Category Archives: Politics

What Is Neoliberalism? It’s Market Fundamentalism

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Neoliberalism has had a titanic effect on the world, but it’s the worst-named political-economic doctrine there is. Robert Kuttner explains neoliberalism at length below (you can read the even longer original for free if you register at the New York Review of Books):

Beginning with the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a succession of Democratic presidents joined Republicans in turning away from the New Deal model of regulated capitalism toward what has come to be known as “neoliberalism”. The neoliberal credo claims that markets work efficiently and that government attempts to constrain them via regulation and public spending invariably fail, backfire, or are corrupted by politics. As public policy, neoliberalism has relied on deregulation, privatization, weakened trade unions, less progressive taxation, and new trade rules to reduce the capacity of national governments to manage capitalism. These shifts have resulted in widening inequality, diminished economic security, and reduced confidence in the ability of government to aid its citizens.

The Republican embrace of this doctrine is hardly surprising. Given the lessons learned about the necessity of government interventions following the 1929 stock market collapse and the success of the Roosevelt administration as a model for the Democratic Party, the allure of neoliberalism to many Democrats is a puzzle worth exploring.

The term “neoliberalism” itself is confusing, because for at least a century “liberalism” in the United States has meant moderate left, not free-market right.

Neoliberalism in its current economic sense draws on the older meaning of “liberalism”, which is still common in Europe and which holds that free markets are the counterpart of a free and democratic society. That was the claim of classical liberals like Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson.

Only in the twentieth century, after the excesses of robber-baron capitalism, did modern liberals begin supporting extensive government intervention—the use of “Hamiltonian means” to carry out “Jeffersonian ends,” in the 1909 formulation of Herbert Croly, one of the founders of The New Republic.

This view defined the ideology of both presidents Roosevelt and was reinforced by the economics of John Maynard Keynes. In Britain, the counterpart in the same era was the “radical liberalism” of social reform put forth by the Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George.

The term “neoliberalism also gets muddled because some on the left use it as an all-purpose put-down of conservatism—to the point where one might wonder whether it is just an annoying buzzword. But neoliberalism does have a precise and useful meaning, as a reversion to the verities of classical economics, with government as guardian of unregulated markets.

In his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Gary Gerstle, an American historian, … argues that neoliberalism needs to be understood as a “political order,” which he defines as an era in which a certain set of ideas and policies have become politically hegemonic. “A key attribute of a political order is the ability of its ideologically dominant party to bend the opposition party to its will,” he writes. “Thus, the Republican Party of Dwight D. Eisenhower acquiesced to the core principles of the New Deal order,” just as “the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton accepted the central principles of the neoliberal order in the 1990s.” Gerstle’s lens helps us appreciate the self-reinforcing power of neoliberalism. As government became a less dependable source of economic security, people were made to feel that they were on their own, thus internalizing an individualist rather than collectivist view of citizen and society.

What differentiates neoliberalism from the older ideal of laissez-faire is the recognition that a free market will not reemerge if the government simply gets out of the way. The neoliberal perspective, as first articulated in the 1930s by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and by Henry Simons of the University of Chicago, holds that if we want entrepreneurs, financiers, and ordinary citizens to be liberated from state regulation, strong government rules must protect the market from the state. Milton Friedman, in a 1951 essay titled “Neo-Liberalism and Its Prospects,” agreed that this project went well beyond laissez-faire. Gerstle writes, “This strategy was built on a paradox: namely, that government intervention was necessary to free individuals from the encroachments of government.” The historian Quinn Slobodian, in his authoritative intellectual history of neoliberalism, Globalists (2018), goes further: “The neoliberal project was focused on designing institutions—not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy.”

Leftist theorists had long appreciated the role of the state in defining the market. As Karl Polanyi famously wrote, relishing the paradox, “laissez-faire was planned.” And indeed it was. To function at all, even “free” markets require extensive rules defining property itself, the terms of credit and debt, contracts, corporations, bankruptcy, rights and obligations of labor, and so on. The difference between the New Deal or social-democratic view of markets and the neoliberal ideal is that progressives want the government’s rules to act as democratic counterweights to the abuses of capitalism, while neoliberals want them to protect market freedoms. But both accept that capitalism requires rules.

