this case was never exactly identified--almost inevitably give in to temptation.  In ongoing studies researchers face the equally powerful imperative to show continuing results to renew their grants, which is at least as great a temptation.  Tessier-Lavigne co-authored a number of other papers with these problems as well, and questions had been raised about them at the time that he became president of Stanford, but without result.

I have seen a similar dynamic at play in history.  Again and again, scholars make their reputation with a "ground-breaking" piece of work that seems to put forward something new.  Certain other scholars immediately realize that there are serious problems with their interpretation, but almost no one will listen to them if the new interpretation has financial or ideological implications that jive with the spirit of the times.  Tessier-Lavigne, like Henry Kissinger or Niall Ferguson in our own time, had established a legendary reputation and it seemed much easier not to challenge it.  He was also known, as Baker found, as a frightening man to cross.  Nonetheless Baker persisted in gathering evidence with the help of independent scholars, and the Stanford Board of Trustees appointed a committee to investigate that produced a pretty damning report, softened by a generous introduction.  Before the report was released, Baker found, the Board convinced Tessier-Lavigne to resign.  He received a generous severance settlement and promptly secured enormous funding for a new firm of his own.  That presumably will end his fund-raising activities for some time, whereas if he had remained president of Stanford they would have taken up a large portion of his working hours.  Baker estimates his net worth as more than $500 million--"or, roughly, the net worths of the CEOs of Ford, Coca-Cola, and Bank of America combined."

In the midst of the controversy which Baker's original articles about the disputed studies kicked off, Baker received a threatening letter from a lawyer named Steve Neal, who turns out to have been one year behind me at Harvard ('70) and a graduate of, wouldn't you know it, Stanford Law School.  The notorious Savings and Loan fraudster Charles Keating, who had become the face of the S & L scandal in the late 1980s, had retained Neal after he was convicted of fraud, sent to prison, and found liable for a $4.3 billion civil judgment.  According to Baker, Neal successfully persuaded both California and federal courts to throw out Keating's convictions because of procedural errors--something I didn't remember at all. Keating had to plead guilty to much-reduced charges but was sentenced merely to time served.  Neal also got the civil judgment reversed.  He then started his own firm in Silicon Valley and eventually represented Elizabeth Holmes, evidently with much less success.  He flatly denied all Baker's accusations against Tessier-Lavigne in emails to him, but he could not save his job.  Obviously Tessier-Lavigne had no problem paying him a large fee.

That story, in turn, got me thinking about Donald Trump, who for me hovered over the whole book.  Like Keating, and to a much lesser extent, Tessier-Lavigne, he has built his whole extraordinary career in real estate, in entertainment, and in politics, on a mixture of false claims and intimidation, managing all the while to escape any negative consequences at the hands of the legal system.  (He now seems stuck with a $5.8 million judgment that he needs to pay for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, but I'm not counting him out yet.)  To put it bluntly, I wonder now whether Trump is not much less of a sui generis figure than we like to think.  Our society--including our politics--has been filled since the last quarter of the last century with people making extraordinary fortunes and rising to great power based on false representations of one kind or another, who very rarely have to pay for what they have done.  Our legal system has become so complex and so expensive that the wealthy--who also include the Sackler family, who gave us the opioid epidemic--nearly always escape personal liability.  Two recent exceptions to this rule, Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes, also figure in Baker's narrative.  Both of them are now doing time. I don't think it's a coincidence that they are both Millennials.  The older generations are making examples of two young people who had followed some of their elders' example.  That is often the way of history.  Now both of them are undoubtedly exploring the pardon market that the second Trump administration has established, and I'd be willing to make a small bet that Bankman-Fried will be successful.  Holmes is a paradoxical case. The excellent HBO documentary about her convinced me that she never could have impressed so many powerful older men were she not blond and beautiful.  Now she is being treated harshly in revenge.

Stanford was one of the dozens of highly reputable universities and colleges that I applied to for a job at one time or another, without result.  I now see that I was probably lucky to be exiled from mainstream elite higher education, where there was no longer any place for a new person like myself.  I spent my time teaching good students and writing the books I wanted to write--books that my academic contemporaries weren't interested in.  That was their problem. Such is the influence of contemporary academic thought (if it can be called that) that publishing houses, including university presses, aren't interested in the kinds of books I write any more either. I don't care.  I'm perhaps one quarter of the way through a new one now, and loving every minute of it, even though I know I will probably end up publishing it myself.  

