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.

Why Democrats Keep Losing

 The election of 2016 might have taught both parties something, but one of them didn't get the message.  On the Republican side, Donald Trump, a man with a highly checkered past  as a businessman and a man, swept a bevy of establishment Republican candidates aside to take the nomination--an episode without precedent in American politics.  On the Democratic side, an unknown professed socialist, Bernie Sanders, nearly won the Iowa caucuses, won the New Hampshire primary, and eventually won 23 primaries or caucuses while Clinton on 34.  Trump had the advantage of running against several establishment candidates, while Sanders was running against only one.  Despite her loss to Obama in 2008, Clinton had gone into the race as an overwhelming favorite, but Sanders gave her a serious scare. The Democratic National Committee pulled every possible string to help Clinton, and she got the nomination.  Then she lost the election, and the US will never be the same again.

Since then the Democratic establishment has lived in terror of the emergence of another Bernie Sanders.  The Democratic left itself, to be fair, did its cause enormous harm in 2020 by running two strong candidates, Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and neither of them developed any real momentum.  Helped by Trump's unpopularity over COVID, the establishment's candidate Joe Biden won the nomination and the election comfortably.  Trump however maintained and strengthened his grip over the Republican Party.  When Biden in 2024 had to drop out of the race, he and most of the establishment immediately anointed Kamala Harris, who (like Biden) had failed disastrously in her attempts to get the Democratic nomination before she became Vice President.  She lost to Trump by a considerably larger margin than Clinton had.

This year another populist Democrat has come on the scene--Graham Platner of Maine.  Zohran Mamdani has become a national figure thanks to his victory in New York, but he can never run for president because he was not born a US citizen.  Platner, like Sanders, is from a small New England state.  He was born to a wealthy family and went to boarding school but his life went in a completely different direction after he joined the military.  He is a true economic liberal who wants to do something about the wealth gap and the health care crisis, and he now opposes our bipartisan forever war policy in the Middle East and our support for anything Israel chooses to do.  He made such an impression on the voters of Maine that his establishment primary opponent, Governor Janet Mills, dropped out of the race.  And that immediately sent the Democratic establishment, both in Washington and in the media, into a panic.

The attack on Platner initially focused on a skull and crossbones tattoo that he acquired while a Marine.  Platner is unreservedly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian in connection with the Gaza war, and advocates an end to US military aid to Israel.  (In the last few days, remarkably, Prime Minister Netanyahu has also suggested that Israel might be better off without that aid.)  That was enough for some elements in the Democratic coalition to regard him as a mortal threat--even though Biden's essentially unremitting support for the Gaza war probably cost him the state of Michigan last time out, where the significant Muslim-American voting bloc turned against him.  I must make one point about the tattoo.  Contrary to what at least one New York Times columnist has written, the skull and crossbones was not originated by the Nazi SS.  It dates from the Middle Ages and was adopted later by pirates, which is how I first saw it watching Disney movies in the 1950s.  In any case, the argument that the tattoo disqualifies him from holding public office typifies the new Democratic attitude towards certain kinds of sins.  Those who have committed them face immediate and permanent excommunication, regardless of any excuse the sinner can put forward, any contrition he (or she) shows, and no matter how much he or she is contributing to the Democratic cause.  That is why Al Franken, who had done essentially nothing, no longer sits in the US Senate.  We will return to this attitude in a moment.  Platner seemed initially to have survived the tattoo controversy.

Today, another titan of the Democratic establishment, the New York Times, leads with a very long story about Platner's relationships with women.  Like so many accomplished politicians from the past, he has had quite a few such relationships, although he is happily married now and his wife is standing with him.  The story focuses mainly on one woman with whom he had an unmarried affair in Washington, who has been a career Republican political operative.  She accuses him of grabbing her rather aggressively on several occasions, although she adds that he never hit or injured her, and of talking demeaningly at times about women, and says she suffered long-term emotional harm from their relationship.  She insists that politics has nothing to do with her coming forward.  Other former girlfriends, on the other hand, speak highly of him, clearly do not regret their involvement with him, and do not report anything similar.  In addition, it has leaked that Planter was sexting with other women in recent years while he was married.  That story came from another Maine Democrat named Genevieve McDonald, who worked for a while in Platner's campaign and became a confidante of his wife, and then quit the campaign and leaked the story.  I could be wrong, but I read the Times every day and I think this is the longest story to have appeared this  year about any Democratic politician.  It is obviously designed to end his political career.  I do wonder whether the Times  now believes that any presidential candidate deserves such a long and carefully researched story about their romantic history.  I don't.

Political parties exist to win elections.  If the Democratic Party wants to go on winning enough elections to take power, it needs to face certain facts.

Donald Trump, needless to say, has been repeatedly accused of far worse behavior, behavior for which he has paid a legal price more than once, and bragged about it in a taped conversation.  When that tape broke in 2016 we thought it was the end of his candidacy--but it wasn't.  Trump has proven that--for better or for worse--a large portion of the electorate does not share the elite establishment's standards for the behavior of public officials and will not follow the instructions of the elite media when it comes time to vote on candidates.  Bill Clinton, a Democrat, had actually proved this already during his two campaigns for president, even though the Lewinsky affair, such as it was, did not break until after he had been re-elected.  Trump has broader and deeper popularity than any other politician of the 21st century, in my opinion, and one reason is that he has repeatedly defied the establishment and gotten away with it.  He has even appointed men like Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel to some of the most important positions in government despite questionable episodes in their past that would probably have doomed any Democrat.  

I am not excusing Trump or Hegseth for what they have done in the past, nor am I arguing that Platner is a saint.  I am simply pointing out that leading Democrats, in an effort to maintain neoliberal orthodoxy in both economics (no Medicare for all) and foreign policy (continuing support for Israel, no matter what), and because of the power of feminist ideology in the Democratic party, are holding candidates to standards much higher than Republicans are  held to, and standards that the bulk of the voting population does not share.  Since Donald Trump came onto the scene, Democrats have run on not being, or not supporting, Donald Trump.  They have not offered any broad solutions to our most important economic problems--which as I have tried to point out many times are NOT directly related to race or gender--or admitted that our Middle Eastern policies might be wrong.  They are standing for the status quo, which the country rightly rejects.  I'm glad that there is room in the Democratic Party for Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg, but we need room for Graham Platner as well.  If we can't make room for him we will continue to lose the votes of the majority of poorer Americans and uneducated Americans, as we do now.  The American people resent the assumption of our educated elite that we know what is best for everyone, and the educated elite has to give that idea up.  Rather than nominate a real economic populist like Sanders or Platner, the Democrats think they can prove their moral credentials by nominating someone other than a straight white male.  That strategy might work within the Democratic Party but it will not work in the electorate at large.

