Actual Reasoning

People have a sense or some indication or belief in what we might call the pulse of history in that they try, inevitably, to outguess the future, whether that means who will win a Presidential election or whether the animals in the wild will come out and harass the cavemen during a dry season. This sense or practical understanding is described in metaphors because the pulse of history is not really a sine curve by which to follow a human heart but is, to use another metaphor, a way history will jump, and it is often described in literary terms, as when Marx said that history comes first as tragedy and then by farce and that we can suggest that Nixon was a tragic figure and that Trump is a farcical one, even if much more dangerous. These perceptions are not quite accurate, the second one only vaguely parallel to the other incident, but giving the idea of a theme and variation. My mother knew nothing of the theory of probability, but advised me that the card I needed would turn up in a rummy deck especially when the deck was getting depleted. Be patient, she warned. She was also a good poker player. But let us not consider the clear comparison between the mathematical rules of probability in contrast to intuition. Think of real life ways in which people try to grasp how things will turn out and see how those insights get formalized into scientific like procedures, the model of natural science overshadowing how it is that people actually do what seems reasonable. Here are three examples.

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Stable Democracies

When is a nation stable? That means that it is unlikely to violently change its form of government. A political scientist I knew thought it a compliment to tell a sociologist such as myself that I would know the answer, that I could measure whether a nation was somewhere on a one to ten scale of national stability, but I did not know that answer. This was in the deeply functionalist version of sociology. Parsons showed what were the essential needs for creating and sustaining a society but only dealt passingly with when a nation was on the brink of collapsing and his student Neal Smelser separated different kinds of unrest, from food riots to cultural upheavals, but couldn;t say what Marxists called revolutionary situations, everything in the social structure ready for a spark to turn a nation topsyturvy. There were so many explanations. The French government had exhausted its finances just before the Revolution, but that could have led to a gradual evolution to constitutional monarchy based on the National Assembly that developed out of the calling of the Estates General. The Russian Revolution was inspired by the prolongation of the First World War but it did not have to mean the Communist takeover. Germany was unstable in the Weimar regime, as was shown by there being paramilitary organizations on all sides, but things were calming down before political shenanigans put Hitler in legal power, allowing him to overturn that in short order and create a one party state. Why did the American Union hold together and even pass useful legislation such as the railroads and land grant colleges during the Civil War? Hard to say.

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Taste

Taste is usually regarded as idiosyncratic and inconsequential. Some people like olives while others like horseradish. Some people like Big Band music and some like Bluegrass. Everyone can indulge with their tastes without being considered moral or immoral for doing so. And the explanation of taste is biographical rather than meaningful. You like bluegrass because you grew up in North Carolina and like Big Band music because you grew up in the Forties or, in a stretch, because you were exposed to it being more complex than Fifties solo artists but not exposed to even more complex classical music. And nobody cares except when it's time to buy Christmas presents. Only a wife cares if you prefer Mallomars to Almond Joys. Nothing is riding on it, as is the case with a religious belief, where you favor one denomination to another, or a political preference for the Democrats or the Republicans, where you can decide to respect those whose preferences are different but where you have to work at being tolerant of their choices. When tastes are concerned, everyone has free will and acceptance, and, indeed, we can define free will in terms of the availability in a supermarket of any number of items and brands from which to choose, people luxuriating in the options of opulence, every customer the king in his court. But if you think about it seriously, taste is a serious matter because, as Hume said, taste refers to what is much deeper but where you have only a small sense, a taste, of what is going on underneath, whether that means an abstract analysis or a distinctive experience, as when we say you have a taste for democratic rather than republican politics or prefer Modernist novelists to the Victorian ones. Those choices do mean something even though we abide by other people having different tastes so as not to become quarrelsome.