As a dissenting remnant of pre-Keynesian economics, neoliberalism languished until the New Deal model faltered in the 1970s with the improbable combination of inflation and stagnation [“stagflation”]. Classical economic liberals like Friedman, who had been politically marginal, got a fresh hearing. Carter, never much of a Roosevelt liberal and facing political fallout from stagflation, hoped that deregulation and market competition might restrain prices. Reduced government intervention was congenial to the business elites who were again ascendant during the Reagan presidency. Neoliberalism became the ideological underpinning of a relentless turning away from a managed form of capitalism.

Gerstle explains how the cultural left also found the libertarian and antibureaucratic aspects of neoliberalism appealing, weakening the New Deal order and its political coalition in yet another way. In the culture wars of the 1960s, the New Left rejected corporate cold war liberalism and unresponsive big government in favor of a wished-for “participatory democracy.” Some of this entailed challenging public institutions. “Both left and right … shared a deep conviction,” Gerstle writes, that the bureaucratized system “was suffocating the human spirit.” A few years later, Ralph Nader became convinced that several regulatory agencies had become hopelessly captured by the industries that they regulated and helped persuade Carter that the remedy was deregulation.

Despite neoliberals’ embrace of economic liberties, they can be cavalier about political liberties. As theorists such as Isaiah Berlin appreciated, people depend on positive as well as negative rights. The freedom to get an education or receive medical care regardless of one’s income exists in the realm of citizenship. These are freedoms that markets don’t provide and that proponents of neoliberalism ignore….

Neoliberalism not only protects the market from the regulatory state; more radically, it expands market principles to realms thought to be partially social. Whereas Polanyi, for instance, warned about the tendency of a market society to relentlessly “commodify” social relations, neoliberal theorists embrace this as a virtue, arguing that market measures can be efficiently applied to value everything from human life to the environment.

In the neoliberal view, labor is better understood as “human capital,” a concept associated with Friedman’s University of Chicago colleague Gary Becker. According to Becker, markets pay workers precisely what they deserve, even though in some cases wages are insufficient to sustain a decent life. Conversely, even rapacious billionaires merit their earnings, by definition, because markets are presumed perfectly efficient when protected from government interference.

In the absence of counterweights such as government regulation and strong unions, these dynamics become more intense over time. Since labor is just another commodity, production can be offshored to countries where it is cheapest. More recently, with computer-aided innovations such as ride-sharing platforms like Uber, delivery services such as Instacart, and odd-jobs bidding sites like TaskRabbit, workers compete directly against one another as vendors in an open marketplace while being monitored minute by minute for efficiency. This was the sort of pure “spot market” in labor celebrated by Friedman and abhorred by Karl Marx.

Corporations, though creations of the democratic state, are said by neoliberal theorists to have no reciprocal responsibility to communities or employees, only to shareholders. Public education is not a public good but another marketplace with mechanisms such as vouchers, which give families money toward tuition at the school of their choice. In health care, cost disciplines are deemed to operate best with the use of market incentives and for-profit vendors. Retirement income is better served by private accounts rather than by public social security. Environmental goals are to be achieved with marketlike measures, such as auctioning the right to pollute, not “command and control” regulation. Taxation rates should be low and consistent across all income levels, rather than redistributive. Antitrust enforcement is gratuitous and even perverse, because markets police themselves through supply and demand.

Government’s role should be largely reduced to maintaining physical security and protecting markets from state interference—the “night-watchman state.”

This has indeed been the dominant set of beliefs behind the policies of the past four decades. Was it a success or a failure? That depends on who you are. For economic elites and the Republican Party, it has been a splendid success. For the Democratic Party, the neoliberal order has been a catastrophe, eviscerating the core claim of progressives since FDR that government can serve the common people. Neoliberalism has thus been both antidemocratic and anti-Democratic.