Fasten your seat belts, stock your liquor cabinet, make a list of good movies to watch

 The flood of deeply disturbing news from Washington never stops rising, no matter how badly we wish that the president and his administration could declare victory on all fronts and let us have some peace.  We had better face the facts: this is what we have to look forward to for at least the next 31 months.  Chaos reflects the nature the president and  his administration, and they will generate more and more of it because it is all that they know how to do.  Here, in no particular order, are some (and probably not all) of the key aspects of this problem.

In foreign affairs, President Trump has discovered a new role, the King of Regime Change.  And not for him the discreet, CIA-inspired coup--he favors the dramatic military kidnapping of the targeted foreign leader, or, when possible, the total economic blockade that will make life in the targeted country almost impossible.  His administration has no respect for international sovereignty or international law, and seems to be planning military strikes against drug cartels in foreign countries, as well as more attacks upon fishing boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific.  Regime change did not take place in Iran--not, at least, in the form that the US government intended--but it looks to me as if we shall have an endless series of crises, punctuated by military action, in our relations with that country.  Any agreement that the two sides reach will be vague on critical points, thereby allowing the president to discover new violations of it and threaten drastic action whenever it suits him.  For the president, any retreat is tactical and temporary, and evidence suggests that he has not given up his designs upon Greenland, either.  All this will destroy any credibility of the US government as a reliable partner in international affairs.

Similarly, despite ICE's retreat from its big operation in Minnesota, that agency will almost surely open up new big operations on other fronts.  They may be designed to provoke confrontations with the governments of blue states, many of which, including my own, have been passing laws forbidding various forms of cooperation with ICE.  And like the Communist insurgency in Vietnam, the immigration problem is too big to succumb to a series of operations like the Minnesota one.  The number of illegal immigrants in the US may drop during the next two and a half years, but there will still be millions of them, and we shall still lack any consensus about what to do about their status.  I doubt that any Democrat will run on legalizing it in 2024.

The president loves transforming landscapes, and seems to regard the city of Washington as his private royal domain.  Already a wing of the White House has been replaced by a large hole in the ground, and the administration is struggling with the courts to implement new plans for it.  In a separate case, a federal judge has just blocked Trump's plans for renovation (and renaming) of the Kennedy Center, and the administration will surely appeal that decision.  I suspect the president will undertake new transformation projects, in Washington and elsewhere.  He will also try to secure congressional authorization for the projected new $250 bill with his face on it.

The pursuit of new cases against former officials and US citizens who have opposed, criticized, or leveled accusations against Donald Trump will surely continue.  Trump's social media feed (available gratis at rollcall.com) suggests that a "grand conspiracy" case accusing most of the Obama administration of trying to bock his election is being studied, and I will not be surprised by a huge indictment along those lines.  The president also reposts stories from friendly media outlets detailing how his first impeachment was based on fraudulent evidence, and how the January 6 riot was the work of the FBI.  Those accusations could find their way into court, too.

And last, but hardly least, there is the matter of November's election.  It seems unlikely that Congress will pass the legislation the administration is pushing to end most mail-in balloting and require new proofs of citizenship for people to vote.  That very failure, however, will almost surely become the president's excuse to discredit the results of that election, especially if the Republicans do in fact lose one or both Houses to Democratic control.  Republican losers may be encouraged to dispute the election results--just as Trump and  his allies tried to do in 2020--and the House and Senate would have the power to rule on any contested elections, as they have many times in the past.  (I plan to do more research on this soon.)  When the House (for example) votes to decide the results of contested elections, representatives from contested districts are presumably not allowed to vote.  Challenges to a sufficient number of Democratic seats might maintain a working Republican majority in the debates over those seats, allowing it to decide contested elections in favor of Republican candidates.  This could lead to our worst crisis since the Civil War.  

All these potential disasters reflect the administration's total loss of respect for any established procedures, any guarantees of fairness in our political and legal systems, and any independent, impartial truths.  That loss of respect has been growing in the United States for decades, on both sides of the political fence, and this is the result.  For the many Americans who have drawn emotional sustenance from their belief in our institutions, this is a personal crisis as well as a political one.  We can all draw on other kinds of sustenance to try to keep things in perspective, as others have in other places and other times.

Memories of Barney Frank

 I met the late Barney Frank in the spring of 1966, when my older brother Bob visited me near the end of my freshman year at Harvard.  They had met at something called the National Student Congress, later the National Student Association, in 1961.  My brother was then living in London and Barney was a grad student in government, writing his dissertation, as he told me, on the conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats in Congress.  Like everyone else, I was immediately struck by his rapid-fire wit, and we always had a brief conversation when we ran into each other on campus.  My two best memories of him involve his humor, and I would like to share them now.

In the summer of 1968, I had stayed in Cambridge for the first time, and was hanging out with some friends at the newly formed Institute of Politics on Mount Auburn Street, whose living room had a television.  I found myself there on the August evening when Richard Nixon accepted the Republican nomination for President, which he had won against the more liberal Nelson Rockefeller and the more conservative Ronald Reagan.  During the convention a newspaper--I think it was the Miami Herald--had leaked the transcript of a meeting between Nixon and southern delegates, whose support was crucial.  Nixon had apologized, in effect, for supporting the fair housing bill that had passed Congress in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination that spring.  He argued that it was better to have "gotten the issue out of the way" then than to have it figure in the campaign.  His acceptance speech was an effective one, and it included the following sentence:

 "And we shall work toward the goal of an open world—open skies, open cities, open hearts, open minds."

As the audience erupted in cheers, Barney burst out:

"But not open housing!"

