Category Archives: History

On Attempting to Control the Extended Use of Authority

Posted on by

I’m reading a book I began reading 40 years ago, but never finished: Politics and Markets by Charles E. Lindblom. Page 130 is the last place I put a mark, an asterisk, next to an especially interesting passage.

I bet if Prof. Lindblom, who died in 2018, had lived to write a new edition, he would have described our current president’s actions with understanding, mixed with disdain. This is from chapter 9, “Politics: The Struggle over Authority” [pp. 129-130]:

People struggle ferociously, . . . first over who will win authority and then over attempts to control those who have won it. However, the struggle goes, the pattern of authority always remains to some significant degree uncontrollable because of ever present possibilities, open to anyone who holds authority, to give it what we have called extended use.

However much the exercise of authority is hedged about with constraining rules, people with authority can always find some loophole to make possible its extended use . . . 

In Western history, the liberal constitutional movement has to be seen as a multiple response to this state of affairs. It was — perhaps first — a movement to convert an often deadly struggle for authority into peaceful procedures so that non-contestants could escape the pillage common to armed contests for authority and losers could go on living and enjoying their property.

It was secondly an attempt to achieve some predictability in the struggle for the use of authority — that is, to move at least modestly toward making the machinery of government systematically controllable in a purposive way (not yet controllable by the masses but by a nobility, merchant group, or middle class). In this attempt, the movement sought to curb the extended use of authority by laying down constitutional restrictions on how rulers might use their authority — to forbid, for example, a ruler’s extended use of his taxing authority to persecute a political adversary.

This attempt to limit authority will perhaps never run its course. The ease with which authority can be given extended use was revealed once more in the history of the Nixon administration and will repeatedly be revealed again [you said it, professor].

A third response of the liberal constitutional movement is the audacious attempt to institutionalize through detailed rules a high degree of mass or popular control over top authority. Since . . . government is in large part simply uncontrollable, since everybody controls it in complex, unpredictable, and ever changing ways, this third aspiration will always be frustrated. But it persists. The democratic faith is that any significant accomplishment in this direction is greatly to be prized.

In the next chapter, we look at this audacious attempt at popular control. Democratic designs amend, though they never replace, the underlying struggle for authority described in this chapter.

Unquote.

We have our chance to exert some control over authority, especially its remarkably extended use, in our upcoming election. I’m convinced Prof. Lindblom would have voted and wanted you to vote too. 

PS: Not following the news is boring but restful. I did hear that the president said something about political provocateurs (or maybe it was snakes) on a plane, but that’s all that’s leaked through this week.

One More: All We Need to Know About the Republican Convention, Part 3

Posted on by

A few more thoughts from Paul Waldman of The Washington Post (I’ve removed several of the most painfully ridiculous quotes from last night’s horror show):

No one doubted that the Republican convention would be filled with insane fearmongering, bizarrely dishonest attacks on Joe Biden, and tributes to the party leader’s magnificence so over-the-top that they would not be out of place on North Korean state television. But watching the first night’s proceedings, something else came into focus: an entirely different President Txxxx from the one we all know, one whose actions and character are completely at odds with what we’ve watched over the past four years.

To put it simply: This is Txxxx fan fiction.

For the unfamiliar, fan fiction allows fans to take well-known entertainment properties and write their own scenarios into them, creating everything from brief stories to entire novels. What if Kirk and Spock were lovers? What if you threw Harry and Hermione into the “Star Wars” universe? What if the singers from “Pitch Perfect” had to fight zombies?

Or what if Txxxx were a caring, compassionate, totally non-racist person who saved America from the coronavirus pandemic? Wouldn’t that be an interesting twist?

So Republicans decided that the way to handle the crisis affecting all our lives was to present an alternate timeline, a bizarro-universe story in which rather than spending months denying the coronavirus would affect the United States and claiming it was about to disappear, Txxxx was in fact the only one who realized how serious it was.

“One leader took decisive action to save lives: President Dxxxx Txxxx,” said the narrator of a video laying out a fantasy in which Txxxx personally wrestled the pandemic into submission.

Speakers were brought in to testify to how fantastically Txxxx performed and how much America benefited. . . .

You’d never know that over 174,000 Americans have died of covid-19, or that while many of our peer countries, such as Germany, Canada, and South Korea, have the pandemic largely under control to the point where their daily death tolls are in the single digits, America is still ravaged by the virus.