As economic policy, neoliberalism largely failed to improve economic performance. Growth rates were far higher between the 1940s and early 1970s, when the economy was governed by principles of managed capitalism. However, neoliberal policies did drastically increase income inequality, with virtually all economic growth benefiting the top few percent, while earnings and job security for most people stagnated or declined.

With concentrated wealth came concentrated political power to promote even more neoliberalism, as countervailing institutions such as labor unions were weakened and direct public programs like Medicare were partly privatized.

Notwithstanding the ubiquity of computers during the neoliberal era, productivity growth has been no better than it was in the postwar period. Health insurance became more costly and less reliable as both insurance companies and hospitals were increasingly transformed into for-profit institutions, avoiding unprofitable patients. Retirement security was weakened, as guaranteed pensions were shed by corporations in favor of marketized 401(k) accounts that shifted all the risk and most of the cost to workers. The deregulation of financial markets led to innovations, but they mainly served speculation by insiders and resulted in the financial collapse of 2008….

Why, then, did Democratic presidents embrace an economic credo that annihilated their own public philosophy and its appeal to the electorate? As Gerstle recounts, it was Bill Clinton who turned the Democrats to full-on neoliberalism. Clinton, who had been attracted to the New Left in his youth, began as more of an economic progressive, espousing New Deal–scale programs such as universal health insurance. The early Clinton presidency was a tug-of-war between more left-wing advisers … and free-market conservatives…

But Clinton was unable to get major progressive legislation through Congress, and Republicans became the congressional majority after 1994. A centerpiece of Clinton’s early program was NAFTA, a “free trade” initiative…. Clinton also made common cause with Republicans in Congress to “end welfare as we know it,” repealing the New Deal’s Aid to Families with Dependent Children program in favor of a stingier and more punitive alternative….. Budget balance, a core neoliberal principle, became an article of faith for Clinton….Federal spending [was reduced] to its lowest share of GDP in decades.

Gerstle characterizes these shifts as mainly opportunistic, and he’s not wrong. Neoliberalism also allowed Democrats to compete with Republicans for business support and campaign money. By the end of his two terms, Clinton … had sponsored more financial deregulation than Reagan or Bush, allowing the growth in speculative credit derivatives and subprime mortgages that set the economy up for a crash. Clinton also made budget balance the centerpiece of his economic program, at the expense of social spending and needed fiscal stimulus. Obama then pursued deficit reduction instead of economic recovery in 2010, when unemployment was still far too high….. As Gerstle observes, Obama was “a captive of the moment…. Obama would also prove captive to his own inexperience and resulting caution”….

The book’s lack of attention to globalization as both emblem and vector of neoliberalism [is a problem]…. The era between Roosevelt and Reagan was one in which capitalism was substantially national. This was a deliberate legacy of the Bretton Woods system, which was established in 1944 and provided for fixed exchange rates and controls on the movement of private capital. Those rules made it more feasible to regulate capitalism …because capitalists could not do an end run around the nation-state… Governments could pursue full employment without pressure from financial markets to pursue austerity—the favorite neoliberal remedy for loss of investor confidence….

In the 1980s and 1990s, … “hyper-globalization” became an important neoliberal instrument for weakening the nation-state in favor of a global market that would be much more difficult to control..Many forms of financial regulation were defined as improper barriers to free trade….

With the Biden presidency, we have seen a welcome turning away from neoliberal ideas more generally. His administration has sought to move back to something closer to the New Deal, with greater public investment, more regulation, progressive taxation, skepticism about free trade, and increased support for labor unions. But unlike FDR and LBJ, Biden does not have a working legislative majority. [There are other] obstacles to Biden’s success: the climate calamity, racial divisions that the right deftly exploits, the lingering political power of liberated finance, the continuing appeal of T____ism, and a gridlocked Congress.