It was around this time, I see, that Barney went to work for Mayor Kevin White of Boston, although he was still theoretically working on his Ph.D. dissertation.  I ran into him in Harvard Square a year or two later and he explained to me that he had now changed its topic to the workings of the Massachusetts legislature.   Apparently Barney had the mind, but not the temperament, to become an academic, and the dissertation never materialized.  Instead he won election to the Massachusetts Legislature from the Back Bay in the early 1970s, and stunned that body with a series of libertarian proposals.  He earned a Harvard Law degree while serving.  And that leads me to the funniest thing I ever heard of him saying, reported in  a Boston Globe feature during those years that described an exchange he had in the Assembly with a more traditional colleague.

"Mr. President," said this colleague, addressing the man in the chair, "when is the gentleman from the Back Bay going to stop? He wants to legalize prostitution! He wants to legalize gambling! He wants to legalize homosexuality!  When is he going to stop?"

"Mr. President," Barney replied, "I apologize to the gentleman from ________.  I'm sorry that he is offended by prostitution. I'm sorry that he's offended by gambling. I'm sorry that he's offended by homosexuality.  I don't know when I will stop, but I promise him this: I won't stop until I find something that he likes to do!"

To advance his political career, Barney not only stayed in the closet, but carried on a well-publicized mock romance with Kathleen Sullivan, the daughter of an important Boston political family who was then serving on the Boston School Committee.  (She eventually married the mayor of San Francisco, Joseph Alioto.)  In 1980 he was elected to the House of Representatives to succeed Robert Drinan, a Jesuit who had to give up his seat in response to a decree from Pope Paul II banning priests from public office.  In the next election, after redistricting had forced a consolidation of districts, he defeated Republican Margaret Heckler, whom Reagan then appointed, and later fired, as Secretary of Health and Human Services.  Not long after that, while running a lecture series at Carnegie Mellon, I brought Barney to Pittsburgh for a debate with Cal Thomas of the Moral Majority on social issues.  

Eventually, of course, Barney became the first openly and voluntarily avowed gay member of Congress, and that became a very big part of his political persona.  He rose to prominence on the House Financial Services Committee and co-wrote the Dodd-Frank Act in the wake of the financial crisis.  That act, for better or for worse, essentially accepted the Obama Administration's view that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with our new financial system, and the trend towards deregulation has continued since then, with consequences that we cannot yet foresee.  He supported Hillary Clinton for president both in 2008 against Barack Obama and in 2016 against Bernie Sanders.  Now, as he informed the world during his last weeks, he has been writing a book arguing that the Democrats must downplay certain issue dear to the Left in order to win elections.  I will withhold judgment on that project until I can see exactly what issues he is referring to.  As I have made clear, I do think they have to change their positions on certain social issues, but I do not think they will return to effective power, or do much good when do, if they do not abandon the neoliberalism which Barney came to champion in favor of something closer to the principles of the New Deal.  Barney was one of the most remarkable of a certain group of 20th-century politicians, the children or grandchildren of ethnic immigrants who took advantage of an affordable educational system to embark on great political careers.  We need more people like him now.

Whither the Democratic Party?

Our national political crisis has been going on for at least 26 years, in my opinion, and Donald Trump remains as much a symptom of it as a cause.  Together my wife and I have just gone through my last book, States of the Union, and many problems within the Democratic Party emerge from my summaries of the state of the union addresses and other major speeches of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden.  To begin with, the Democratic Party largely accepted the Reagan revolution and never fundamentally challenged it.  Both Clinton and Obama echoed Reagan's arguments that the federal government had grown too large and that the American people, not the government, had to solve their own problems.  Clinton, of course, pushed the work of deregulating the financial world, setting the stage for the subprime boom and the crisis of 2008.  Obama's response to that crisis worked too slowly and did not reflect a belief that there was anything fundamentally wrong with our new deregulated financial system.  In the same way, Obamacare did not challenge our disastrous for-profit health care system, but merely tried to integrate more Americans into it with the help of federal subsidies.   

The Democrats have also failed to offer much in the way of a different foreign policy.  Obama withdrew from Iraq, but increased our commitment to Afghanistan, and eventually had to go back into Iraq to deal with ISIS, as well.  He forced out Egyptian President Mubarak during the Arab spring, but didn't take long to conclude that his Muslim  Brotherhood successor--the victor in a democratic election--had to be forced out of office.  He did allow John Kerry to reach the nuclear deal with Iran, but he failed to build up any constituency on its behalf, and Donald Trump repudiated that agreement in his first term, turning the Iranian enrichment program loose, and has gone to war with Iran in his second. Similarly, an attempted rapprochement with Cuba has now given way to an effort to overthrow Cuba's communist government under Trump.  Biden did pass a big energy and infrastructure bills, extending large subsidies to renewable energy, but Trump immediately undid most their impact when he returned to power in 2025.  The Obama Administration also adopted the Bush II administration's regime change policy in Libya, creating more chaos, and the Biden administration allowed Israel to carry out the destruction of Gaza with hardly a whimper during its last  year in office.  And on the domestic front, Biden abandoned the traditional Democratic policy of reducing the deficits opened up by Republicans.  Every Democratic president from Kennedy through Johnson, Carter, Clinton and Obama had left office with a much smaller deficit than they had inherited, but the Biden deficit for fiscal 2024 was considerably larger than the Trump deficit for fiscal 2019, before the pandemic struck.

I have written many times that the election of 2016 showed that the American people had lost faith in their traditional political leadership.  Only that loss of faith allowed Donald Trump to win the Republican nomination in a romp and defeat Hillary Clinton in the general election.  Clinton had also faced an important populist challenge from Bernie Sanders, but the whole party establishment got behind her and managed to defeat him.  Joe Biden, who had failed in two earlier presidential bids, won the Democratic nomination in 2020 with help from key southern black votes, and soundly defeated Trump in the midst of the pandemic, but he ignored the inflationary spiral that the government's response to COVID had set off until it was too late.  After ignoring Trump for about a year, the administration went on a legal offensive against him, one which has now failed spectacularly.  When Biden finally left the race the party promptly anointed another establishment favorite, Kamala Harris,  who ran, as Clinton had, mainly on not being Donald Trump.  She refused to acknowledge that there was anything seriously wrong with the country, and the American electorate registered its dissatisfaction with the status quo once again.  Since Trump's victory the party leadership has once again focused upon opposing everything he does, without giving any indication of how a Democratic return to power would help the American people. No party leader has complained much about the abandonment of 70 years of traditional US foreign policy.