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The 2022 Midterms

The barbarians were at the gates, but not last time when they stormed the capital so as to foment insurrection and so violate the U. S. Constitution, but this time perhaps legitimately were electing Republican majorities in both houses of Congress because of the indifference of the voting public to Jan. 6th, treating the Insurrection as just one of the issues to be considered, such as crime or inflation, rather than of the utmost and primary importance because the procedures of democracy were at stake. The other issues were cooked up by those Republican funders who spend a lot of money to make up issues to contest. The economy is in fact doing pretty well, what with unemployment low and jobs high. We need more workers. GDP is going up and so is the Stock Market. Yes, there is inflation, but it is steady rather than runaway and probably the result of the aftereffects of the pandemic. Three of its nine percent are attributed to the cost of oil, which is the result of the war between Russia and Ukraine. That makes it a war tax,something to endure for the duration. TV commentators will not say so, because they never will allow the voters to be mistaken, but the American people should stop bellyaching. They should persevere through the war, which is not so bad for us in that the United States is shipping weapons but only the Ukrainians are dying for it, quite a coup by Biden given that in a different proxy war, the United States had 55,000 casualties in Korea. That other phony issue is crime, by which Republicans mean that black looting in the cities is crime, which means burglary, while the white insurgents at the Capitol attacked people so as to overthrow the peaceful succession of power and so could be considered traitors to the country, but that doesn’t seem to matter because the Republicans, like Ron Johnson thinks white rebels who kill only a few people are not really criminals, perhaps because they had the highest (or to my mind, the lowest) of intentions, while the looting of property, as deplorable as it might be, is non violent and spasmodic, the result of people not won over to the idea that acting accordingly seems worthy even if what they are doing is in fact unworthy and stains their entire ethnicity.

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Re-release: Why Noam Chomsky Is Wrong



Right wing Americans explain themselves with either the primitive thought of conspiracy theories such as Qanon or the more sophisticated ideologies of Nazi style racial warfare. Left wing Americans invoke the warfare between the rich and the poor. One of the most prominent of the Leftists for many years has been Noam Chomsky whose ideas sum up most of the memes used by the left and are therefore quite distinct from what was considered the Liberal and now the Centrist Democratic view that is ideo;ogically based  on democratic constitutionalism and on the concepts of  rights and a policy of ever extended entitlements and the structures that are within the U. S. Constitution. I have therefore re-released my post about Noam Chomsky so as to provide a challenge against the leftist shibboleths.


RE-RELEASE: WHY NOAM CHOMSKY IS WRONG

June 12, 2017

Noam Chomsky, so I am told, is much admired as a truth-teller among young people looking for accurate explanations of what is going on in America politically and economically. His basic thesis is that the small number of people who are in power in this country exert their interest in enriching themselves by pursuing imperialist policies abroad and oppressive policies at home. They keep down poor and even middle class people both foreign and domestic. I think this view is mistaken. Rather, Chomsky is just repeating shibboleths that were inaccurate when they were first enunciated by Lenin and then, for a later generation, by C. Wright Mills, who wrote in “The Power Elite”, in the Fifties, that militarists dominated the United States government and fomented wars so that they could increase the defense budget as well as keep America in control of third world countries, the natural resources and domestic labor of these countries that fell into the American sphere of influence thereby available for exploitation. Let us deaggregate this point of view into distinct propositions and hold them up for examination.

First is the idea that the United States turns underdeveloped countries into colonies so that it can steal their natural resources and employ their work forces at very low wages.  Chomsky, in “Who Rules the World?”, applies his brush of derision for United States foreign policy very broadly and very thinly, to Haiti, to Cuba, to Palestine, and even to the springboards for 9/11. The United States just can’t do anything right. But foreign policy is more complicated than that. Barrington Moore, Jr. showed long ago that homelands spent more on their colonies than the wealth they brought in from them (with the possible exception of Belgium’s grim rule of the Congo, which much enriched the royal family). For the most part, colonies were ways of increasing national pride, especially among the newly enfranchised working classes which would therefore vote for jingoistic politicians. As far as the United States is concerned, it acquired from Spain its Caribbean and Pacific empire at the end of the nineteenth century because some nation was going to take it away from Spain and it might as well be us, we not wanting Europeans to be involved in the Americas and when it was clear that Japan was the rising power in Asia and we did not want the Philippines to fall to them. As usual, the explanation for American foreign policy is geo-political, a calculation of realpolitik, which means what is in our national interest, whatever the claims of morality or of economics. The United States has been bailing out Puerto Rico ever since it took over the island.