But not in the GOP fanfic. “Just imagine what 2020 would have looked like,” said cancer survivor Natalie Harp, had Txxxx not done such a magnificent job. “Millions would have died. Millions more would have been infected.”’

Just like in all those countries unfortunate enough to lack the benefit of Txxxx’s leadership, like … um … well, anyway, the pandemic is pretty much over, right?

Then there was the rewriting of Txxxx’s character. That Txxxx we all know, the petty, vindictive, crude, selfish narcissist who only seems comfortable around other humans when they’re telling him how great he is? Forget that guy. The convention gave us a fan-fiction version of Txxxx, one brimming with kindness and compassion.

“I’ve seen up close a man who has a deep love for family,” said RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who literally was forced to change her name because Txxxx found the “Romney” in it displeasing. (She’s Mitt’s niece.) . . .

Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan told us “how much he truly cares about people” . . .

Former football star Herschel Walker testified too to Txxxx’s boundless love for ordinary people. . . .

Walker also insisted that Txxxx — he of the racist birther lie, “s—hole countries,” and too many bigoted remarks to mention — is actually a great friend to Black people. . . .

Four years ago, the Republican Party said to America: Why not the worst? What if we searched far and wide to find the most corrupt, immoral, ignorant, narcissistic, impulsive, childish, bigoted demagogue in all the land, a guy who cheats on his taxes and has been accused of sexually assaulting women and is a literal con artist, and made him president? Which we did, and we all know how it worked out.

So now they ask: What if we imagined that none of that actually happened? If we imagined a Txxxx who is kind, gentle, and compassionate, and the worst disaster of his presidency, the one that has destroyed so many families and left the economy devastated, never occurred? What if that spectacular failure was actually a tremendous success? Wouldn’t that be great? . . .

All We Need to Know About the Republican Convention

Posted on by

In olden days, the presidential nominee would appear on the convention’s last night, after having been celebrated almost ad nauseam by previous speakers. He (almost always he) would finally walk out on stage to an ecstatic welcome. “I accept your nomination”. More ecstasy bursts forth.

All we need to know about this week’s Republican convention is that the party’s dear leader will speak every night. It wouldn’t be like him to pass up a chance to be on TV. But why have other speakers? Why doesn’t he simply ramble on for two hours each night. I mean, give the boobs at home what they want.

This is more sober pre-convention analysis from Paul Waldman of The Washington Post:

Much more so than the Republican convention of 2016, when there was at least some drama and dissension — remember when Ted Cruz got booed for refusing to endorse Dxxxx Txxxx? — the one that starts on Monday night will have a much more unified and consistent message. In fact, it will be so unified and consistent that the [Grand Old Party] has decided that it doesn’t even need a new platform.

Policy proposals and an agenda for the future are apparently for the weak. The Republican Party is President Txxxx, and Txxxx is the Republican Party.

To that end, the Republican National Committee adopted this resolution on Saturday, which includes lots of bellyaching about the media being unfair, then reaches its conclusion:

. . . RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda;

RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention;

The Republicans still have their 2016 platform, which you can read if you’ve forgotten just how much they loathe Barack Obama. But four years later, they can’t muster up the energy to debate among themselves whether anything in the world has changed, what the party wants to stand for, or what policy proposals ought to be at the forefront of their agenda going forward.

It’s not just that Txxxx doesn’t care about that kind of policy statement. Nobody else in the party does, either.

After enduring mockery over the weekend — and after weeks in which interviewers would ask Txxxx to describe his second-term agenda, to which he’d respond as though he’d been asked to explain Fermat’s Last Theorem — the Txxxx campaign hastily released a list of  second-term priorities. [e.g. making life harder for immigrants, criminals, terrorists and members of Congress, i.e. term limits].

The truth is that the resolution [not the priorities] more clearly describes today’s Republicans. They have some things they want to do, sure — cut taxes, gut environmental regulations, restrict abortion rights — but mostly, what unites the party is that they hate Democrats and they worship Txxxx. That’s about all you need to know.

There was a time when the GOP fancied itself “the party of ideas,” a place where serious people seriously considered serious questions of policy and society, working to devise creative plans that would move the country in a conservative direction.