A prediction market now gives the Democrats a 46 percent chance of regaining control of both the House and Senate in November.  But what will happen if they do?  They will presumably start a new round of investigations of administration behavior, leading to repeated confrontations with the executive branch.  A new impeachment, trial and acquittal is quite likely.  The functioning of the government may come to a complete halt.  I am not confident that any of this will actually increase the  popularity of the Democratic Party.  And then there is the matter of the Democratic candidates for President in 2028.

Various polls ranking the possible Democratic candidates in 2028 are giving wildly differing results. They tend to show two Californians, Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, in the lead with about 35 points between them, followed by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg with perhaps 10 percent each, and Governors Pritzker of Illinois, Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Beshear of Kentucky and Whitmer of Michigan, along with Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona,  with a few points each.  Harris has proven that she is not an effective national candidate, and I am not at all sure that Newsom would be either. He too would face ads about transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants and other related woke policies in California.  I don't think that either Ocasio-Cortez or Buttigieg is middle America's idea of a presidential candidate either.  Newsom is leading J. D. Vance in trial heats right now, but that may not hold up as the election nears.  Meanwhile, the Democratic establishment is once again in a panic over the emergence of younger, more independent voices such as Mayor Mamdani of New York City (who of course will never be able to run for President) and Graham Platner of Maine.  The old Democratic brand still rules the Northeast and the Far West, but it lost all the swing states last time around and appears to have no traction at all in much of the heartland.  It relies on corporate contributions just as heavily as the Republicans do.  And neither party seems to me very likely to be able to do much about the potentially enormous economic effects of the AI revolution.

Both the Democratic Party and the nation need to revive faith in government.  The genius of Trump is that his nonstop reality show, featuring new scandals and fiascos every week, makes that essentially impossible.  I think we are headed for changes to our economy, our world position, and our lives that older Americans will  not recognize.  It will fall to the younger generations to try to make some sense of them and their effects.

Can the US hold together?

 Last fall, the historian Jill Lepore gave an interview to the Chronicle of Higher Education about her career as an historian that sheds a great deal of light about what has happened to history in the last hafl century or so.  She described a key moment in her professional evolution.

"My passion as a historian came out of that impetus to tell the stories of people who were left out of the accounts of history that I grew up with. But what I increasingly saw as a young professor was how little of an impact that work had had. I saw how inward a lot of that work was. In the ‘90s, when I was in graduate school, if you walked into a bookstore, the history books would be David McCullough and Steven Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin — these doorstop biographies of presidents and generals. The Father’s Day book trade, as it’s sometimes called. Whether you like those books or don’t like those books, they do not offer Americans an understanding of their past that is useful for living in a pluralistic, multiracial, multiethnic democracy. That’s not what they’re trying to do."

Lepore is a Gen Xer who didn't reach college until the 1980s, by which time the prejudice against that kind of book in academia was well advanced.  The Silent and Boom generations had sold the idea that the mainstream story of American history was a fraud, designed to conceal centuries of oppression of black Americans, women, Indians, and homosexuals.  That is what Lepore was referring to when she mentioned a "pluralistic, multiracial, multiethnic democracy."  We cannot understand our place in American society, she is arguing, without paying attention to the particular status of groups to whom we belong and their place in various hierarchies.  Any "understanding of the past" that lacks that focus, she says, is not "useful" for living in our nation.

I would like to argue the opposite.

It is only after beginning work on the political history of the early 19th-century United States that I have come to appreciate what an extraordinary document the United States Constitution is.  Almost anyone on the Left  now dismisses it on the grounds that it did not guarantee Americans of different races and sexes equal rights.  Yet it now seems more significant to me that there is literally nothing in the original US Constitution that explicitly denies anyone equal rights.  It does not define the right to vote at all, leaving the qualifications of voters for the House of Representatives up to each individual state--which is why a number of states had allowed votes for black men or women well before the 15th or 19th Amendment was passed.  In some explicit ways it extends rights further than many states did.  It bans any religious test for federal office, even though some states did not allow adherents of certain religions to hold office.  Some states also had property qualifications for elected officials, but the Constitution had no such qualifications for Congressmen, Senators, or Presidents.  It carefully avoided using the word "slave," allowing some politicians to claim by the 1820s that there was no federal right to own slaves.  Most significantly of all, in my opinion, the Constitution does not include the words "men," "women," "white," or "black".  "Person" is the only word used to refer to inhabitants of the United States.  

To my mind, those aspects of the Constitution make it an ideal political charter for "a pluralistic, multiethnic, multiracial democracy."  Over the last half century our new left, so dominant in academia, has insisted that we must focus on the characteristics that divide us, and that in my opinion has contributed enormously to the polarization of our society and our inability to united behind a common goal.  We will not develop more healthy politics and government until we can focus once again, as we did in the middle decades of the last century, on what unites us and on the things that either benefit or threaten us all.  The books that Lepore dismissed--while they varied widely in quality--described attempts to create our Constitution and society and make them work.  Our biggest problem, I think, is our continually increasing economic inequality, and that problem cuts across racial and gender lines far more than we tend to recognize.  15 million white Americans, 8 million black Americans, and 14 million Hispanic Americans live in poverty, but the Democratic Party frequently talks as if poverty was primarily a racial problem--and while nearly all poor black people and most poor Hispanics vote Democratic, most poor whites now vote Republican.  The structure of our economy--so much changed over the last forty years or so--produces too many superrich people and too many poor ones, and that problem can't be solved by trying to favor some groups over others.  Our educational system, to judge from mandatory test scores, is failing children of all races at growing rates.  The AI revolution threatens the livelihoods of Americans of all kinds, and disastrous, inflationary wars affect us all as well.

