An American Tragedy

 I define a dysfunctional family as a family in which one member is a god.  Such a member can be a father whose career takes them all over the world, or a mother obsessed with what the world thinks of every member, or a severely disabled or prodigiously talented child.  In each of those cases, and in others as well, the needs of all the other family members tend to give way to the chosen one's.  From 1789 onwards, the president of the United States has been, in a profound emotional sense, the father of our national family, and our emotional health depends partly on his.  We have never had a president like this one.

In relatively good times our national family functions relatively well, although like any human institution it never functions perfectly.  In such times it respects boundaries--boundaries between different branches of the government and between the government and individual citizens.  Simple courtesy, which demands that officials refer even to their political opponents with respect, is another such boundary.  The national family depends above all on a recognition of a common family interest that requires each of us, at one time or another, to sacrifice for the common good and accept that we cannot always have our own way.  And it requires respect for a relatively impartial legal system that will try to identify and punish the genuinely guilty according to relatively neutral standards.  

Our current president has built his whole career on the principle that he is unique among men and women, the best at anything he tries his hand at.  That is why he cheats at golf and proclaims his every achievement to be the greatest of its kind.  From the beginning of his career as a developer he focused on building up his image, and major media outlets cooperated because he was good copy.  At a certain point, his businesses began to fail, but he compensated by building up his brand.

Four Trump real estate properties in Atlantic City had all filed for bankruptcy by 2004, when The Apprentice first aired.  Trump seamlessly transitioned from a genuine entrepreneur who kept making bad choices, to an actor playing the role of a managerial genius to an audience of tens of millions.  The show was carefully scripted  to make him look omniscient and omnipotent, the self-image he had already created for himself.  Ratings, not the performance of the winners he picked, were its only measure of success.  Meanwhile, a big chunk of the US public got to know him every week.

I have written many times that Trump's spectacular rise in 2015-16 could never have happened if the political leadership of both parties had not lost touch with the great mass of US voters.  Only that allowed Trump to wipe the floor with a list of traditional Republican candidates and narrowly defeat Hillary Clinton in the electoral college. Trump adopted the role of savior of the country from the threats of immigration and leftist ideology.  The media establishment and the Democratic Party fought back by declaring  his election illegitimate, and the pandemic allowed Joe Biden to defeat him in 2020.  Biden failed however to restore a real bond between the president and the American people, and Kamala Harris promised nothing but more of the same.  Trump improved his standing among several key groups of voters and won both the popular vote and the electoral college.  Meanwhile, a coterie of younger Republicans planned a drastic scaling back of the federal government, a complete rejection of policies designed to halt climate change, a new crackdown on illegal immigration, and an all-out attack on certain popular ideologies that had come to dominate American universities, the mainstream media, and a growing number of corporate boardrooms.

In nine months back in power Trump and his subordinates have demonstrated a total disregard for American legal and constitutional norms, and even for the very idea of a general good which the government is supposed to serve.  The president regards the whole federal government as his own corporation, which exists for the purpose of enriching its stockholders--the economic interests that back him--and punishing his enemies.  He has staffed the highest levels of the Justice Department and certain key US Attorneys' offices with lawyers who have worked for him personally and ordered them to indict political enemies, which they are doing.  He has ordered federal troops into Democratic-led cities against the will of their mayors and governors.   He is withholding approved funds for large infrastructure projects in blue states, and he is trying to force universities to accept federal ideological controls.  He has no respect for any public official who disagrees with him, and his subordinates are purging various parts of the federal bureaucracy of people who think for themselves, including some who supported him at earlier stages of their careers.  He seems to believe, like Louis XIV, that he is the state, and he is turning the White House into his own Versailles.  Meanwhile, he is promoting himself as the greatest leader who has ever lived, who creates a booming economy, ends wars all over the world, and eliminates crime in major cities within a few weeks.

I have just finished teaching an old favorite book, Doctor Zhivago, for the first time in many years.  At the climax of the book Zhivago, whose life has been upended by the Russian revolution and civil war for several years, reflects on history.