That insight applies to our Cuban policy, much chastised by Chomsky for having turned against Castro because he was going to distribute land to the peasants. Batista, whom Castro overthrew, had served the interests of the United Fruit Company, the Bell Telephone Company, and American sugar interests. But those corporations had made use of the opportunity to invest in Cuba rather than were the cause of our engagement with Cuba. Yes, one issue that led to a severing of relations with Cuba after Castro took over the government (not mentioned by Chomsky perhaps because he was not familiar with the fact) was that Castro did not want to honor the sugar quota that had limited exports of Cuban sugar to the United States so as to protect the American domestic sugar industry. But protectionism is not imperialism. Moreover, the break with Cuba was over political matters. Liberals like myself, who were reluctant to regard Castro as a menace or see him as a Communist until he declared himself to be one (and even then wondered whether he was saying that just to curry favor with his new masters in the Kremlin) were appalled by the show trials Castro staged immediately after taking power. Batista officials were tried in football stadiums, rapidly convicted and quickly thereafter executed. Castro also clamped down on the press and began a persecution of gays. Castro showed himself not to be a small “d” democrat, but just another Latin American strong man, this time the client of our arch enemy, the Soviet Union, and it made no sense for the United States to allow Soviet penetration into the Caribbean, the Cold War waging all around the globe, from the Caribbean to Europe to Afghanistan, to Vietnam and Korea and the Horn of Africa. There was more at stake than the price of sugar.

If there is imperialism in the world today, it does not involve the developed world exploiting Latin America and Africa;  it is in Europe. The North of the continent exploits the South of the continent by offering it loans that it knows can not be paid back and then, like American bankers, foreclosing or threatening to foreclose on the Greek or the Spanish economy unless those countries engage in painful austerity measures to allow them to repay their debts at least in part. But the more important message is that the European Union never learned the lesson demonstrated by Alexander Hamilton when he helped to further the cause of the new union of American states by having the federal government assume the debts of the states, thereby making the federal government the center of economic power and stabilizing the currency and increasing commerce. Rather, Brussels was too hesitant to federalize economic policy and so keep Southern member states from borrowing more than they could afford. As with the American mortgage crisis, don’t blame the people who take out loans but those who offer them to borrowers they know cannot pay them back.

The second and conjoined idea is that the rich people get richer by making poor and middle class people poorer right back here in the United States. That is certainly what Republican tax policy adds up to. Chomsky makes the idea that the rich rule the country for their own benefit by blaming it, in his book “Requiem for the American Dream” (2017), on the shift in power from the industrialists to the money managers, those same people responsible for the Great Recession. But both Chomsky and Bernie Sanders are wrong to think that the extravagant salaries and bonuses the rich bestow on themselves is what makes everybody else worse off and that thereby the incomes of the rich need to be curtailed except to the extent that they can provide the wealth, through taxation, to build infrastructure, fund entitlement programs, and improve the lives of the poor and middle class. Rather, Hillary Clinton, however flawed as an explicator of her own policies, was closer to the mark. What the poor and middle class need are higher basic standards of living and a promotion ladder that allows them to improve their condition of life over the course of a work life. That is why a much higher minimum wage, expanded healthcare coverage, and scholarships to community colleges where people can learn a trade, are more important than reducing the wealth of those on top. How does making the rich suffer help the poor and middle class except, as I say, by providing more taxes to support programs that help the poor and middle class? Punitive taxes don’t accomplish anything except to make radicals like Chomsky feel satisfied that they are creating a more just system simply by making rich people suffer. Rather, look at what the poor and middle class need and go from there.

So, in short, Chomsky supplies neither a detailed study of particular issues or a sustained exercise in creating an analytic framework within which to place these issues, even if any number of social commentators on both sides of the political aisle, such as John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen and William Graham Sumner have done just that. Rather, Chomsky is doing on the left what William Buckley, Jr. and Barry Goldwater did two generations ago on the right. He is just pushing out platitudes that those who are already convinced that there is something rotten in Denmark can glom onto without needing to think through. Let us hope he is not as successful as they were in providing the rhetoric that would get Presidents elected.