Despite the Constitution, we have never treated each other completely equally--but that fault, dear Brutus, is not in our Constitution, but in ourselves.  We need to keep the idea of colorblindness alive because it is the only possible basis for generally fair treatment.  Affirmative action and DEI have done a lot to diversify our elite, but without doing anything for the tens of millions of Americans of all races who will never belong to the elite.   Meanwhile, we have to prove, for the first time since the early 1960s, that we all really can sacrifice for the common good and achieve things as a society that can inspire us all.  We failed to do that in response to 9/11, or the 2008 financial crisis, or the pandemic.  We may have to live for a long time without that kind of inspirational glue.

The Voting Rights Decision

 Last August, thanks to a column by Linda Greenhouse, I anticipated the voting rights decision that the Supreme Court just handed down, and said that I thought that it would in fact do some good--a rare, but not unheard of, position on the left side of the political fence.  The decision has come down as expected.  The logic of Justice Alito's opinion is at times quite depressing.  The Supreme Court has already ruled, tragically in my opinion, that politically motivated gerrymandering does not contravene the Constitution, and Scalia's decision rests on the idea that the Louisiana Republicans stuck with one black (and therefore Democratic) district for political rather than racial reasons.  I think that is probably true, but it doesn't make me feel better about the logic.  I don't think states should have the right to devalue the votes of perhaps 45 percent of their voters because they will vote against the candidates that the other 55 percent want.  I would like to ask you all to read (or reread) the post I wrote last August.  I will highlight two points.  First of all, the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights act, which many now accuse the court of eviscerating, specifically denied any right of any racial group to be represented proportionally.  Secondly, as I pointed out at length in the post, I don't think we'll have any meaningful progress towards economic equality as long as poor black Americans vote for one party and poor white Americans (a larger number) vote for the other one.  The creation of black majority districts has contributed to that result, and removed any incentive for either party to build interracial coalitions, especially in the South.  The black vote in the US was solidly Republican until 1936 and has been solidly Democratic since 1964.  It was no accident that the 1936-64 period saw by far the greatest progress towards racial equality that we have ever experienced.  The parties were competing for black votes.

Higher education

   The crisis in higher education is much in the news.  I have been too busy to write much myself for awhile, but anyone interested in this topic will benefit from reading the following two articles.  The first, by the venerable Nicholas Lemann, deals with the Trump administration's confrontation with elite higher ed, and is well researched. The second, by an art professor at Purchase College, really calls a spade a spade, rather than referring to it metaphorically as a shovel, with respect to the decline of education within higher ed.  I disagree with the author on two points. I've never liked the phrase "the production of knowledge" and I think education should stimulate individual creativity, not help form a collective. But it's a great piece all the same.

Our Broken Government

 Regarding the crisis in the Persian Gulf, nothing has happened in the last eleven days to alter the opinions that I expressed eleven days ago.  The same drama continues in slow motion, and the result--a resounding declaration of an historic victory after the US has abandoned many of its proclaimed goals--seems to me as likely as ever.  Cuba will be the next contestant on the reality show.

Just a few minutes ago I read through a long front-page story in today's New York Times, about the 2016 origins of Supreme Court emergency review.  Someone has leaked court documents to the Times, and they tell an amazing story of how Justice Roberts insisted on acting so as to prevent the implementation of President Obama's plan to move away from coal and towards natural gas, wind, and solar. (The story doesn't mention oil, oddly.  I tried to copy the share link for it--the free one--but apparently the Times won't allow that for this story, at least now. I'll check later.)  Remarkable enough in itself, the story also brought home to me what a wretched state our constitutional republic is in--and no, that is not merely the fault of Donald J. Trump.

When the Clean Air and Clean Water acts passed by huge bipartisan majorities in 1970 and 1972, Americans worried about poison in the air and water, but only a few scientists were voicing concerns about global warming.  The 1970 act defined pollutants very broadly and gave the new EPA the authority to regulate any pollutant that could "cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare."  The same act defined welfare as "effects on soils, water, crops, vegetation, manmade materials, animals, wildlife, weather, visibility, and climate, damage to and deterioration of property, and hazards to transportation, as well as effects on economic values and on personal comfort and well-being, whether caused by transformation, conversion, or combination with other air pollutants."  The Congress that passed those acts, let it be noted, was still dominated by members of the GI generation, whose young adult years had revolved around sacrifice for the common good, and who had had to learn to respect established procedures.  They were, for the time being, the last such American generation.  The inclusion of "climate" did reflect emerging concerns about the long-term effect of greenhouse gases on the earth's temperature, of which both Democratic Senator Ed Muskie, a major architect of the bill, and the Nixon White House were well aware. 

In 2007 the state of Massachusetts had sued the EPA arguing that the agency's obligation to protect the public welfare extended to regulating greenhouse gases, and the Supreme Court held, by a 5-4 vote, that greenhouse gases did fit the definition of a pollutant.  By this time, of course, climate change had become a very heated and partisan issue.  The financial crisis diverted attention elsewhere, and Barack Obama, elected the next year, quickly abandoned a proposed cap-and-trade system to regulate carbon emissions after Congress failed to act on it and he lost control of the House in 2010.  In 2016, however, with his second term winding down, his EPA issued sweeping regulations designed to change the shape of our power grid under the authority granted by the act as interpreted by Justice John Paul Stevens (the last GI to serve on the Supreme Court) in 2007.  The state of West Virginia and four other plaintiffs made an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to stay the implementation of the regulation as on overreach of authority.  Justice Roberts on February 5, 2016, wrote an extraordinary memo to members of the court advocating granting the rehearsal.  It reads like a brief for the plaintiffs, arguing that the Court would probably rule against the EPA (as indeed it eventually did, with somewhat changed membership) and that the affected industries would suffer irreparable harm in the meantime if the court didn't act now.  As the Times explains in its story, five members, including the incumbent swing justice Anthony Kennedy, went along with him.  

The Times story focuses on this case as a procedural innovation, because the Supreme Court has decided an increasing number of cases in this emergency fashion, short-circuiting not only the role of the lower courts, but also the whole process of briefing and arguments by the two sides.  I will focus on the broader constitutional implications of the whole controversy.

