Time moves quickly in an election season. There I was writing a response to Michelle Goldberg’s column in the NY Times in which she suggested that there should be prosecutions of Trump and his deputies for their illegal shenanigans in office after they had left office, however difficult that might be, she agrees, without it seeming to be just a political vendetta against the deposed party, when information came out about the President trying to interfere in the administration of an election by having his appointee as Postmaster General downsize the Post Office so that it could not handle what are likely to be the huge number of absentee ballots that are mailed in this November. So the question shifts from what to do with him after he is defeated to what to do with him now, he having confessed that he wanted to withhold money from the USPS just so that it would not be able to process the ballots. That is a real life case of election tampering, which is barred by most state laws, and certainly an impeachable offense in that Nixon was hounded out of office for illegal acts to cover up his trying to influence the election of 1972, while here we have an attempt to intrude on the administration of an election, all out there in the open. But before going on to that, let us consider the Michelle Goldberg case for going after past crimes of a President.
Read MorePolitics and Time
Politics is one of only a few social institutions that are complex in that they embody an existential paradox. On the one hand, politics is dramatic. The 1968 Democratic nominating process and the campaign that followed afterwards where Nixon went from a close to thirty percentage point lead over Humphrey to pulling out a victory by only about a half of one percent is testament to that. The same is so in any number of elections when people come from behind or, even more surprisingly, simply solidify their leads, as happened for George W. Bush in his bid for reelection, despite having led the nation into war under false pretenses, the Iraq War at its peak when the election was held. Politics provides the public with a bevy of interesting characters whose repeated exposure to the public makes the public think that it knows what these people are really like; campaign spectacles like rallies and even, up to forty years ago, the intrusion of assassinations and assassination attempts to provide dramatic reversals that keep the plots intriguing. Yet at the same time, politics is dramatic without doing what drama does, which is elide time so that the boring parts are cut out or shortened or compressed. Far from exemplifying Aristotle’s principle that there are unities of time and space in drama, politics works itself out in real time, events moving no faster than it takes them to unfold, however extended may be the longueurs between pivotal events. This fact about politics, that it is dramatic without eliding time, goes far to explain the texture of the public’s exposure to political life as well as the dynamics within politics itself.
Read MoreThe Veep Sweepstakes
The current debate over who should be Vice President Biden’s running mate this fall is likely to be settled in a week or so when Biden announces his choice. It is a remarkable feature of our ever evolving and largely unwritten constitutional system that this choice is left to him entirely alone, each of the contenders proclaiming that they will be satisfied to be spear carriers in his campaign if that is the role assigned to the. And yet the choice is likely to be very significant, given his age. His Vice President may well ascend to office either by death or because Biden does not run for a second term and his Vice President would therefore have an inside lane for the nomination in 2024. But the Vice Presidency has become something at the disposal of the nominee for over a very long time reaching back into the early Nineteenth Century and has, if anything, become even more so now that the Vice President, since Jimmy Carter was President, has significant responsibilities and so the President is likely to want someone with whom he feels comfortable and who shares his basic policy viewpoints.
Read MoreWorking for Trump
Let us commit a bit of sociology by proposing a typology, which means a systematic set of ways in which something can be accomplished. Here are the ways in which a subordinate can support their superior: the subordinate can agree or disagree or disregard or amplify the views expressed by his or her superior. All four of these options apply to one or another of the people who work for Trump, and so we can explore the dynamics of subordination as well as why Trump seems so difficult a person to work for.
Read MoreThe Future of the Presidency
Gerald Ford, in his first speech in office, said that we were over our “national nightmare”. What followed from it were a series of measures to bring some control over the federal bureaucracy so that a future President could not manipulate it in the ways Nixon had. These included the Inspectors General offices in the various cabinet departments, those same offices which President Trump has vacated so that he can replace the career officials with his own supporters. What will happen when the present national nightmare is ended and Joe Biden becomes President, which assumes that state election officials will conduct honest elections and that the Russians will not very significantly influence the campaign or its results? The larger question is a very hard one to answer.