"He reflected again that he conceived of history, of what is called the course of history, not in the accepted way but by analogy with the vegetable kingdom. In winter, under the snow, the leafless branches of a wood are thin and poor, like the hairs on an old man's wart. But in only a few days in spring the forest is transformed, it reaches the clouds, and you can hide or lose yourself in its leafy maze. This transformation is achieved with a speed greater than in the case of animals, for animals do not grow as fast as plants, and yet we cannot directly observe the movement of growth even of plants. The forest does not change its place, we cannot lie in wait for it and catch it in the act of change. Whenever we look at it, it seems to be motionless. And such also is the immobility to our eyes of the eternally growing, ceaselessly changing history, the life of society moving invisibly in its incessant transformations.

"Tolstoy thought of it in just this way, but he did not spell it out so clearly. He denied that history was set in motion by Napoleon or any other ruler or general, but he did not develop his idea to its logical conclusion. No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshipped for decades thereafter, for centuries."

We cannot understand what is happening if we ignore the changes in our national forest which grew slowly over five or six decades.  Business interests in the 1970s adopted the ideas of the Powell Memorandum and embarked upon a long-term attack on the regulatory state that the New Deal had created.  Academics starting in the same decade and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s replaced the story of the advance of western civilization with a history of oppression and resistance based on race, gender, and sexuality.  Financial manipulation and advertising replaced manufacturing and engineering skill as the motor of our economy.  The press set itself up as the ultimate arbiter of good and evil, the role that the framers reserved for our political leadership.  And our educated elite not only assumed more and more power, but also used that power to benefit itself at the expense of the more than half of the population that does not graduate from college.  Entertainers eclipsed politicians as national figures, opening up the opportunity which Donald Trump took advantage of.

Most of all, I think, the 1960s marked the beginning of a general revolt against more traditional authority of all kinds--moral authority, legal authority, political authority, and even the authority of custom.  That is the only reason that Donald Trump, who has spoken about real and presumed enemies in utterly unprecedented ways since he entered politics, could have gotten such a hearing.  Richard Nixon's tapes revealed an inner world quite similar to Trump's. Nixon too divided the world into allies and enemies and spoke frequently of setting various parts of the federal government on particular enemies and firing any civil servant who seemed to countermand his will--but both Nixon and the men around him knew that he had to moderate these impulses in real life and hide them from the American people.  Trump has not found that to be necessary.  We have for the first time a president who rejects our political and constitutional traditions, but he could not have come to power if so many of us had not lost interest and confidence in our political system first.  There is no point in assigning blame for what has gone wrong, because we cannot rewrite history and magically undo the changes that took place so gradually that we could not see them at the time.  Two centuries of an enlightened experiment in government are giving way to something very new all over the north Atlantic world.  I turn again to Zhivago and to another paragraph from the same part of the book.

"As he scribbled his odds and ends, he made a note reaffirming his belief that art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence. And his own ideas and notes also brought him joy, a tragic joy, a joy full of tears that exhausted him and made his head ache."

Boris Pasternak, the author of Zhivago, had translated several of the most important Shakespearean tragedies.  The United States, like Russia in 1917-21, is now in the midst of a tragedy of our own, one that began, I think in the mid-1960s, as I suggested in American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War.  Any joy must come from reverence for the great things we achieved together, the knowledge that every great nation pays for its greatness in this way from time to time, and the confidence that this will not be the end of history or of progress.

Our New Era

 Beginning, I suppose, in the early twentieth century, when the ancestor of the FBI was first created, and accelerating very rapidly during the New Deal era and afterwards, the United States federal government acquired enormous new powers, vastly increased its budget and personnel, and became involved in many more areas of American life.  All this happened, for the most part, in the spirit of the Enlightenment.  It attempted to improve American economic and social life, and also to deploy federal power to correct vast economic imbalances.  The Enlightenment, in practice if not always in theory, relied on bureaucracies operating according to impartial rules.  That was what our new federal bureaucracies, including our vastly expanded Department of Justice, claimed to do.