Gerstle’s title refers to the “fall” of neoliberalism. But … that characterization may be premature. Neoliberalism has indeed been discredited, as both theory and practice…. Yet because of the residual power of financial elites and their intellectual allies, the appeal of market fundamentalism is far from dead.

This political moment is not necessarily a turning point. It could be an inconclusive stalemate that will produce even more mass disaffection from democratic government and politics (and from the Democratic Party), along with more support for autocrats. As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote of an earlier period, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

The Right To Peacefully Assemble Is Under Attack

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The Supreme Court Five may deny that Americans have a right to privacy, but until they rule otherwise, the First Amendment guarantees the right to peacefully assemble. Except that peacefully assembling isn’t what it used to be. Right-wing violence and threats of violence are becoming common in our civic life. Andy Campbell is the author of a forthcoming book about one of the groups that led the January 6th insurrection He writes about the ways protesters are now being attacked and threatened by right-wing extremists:

On June 24, mere hours after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade and upended abortion rights in America, a truck driver sized up a group of protesters crossing the street in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and put his foot on the gas.

The victims — all of them women — were among the last few people in a group of about 100 trying to cross a busy downtown intersection safely via the crosswalk. They described the attack as a slow-motion horror show: A visibly irritated driver maneuvered his truck around the car in front of him and then beelined it through the intersection, directly toward the protesters.

He slowed down as his bumper met with the outstretched arms of the women still in the crosswalk. But he didn’t stop.

“We made eye contact at that point. And I saw hate. Just hate,” said one of the women, who asked to remain anonymous for her safety. She spoke through tears as she continued, “He screamed at me to move, and I remember shouting ‘No,’ and he started driving. And that’s when I knew I was going to get run over.”

The driver — whose identity police haven’t made public — pushed forward, bowling the women over before he left the scene, witnesses said. Several were hospitalized, including one woman who suffered a concussion and another whose ankle had been rolled over.

Multiple high-profile members of the community attended the march and witnessed the attack…. Initially, witnesses thought they might have an open-and-shut case in front of them: They had witness statements from community leaders, footage of the incident from multiple angles, and they all saw the same thing.

But … in 2021, Iowa Republicans passed a bill that effectively eliminated civil liability for drivers who hit protesters in the street, and increased various penalties for protesters. The bill was championed by Gov. Kim Reynolds, whose own SUV driver struck a Black Lives Matter protester in the heat of the 2020 demonstrations (state police blamed the protester). While it remains to be seen how those laws might affect the case in Cedar Rapids, two women who’d been hit by the truck wondered aloud in interviews with HuffPost whether they might face charges instead of the driver….

The sobering reality now coming into focus is that the attack on this community isn’t particularly unique or surprising. Taken alongside recent incidents of political violence across America, the Cedar Rapids attack is an almost insignificant data point on a densely packed timeline.

In fact, vehicular assaults against protesters amount to a crisis in their own right. Incidents have skyrocketed since the summer of 2020, when millions of protesters took the streets to demonstrate against police violence and bigotry following the murder of George Floyd….

Data collected by The Washington Post proved that those protests were overwhelmingly peaceful — no injuries or property damage were reported in more than 96% of events — and yet protesters across the country were met with vitriol, authoritarian crackdowns and physical violence from the [president] and his administration. He called them “vicious dogs” and “thugs,” and deployed federal troops to events, where they attacked protesters and disappeared them in unmarked vans. Fox News, meanwhile, was churning out disinformation and lies surrounding those rallies, using isolated footage and even doctored images to manufacture a false sense that entire American cities had fallen to BLM and antifa.

And the vilification worked. Everyday people really seemed to want to kill protesters: The Boston Globe analyzed 139 cases of vehicles ramming protesters in just 16 months following Floyd’s death, leading to more than 100 injuries and three deaths….

Today, political violence is a regular feature at civic events, and not just at far-right and MAGA rallies. Gun violence is an ever-present threat across the country, and even on the rare day where a mass shooting doesn’t happen, droves of armed demonstrators and militia groups show up to political events to ensure that the specter remains. Meanwhile, far-right street gangs like the Proud Boys are now mobilizing to all manner of community gatherings in service to the right wing’s various grievances.