Read MoreHeroism
Heroism or courage is usually thought of as a personality attribute. People are either brave or they are not when they are called on to be so, which means a hero is the opposite of the normal person who could not or would not rise to the circumstances. Achilles was brave; Audie Murphy and Sergeant York were brave; Freud was brave, in an extended sense of the term, because he was willing to challenge the conventional thoughts of his time in a major way that earned him derision at best and a suspicion that this man was preoccupied with things better left alone. Part of his success was to legitimize the connection between sex and ordinary feeling as a fit subject for communication. Most of us just keep our secrets.
There is another way to look at heroism or courage. It is to emphasize the situation rather than the person. Certain situations require a person to take an action that will be thought brave or courageous; to act otherwise is cowardly rather than ordinary. The soldier who is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for throwing himself on a grenade to spare his comrades is brave, though, depending on the details of the circumstances, if he had acted otherwise so as to save himself when that would only have meant that all the people in his foxhole would have died, would have made him a coward, and we do not know whether there was a way he might have hunkered down and saved only himself and still have been considered honorable.
Read MoreNuclear Amnesia
The coronavirus pandemic is pretty bad as catastrophes go. It has killed more people in the United States than the number of U. S. soldiers killed in World War I. It has had a heavy economic impact and we do not know how quickly the country will recover from the economic downturn. It has had a psychological impact in that people are asked to stay home and they are rebelling against that because it disrupts their lives too much, whatever may be the dangers of contagion. It leaves everybody with the feeling of how vulnerable we are to the almost invisible world of microbes. And the situation is getting worse rather than better. What if this turns into a general panic, with people roving the streets to attack who knows what? I have been told that Periclean Athens survived a plague and life went back to normal. I am not so sure that will happen this time around. The Black Plague changed the European economy and may have been responsible for the end of feudalism.
But this pandemic, I would insist, has not been the scariest time in the past hundred years, dating back to the last pandemic, the so-called “Spanish Flu”, which was, in fact, of American origins. That “honor” is to be reserved for the Cold War which was waged between the United States and the Soviet Union from, let us say, the time of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri in 1946, which all but declared it, the President of the United States sitting behind Churchill at the time, to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and Reagan had arrived a few years before at what amounted to a Soviet surrender arrangement with Gorbachev, the details of which have not yet been made public. During that 43 year long war, the United States also lost as many soldiers as it had in World War I, if you add together Vietnam and Korea, two wars in which the United States and its allies engaged with Soviet or Communist proxies, and also add in the dead among our allies that resulted from other proxy wars in Africa and South America (remember Chile? Remember the Bay of Pigs?). Worse than that, during the Cold War. we were under the threat of most of us dying as a result of a nuclear exchange in which both sides would destroy one another within thirty minutes of launching. “The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” was posting how close we were to midnight on its monthly cover and, according to its editors, we came within one minute of midnight. The talk was of “Better Red than Dead” and children were taught to hide under their desks to avoid bomb blast and many of us who were children at the beginning of the Cold War dreamed about atomic attacks and their aftermath.
Read MoreMonuments and Politics
This is going to be a long hot summer. The coronavirus is not going away and there is no plan to deal with it until Joe Biden, should he be elected, puts one in place, the current President having no plan other than denial. The public protests that started with the death of George Floyd seem not to be abating, though they eventually and inevitably will, with nothing to show for it, because the Republicans think that they can wait the protesters out, which is the way they handled protests against mass shootings, and so no legislation will get passed to decrease police brutality until Joe Biden gets elected with a Congress that will support him. The economy may rebound a bit, as is indicated by all the traffic on the roads in New York City, people commuting to their jobs and probably avoiding mass transit as a way to do that. But those who are running out of money, which means workers and restaurants and those who own the office buildings where the businesses have switched over to telecommuting, suggests that the road to economic recovery is very rocky and likely to be long, at least until Joe Biden comes up with a plan on how to develop a new economy for post epidemic times, including how to revamp research and forecasting so that we are not caught so badly when the next pandemic rolls around. Meanwhile, what do we do until the election rolls around and we get to see if that is conducted fairly so that the winner can seem legitimate? That is a problem we have never had before, given that elections were conducted fairly in the midst of a Civil War and during the Second World War.