This process aroused considerable opposition from the beginning.  Some progressives and some conservatives feared the growth of federal power, and some of the nation's leading progressives opposed US entry into the First World War because they did not want a militarized state.  Many Republicans became apoplectic during the 1930s over FDR's expansion of federal power, which they viewed similarly to the way many liberals view the Trump Administration today.  After President Truman began trying to put the federal government behind the civil rights movement in 1948, many (but not all) white southern Democrats became deeply hostile to federal power once again as well.  In the 1960s Kennedy and especially Johnson resumed the expansion of federal power over civil rights issues and other matters, leading to the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the political realignment that in 1968 reduced the Democratic presidential vote from 60 percent in 1964 to 43 percent in 1968.  That percentage reached 50 percent only once between 1964 and 2008, in 1976.

Ronald Reagan campaigned against federal power in 1980 and 1984, but he did relatively little to decrease it, even though he created permanent large federal deficits with his tax cuts and military spending increases. George W. Bush destroyed the balanced budget that Bill Clinton had left him with tax cuts of his own, but also expanded the federal government's reach in certain areas.  Donald Trump also moved relatively cautiously in his first term.  Now, however, the situation has completely changed.

Bitter arguments over race, sex and gender have now joined with the century-old struggle over the economic role of the federal government to divide Americans as deeply, probably, as they were divided in the 1850s, and more divided than they were during the New Deal.  The Trump Administration, which represents a coalition of the fossil fuel industry, an increasing segment of Silicon Valley, the financial community, conservative supporters of the Israeli government, the religious right, and free-market ideologues, has now declared a long-term political struggle against the ideology of the Democratic Party and the institutions that support it, led by universities and certain foundations.  Discarding the idea of a federal bureaucracy operating according to impartial rules, it has begun distributing and withholding federal money arbitrarily to achieve political objectives.  Money approved by Congress for medical research and parceled out bureaucratically to universities has been blocked to force universities to abandon ideologically motived programs like DEI and to do more to stop anti-Israel protests, which they label as anti-Semitic.  And this may only be the beginning.

Based on statements by Christopher Rufo, who is not part of the Administration but seems to be closely connected to it, and leaks from Washington in the last few days, it seems that the Justice Department is contemplating cases against the Soros and Ford Foundations based on the RICO Act, which was passed to go after organized crime.  In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, they are thinking about charging those foundations with leading a criminal conspiracy to incite violence against conservatives by spreading hate speech against conservative ideas.  Rufo, a fellow of the Manhattan institute, outlined this idea here.  This concept is, to put it mildly, a remarkable stretch of the RICO Act in defiance of numerous precedents about free speech, but the recent indictment of James Comey shows that the Bondi Justice Department, prodded by the White House, is not likely to be deterred by that.  If such cases are indeed filed, they could drain enormous resources from those foundations even if they are eventually thrown out of court.   In a parallel development, today's papers report that FBI director Kash Patel has ended long-term cooperative relationships between the Bureau and both the Antidefamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center because those two groups have cited many conservatives for hate speech. 

I believe that there are ample constitutional and legal grounds to block the administration's discriminatory use of federal money, as well as further tortured legal attempts to bring down the left, but we have no idea in today's climate whether  federal courts will, or can, ensure that those laws will still be applied.  As regular readers know, I myself reject many aspects of mainstream Democratic ideology nowadays, and I also think that our leading universities need drastic reform and re-orientation.  This is not how I would like to see necessary changes come about, but history does not care what I want.  I also believe that broader forces are at work here.  More than a century ago the German sociologist Max Weber defined three kinds of authority: traditional, bureaucratic, and charismatic.  We established key elements of our bureaucracy under Franklin Roosevelt, who had charismatic authority of his own, but I don't think we have had a truly charismatic spokesman for strong federal authority since John F. Kennedy, and perhaps Lyndon Johnson in his first two years in office.  I do not think modern life can exist without bureaucracy, but we all know how stultified and frozen it can become, and we could see back in the late 1960s, if we were looking, that some aspects of human nature instinctively revolt against it, even when it is doing good.  We are watching history lurch back and forth, as it always has and probably always will. 