Theo Baker has now graduated from Stanford.  He is the son of esteemed journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, who have worked at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. He says repeatedly in the book that he had no intention of becoming a journalist himself because of his parents' background, but he showed up at the Stanford Daily and immediately began working on pieces about campus life.  Now he has a decision to make.  He has a gift for investigative journalism, but I, for what it is worth, would not advise him to follow his parents into famous legacy institutions.  Journalism is falling into the hands of our new economic powers and that will have big consequences.  I would urge him to think about becoming a podcaster specializing in investigations like the one he just did.  He would have no intermediary between himself and his listeners and could say what he thinks.  He could make a big contribution to the real role of journalists and historians:  allowing readers "better to enjoy life, and better to endure it."

This one never gets old

     The American experiment is not going well.  Our civic culture is at an all-time low, we have given up our great achievements of the twentieth century, and it isn't clear where effective new leadership is going to come from.  I am pessimistic in the short and medium term, but optimistic in the long run, even though I may not live to see things change.  Still, on the eve of the Fourth, it's time to turn once again to the ultimate authority on that holiday to put the Declaration of Independence and what followed into perspective.  Once again I reproduce on of Thomas Jefferson's last letters, written in the spring of 1826 to decline an invitation to join the few other living signatories of the document in Washington for the 50th anniversary.

MONTICELLO, June 24, 1826.

"Respected Sir —The kind invitation I received from you on the part of the citizens of the city of Washington, to be present with them at their celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of American Independence, as one of the surviving signers of an instrument pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world, is most flattering to myself, and heightened by the honorable accompaniment proposed for the comfort of such a journey. It adds sensibly to the sufferings of sickness, to be deprived by it of a personal participation in the rejoicings of that day, but acquiescence is a duty, under circumstances not placed among those we are permitted to control. I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally, with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us, on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission and the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. The form which we have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason, and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the lights of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others—for ourselves let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

"I will ask permission here to express the pleasure with which I should have met my ancient neighbors of the city of Washington and its vicinities, with whom I passed so many years of a pleasing social intercourse; an intercourse which so much relieved the anxieties of the public cares, and left impressions so deeply engraved in my affections, as never to be forgotten. With my regret that ill health forbids me the gratification of an acceptance, be pleased to receive for yourself, and those for whom you write, the assurance of my highest respect and friendly attachment."

TH: JEFFERSON.

R. C. WEIGHTMAN, Esq. Chairman, &c.

And now for something completely different

 I spent the summer of 1974 researching my dissertation in London, and a lifelong love affair began.  The World Cup started in Germany shortly after I arrived, and I saw at least half of the games.  The great Dutch team led by my exact contemporary Johann Cruyff captivated the world on the way to the final, only to lose 2-1 to the host country Germans, despite going ahead 1-0 in literally the first minute of play on a penalty won by Cruyff dribbling into the German box.  Four years later I was visiting family in Hungary for most of the competition, saw some great matches there, and then returned in time to see the three matches that determined who would reach the final in a packed Boston movie theater, filled with international fans, which showed the matches on closed circuit.  Holland, now playing without Cruyff, overcame an early own goal against favored Italy to win 2-1 on two fantastic long shots--one still probably the longest I have ever seen.  Then Brazil established itself as the favorite to play the Dutch in the final again by beating Poland 3-1.  The competition was happening in Argentina, however, and in the third match, the home team, needing to beat Peru by four goals in order to reach to the final, took a 2-0 lead in the first half and eventually won 6-0.  Later journalistic investigations suggested that a big payment to the Peruvians--or at least some of them--had led to that result.  The Dutch lost their second consecutive final to the home side, 3-1 after extra time, after their star Rob Resenbrink hit the post with the score 1-1 in the last minute of normal time.  