And when it offered itself to the electorate, the GOP could boil it all down to a few declarations of principle that could be repeated by candidates for every office from dogcatcher all the way up to president. What do Republicans believe in? Small government, low taxes, traditional values and a strong military. This was a source of great political strength; some people even wrote books telling Democrats they should learn from their rivals and come up with their own easy-to-grasp summation of their ideology.

But no more. Like so many other things, this intellectual impoverishment of the GOP is of its own making, the seeds sown long before Txxxx came along. The party always knew most of its voters couldn’t care less about tax cuts for the wealthy and corporate deregulation, so it fed them a steady diet of race-baiting and cultural resentment so they’d keep pulling that Republican lever. It was inevitable that sooner or later a demagogue would come along and distill it all down to just the nasty parts. . . .

On the vast majority of issues, Txxxx has been more conservative than any [establishment Republicans] dared to hope, in large part because he doesn’t really care what his administration’s policies are, outside of a few areas such as immigration that capture his interest.

The trouble is that Txxxx also doesn’t care about the future of conservatism or the Republican Party. It’s all about him. And as it has remade itself in his image, so too is the party all about him. If that’s the case, why bother putting together a platform?

It’s perhaps fitting that this comes at the same time as the GOP’s opponents have engaged in the most vigorous and passionate internal policy debate at least since Bill Clinton dragged Democrats to the center in 1992. It isn’t just that their presidential primary campaign produced enough policy papers to encircle the earth; it was also a very self-conscious argument about who the Democratic Party is, whose voices it represents and where it wants to go.

Health care, immigration, climate change, the size and scope of the welfare state, policing, civil rights, political reform — all that has been subject of extensive argument among Democrats over the past year, and the Democratic platform wound up reflecting both the center and the left of the party.

It still resists easy summary, because hey, they’re Democrats. But none of it depends uniquely on Joe Biden: He could withdraw from the race tomorrow and hand the ticket over to Sen. Kamala D. Harris, and it would be the same agenda.

Likewise, while there are people who love Biden, there are no Biden cultists. On the other hand, while not everyone in the Republican Party thinks Txxxx is a demigod walking among us, perfect in his every word and deed, it’s pretty much the official position of the party that he is just that. . . .

As If the Future Wasn’t Scary Enough

Posted on by

The science fiction I used to read often depicted the future as very weird, culturally speaking. It was the kind of place where nutty celebrities would rise to high office and strange cults would be born. It was like the Sixties and Seventies but more so.

If you don’t find climate change or the next pandemic scary enough (or a visitation like what killed the dinosaurs), read this long article by Adrienne Lafrance in The Atlantic. It’s about QAnon, the conspiracy theory that now looks like a new religion. A few paragraphs:

If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. . . . You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this sounds crazy, but you don’t care. You know that a small group of manipulators, operating in the shadows, pull the planet’s strings. You know that they are powerful enough to abuse children without fear of retribution. You know that the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the secretive denizens of the deep state. You know that only Dxxxx Txxxx stands between you and a damned and ravaged world. You see plague and pestilence sweeping the planet, and understand that they are part of the plan. You know that a clash between good and evil cannot be avoided, and you yearn for the Great Awakening that is coming. And so you must be on guard at all times. You must shield your ears from the scorn of the ignorant. You must find those who are like you. And you must be prepared to fight.

You know all this because you believe in Q.

The origins of QAnon are recent, but even so, separating myth from reality can be hard. One place to begin is with Edgar Maddison Welch, a deeply religious father of two, who until Sunday, December 4, 2016, had lived an unremarkable life in the small town of Salisbury, North Carolina. That morning, Welch grabbed his cellphone, a box of shotgun shells, and three loaded guns . . . and hopped into his Toyota Prius. He drove 360 miles to . . . Northwest Washington, D.C.; parked his car; put the revolver in a holster at his hip; held the AR-15 rifle across his chest; and walked through the front door of a pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong.

. . . As parents, children, and employees rushed outside, many still chewing, Welch began to move through the restaurant, at one point attempting to use a butter knife to pry open a locked door, before giving up and firing several rounds from his rifle into the lock. Behind the door was a small computer-storage closet. This was not what he was expecting.

Welch had traveled to Washington because of a conspiracy theory known, now famously, as Pizzagate, which claimed that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong. . . .