In that connection, I am once again teaching one of my favorite novels, Doctor Zhivago, in an older students' program at a local university.  One striking passage occurs during a house party in Moscow in the fall of 1917--after the overthrow of the Tsar, but before the Bolshevik Revolution.  Zhivago, speaking for author Boris Pasternak, makes the following speech to the guests.

"During the revolution it will seem to you, as it seemed to us at the front, that life has stopped, that there is nothing personal left, that there is  nothing going on in the world except killing and dying. If we live long enough to read the chronicles and memoirs of this period, we shall realize that in these fie or ten years we have experienced more than other people in a century.  I don't know whether the people will rise of themselves and advance spontaneously l ike a tide, or whether everything will be done in the name of  the people. Such a tremendous event requires no dramatic proof if its existence. I'll be convinced without proof.  It's petty to explore causes of titanic events. They haven't any. It's only in a family quarrel that you look for beginnings--after people have pulled each other's hair and smashed the dishes they rack their brains trying to figure out who started it.  What is truly great [or terrible--DK] is without beginning, like the universe.  It confronts us as suddenly as if it had always been there or had dropped out of the blue."

Having spent my whole life trying to uncover the causes of titanic events, I never really liked this passage--but now I think I understand it.  I would change "They haven't any" to "They have too many."  But that doesn't change the thought that much.

A Comeback at NYRB

 I have been reading the New York Review of Books since the late 1960s, and I think I started subscribing in the early 1970s.  That was the era of its founding editors, Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers, and for several decades it featured numerous articles by critical liberals like my old friend Stanley Hoffmann, Theodore Draper, Hannah Arendt, I. F Stone, and many more.  Such authors wrote frankly and often brilliantly about the failures of the United States government without arguing, like so many of my contemporaries, that it was by nature hopelessly imperialistic, racist, and corrupt.  Epstein and Silvers both died some time ago, and in the last decade or more--and particularly since 2020--I had to admit to myself that I was only renewing my subscription because I couldn't exile such a long-term family member from my house.  The cultural and political criticism in the NYRB became increasingly woke, and I wasn't impressed by the Irishman Fintan O'Toole, who has become their leading political writer.  Recently, however, I have found more to like in the issues that have arrived on my doorstep, and I want to discuss two articles in the September 25 issue, at least one of which is available online to anyone.

None of the articles related directly to the Trump Administration.  The events of the last few weeks have told us a lot about where it is going.  President Trump has publicly ordered the Attorney General of the United States, Pam Bondi, to indict James Comey, Letitia James, and Adam Schiff, and has replaced his previous appointment of the US Attorney in Eastern Virginia with one of his personal lawyers, a woman with no prosecutorial experience, to secure the Comey indictment just days before the statute of limitations will rule it out.  Donald Trump evidently regards the federal government as another corporation that he has managed to take over, every employee of which has the duty of rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies.  The Justice Department is now his personal legal firm.  Some of his subordinates are thinking about using the RICO Act to prosecute any important institution, such as George Soros' foundation, that has given financial support to left wing projects.   60-90 years ago, when Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party were vastly expanding the role of the federal government in American life, some conservatives warned that "a government big enough to give you everything you need is a government big enough to take away everything you have," and leading universities are now learning that lesson the hard way.  And for reasons known only to himself, Trump has given Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the power to undo important parts of the public health revolution that has saved so many lives over the last century and a half. He is eliminating the regulatory role of the federal government, disrupting our economy with tariffs, and pushing for more and more deportations of immigrants.  Yet in the midst of this, a review by one Mark O'Connell of a new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, enlightened me about other equally momentous developments that hadn't crossed my radar.