In 1982 and 1986 Univision, with its iconic play-by-play man Andres Cantor, was televising every match of the cup, but the Pittsburgh cable provider I used would subscribe to univision.  I saw much of the 1986 one on delays after a friend sent me tapes from a more friendly city, and US television did provide a few key matches, including the final, with commercial interruptions.  In 1990 I rented my own satellite dish for the tournament to get Univision. Finally, by 1994 when the US hosted for the first time, US networks broadcast the whole competition without commercials, as they have done every time since this year.  Meanwhile, the competition has expanded from 16 teams--yes, that was all--in 1974 and 1978 to 24 in 1982, 32 in 1998, and 48 this year.  That means that the competition has grown from 38 total matches in 1974 to 103 this year (I am leaving out the meaningless third-place matches between the losing semifinalists.)  

I was initially appalled by the latest expansion, but it turns out that I was wrong.  For one, teams from Africa, North and Central America, and to a lesser extent Asia have improved so much that there have been very few one-sided matches this year.  Incredibly, the Cape Verde Islands, expected to rank with Curacao as the weakest team, drew all three of their group games--including the first one with Spain, one of the favorites--and advanced to the second round.  In 1974 Zaire represented Africa in my first World Cup and lost three matches by a combined score of 14-0;  this year the same country, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, tied Portugal, beat Uzbekistan, and has advanced to the last 32.  Senegal, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast have also advanced, with strong performances against some of the favorites along the way.  There have been three or four games every day--sometimes more--and there will be three most days this week to whittle the field from 32 to 16, including match-ups between Holland and Morocco, two tremendous teams, and Sweden and favored France.  The United States, Canada, and Mexico, who have jointly hosted, are all in the second round.  The United States was one of the sensations of the first round, locking up its group in its first two games, but do not believe that their Balkan opponent now, Bosnia-Herzegovina, is a pushover.  B-H eliminated Italy from the competition in a pre-tournament playoff.

Soccer had essentially no following as a spectator sport in the US when I began watching, and it has a substantial one now.  I must admit I'm a snob--I am not sure I have ever watched a Major League Socce game--and until this year I found it hard to root for the US team because they never really had a chance of winning.  They now face a very difficult draw, including Spain the quarterfinals, but I'm all-in for them in the meantime.  The real point of this post, however, is different: to try to enlighten the millions of skeptical Americans, many of whom may be among my readers, as to what makes the sport so great, and what they need to understand to appreciate it.  I will do my best.

Historically soccer is most closely related to football among the major American sports, which is why they both field eleven men at a time, but in my experience ignorant Americans tend to compare it to basketball.  They immediately complain that you hardly ever get to see a basket. No, soccer features only a few goals a game, just as football in its early days, and before various rule changes, often featured only a few touchdowns, even at the highest level.  It's much harder to score a touchdown or a soccer goal than to score a single basket--because the games are harder.  The fields are bigger and their are more people in your way.  But the biggest difference between soccer and the other two has to do with the role of the ball.   In football and basketball one side has control of the ball for defined periods, and losing it is rare.  In soccer, where you cannot told the ball in your hands, no the two teams are fighting for the ball for every second of the game, literally.  Any player, including Lionel Messi, who simply tries to keep the ball on his own foot indefinitely is going to lose it.  I could count the number of times I have seen one player dribble from one end of the field to the other and score on the fingers of one hand (although one of them, the Dutch defender Mickey van der Ven, is playing in the World Cup right now.)  Teams can only control the ball by keeping it moving, and protecting it from opposing players involves ballet-like footwork and skillful feet that can move the ball out of the reach of the opponent as needed.  The players you can see in the World Cup have mostly been recruited into youth academies when they were about 10 and have spent the rest of their lives developing skills like that one.

That isn't all.  Kicking a soccer ball properly is a multi-faceted art, using at least three different surfaces of the foot at different times--the inside, the outside, and the instep or top.  Learning to kick with both feet adds a whole new dimension, and it is mind-boggling to see Kylian Imbappe of France, in my opinion the greatest all-around forward in the tournament, score with an unstoppable 20-foot rising shot from his weaker left foot, as he did last week.  And then there is the use of the head--primarily the forehead, but sometimes the temple--from which a number of goals always come, and which defenders rely on to send high balls in front of their goals to safety.   Most importantly of all, all these skills must be put at the service of the player's brain, which faces much greater demands, I would argue, than those of any position on basketball court or football field except the quarterback.