While Welch may have expressed regret, he gave no indication that he had stopped believing the underlying Pizzagate message: that a cabal of powerful elites was abusing children and getting away with it. Judging from a surge of activity on the internet, many others had found ways to move beyond the Comet Ping Pong episode and remain focused on what they saw as the larger truth. If you paid attention to the right voices on the right websites, you could see in real time how the core premises of Pizzagate were being recycled, revised, and reinterpreted. The millions of people paying attention to sites like 4chan and Reddit could continue to learn about that secretive and untouchable cabal; about its malign actions and intentions; about its ties to the left wing and specifically to Democrats and especially to Clinton; about its bloodlust and its moral degeneracy. You could also—and this would prove essential—read about a small but swelling band of underground American patriots fighting back.

All of this, taken together, defined a worldview that would soon have a name: QAnon, derived from a mysterious figure, “Q,” posting anonymously on 4chan. QAnon does not possess a physical location, but it has an infrastructure, a literature, a growing body of adherents, and a great deal of merchandising. It also displays other key qualities that Pizzagate lacked. In the face of inconvenient facts, it has the ambiguity and adaptability to sustain a movement of this kind over time. For QAnon, every contradiction can be explained away; no form of argument can prevail against it. . . . 

QAnon is emblematic of modern America’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and its enthusiasm for them. But it is also already much more than a loose collection of conspiracy-minded chat-room inhabitants. It is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. And we are likely closer to the beginning of its story than the end. The group harnesses paranoia to fervent hope and a deep sense of belonging. The way it breathes life into an ancient preoccupation with end-times is also radically new. To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion.

Unquote.

Joseph Smith said he was visited by an angel in upstate New York. There are now more than 17 million Mormons. William Miller claimed Jesus would return in the 1840s. There are more than 20 million Seventh Day Adventists. America has done it before and can do it again.

One more paragraph from The Atlantic:

The Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are thriving religious movements indigenous to America. Do not be surprised if QAnon becomes another. It already has more adherents by far than either of those two denominations had in the first decades of their existence. People are expressing their faith through devoted study of Q drops as installments of a foundational text, through the development of Q-worshipping groups, and through sweeping expressions of gratitude for what Q has brought to their lives. Does it matter that we do not know who Q is? The divine is always a mystery. Does it matter that basic aspects of Q’s teachings cannot be confirmed? The basic tenets of Christianity cannot be confirmed. Among the people of QAnon, faith remains absolute. True believers describe a feeling of rebirth, an irreversible arousal to existential knowledge. They are certain that a Great Awakening is coming. They’ll wait as long as they must for deliverance.

The president has spoken highly of QAnon and provides publicity on Twitter. All he claims to know is that they are patriots who “like him” a lot (that’s all that matters). It’s easy to imagine QAnon playing a bigger and bigger role in the Republican Party after a difficult election, with less crazy office-holders being replaced by crazier ones.

From Charlie Warzel in The New York Times:

For almost three years, I’ve wondered when the QAnon tipping point would arrive — the time when a critical mass of Americans would come to regard the sprawling pro-Txxxx conspiracy theory not merely as a sideshow, but as a legitimate threat to safety and even democracy.

There have been plenty of potential wake-up calls. Among them: a 2018 standoff at the Hoover Dam with a QAnon believer, the 2019 murder of a Gambino crime family boss by a QAnon supporter who believed the boss was part of a deep-state cabal, an August 2019 F.B.I. report that warned that QAnon could spur domestic terrorism, a West Point report calling the movement “a security threat in the making,” and the April arrest of a QAnon follower who was found with a dozen knives while driving to “take out” Joe Biden . . . 

Then, on Tuesday, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia who has been vocal in her support of QAnon, won a primary runoff. (In recently uncovered blog posts, Ms. Greene said that Hillary Clinton had a “kill list” of political enemies and questioned whether the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting was orchestrated in a bid to overturn the Second Amendment.) Given the deeply Republican makeup of Ms. Greene’s district, she is widely expected to be elected to Congress in November.

This week’s news is a sign of QAnon’s increasing influence in American cultural and political life. What started as a niche web of disproved predictions by an anonymous individual has metastasized into a movement that is now too big to be ignored.

Mysteries

Posted on by

I did something I usually don’t do, which is look at one of those articles about rural or suburban voters in the Midwest who voted for Txxxx and will do it again (“Txxxx supporters still support Txxxx!”). Everything he said was about how he’s doing personally. His farm is doing well. The pandemic is mostly far away. He expressed no concern about anybody else and made inane excuses for the president (e.g. it’s so unfair that the news media report all this bad news — they’re purposefully ignoring the good things (?) the president does).