Something About to Happen

I am always anticipating that something big is going to happen just around the corner. Maybe it is because I lived through the Sixties and I would turn on the tv as soon as I got home to see if someone important had been assassinated. But, as you may note, there has been no big assassination attempt in the United States since Ronald Reagan, which is forty years ago. Maybe the fad for doing so is past and so we might hope that campus killings are also a thing of the past but I am not sure, just the result of a more efficient Secret Service monitoring where a President can go. More likely that my anxiety for new events is more the result of my sense that politics is an unfinished and unedited drama even though the whole point of experiencing politics is that it stumbles along in real time, full of longueurs and distractions, while "Julius Caesar" is crisp, James Mason superb as Brutus and Marlon Brando also as such as Marc Antony. So I want to see some action by the Justice Department and the other people hounding trump. They move so slowly. But the ninety day rule, which says the Justice Department will not announce anything that impinges on an election (not that Comey abided by it and so did Hillary in) means that nothing will happen on that front until the New Year or so. There is enough nail biting to keep me busy, however, because the November election seems to me momentous (though i think that is the case in all elections). In retrospect, the next day after the election, we will look at the decisions as monumental: whether Trump has been vanquished or revived depending on whether the Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin and Georgia Republican Senatorial nominees prevail or not. Either gloom and doom or a sigh of relief. Too much anxiety for an old man.

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Truman and Biden

I have voted in every congressional and presidential race since 1964, when I voted for Lyndon Johnson, having been too young to vote for JFK in 1960, however much I was hyped up for him, particularly taken with his patrician charm and that of his wife at the time of the Democratic Convention even though I had previously been a supporter for a third nomination of Adlai Stevenson and distrusted the right wing contacts and anti-FDR positions of his father. I couldn’t vote at that time because the voting age was 21 until it was reduced by constitutional amendment to 18 in response to young men having been drafted to fight the war in Vietnam. I was inspired by a telethon (really a radiothon) I heard during the campaign of 1948 where the broadcaster told of a couple that drove a hundred miles to a polling station so that they could vote with one spouse voting Democratic and the other Republican, and so canceling one another out, but both having participated in the electoral process. I still take that ideal seriously. Voting shows citizens have agency, that we the people empower the government, whether wisely or not. I still think that the best way to deal with the lingering of Trump is not with the courts or lawsuits or Congress but in having the people he supports soundly defeated in November.

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Insurrection Denial

The unusual situation regarding the Jan. 6th insurrection is that the Trump supporters are either denying that there was an insurrection or mitigating it by saying that it was a righteous riot in defense of voting rights despite the fact that a violent assault on the Capital has never occured in American history, even during Shays Rebellion, early on in American history, because it was a local event rather than a challenge to the sanctity of the transfer of power. How could this be when violent political opposition to a government was regarded as a weighty matter that required people to declare their old or new allegiances? The Founding Fathers knew they were engaged in a revolution, had explained their reasons for doing so and pledged their sacred honor to that cause. The French and Russian revolutionaries were not queasy about saying thy were out to overthrow their regimes and the Confederates regarded themselves as doing the right thing to oppose the Union, explaining, as the other fomenters did, why they had done so, which was to protect a slave order that was required so that there could be a democracy for the white elite. But this time is different. Rioters showing up in court say they were misled or overcome by enthusiasm. Not much there really happened and legislators who had abetted the uprising now hide their enthusiasm at the time by hiding behind technicalities so as not to be indicted rather than facing up to what they did as the honorable course. Let us try to understand this not as cowardice but rather as a distinctive political phenomenon, sort of a rehearsal for revolution that might arise again if people are able to survive what they hope is the temporary quelling of insurrection or maybe even claiming that it need not arise again because usual electoral politics will allow the insurrectionists to become triumphant, whatever their claim that electoral politics have been deeply delegitimated in 2020. Maybe Wyoming politics are clean and so can get rid of Liz Chaney, which is certainly the right of the Wyoming electorate however unwise it may be.

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Heros and Roles

A hero is a person who takes risks of life or property or social respect so as to accomplish an end. Going beyond their duties makes someone a hero and that applies to all the firefighters who ran up the World Trade Center on 9/11 or the very few of those civilians who run into the surf so as to rescue someone from an undertow. By extension, Willy Loman can be considered a hero because he risked exasperation and planning and anxiety so that he could pay off his mortgage and so everyman is in some way or another a hero, but we usually treat heroism as people or categories of people who are extraordinary in putting duty above self interest. Other people are just conducting their lives and accorded dignity but not heroism.

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Should Trump Be Prosecuted?