When the GOP was up in arms about LGBTQ issues, armed Proud Boys rushed drag events, and their fascist cousins in a group called Patriot Front threatened community Pride celebrations. When the right-wing conspiracy theory of the day was that The Walt Disney Co. was grooming children, Proud Boys showed up to Disney events and threatened attendees, calling them “pedophiles.” And when Roe was overturned and liberal demonstrators filled the streets, the Proud Boys and heavily armed members of various militia groups showed up to intimidate the crowds. These incidents are accelerating as election season draws nearer.

This appears to be the new normal in America. Politically charged violence, having gone unchecked for years, is no longer a fear but an expectation for many politically active Americans….

Unquote.

Escalating violence toward protesters is consistent with predictions that America will eventually experience a violent right-wing insurgency. All the signs are pointing that way.                  

They Have a Point

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Every 20 minutes or so, unless I’m asleep, I wonder why millions of otherwise sane people would give Republicans more power in Congress or make T____ or somebody like him president again. I won’t go down the list of reasons why Republicans don’t deserve to be in charge of our government. At the moment, I’m thinking about why so many people prefer them to be.

I believe the predominant reason is that they don’t like how America has been changing. But the change they’re upset about is not how the rich keep getting richer and the rest of us are treading water or falling behind. Otherwise they wouldn’t vote for politicians whose overriding goal is to lessen the “tax burden” on people and corporations that are already doing fine. The problem they see lies elsewhere.

Most of them fear they’re not on top anymore or soon won’t be.

President Lyndon Johnson, who knew politics backwards and forwards, made a relevant point way back in 1960. Bill Moyers, Johnson’s press secretary, recorded the moment:

We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs. “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he said. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

It’s not all about race, however.

If you could find the typical American who prefers the Republican Party, he would have characteristics like these. In addition to being male, he’d be white, solidly or loosely Christian, heterosexual and nationalistic. He’d be comfortable making fun of people unlike him. He wouldn’t live in a big city or have a 4-year college degree. He might be financially secure or trying to get by on Social Security, but he would fondly look back on a time when someone with his characteristics would automatically feel pretty damn good about himself and his place in the world relative to “lesser” people and “lesser” countries. 

Obviously, nobody has to meet all those criteria to happily vote Republican, since millions of women vote that way (many of whom believe a man should be “the head of the family”).

The point is that recent trends have made it less important, less praiseworthy, less powerful, to fit those Republican-friendly criteria. That fact — what those of us on the other side call “progress” — bothers millions of Americans a great deal. The feeling that they’re falling behind millions of people unlike themselves means a politician who acts or talks tough and promises to address their concerns about their perceived loss of status — to somehow reverse that progress — is immediately appealing, even if that politician owns a gold toilet and doesn’t resemble Jesus in any way. He may be despicable and a con man, but he claims to be on their side, and occasionally does something that makes them happy while angering their supposed enemies. That’s enough to get their support. 

In light of this, an article at FiveThirtyEight explains “why Democratic appeals to the ‘working class’ are unlikely to work” with Republican voters, even if they’re part of “the working class”:

… The dividing line in the American electorate is not economics; it’s race and culture…. And on this issue, Democrats and Republicans could not be further apart. It’s why Democratic appeals to win back the [white, especially male] working class are unlikely to work…

In the Democratic Party’s 2020 platform, “building a stronger, fairer economy” was the second item listed, after strategies to deal with COVID-19, and it sounded a populist note: that the American economy is tilted toward corporations and the wealthy, and that it’s harder than ever for Americans to move up the economic ladder. “Americans deserve an economy that works for everyone — not just for the wealthy and the well-connected,” their platform reads….

[But] Republicans mainly think of the working class as a cultural and racial identity, and not an economic one. When Democrats … pitch themselves to working-class voters, [it’s] primarily a populist appeal bent on uniting the working class against corporate greed….