Read MoreOld and New Protests
Rather than think of the current protests in isolation, compare them to the protest that went on during the Sixties. There was, then, much more damage to property, and a far greater impact on social structure. This time the protests are aimed at revising police policies so that they are less brutal without requiring any large scale change in the way society is ordered. Back in the Sixties, demonstrations that led to the burning down of large parts of downtowns, usually those inhabited by African Americans, and that required significant presence of the National Guard in a number of states for a number of weeks, was part of the movement to change American society as a whole so that its Black citizens would no longer be members of an inferior caste but understood as an ethnic group like any other ethnic group in American society. The stakes were bigger and the outcomes more significant. It is a shame that sixty years later, it is that same ethnic group that is at the forefront of national concern, portrayed by some as victims or heroes and by others as troublemakers. That we have not moved further on in black-white relations shows just how much slavery was our original sin. America has not yet found a way to put race behind it.
Read MoreDefunding the Police
Defunding the police is a policy initiative that has arisen in recent days perhaps because of the exuberance of protesters who see that the protests have sustained for a while now and so want to implement something that will really change the lives of people in their communities as well as settle old grievances held in their communities. So the idea of funding new programs that aren’t all that new is yoked with taking revenge on the institutional oppressors, the police, by hitting them where they can be hurt, in their funding. But this is a very bad policy initiative. It does not stand up to scrutiny and so Joe Biden was correct to deny any interest in it right away and not just because Trump wanted to pin the policy on him.
Read MoreThe Current Riots
When the worst riots since those of the Sixties broke out only a week ago, I thought that I was ahead of the curve by opineing to friends that outside agitators were behind them. However much I dislike conspiracy theories, in that I did not think either the left or the right had brought down JFK, even though there did seem some money behind James Earl Ray, the assassin of MLK, so that he could temporarily avoid capture, this time the pattern seemed to be clear. In many cities across the country with not enough time for the rioting to mushroom beyond Minneapolis, there were peaceful demonstrations in the daytime and evening followed by arson and looting in the night by people who were unknown to the local community and who did not identify themselves. That has since become the standard explanation provided by the media, whose interviews of peaceful protestors tell them the arsonists and looters are shadowy figures. I speculate that they are leftists or rightists or agent provocateurs employed by the Russians, who mean us no good and are availing themselves of a tactic well known to the Czarist regime and afterwards. This theory has been picked up by the Trump administration, though they are careful to accuse only the left wing Antifa and not white nationalists of being the perpetrators.
Read MorePolitics Before and After the Pandemic
What happened to the Squad of Four? You remember them, don’t you? They were the set of leftish congresswomen that came into office after the 2018 election: Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and, most notably, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes, the firebrand from the Bronx, quickly in the spotlight because she was so young and had a mouth on her. Trump and his acolytes were quick to pounce on the Squad of Four and proclaim that the Democratic Party had been taken over by Socialists (and AOC was indeed a member of Social Democrats of America). That was what Trump was going to run against in 2020. Right wing rhetoric quickly turned racist, asking these women to go back to where they came from though that meant, in the case of AOC, going back to the Bronx, three of the four women born here though one was black and two were Muslim and AOC was Puerto Rican. It doesn’t take much to see the racism there. Nancy Pelosi had to pass a resolution rejecting racism however much she held these four at arms length, at one point remarking that they were only four of her members and so hardly spoke for her caucus. AOC disappointed people like me who had hoped she would bring new life and fresh ideas to the Democratic Party by opposing the deal whereby Amazon would bring 50,000 jobs to New York City, even though the plan, including tax favors that wouldn’t occur until the project was done, was supported by labor unions, the local Congresswoman, and political leaders throughout the city. Enough with this jejune radicalism.