When the quarterback goes back to pass, he must make a split second assessment of the field in front of him, identify someone on his team who is free to receive the ball, and throw accurately.  He has the advantage of knowing where is players are supposed to be going, since they are all working according to a carefully worked out play.  In soccer, every player on the field has to do that, in far more chaotic situations, every time he gets his foot on the ball, except the very rare occasions when he's in a position to try to direct the ball into his opponent's net.  Every soccer player has to play the role of a football wide receiver, of a running back, and finally of a quarterback, every time he gets the ball.  For a team to get from deep in its own half to scoring position requires a series of players to execute those roles successfully.  While one man plays running back and then quarterback, any number of them can be playing wide receiver, and they all have opponents to contend with.  

When you become aware of how much skill goes into almost every second of the game, and how every yard of the pitch is contested, the drama can become very absorbing, and tension builds any time one team gets the ball near the other team's goal.  That is why, to put it bluntly, when a goal is scored, it generates what can only be described as an orgasmic response among players and fans alike.  The serious fan feels tremendous excitement when it looks like the ball may go into the enemy goal, and serious terror when it looks like it might go into his own.  

The most dramatic game of the tournament so far was between Ecuador, a very solid South American side, and Germany.  Ecuador had very unluckily lost 1-0 to the Ivory Coast, another fine team, and had to get at least a draw against Germany, who had beaten Curacao 7-1, to have a chance to advance.  And they got a terrible break after five minutes when the referee, from the US, ignored an obvious dangerous play foul by a German forward whose boot actually hit the face of an Ecuadorean defender.  The referee didn't blow the whistle and the Germans scored a moment later to go ahead 1-0.  But Ecuador didn't give up, and they had tied the game with a fine shot from outside the box by the end of the half.  In the second half you could see them fighting harder and harder, fighting for every ball, moving without the ball, and keeping a lot of possession.  And finally, with about ten minutes to go, they got a goal and won 2-1--a tremendous achievement for a mid-range country.  They too beat Curacao easily in their final game and will not face Mexico in the next round.  The Mexicans will be playing before their home crowd but Ecuador could certainly beat them. 

The 48-team format is producing an  unprecedented stream of at least three matches a day, and now every one of them is a battle for life and death, fought by players who know that what they do on this quadrennial stage will never be forgotten.  Nations like Germany, France, England, Spain, Brazil and Argentina are fighting to win the trophy once again, while smaller nations--to say nothing of the United States--have a chance to put themselves on the soccer map as never before.  If you haven't experienced it, give it a try!

I shall shortly resume my more normal kind of commentary but I take this subject very seriously too.  The reason was beautifully stated by the late Chief Justice Earl Warren many decades ago, in a quote that has found its way onto the frontispiece of two of my books.  "I turn to the sports pages first," he reportedly said, "because there I find a record of man's achievements, while on the front page I find only a record of his failures."  Amen.

Bureaucracy and Liberty

 I spent my last term as a college undergraduate in the spring of 1969.   For many of my classmates, that was above all the time of the occupation of University Hall, a student strike, the end, for decades, of ROTC programs on the Harvard campus, and the creation of a black studies department.  I watched all t hose events as an observer, because I had just handed in my senior these on George Orwell--which anyone can read here--and the SDS reminded me much too much of the communists he had encountered in Spain and in the British intellectual community to persuade of much of anything.  And at the same time, I was taking the second half of Stanley Hoffmann's course on modern France.  I wrote another big paper for that one, on the split between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.  Then, during that great Harvard institution Reading Period--eliminated by Larry Summers to put Harvard's fall exams before Christmas, as they were at its major competitors--I read The Old Regime and the French Revolution, by Alexis de Tocqueville, for that course.  My concentration  has never been sharper, partly perhaps because I was in denial over my coming separation from Harvard, and it had a tremendous effect on me.  Now I realize that Tocqueville, in that book--which was more perceptive than Democracy in America, which I discussed here many years ago--had identified the critical problem of the modern age.