Alexander Karp is the CEO of Palantir Technologies, which he founded in 2003 along with Peter Thiel, one of the founders of Ebay.  Zamiska is one of his in-house lawyers and did the actual writing.  Born in 1967 to a Jewish father and black mother in Philadelphia, Karp met Thiel at Stanford,. and initially wanted to become a social theorist.  He is now the highest-paid CEO in the world (he made $6.8 billion last year) and evidently one its most important social engineers.  Palantir was developed to use information technology to meet the enormous new intelligence needs of the Bush II administration after 9/11.  According to the review, $2 million from the CIA helped to finance it.  During the first Trump administration it worked closely with ICE to build datasets of illegal immigrants to plan raids and deportations, and after October 7, 2023, Karp, a strong supporter of the Israeli government, secured a contract from the Israeli government to plan the war in Gaza.  The Technological Revolution is apparently a manifesto pointing the way to a new role for Silicon Valley firms like his own.  They should, he argues, abandon the woke ideology that dominated much of the industry for the first 20 years of the century and provide AI and other military and political tools to the government to save western civilization in its ongoing struggle with geopolitical rivals.  That presumably refers to Russia and China, but the review, at least, never specifically identifies them.  In any case, the Ukraine war has proven that every major nation has to begin building up a new arsenal built largely on drones and AI, and that has led to new contracts between the federal government and Palantir, as well as other leading technology firms.  I was astonished to find this new information in the review: "In June the US Army launched something called Executive Innovation Corps, which it described in a press release as “a new initiative designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation.” Under the program, four high-level tech executives were commissioned into the army reserve as lieutenant colonels. The four new officers were Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar; Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth; OpenAI’s chief product officer, Kevin Weil; and Bob McGrew, an adviser at Thinking Machines Lab who was formerly OpenAI’s chief research officer."  Some industrial executives came to Washington to help supervise war mobilization during the First and Second World Wars, but I don't recall any being commissioned. 

Palantir's previous involvement with ICE, of course, suggests that Silicon Valley--once a libertarian bastion--might have a huge role to play in domestic surveillance as well, perhaps stepping into the void left by Kash Patel's evisceration of the FBI as we have already known it.  The purge of hundreds of people around the country from their jobs for having posted unwelcome reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk suggests what might be done along these lines.  And just as I could not have identified Charlie Kirk before his death, I could not have identified Palantir or Karp before I read this review, for which I thank the new editors of the NYRB.  Success in Silicon Valley evidently encourages breathtaking hubris, leading Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, among others, to believe they have the answer to all the world's problems.  I do appreciate that Karp's hubris seems to have encouraged him to explain to the rest of us what is actually happening in the relationship between Silicon Valley and various governments.

The second, equally important review in this issue, by Trevor Jackson, combines Abundance, a well-publicized new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, with Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton.  You may easily have heard of Abundance, which apparently argues that Democrats have to return to the New Deal tradition of building things, rather than spending their time obstructing projects pushed by evil institutions, including governments.  More important, to me, is Overshoot, because it faces a most uncomfortable fact for liberals like myself:  we have evidently lost the war on fossil fuels, whose role in the world economy has been increasing, not diminishing.  I quote:

"Overshoot breaks neatly into two thematic portions. The first is a bleak climate history of 2020–2023. 

"'Already by 2021 the world had seen at least 1.1°C of global warming, six IPCC reports, twenty-six COPs and immeasurable suffering for the most affected people and areas, and yet it generated the largest surge in absolute emissions—the input that directly determines the rate of warming—in recorded history.'

"They anatomize the world-record profits of the five big oil companies, the immense investment (over $5 trillion, they estimate) by banks in fossil fuel projects, and the ongoing global construction of pipelines and gas terminals. Despite all the disasters, all the models, and all the conferences, in 2022 there were at least 119 oil pipelines in development around the world, plus 447 gas pipelines, 300 gas terminals, 432 new coal mines, and 485 new coal power plants. As the historian of science Jean-Baptiste Fressoz showed in his recent book More and More and More, despite the vast quantities of talk and money invested in producing a technological “energy transition,” last year the world burned more coal and more wood than ever before."