Read MoreThe Politics of The Pandemic
One of the lasting aspects of the coronavirus pandemic will be watching President Donald Trump standing in the White House Briefing Room holding two hour press conferences in which he delivers a mixture of buffoonery, wrong information, platitudes, and self serving rhetoric while yielding to health experts who then contradict what he has just said and can get away with it however polite they are being, keeping up the fiction and the reality of demural to the commander in chief. Fauci says weeks ago that what the President said about opening up the country by Easter was “aspirational”, while what Fauci said himself had to be based on science, and the President apparently liked that formulation, saying he was indeed aspirational and more that he was a “cheerleader” for the nation and so not a person who emphasized bad news, and so admitting out of his own mouth what he really thinks, which he is prone to do, which is that he lies to the American people. Hardly Churchillian. This practice of the experts diverting from what the President standing behind them had just said may be why the Wall Street Journal asks him to leave the press conferences in the hands of the experts because the press conferences are not winning him any votes, but the President is a showman and so unlikely to voluntarily leave the stage.
Read MoreThe Poor Suffer More
When I taught sociology of disasters, which covered everything from the Black Plague to Chernobyl, my students insisted that disasters were times that brought people together in a cooperative spirit. That is what the media would like you to believe, showing anecdotes to that effect so as to calm down the population, but it is the opposite of what usually happens, which is that disasters intensify whatever are already the lines of conflict in a society. The rich become richer; the poor suffer more. And political conflicts grow worse.
Read MoreThe March Democratic Debate
The idea of “The Loyal Opposition” emerged in early parliamentary government. It meant that whatever the issues that divided the major parties, whether that was based on their different class interests or ideologies, both of those holding for Tories and Whigs and Labor in Great Britain, the parties would come together in some national emergency in the interests of the nation, to which all parties felt themselves loyal. That certainly played itself out in World War II when Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labor Party, took up his role as the Deputy Prime Minister in Churchill’s Government of National Unity, even though it was clear that Churchill was calling the shots. The same thing happened in the United States during World War II. Frank Knox, a former Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, took over as Secretary of the Navy in the FDR administration, and Henry Stimson, a long time Republican Party stalwart, who had been Secretary of State under Hoover, became Secretary of War, which meant the civilian in charge of the army and air force. The two managed production and procurement and manpower for the armed services, although it was clear that FDR reserved grand strategy to himself. Other issues than warfare are regarded as ones about which men of good will can disagree and that they do so should not prevent any of them from being considered people with the best interests of the nation at heart.
Read MoreThe Second Super Tuesday
The results of Tuesday’ selection, what with clear victories for Joe Biden in Mississippi, Missouri and Michigan, led James Carville to say that the Democratic Party had decided to move on from contesting who would be the nominee to opening the general election campaign against Trump. The Democrats had settled on their candidate. The end, to all intents and purposes, of the primary season, gives time to pause to consider the shock that was delivered to the political system by the fortunes of some of its contenders. Elizabeth Warren did not get many votes, She had about eight percent of the male vote in North Carolina, and even if you doubled that so that her female vote was 16%, that means she just wasn’t a popular candidate, regardless of gender. That may be because her policies were not all that attractive, or it may be because the electorate will not abide a woman candidate. Warren herself said that if you say that sexism played a part in her political race, you will be considered a whiner, but the truth of the matter is that the American people, male and female, just don’t accept the idea of a woman President. A woman in that role just does not sit well with them.