Whether to prosecute Trump for his various crimes, including the incitement to riot against the Congress, is a difficult question. I infer that the Founding Fathers would have thought not to do so. There is no provision in the Constitution for a judicial procedure for a crime committed by the President. Rather, there is the political decision to relieve a President of office through impeachment and conviction. The United States does not want to follow a path of getting rid of a President by jailing or executing him, something the Founding Fathers might have anticipated would happen more than a century later when politicians out of favor in the Soviet Union were put into kangaroo courts and were executed for their so called crimes. Conservatives also think that a President has a wide leeway as to how to act while in office and so should not be tried for what he deems it necessary to do in the interests of the nation. Lincoln had suspended habeas corpus. Should he have been prosecuted for that if he had lived even if it had been a useful expedient? But, as a matter of fact, few Presidents go even close to engaging in crimes. Nixon did, but how many others? FDR didn’t and the closest Truman did during his very active Presidency was the Youngstown Steel case, where he nationalized factories so as to prosecute the Korean War, and that was a political matter, purely above board rather than conspiratorial, and was overturned by the supreme Court as having gone beyond the scope of Presidential powers. What happens rather than a trial is a scandal, such as Reagan’s involvement with Iran Contra. He was never prosecuted for violating the Boland Amendment not to send money to the Contras.

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Two Sides Going Past One Another

History is informative when it allows for comparisons but not predictive because it does not tell you how things will work out. It is therefore informative to point out that there are ways in which the era of the Fifties and Sixties is repeating itself in the Twenties by presenting an intensity of events in the public arena that are unsettling and foment change and are perfectly visible. That earlier era saw assassinations and riots and major landmark legislation and Supreme Court decisions, deeply flawed Presidents contending with real statesmen (though today including stateswomen) and simultaneous actions here and abroad: a war then as well as a major domestic upheaval over race, based on regional conflict, while today there is a still minor scale (for American) war alongside an upheaval over the rights of women and attendant other “minorities”, again based on regionalism (the west coast and the east versus the south and the mountain states). There was rioting in a number of cities after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a little bit of rioting after the death of George Floyd a few years ago. There was back then a President assassinated and one resigned and today there is a recent President who was twice impeached and leads an insurrection and a President, two incumbent’s before, who qualifies now as the second worst President ever for having gone into war on the basis of a lie, the real reason for it still unclear. History, for the duration of the periods, then and now, seems to be moving at quick speed, not having to absorb one moment before there is another one demanding its attention. What is happening that makes us attend to what will happen next, what will unfold in the news cycle, is the long slumbering answer or backlash against the Fifties and Sixties, an attempt to regain what had been supposedly lost as a result of those reforms some fifty or more years ago and reestablish the social order that existed before those changes. It has been a long time in coming, but it has come, and it is unclear which of the two major factions, those who prefer what existed before the Fifties and what came after it, will prevail.

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Where Morals Can't Go

Hobbes is treated by intellectual historians as a pessimist because people are so anxious to enter into a social contract that will protect their lives and livelihood that they will rush to anyone who offers such guarantees, including potential leaders who are demagogues or charlatans, so long as they offer peace and security. Never mind that Hobbes gives a back door way to democracy because he is saying that the authority for leadership is the result of the consent of the governed in that the popular majority decides whether they can live with the going or the proposed political arrangement. John Locke, on the other hand, is to be regarded as an optimist in that there is never an end to how people can form a new social contract, a new one created as soon as an old one ends, people always political in that they can frame an ever more useful constitution-- or, at least, the British are always able to. Moreover, there is, in addition to the overall social contract, there are any number of individual contracts that people can make which are mutually advantageous, such as contracts for employment, or to rent land, each crafted that is voluntary and reasonable, even if some people can arrive at a disadvantage as when a person agrees to work for low wages because poor people need the work more than the rich people need to hire one or another of them. Bad contracts are still effective except when people’s lives are endangered, and so slavery is prohibited by Locke as an individual contract because becoming a slave means putting one’s life in danger. And, according to Locke, people have innate rights, regardless of the nature of the constitution or the laws, whereby people are recognized as morally free to act because such things, like free speech or privacy, are recognized as part of a person’s nature rather than just the sufferance allowed by the government. It would therefore seem, in Locke’s view, that morality orders most of social life in that people can appeal to government, freely agreed to contracts, and personal rights, as allowing people to defend, of right, their dignities. But the Lockean question remains: where are the areas of social life where morality doesn’t prevail? What parts of social life have no moral sway, either because of a general social contract, or a particular contract, or as a matter of right? Where is the abyss into which people can descend where there is no morality?