I could not have quoted those figures to you but I already knew that this trend, in different ways, has continued to dominate US energy policy as well, and that it is a bipartisan trend.  Yes, the Biden Administration's misnamed Inflation Reduction Act provided a lot of new money for alternative energy and electric vehicle development, but it secured Joe Manchin's critical vote only by promising to increase oil and gas drilling as well.  Europe is a major exception to this picture--it has been reducing greenhouse gas emissions significantly for some time.  That  may account for President Trump's having explicitly attacked the European nations for falling for the "climate change scam" during his recent UN address--he has allied himself with our own fossil fuel industry and wants to destroy their competition.

The authors of abundance, the review tells us, still hope to see fossil fuels eliminated as an energy source, even though they explain that $13 trillion of assets would thereby be lost.  Obviously only Stalinist or Maoist regimes would be able to make this happen--but the authoritarian regimes of Russia and China, which are no longer anti-capitalist, don't seem to be too worried about climate change either.  I think that if and when the consequences of climate change become bad enough to demand action, some form of geoengineering to block some of the sun's rays is much more likely than a real turn away from fossil fuels.  As I hope you have come to understand, my main goal these days is to face reality, and this review helped me do that.

The September 25 issue also includes a review of several new books on abortion by my Harvard contemporary Linda Greenhouse; a review of two new biographies of the black 1950s tennis star Althea Gibson; a review of two books on free speech by Kwame Anthony Appiah; and not one, but two reviews of Sam Tannehaus's new biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., by the political scientist Mark Lilla--who is one of the best remaining representatives of the intellectual tradition that initially dominated the New York Review--and Osita Nwanev.  I have read two of those four pieces as well and will get to the other two.  My subscription is safe once again.

Bismarck in the White House?

 The Kingdom of Prussia in 1862 was experiencing a constitutional crisis.  After centuries of bureaucratic absolutism, the kingdom in 1848 had survived a revolution and the King had granted a constitution giving the Parliament or Landtag the power of the purse.  Now the government had proposed a reorganization of the military to downplay the role of reserve troops, who included many politicians, and increase the term of service for conscripts.  A majority in parliament refused to pass an annual budget until the government yielded on the army issue.  

The Prussian King William, a conservative, appointed the noble diplomat Otto von Bismarck, who had no national political experience, as Prime Minister.  Claiming that the constitution could not possibly be interpreted to prevent the government from functioning, Bismarck said that if the Landtag refused to pass a new budget, he would continue taxing and spending based upon the budget from the previous year.  He exerted pressure on the civil service, which included a good many supporters of parliament, to conform to his views, making political loyalty a requirement for promotion.  He began subsidizing friendly newspapers and had the king sign an edict allowing the government to shut down opposition newspapers.  In the next year he called new elections, only to see the parliamentary opposition return a greater majority.  An aggressive foreign policy gave Bismarck a way out of his domestic impasse.  In 1864 Prussia and Austria fought a successful war against Denmark, and in 1866 Prussia defeated Austria and Bismarck created a new North German Confederation dominated by Prussia.  Then, for the first time, the Prussian Landtag retroactively legitimated his four years of government without an agreed budget.

The United States, I believe, is about to go through something similar.  Article I, section 8 of our constitutions gives the Congress the power "to borrow money on the credit of the United States,"  and this month the debt ceiling has to be increased to keep the government running.  Minority leader Chuck Schumer, under heavy pressure from some of his fellow Senators and from the House, has decided to take advantage of the filibuster rule to refuse to increase it unless the Republicans agree to undo provisions of the "big, beautiful bill" relating to health care, in particular.  These include the repeal of new Medicaid eligibility restrictions and forthcoming reductions of subsidies for insurance under Obamacare, which may deprive millions of Americans of health insurance.  

The chances of the Administration and its congressional allies giving in to these demands, in my opinion, are the same as the chances of Bismarck giving in to the Landtag, that is, zero.  I don't think the President is going to give up major portions of his signature achievement to a minority within the Senate--and if the same controversy were taking place with the roles reversed, I don't think that I would want a Democratic president to give in, either.  Unless the Democrats cave in at the eleventh hour, that leaves two possibilities.  The first is that the Republican Senate leadership will find a way around the filibuster rule so as to pass the continuing resolution on a simple majority vote.  Majority Leader John Thune has already done this with respect to several other important issues, some budget-related, in recent months, and this is probably the most likely outcome.  The second possibility is that Trump, like Bismarck, will simply disregard the plain language of the constitution and claim authority to borrow the money to keep the government going whether Congress passes a continuing resolution or not.  That would surely provoke a court challenge, but the Supreme Court has always been reluctant to intervene in disputes between the executive and legislative branches.