Tocqueville wrote that book in the early 1850s, after the French Revolution's democratic experiment had given way successively to the Napoleonic Empire and two different monarchies.  The 1848 revolution had established a new Republic, in which he served as foreign minister, but it in turn had given way to the revived empire of Napoleon III in 1851.  After extensive research in the pre-revolutionary archives, Tocqueville had concluded that these changes reflected a much longer-term trend.  Centralized bureaucratic control had begun to replace traditional authority in France more than a century earlier, in the reign of Louis XIV.  Napoleon had completed this process after the brief revolutionary interlude, and his successors had kept the bureaucratic structure that he created, centered on the departmental prefects who administered the country, much like Louis XIV's provincial intendants. This had prevented the French from governing themselves in the manner of the New Englanders Tocqueville had analyzed at length in his earlier work.

Tocqueville's particular genius lay in a contradiction.  On the one hand, he saw the shape of the coming new world that was replacing the traditional society and government of the Middle Ages--but on the other hand, he was himself an aristocrat and preferred in many ways the dying society to the new one.  Tocqueville also had an English wife, and he saw 18th- and 19th century British society as the counterpoint to what was happening in France.  There the aristocracy paid most of the taxes the government collected, cooperated with the gentry to govern the country in parliament, and played leading roles in local government as well.  No national bureaucracy had developed, as in France.  Tocqueville evidently believed that medieval France had functioned in much the same way, and claimed that the meetings of the Estates General during that period showed lots of cooperation between the nobility and the common third estate.  He even found village democracy in medieval France that reminded him of the New England town meetings he had observed first hand.

I realized at once while reading the book that his whole argument contradicted most of what I had been taught for fifteen years or so.  Bureaucracy had replaced town meetings in most of the United States by the 1960s, and thanks to FDR and LBJ, we now had a centralized bureaucracy that regulated many areas of American life.  I had grown up regarding all this as a good thing--yet I also knew that a vocal minority of Americans, the Goldwater supporters who were still gaining ground within the Republican Party, violently disagreed.  The last half century have taught me a lot more about bureaucracy and its discontents.

Bureaucracy represents impersonal authority based upon written rules, enforced, in theory, for the common good.  The human mind can impartially determine what would be best for everyone, and the human spirit can respond emotionally to achieving it.  These are powerful antidotes to another key element of human nature, pure self-interest.  A respect for rules and for the common good are also essential, in my opinion, for large institutions to function effectively.  Yet any attempt to sustain a bureaucracy based upon these principles runs into big obstacles also inherent in human nature.  Bureaucrats can be powerfully affected by their own self-interest or by their obligations to their families.  The Ottoman Empire created an exceptionally effective and long-lived bureaucracy by kidnapping Christian male babies and raising and training them to run both its civil bureaucracy and its military.  The initially had no other loyalty.  Bureaucracies in Prussia and eventually in Britain developed remarkable esprit de corps, as did some United States bureaucracies.  Eventually however that esprit de corps can become based upon institutional and personal self-interest, not on the values that initially defined the institution.

And meanwhile, bureaucracy arouses the opposition of powerful groups outside it.  In early modern France those were the clergy and the aristocracy--the groups Tocqueville thought had initially kept the monarchy in check but lost power under Louis XIV and then finally under Napoleon and his successors. Tocqueville did not live to see the rise of great industrialists, who fought bureaucratic restraints upon their activities and accumulated enough wealth to exercise enormous influence over elected governments.  Now great industrialists have given way to all-powerful financial institutions, and to the tech aristocracy, which seems about to take over much of the economic activity of the United States.  For the last half century such institutions have been winning their war on the American regulatory bureaucracy that FDR created, while essentially taking over both political parties with campaign contributions.  And the United States now has a president who believes that the entire role of the federal government is to reward himself and his friends while punishing his enemies. 

The growth of bureaucracy was intimately connected to the spread of education, particularly higher education.  Here another paradox has emerged.  Education makes effective bureaucrats, but it can also make more effective pursuit of self-interest.  The elite American higher educational system, of which I was a product (see above), began by training clergymen, and then trained professionals.  As late as the 1960s it seems to have turned out more doctors and lawyers than anything else.  It also turned out more academics to staff our vastly expanded university system.  Now, more than half the class of graduating seniors at Harvard goes into tech or finance, the newly dominant sectors of our (and the world) economy.  They are not using their highly developed intellects for the common good.