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New Yorker Covers and Culture

Some years ago, my friend, the critic of culture Roland Wulbert, remarked that “New Yorker” covers contained only one joke. I did not know whether this observation was a convention unessential to the genre of the magazine’s cover or whether it was an essential point so that this form of understanding could not be the same thing if it were to include multiple jokes. I have been intrigued with this insight ever since. I want to get right what magazine covers are as forms of expression and what they tell about the message to be conveyed or about the temper of the times, cultural critics looking at the nuances of one or another aspect of culture so as to grasp the nature of reality, of existential life, or else the social ambiance of a time, for those items of culture reveal far more to me, at least, than what is told by survey research or by the not so deep thinkers who opine over the airways.

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Jane's Aphorism

My deceased wife had an aphorism that seems to ring true and to which I regularly return. It says: “If you can’t explain what you mean, then you can’t know what you mean”. She arrived at this aphorism by trial and error by noticing people who got confused when they were asked to explain themselves. This insight had been formalized by Bertrand Russell's Theory of Definite Description which propounded the idea that a wrong statement was not just incorrect but made no sense. If a statement were properly propounded, it had to make sense. Jane applied this criterion to any number of people who got very annoyed at having failed to make themselves as clear as Jane required people to be. It was a standard that also applied in the mid Twentieth Century to what was then considered an age of ideology. I would have arguments with Marxists and Stalinists where each of us would try to pick out the crucial flaw in their logic, reducing one another to basic and irreducible axioms. I would argue that Weber’s idea of status and organization were independent of social class as the ways to create power and that was all that had to be said, and a Stalinist and I also came to agree to essentials, he thinking that something called the Communist Party would govern over the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its wisdom would lead us to the future, in whatever way the Party chose and saw fit, while I thought the evolution of society was subject to the constraints of social structure. I thought him quasi religious in he giving himself over to an ultimate authority, or to put it otherwise, to an almighty, but he was clear and consistent. He knew what he meant even if his basic stated principles did seem to me muddled because any leader could call himself a Communist and lord over everyone if there were no independent standards. That point of view is very different from the present one where people can, in effect, invoke the idea actors or feigning roles that “you know what I mean” as a way of providing a sufficient explanation for their meaning, having a sense of it that it would be rude to suggest needed further explanation, and people back in those days also though rude if Jane would persist and insist on people explaining themselves i f they were not to be thought of as engaging in gibberish. No longer insisting on narrowing down to basic principles but only a general sense of things to be respected.

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The Legitimacy of the Supreme Court

The legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court may be deteriorating, whether because so many decisions are badly decided or because too many of them are so out of general public sentiment. Leaking of Justice Alito’s draft decision to override Roe v. Wade is just a fru-fru that doesn’t amount to much even if Sen. Cruz of Texas says he is sure, without evidence, that a Liberal had disclosed it, and that the perpetrator should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, though it is not clear that this is even a minor legal infraction. After all, this is not a national security matter, just a custom of privacy before everyone has had a chance to edit a decision. Moreover, it is the Conservative Supreme Court watchers who are the ones casting aspersions to the legitimacy of the Court in that they are the ones who seem to find every recent major decision since Brown v. Board of Education to have been flawed and requires being overturned. What validity should Supreme Courts hold if they get everything wrong? Indeed, most major decisions rest on flimsy grounds. Griswald discovered the penumbra of the Constitutional right to privacy and Roe invented legislative like stipulations about when the Court could allow when the government could intervene in privacy (the last trimester), something subject to change every few years when there are advances in neonatal care that move fetal viability to ever shorter terms in their pregnancies. It is a very different way to make decisions from on high as when the Vatican insists it never makes mistakes or apologizes for few papal decisions or even administrative matters where they have erred. If errors are frequent, then how is the Catholic Church to be infallible? If the Supreme Court is regularly erroneous, how are we to think that the Court is wise and thoughtful?