I certainly would support drastic measures to change the shape of the power grid and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  That opinion is reinforced by an experience I have just had--adding a heat pump system to the two floors of an old Victorian house in which I live.  This has allowed my wife and me to heat only the individual rooms we have to be occupying, rather than having to heat at least one whole floor at a time with oil.  It turns out that this is going to save us a substantial amount of money during the winter months.  The electric bills during the winter will approximately double, but that doesn't come close to the amount of money that we have been spending on oil, which has been reduced to a trifle (the oil has to kick in when the temperature is really low, well below freezing.) In other words, yes, our electric company burns fossil fuels to generate our electric power, but it evidently burns far less to generate the heat that our house needs than our oil heating system does.  

As it happens, however, the whole controversy over regulating greenhouse gases raises the question of how our democracy is supposed to work.  Most of the people I know, presented with the evidence that climate change is a serious danger and moving away from fossil fuels--or from how we use fossil fuels--could reduce it, would immediately conclude that yes, obviously the EPA should regulate them.  It would not in the least disturb them that the EPA in 2016 was relying on one word in the Clean Air Act of 1970, when no one was activating this kind of full-scale regulation, or that powerful economic interests continue to oppose this change. This is right, therefore it should happen, has been the mantra of liberal activists--and, for that matter, of conservative activists too--for decades now.  And that, in my opinion, is why our democracy is in such a mess.

Democracy can only work if we respect certain procedures, regardless of whether they always produce our preferred outcome or not.  I do not believe, sadly, that there has ever been a moment when the Congress would have passed a new piece of legislation or new amendments to the 1970 act that would have authorized the EPA effectively to make it impossible for coal-fired plants to operate any longer.  President Biden did pass significant incentives for increasing renewable energy production, although he had to couple them with other measures that would increase fossil fuel production, as well, but they passed with no bipartisan support.  That has allowed the Republican Party, which now controls both the Executive and Judicial branches of our government, to undermine them.

In fact--and this is the other point to be drawn from the Times story--the Congress, designed as the most powerful branch of our government, has become a bystander with respect to all the great domestic questions of our time.  Issues of race preference, of climate regulation, and of immigration are all fought out between the Executive, which decrees policy in various ways, and the Judiciary, which in turn rules on the constitutional propriety of what the Executive has done.  What shocked me about the Roberts memo (see above) was how completely it seemed to focus on the wisdom of the Obama administration's action, rather than its legality.  Both parties champion the power of the courts when they do not control the White House, and attack it when they do.  The Executive and the Judiciary are both staffed with highly educated Americans (I include the judicial law clerks as well as the judges themselves) who emerge from the educational system with strongly held views, either progressive or conservative.  The bulk of the American people play little or no role in all this.  It is not what the constitution intended.  Perhaps nothing can fix this except some new and terrible crises that requires genuine sacrifice by all of us to surmount--a test which we have failed repeatedly since 2001, as I have noted--or until a new generation grows up with respect for procedures and institutions, a recognition that we have to respect something more than our own preferences.   Meanwhile, this is where we are.

When will the show be canceled?

 Even relatively apolitical Americans, I think, inevitably think of the president of the United States as a father.  In a sense this is true: any president has enormous responsibility for our well-being.  It can therefore be quite traumatic to see a profane, irresponsible, erratic man in the White House--someone who proudly announces from time to time that he can do anything and get away with it.  This last weekend was particularly difficult in this respect, but suddenly the crisis is over, and the denouement will, I suspect, help me cope a little more easily with the next two and half years of our national life.

Donald Trump actually told us all we need to know about his approach to foreign policy during his first term, in the crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons program.  After some North Korean tests of missiles and potentially intercontinental ballistic missiles, he announced, "North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before."  Then, after an unprecedented summit with Kim Jong-Un produced a meaningless commitment, he declared the crisis over.  Eventually he added that the two leaders had fallen in love.  The playbook, as my wife has put it, came straight from a reality show script:  identify a problem, issue a horrifying threat, and then announce, without evidence, that the adversary had given in.  Over the last week we have seen a new episode of this long-running show.

Lost in the drama of threatened escalation and sudden cease fire yesterday was a very important New York Times story on the origins of the attack on Iran. On February 11, it turns out, Benjamin Netanyahu gave a long presentation arguing for war on Iran in the Situation Room of the White House, backed via zoom by a team of Israeli officials. His audience included President Trump, the White House Chief of Staff, the Secretaries of State and Defense,  the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the CIA Director, and the president's personal envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.  It did not include the Vice President or the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who were skeptical about such  a war. None of the American officials present were pushing for war with Iran at that moment.  Netanyahu argued that war could bring down the Islamic regime, and even showed pictures of possible opposition successors, including Reza Pahlavi, the would-be successor to is father the Shah.  In subsequent discussions, no senior American official backed that prediction, but none of them actually opposed the war either.  It seems to be a fixed rule of the Trump Administration that no one but the president can actually suggest what should be done in a given situation, perhaps to protect them from coming out on the wrong side, or to protect the president from ignoring good advice.  Trump began the war apparently hoping for regime change, but immediately began muddying the waters by declaring that the conflict was over without any sign of it, or that the Israeli assassination of various Iranian leaders had already changed the regime.

The enemy, however, turned out to have a say in the matter.  Just a few hits on ships in the Persian Gulf by missiles or drones shut down most of the traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.  I was reminded of a student of mine at the Naval War College, perhaps fifteen years ago, who had served on ships in that region. "They can close the strait any time," he said, "and there's nothing we can do about it."  I don't know if this is exactly what he had anticipated, but it turned out that the Iranians didn't have to put warships or even mines into the strait to shut down traffic.  This almost instantly created an economic crisis in some far-off lands, such as the Philippines, drove gas prices in the US to nearly $4 a gallon, and threatened a world-wide recession.  Iranian attacks on energy production across the Gulf made the situation even worse.  And it does seem that Iranian missile attacks on Israel and elsewhere were getting more effective, not less, and that allied stocks of anti-missile missiles were getting dangerously low.  The US meanwhile sent more ground troops to the region, threatening to seize Karg Island in the strait, the source of Iran's own oil exports--an extremely risky operation that would leave US forces in reach of Iranian firepower.

On Saturday, April 4, the president made the first of three historic posts:

"Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out - 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!"