Read MoreSuper Tuesday
The past week in national political events has been satisfying to me because it put my candidate, Joe Biden, back in the race, and I saw the week before last that something like this was necessary-- either a Biden resurgence or a Bloomberg surge-- so that Sanders would not run off with the nomination because and I thought, as apparently did so many other people, that Sanders was the candidate most likely to be defeated by Trump. Most voters, I think, are not like me, who will support anyone but Trump, but will instead settle for the known evil rather than what they suspect to be the worse evil of a Democratic Socialist. Now we will see what happens with Biden. The week has also been satisfying because it provided a splendid example of political drama, something that happens more often than we might expect because the forces that make it a drama are arranged fortuitously rather than by the hand of a playwright. This political drama brought together engaging and distinctive personalities, noble rhetoric, a clash over issues and constituencies as well as personalities, all occurring, mostly in public view, in the course of a brief period of time that allowed for plot complications as well as for the reversal of expectations. Playwrights should do as well, and certainly Shakespeare did in “Julius Caesar'' and Oscar Wilde did in “An Ideal Husband”.
Read MoreThe Nevada Debate
Yes, the Democratic debate last night was certainly a food fight and the candidates had nothing new to say for themselves. The candidates are also getting a little testy out there. But the debate was illuminating nonetheless and pointed a way forwards. Joe Biden gave a very solid performance. He clearly laid out a tax package that made sense, more so than any of the others, and even though no one bothers to mention that Warren's wealth tax is unconstitutional. Biden has to do well in South Carolina and then the media, who are very fickle, and are at the moment conceding the race to Bernie, who they found to have a lot of integrity until it seemed possible he might actually triumph as the nominee and surely to be beaten by Trump, may will come to recoil from Bernie and reconsider the Veep. Mayor Mike had a worse night than was even expected and did not come up with answers to questions he knew he would face. When Elizabeth asked him to release women from their NDA's, he should have said NDAs are not a bad thing and that the #metoo movement had in fact thought women should get training in negotiating them. So where did Elizabeth stand on that? Bloomberg should also have said that Stop and Frisk was a policy supported by many Black politicians because it was a way of protecting little Black girls from being killed by random or drive-by shooters. For some reason or other, New York City Mayors, like Lindsay and Guiliani, never make it in national politics. Mayor LaGuardia became Mayor after serving as an influential Congressman in Washington.
Read MoreThe Iowa Caucuses
One week before the Iowa Caucuses, one poll showed Biden ahead, another showed Sanders ahead, and a third showed the race to be a dead heat. At that point, forty percent of Iowans said they were still undecided about their final choice. What do these Iowan prima donnas want? A third or fourth or fifth encounter with a candidate at a coffee shop so they can make up their minds? They have had since last summer to look these candidates over: to evaluate their programs and savor their characters. The main influence of a Bloomberg candidacy, which is already, by one poll, at double digits, may be to rid us of the influence of the “ethanol” state on national politics. Other candidates have already caught that message in that they were scheduled to spend less time in Iowa than in past presidential years because they are aware that Nevada and South Carolina and then Super Tuesday will quickly diminish whatever victory Iowa seems to provide.
Read MoreThe Dershowitz Argument
Alan Dershowitz, the retired Harvard Professor of Law and well known defense attorney, has offered up a very interesting defense of Trump that deserves to be taken seriously, although I think it displays the limits of legal reasoning rather than the inadvisability of the impeachment proceedings. Dershowitz argues that an impeachment must be based on a violation of criminal law or something close to that, something that can be identified as a crime whether or not in the statutes, rather than on the rejection of a policy of the President where he is doing something of which the Congress may disapprove but is not outside his authority. Dershowitz argues that the Congress had in effect confessed to having engaged in this impropriety when they charged the President with “abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress” because these charges are too vague to be impeachable offenses. They could have charged him with bribery or extortion, but did not, notwithstanding assertions that have been made by supporters of impeachment that a charge of bribery would run afoul of the way that crime is defined by statute as requiring a monetary transaction, which is not what happened in the case of Ukraine, where what Trump was asking for was an exchange of favors. Dershowitz cites Supreme Court Justice Curtis as his authority. At the time of the Johnson Impeachment, Curtis had argued that impeachment was not appropriate for this same reason. There was no crime, only the violation of the Tenure of Office Act, which had been passed only in order for Johnson to run afoul of it while carrying out his legitimate powers to pick his own cabinet. No real crime; no impeachment.
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