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The White House Press Conference

The White House Press Conference is a peculiar institution, one of long standing and going back to when FDR met a gaggle of reporters to crowd around his desk and throw out questions, knowing that FDR could handle any ones that came up, avoiding hot potatoes and providing answers both glib and persuasive if he wanted to say something. Steve Early, His press secretary, facilitated information traffic rather than made much news. Jen Psaki, the present press secretary, who meets in the press room to take questions most days of the work week, follows most predecessors in not trying to make much news. She refers questions to the State or Defense Departments or to agencies to get details, and works hard not to utter a striking phrase or otherwise outshine or anticipate whatever the President might have said about a matter or what the President might soon say. That was different from what happened in the Trump Administration when press secretaries vied to be as partisan as possible and so curry favor with Trump, there being an audience of one for the press room, while Psaki’s audience is to the public, to make the Administration as surefooted as possible and in line with the Administration’s point of view.

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Anarchic Democracy

Democrats are in the dumps. Poll numbers are cratering for Joe Biden. Paul Krugman says that the Republican field of Senatorial candidates are just spewing hate rather than offering policy alternatives. The Krugman analysis has credibility because Mitch McConnell has said that he is going to run the midterms on inflation, the border, and crime, though he just mentions the topics rather than offers alternative policies. McConnell is just carping, Republicans full of outrage rather than solutions, And why should that not be the case? The Democrats are on the defensive, many of them sure that they will lose both the House and the Senate even if Biden has managed Covid and the Russian Ukraine War quite well. What is the disconnect between governmental results and the electorate? That is the question I want to answer.

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Prophesying From Fall, 1943

By the fall of 1943, World War II, for the United States, was half over and so the contours of what the war was like was well established and what would have to ensue was foreseen. It was two years since Pearl Harbor but it was clear that the Axis powers were in retreat. The Japanese were no longer expansive, the pivotal victory in Guadalcanal victorious, and the ever increasing American armada moving up the island chains in the Pacific to deal with the eventual defeat of Japan, however problematic whether that would need invasion rather than isolation, and not considering what would eventually happen, which was an atomic bomb. What was also forecast were very bloody campaigns, the United States having conquered what might seem the inconsequential island of Tarawa, which devastated the U. S. Marine Second Division, but was a stepping stone to the East. Iwo Jima and Okinawa would follow. And in Europe, it was also the case that Germany had spent its strength, sure to be defeated unless Hitler came up with new wonder weapons, such as sufficient numbers of jet planes and rockets, so as to make up the difference of ever growing American armament. Hitler had already by then failed at Stalingrad, and in a slow but definite retreat on the Italian boot, but everyone knew that a cross channel landing and progress to Berlin would neccesitate great casualties. The war was not over even if the Allies were clearly winning. The question is what was the state of the nation in the midst of the war and what did it foretell about what post-war America would be like, whether the war was transformative as it would show itself to be rather than to fall back into a pre-war mode, has happened in the South after the end of the Civil War, or destabilized, as happened to Germany after the First world War, or surprisingly having few consequences after the Vietnam War, and England, the victor of the First World War, not really changed until after the second World War when Labor created the nationalization of industry and social services, such as education and health. Can we see into the crystal ball of 1943 so as to predict its future?

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Wartime Atrocities

Let us try to sort out the terms that are now being applied to the newly discovered wartime atrocities found north of Kiev, that term neutral in that it remains problematic whether these events of Russian troops killing civilians, executing them after they are tied behind their backs, is to be treated as a war crime or even a genocide which is what Zelensky says is the case because the Russians are out to eliminate Ukraine as a people. Biden regards them merely as war crimes and regards Putin as a butcher and a war criminal and wants independent authorities to put on trial those who are responsible. Those events of killing civilians are vile and horrendous and certainly to be condemned, but whether to try them is a good question. Today, we say that killing civilians is a war crime because it does not fulfill a military objective. In similar fashion, it is considered a violation of the rules of warfare not to execute prisoners of war and expect combattants to either be wearing a uniform or some insignia or, at the least, be enrolled in a military so that the person is not regarded as a terrorist. But these restrictions only apply to the defeated. Japanese commanders were executed for having mistreated prisoners of war and Germans for having used slave labor camps. But the victors get scot free. Gen. Curtis LeMay was not prosecuted for leveling Japanese cities, the bombing of civilians treated as collateral damage while artillery aimed at civilians is regarded, now as then, as culpable. You could argue that hurting the morale of civilian targets is a military goal, but in that case Russians are now engaged in hurting morale by killing people and so should not be regarded as a war crime.

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