The next day he followed up with this:

"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

And then, yesterday morning (Tuesday), came this:

"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!"

The world held its breath for about twelve hours, when we learned that the government of Pakistan had brokered a deal for a two-week cease-fire involving Iran, Israel, and the US.  This morning our president struck a different note:

"Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East. We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated. On behalf of the United States of America, as President, and also representing the Countries of the Middle East, it is an Honor to have this Longterm problem close to resolution. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

I probably won't know for sure for some time, but I find it very difficult to believe that that agreement was actually negotiated during the day on Tuesday.  We know that Witkoff and Kushner had been negotiating for some time, and I strongly suspect that the outlines of the deal had been agreed to late last week before the flood of tweets began.  The downing of two American planes over Iran and the successful rescue mission may have delayed things as well.  Meanwhile, the three above tweets established a new narrative--that Trump's promise of drastic action had forced the Iranians to make peace.  We shall be hearing a lot more about that in weeks to come.

Turning to the reality of the situation, both sides apparently have submitted maximum peace programs, with the US demanding that Iran totally give up its nuclear program and its enriched uranium while Iran demands reparations for war damage and an end to sanctions.  Meanwhile, they do not even agree on what the truce means, with Iran arguing that it applies to Israeli action in Lebanon as well, while the Israeli government denies this. I suspect that the cease-fire will be extended indefinitely while both sides claim victory.  Vice President Vance, a leading administration skeptic about the war, now has to try to negotiate a real peace.  Certainly Iran, I think, has strengthened its international position by demonstrating how seriously it can harm the whole world economy.  I don't think that President Trump has raised his standing among the rest of the leaders of the world, and polls indicate that he has not impressed the American people, either.  I think he will be quick to threaten to resume the war, but very reluctant actually to do so.  It isn't easy to get a real sense of where the world and our place in it is going, because the president does such a remarkable job of keeping attention focused upon himself.  At that he has no peer.

I suggest that we all prepare for more episodes of the long-running drama, Donald Trump, Master of the Universe, Maker of all Peace.  Meanwhile I will close on a different note.  Joseph Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned in protest of the war, writing, "I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby."  For that he has been attacked for promoting an old "anti-Semitic trope" that Jews control the world.  It isn't clear that AIPAC and other pro-Israeli government American Jews directly pressured Trump to start this war during February, but the New York Times story absolutely confirms that Prime Minister Netanyahu did more than anyone else to talk Trump into undertaking it.  Truth, in my judgment, should be a legitimate defense against accusations of spreading anti-Semitic tropes.  Regarding Israel, Kent knew what he was talking about.

A Guest contribution

 I hesitate to write about the ongoing war.  It is very easy to speculate about how it will end in disaster, and very hard to know at this point how it will actually turn out.  I have begun an unrelated post, but meanwhile, here is an excellent article by Anatole Lieven of the Quincy Project on what this war is doing to the standing of the United States in the world.  It builds on what I said the week the war broek out.

My uncle, the prophet

 My uncle Henry Kaiser was born in 1911 and died in the late 1980s after a long career as a labor attorney.  He was the third of his 9 siblings to be born in the United States, not Ukraine, and the second, I believe, to attend college.  After graduating from Brooklyn College he attended the University of Wisconsin Law School--joining my father in Madison during his undergraduate degrees--even though their family, by that time, had fallen on hard economic times. He began his legal career before the war, working as a counsel for the American Federation of Labor, and was eventually drafted, becoming a civil affairs officer in France after D-Day.  In 1946 he argued the biggest case of his career before the Supreme Court: the contempt case against John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers, who had refused to return to work during a strike after a court issued an injunction that it had no legal right to issue.  During my college years I spent parts of two summers living in his house in Chevy Chase along with his wife and my two cousins.  We had a wonderful relationship and got to know each other very well.  He was, like me, something of a contrarian who reached his own opinions about everything.  Some of them differed significantly from the standard New Deal/Great Society views of my father and most of the people in his orbit.  I frequently argued with him, but I learned a lot.

To put it bluntly, Uncle Henry was never convinced that the vast expansion of the federal government's power over the economy had done more good than harm.  He was a brilliant negotiator and felt that the unions he represented, including the musicians and bakers' unions, could perfectly well work out their problems with management on their own.  He once volunteered that he did not think that the labor movement in the long run had benefited from the 1935 Wagner Act, which established a legal right to organize and set up the NLRB and the whole mechanism for securing government-recognized union recognition.  That was partly, he later elaborated, because in 1946 the Wagner Act had been amended in a very anti-union manner by the Taft Hartley Law, but also because he did not trust government interference.  He had seen the development of the whole network of Washington law firms and lobbyists who made so much money out of trying to bend government regulation to the interests of their clients.  And in the last decades of his life he became very concerned with changes in the legal profession more broadly, and by the growing tendency of institutions, including the government, to sue one another over almost everything.  The increasing corruption of administrative processes, he once said, might eventually tempt the American people to turn to a strongman.

I still do not think that my uncle was entirely right, because I think the New Deal did lasting good for the American people, and because I see no alternative to substantial bureaucratic authority in modern society.  Now however that most of the New Deal legacy is utterly dead--including its attempts to secure the rights of labor--I often find myself thinking that he had a point.  Such a moment occurred this morning when I opened this Wall Street Journal article about the fate of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice.  It revolves around 48-year old Mike Davis, a lawyer from Iowa with huge corporate clients who has the ear of the White House and some of the leading figures in the Justice Department.   Like Pete Hegseth, Davis apparently won Trump's heart by repeatedly defending him on cable news shows, in Davis's case after Trump was indicted for refusing to return classified documents he had taken to Mara Lago after 2021.He has been threatening the leaders of the Antitrust Division with ruin if they do not approve certain antitrust settlements, and has evidently driven the head of the division, Gail Slater, and two of her deputies, out of their jobs.  Davis denies this, but one of the deputies has sworn to it under oath. Davis has now filed suit to get that deputy, one Roger Alford, disbarred.  He has also used contacts with Trump and Attorney General Bondi to get a settlement for Live Nation, one of the nation's leading ticket brokers, that is much more favorable to them than what the antitrust division had proposed.