Fortunately, however, the thrust of the article was that Txxxx will do worse in Iowa than four years ago and possibly lose the state.

Along with the mystery of why anyone would vote for such a terrible person and president, there’s the mystery of why the stock market is doing so well. Paul Krugman helps answer that question and warns of darker times ahead:

On Tuesday, the S&P 500 stock index hit a record high. The next day, Apple became the first U.S. company in history to be valued at more than $2 trillion. Dxxxx Txxxx is, of course, touting the stock market as proof that the economy has recovered from the coronavirus; too bad about those 173,000 dead Americans, but as he says, “It is what it is.”

But the economy probably doesn’t feel so great to the millions of workers who still haven’t gotten their jobs back and who have just seen their unemployment benefits slashed. The $600 a week supplemental benefit enacted in March has expired, and Txxxx’s purported replacement is basically a sick joke.

Even before the aid cutoff, the number of parents reporting that they were having trouble giving their children enough to eat was rising rapidly. That number will surely soar in the next few weeks. And we’re also about to see a huge wave of evictions, both because families are no longer getting the money they need to pay rent and because a temporary ban on evictions, like supplemental unemployment benefits, has just expired.

But how can there be such a disconnect between rising stocks and growing misery? Wall Street types, who do love their letter games, are talking about a “K-shaped recovery”: rising stock valuations and individual wealth at the top, falling incomes and deepening pain at the bottom. But that’s a description, not an explanation. What’s going on?

The first thing to note is that the real economy, as opposed to the financial markets, is still in terrible shape. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s weekly economic index suggests that the economy, although off its low point a few months ago, is still more deeply depressed than it was at any point during the recession that followed the 2008 financial crisis.

And this time around, job losses are concentrated among lower-paid workers — that is, precisely those Americans without the financial resources to ride out bad times.

What about stocks? The truths is that stock prices have never been closely tied to the state of the economy. As an old economists’ joke has it, the market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.

Stocks do get hit by financial crises, like the disruptions that followed the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the brief freeze in credit markets back in March. Otherwise, stock prices are pretty disconnected from things like jobs or even G.D.P. [the Gross Domestic Product] [although the market does quickly, sometimes violently respond to the latest earnings reports].

And these days, the disconnect is even greater than usual.

For the recent rise in the market has been largely driven by a small number of technology giants. And the market values of these companies have very little to do with their current profits, let alone the state of the economy in general. . . .

Take the example of Apple, with its $2 trillion valuation. Apple has a price-earnings ratio — the ratio of its market valuation to its profits — of about 33. [The historical P.E. ratio for the stock market is around 15.] As long as they expect Apple to be profitable years from now, they barely care what will happen to the U.S. economy over the next few quarters.

Furthermore, the profits people expect Apple to make years from now loom especially large because, after all, where else are they going to put their money? Yields on U.S. government bonds, for example, are well below the expected rate of inflation.

And Apple’s valuation is actually less extreme than the valuations of other tech giants, like Amazon or Netflix. . . .

[Prof. Krugman left out another well-known factor helping the stock market (a factor he understands very well). That’s FOMO (fear of missing out). When stocks go up, it’s natural that people want to own stocks. The stock market is, among other things, a giant casino. When some gamblers are having a great time, other gamblers want to join in the fun.]

Unfortunately, ordinary Americans get very little of their income from capital gains, and can’t live on rosy projections about their future prospects. Telling your landlord not to worry about your current inability to pay rent, because you’ll surely have a great job five years from now, will get you nowhere — or, more accurately, will get you kicked out of your apartment and put on the street.

So here’s the current state of America: Unemployment is still extremely high, largely because Txxxx and his allies first refused to take the coronavirus seriously, then pushed for an early reopening in a nation that met none of the conditions for resuming business as usual — and even now refuse to get firmly behind basic protective strategies like widespread mask requirements.

Despite this epic failure, the unemployed were kept afloat for months by federal aid, which helped avert both humanitarian and economic catastrophe. But now the aid has been cut off, with Txxxx and allies as unserious about the looming economic disaster as they were about the looming epidemiological disaster.

So everything suggests that even if the pandemic subsides — which is by no means guaranteed — we’re about to see a huge surge in national misery.

Oh, and stocks are up. . . .Â