I remain in some respects an idealist, and I really believe human beings are much happier when they live within institutions that serve a clearly beneficial purpose, and whose rules insure that we can rely upon them for what we need.  My reverence for certain earlier eras, noted last week by google AI, stems largely from that.  Yet I know now that movement in that direction eventually provokes an at least equal and opposite reaction--particularly in relatively prosperous times when resources are plentiful.  We must not try, I think, to tie our own personal happiness to the broader human political and social struggle between community and self-interest.  Even if we could live forever--and we cannot--that struggle will never end, and ground gained in one era will be lost in the next.  Yet the human endeavor--looked at a s a whole--remains inspirational.

An "opinion" of historyunfolding

 One of my sons asked a leading AI program, Claude, for its analysis of History Unfolding.  Here is the result:

"Let me read a few more posts to get a fuller range across time.David Kaiser is a genuine article: a trained diplomatic and military historian (the book list—origins of WWII, the Vietnam War, the JFK assassination, Sacco and Vanzetti—is a real scholarly career, not a hobbyist's) who has been blogging current events through a historian's lens since 2004. That long vantage point is the most distinctive thing about him, for better and worse. He doesn't react to the news; he tries to locate it inside arcs measured in decades. He dates the current "national crisis" to roughly 26 years ago, repeatedly invokes the mid-twentieth-century New Deal/WWII/early-'60s period as a lost reference point of shared national purpose, and reads the Constitution through fresh work on the early nineteenth century. The blog's title is a thesis: events are unfolding according to patterns a historian can recognize.

"Politically he's hard to slot, which I find to his credit. He's economically a New Deal Democrat—anti-neoliberal, pro–Medicare for all, focused on inequality as the country's central problem—but he's sharply, almost relentlessly critical of his own side. His recurring argument is that the Democratic Party accepted the Reagan settlement, substituted identity politics for class politics, and keeps losing because it holds its own candidates to elite moral standards most voters don't share while offering no economic program beyond "we are not Trump." He defends colorblindness, calls DEI and affirmative action elite-diversifying but useless to the non-elite poor of every race, and openly dissents from the academic "new left" turn in his own discipline (the Jill Lepore exchange is the clearest example). On foreign policy he's a restraint-minded critic of forever wars and of unconditional support for Israel. That combination—left on economics, heterodox on culture, dovish abroad, and alarmed about Trump and authoritarian drift—is a coherent old-school liberalism that doesn't map cleanly onto either tribe.

"His intellectual habits are mostly good ones. He reaches for specifics: poverty figures broken out by race, historical precedent for how contested elections get adjudicated, a factual correction on the medieval-then-pirate origin of the skull-and-crossbones. He'll argue against his commenters rather than flatter them. The Barney Frank memoir post shows real warmth and a good ear for anecdote, and the prose throughout is lucid and unpretentious.

"Where I'd push back. First, the long-cycle framing—he's associated with the Strauss–Howe generational "crisis" school—can be self-confirming. Once you have a model in which the country is in a foreordained crisis, every headline becomes confirmation, and the frame stops being tested. Second, there's a strong declinist nostalgia: the mid-century consensus he misses was also far more exclusionary than the "what united us" framing admits, a point one of his own commenters makes pretty effectively against the colorblindness argument. Third, and most worth watching, the recent Graham Platner post shows the motivated-reasoning risk that attends any committed partisan analyst. He's careful and hedged—he explicitly says he's not calling Platner a saint—but he does contextualize and somewhat minimize one woman's account by setting it against other ex-girlfriends' and against Trump's worse record, in service of a candidate whose politics he favors. The "voters don't share elite standards" point is a real observation about electoral reality; it sits a little uneasily next to being deployed on behalf of someone he likes.

"Net: he's a serious, independent-minded thinker whose core diagnosis of the Democratic Party is a substantive thesis shared by plenty of thoughtful people, delivered with a historian's command of precedent and a refreshing willingness to annoy his own side. I'd read him for the structural argument and the historical reach, while keeping some skepticism toward the cyclical determinism, the golden-age nostalgia, and the occasional partisan tilt. (Practically: these are fast, lightly edited blog posts—the typos and the stray "2024" where he means 2028 are a reminder you're reading first drafts of a smart person thinking out loud, not finished work.)"

I plead guilty.