To put it another way, while the antitrust division was originally designed to stop monopolistic practices that cost consumers money and strangle competition, now its existence allows lawyers like Davis to make millions of dollars by using political influence to get its decisions overturned to favor their clients.  They couldn't have earned that money if we had no antitrust laws or antitrust enforcement.  That was exactly the kind of development that drove my uncle crazy.  Now, more than 35 years after his death, we see how much worse it could get.

I still find the impulse to create impartial bureaucracies to secure more economic justice for our citizens was a noble one, but Uncle Henry rightly recognized how easily it could be corrupted and turned into a new income stream for lawyers.  Like nearly everything else that President Trump is doing, this isn't an entirely new development by any means, but he and his team have pushed it to an entirely new level. There is no vaccine for this disease and there never will be, and the cure takes generations to find.  In the long run now law or constitution is stronger than human nature, and history remains a struggle between different parts of our brains.   

Farewell to another era

 In January 1917, two months after his re-election and three months before the United States entered the First World War, Woodrow Wilson gave a remarkable speech calling for peace.  Addressing the European powers, he warned prophetically that an imposed peace "forced upon the loser" would rest "as only upon quicksand."  The world needed "not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace." The United States, he said optimistically, would gladly take part in a new international organization designed to create a peaceful world.  These, he said, were the principles and policies "of every modern nation, of every enlightened community.  They are the principles of mankind and must prevail." The victorious powers did create a League of Nations at Versailles, but the United States Senate refused to ratify it after an ill Wilson refused to question any of its conditions.

Twenty years later, in October 1937, Franklin Roosevelt spoke in Chicago about the frightening world situation, including the Spanish civil war, in which Hitler and Mussolini were assisting General Franco, and the brutal Sino-Japanese war, which had just broken out. "The present reign of terror and lawlessness," he said, seriously threatened "the vey foundations of civilization. . . .Let no one imagine that America will escape.  There can be no stability or peace either within nations or between nations except under laws and moral standards adhered to by all.  International anarchy destroys every foundation for peace."  After the European war broke out in September 1939 he secured authorization to sell arms to France and Britain for similar reasons, and after France fell he asked for unlimited aid to Britain under the Lend-Lease Act.  And in August 1941 he met with Winston Churchill and issued the Atlantic Charter, which included two critical provisions:

"Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned;

"Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them."

Four months later, those principles, and a new commitment to form and join an international organization, became the US war aims in the Second  World War.

According to a quote which I have not been able to confirm, FDR--a man of extraordinary historical perspective--remarked late in the Second World War to Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, a staunch ally, that the new world they were helping to build would last for as long as anyone who had already been born was still alive.  That prediction has now come true, and the United States has taken the lead in the repudiation of the world that Wilson and FDR called for.  

Donald Trump and his administration are completing that destructive work, but it did not begin with them.  We took one big step in that direction, as it turned out, during the Vietnam War.  Having spent an entire decade writing a book on the origins of that war, I believe that our government undertook it in a sincere attempt to apply Wilson and FDR's principles as they had come to understand them, but the war itself rapidly appeared as a betrayal of those principles.  That in turn persuaded many members of two younger generations--who for generational reasons didn't need much persuading--that those principles had never been anything but a sham designed to conceal the real history of the United States, a history of genocide, slavery, and imperialism.  I was forcibly reminded of this yesterday listening to Glenn Loury's podcast, on which a Millennial historian, Daniel Bessner, echoed those views verbatim.  Equally importantly, under the George W. Bush administration, Boomer bureaucrats and politicians defined and implemented a new national security strategy based almost entirely on force, claiming the right forcibly to remove any hostile foreign government that sought to develop dangerous weapons or that oppressed its peoples.  That view was also very bluntly stated on the very same podcast by Larry Kotlikoff, an economist.  Only Andrew Day, a conservative Republican, argued that a lawless world would not be a safer one for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.

The critics of a vision of a world ruled by impartial legal principles--like the many critics of the United States Constitution, about whom I will have more to say in a later post--have failed to understand human nature, and the role that ideals can play in the world.  The ideals both of the United Nations and the US Constitution are too just for real human beings consistently to live up to them, and cynics will always easily find debating points with which to discredit them. Similar feelings led Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, to decide by 1938 that British democracy was a sham and that a war between Britain and Germany would not be worth fighting.  But when that war broke out Orwell had a change of heart, which led him in 1941 to recast the whole question of ideals versus reality in his pamphlet, "The Lion and the Unicorn," in a passage referring to a key aspect of English political life.

"Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.

"It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. , . . Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.

"An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. . . .The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape."

The whole enterprise of civilization, as Sigmund Freud realized, is a continuing struggle between different parts of the human brain, one of which can understand and seek to apply impartial principles to a nation or a world, and another simply dominated by primal emotions.  That it can never be entirely successful does not mean that we should give it up.  

The United States is now joining Russia as a danger to world civilization because our head of government has no respect for law and believes only in power.  He told the New York Times a few weeks ago that he is restrained only by "my own morality, my own mind," and they give him an unlimited right to reward friends and punish enemies, both at home and abroad. He appears to view the US military as his own personal force, which he can turn on any person whom he deems punishable with death.  He bragged about killing an Iranian general in his first term, and he is bragging about killing now. " We have unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition, and plenty of time," he posted yesterday.  "Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today. They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!"  No American president has ever used remotely comparable language in any previous war.

How has this happened?  Perhaps FDR's purported remark to Mackenzie King--which I still would like to confirm--tells us.  The two world wars persuaded the world of the need for international organizations to enforce international law, and for rules limiting war to self-defense.  The strategy and architecture of the Cold War as waged by the US was based upon defense, not offense, and the government cited deterrence, not destruction for its own sake, as the rationale for nuclear weapons.  Those generations of leaders had seen the consequences of full-scale international lawlessness.  The generations that have grown up since 1945 have not.  In in the United States, first under George W. Bush and now under Trump, and in Russia under Putin, they have arrogated to themselves the right to begin wars at their pleasure, counting on the superior militaries they built up during the Cold War to prevail.  China may do the same at any moment around Taiwan.  This is a terrible setback for civilization, but which seems to be part of the inevitable rhythm of history.