The wars Bismarck fought, both for foreign policy reasons and to secure his position at home, created a new domestic consensus within Prussia and ultimately within Germany as a whole.  Trump does not seem to have any intention of fighting a war of sufficient scale to do that, even if one were readily available.  I expect the US eventually to emerge from its current crisis with some new consensus established, but I can't as yet see exactly how that will happen.

A Reichstag Fire

 Shortly before President Trump's inauguration, the activist Christopher Rufo wrote a piece warning that violent leftwing groups in the District of Columbia would try to disrupt the event, and tying such groups to a network of leftwing organizations.  That disturbed me because it sounded as if Rufo, and perhaps allies within the new administration, were hoping for something like that to occur so that it could take drastic action against opponents.  I was not particularly surprised that nothing happened.   Tonight, it seems, senior administration officials have briefed leading press outlets warning that the administration is going to use the assassination of Charlie Kirk in exactly this way.

An historical parallel had already been on my mind.  On February 27, 1933, four weeks after Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany, a Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe set the Reichstag--the German parliament--on fire, and it burned to the ground.  Just one day after the fire the German president, Paul von Hindenburg, issued a decree suspending freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the right of habeas corpus within Germany, as the Nazi government blamed the German Communist Party and warned of an effort to take over all Germany.  Meanwhile, neutral observers inside and outside of Germany concluded that the Nazis had actually set the fire themselves.  One week later Hitler's coalition won a bare majority in Parliament, and the new Reichstag essentially ceded all its powers to Hitler a few weeks later in the Enabling Act.  Thousands of anti-Nazis were arrested and sent to concentration camps.  The Nazis arrested and tried three communist leaders, as well as van der Lubbe, for the fire, but the German courts had not yet lost all their independence and the three leading communists were acquitted.  Decades later, a new generation of German historians concluded that Van der Lubbe had in fact set the fire all by himself, just as he had claimed.

Tonight's stories suggest that the administration will use Kirk's assassination the same way--albeit with even less excuse.  Tyler Robinson, the young man arrested for killing Kirk, clearly has no ties to any leading leftist organization, and despite the regrettable statements of the Governor of Utah, no clear evidence of his political views has yet been released.  Interestingly enough, already an online chorus has proclaimed that Robinson is an acolyte of Nick Fuentes, another right wing influencer who has been feuding with Kirk, but there is no evidence for that either.  Nor can the situation in the United States with respect to violence really be compared to Germany in 1932-33, when the Nazis, the Social Democrats and the Communists all had uniformed militias including hundreds of thousands of men who had battled each other in the streets for years, with significant loss of life.   Yet senior officials have told reporters that the administration may try to take the non-profit tax exemption away from George Soros's Open Society Foundations [sic] and the Ford Foundation on the grounds that they support left wing groups that carry out violence against conservatives.  They may also try to charge them under the RICO law, and President Trump has talked about designating ANTIFA--which has little or no organization--as a terrorist group.   I would not be surprised if the administration also tried to designate any protesters on behalf of Palestinian rights as terrorists, since many conservatives already identify such protesters as Hamas supporters.

As Donald Trump has found out himself, the government can impose huge burdens on anyone that it chooses to accuse of a serious crime, even if the target is never convicted.  Cases against leading foundations could stay in the news for years, providing ammunition for Republican attacks and, in necessary diverting attention from the economy.  Meanwhile, Trump has already proven that he does not object to political violence on his own behalf by pardoning all the January 6 rioters.  He isn't interested in toning down our political debate, only in reserving the strongest words and actions for his enemies.  Already he is treating Kirk like a national hero who was killed fighting a foreign war.

We are in difficult times.