This takes it as a given that the long-term trends in economic outcomes, which have affected many Americans, are what T____’s voters are responding to. This line of thinking, though, ignores other changes in American life and politics, such as an increase in global trade, a shift toward knowledge work instead of blue-collar labor … and a more expansive view of rights and equalities for racial, ethnic and gender minorities….

[A Democratic strategist offers this advice:] “The way we get around [ideological polarization] is by talking a lot about progressive goals that are not ideologically polarizing, goals that we share with self-described conservatives and moderates….Even among nonwhite voters, those tend to be economic issues.” But this assumes that voters will forget about the party alignments that are deeply entrenched.

When Democrats lament a bygone era in which they won the working-class vote, they are primarily talking about the New Deal policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt— a time when the economy was radically shifted toward worker and labor power. But that was also a time when policies meant to favor the working class were specifically designed to help white men. The relative position of many people in the economy — and society at large — has shifted, and if that’s what Republican voters are responding to, messages of economic justices and leveling the playing field for all workers won’t change that. 

Unquote.

Yes, they have a point. They’re not automatically on top anymore. That they don’t deserve to be automatically on top hasn’t sunken in.

An Expert on Civil War Predicts We Have Insurgency in Our Future

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Wikipedia quotes this definition of ”insurgency”:

A violent, armed rebellion against authority waged by small, lightly armed bands who practice guerrilla warfare from primarily rural base areas. The key descriptive feature of insurgency is its asymmetric nature: small irregular forces face a large, well-equipped, regular military force state adversary.

This is part of an interview from March in The Washington Post:

Barbara F. Walter is a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego and the author of How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them….

We we actually know a lot about civil wars — how they start, how long they last, why they’re so hard to resolve, how you end them. And we know a lot because since 1946, there have been over 200 major armed conflicts. And for the last 30 years, people have been collecting a lot of data, analyzing the data, looking at patterns. I’ve been one of those people.

We went from thinking, even as late as the 1980s, that every one of these was unique. …Then methods and computers got better, and people like me came and could collect data and analyze it. And what we saw is that there are lots of patterns at the macro level.

In 1994, the [CIA] put together this Political Instability Task Force. They were interested in trying to predict what countries around the world were going to become unstable, potentially fall apart, experience political violence and civil war.

Originally, {our] model included over 30 different factors, like poverty, income inequality, how diverse religiously or ethnically a country was. But only two factors came out again and again as highly predictive. And it wasn’t what people were expecting, even on the task force. We were surprised.

The first was this variable called anocracy. There’s this nonprofit based in Virginia called the Center for Systemic Peace. And every year it measures all sorts of things [to decide] how autocratic or how democratic a country is…. Negative 10 is the most authoritarian, so think about North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain. Positive 10 are the most democratic, [like]  Denmark, Switzerland, Canada. The U.S. was a positive 10 for many, many years…. The U.S. was briefly downgraded to a 5 and is now an 8.

And what scholars found was that this anocracy variable was really predictive of a risk for civil war. That full democracies almost never have civil wars. Full autocracies rarely have civil wars. All of the instability and violence is happening in this middle zone. And there’s all sorts of theories why this middle zone is unstable, but one of the big ones is that these governments tend to be weaker. They’re transitioning — some of the authoritarian features are loosening up — so it’s easier to organize a challenge. Or, these are democracies that are backsliding, and there’s a sense that these governments are not that legitimate… Anyway, that turned out to be highly predictive.

The second factor was whether populations in these partial democracies began to organize politically, not around ideology — not based on whether you’re a communist or not, or you’re a liberal or a conservative — but where the parties themselves were based almost exclusively around identity: ethnic, religious or racial identity. The quintessential example of this is what happened in the former Yugoslavia.

What was the moment you thought: Wait a minute, I see these patterns in my country right now?

My dad is from Germany. He was born in 1932 and lived through the war there… And starting in early 2016, my dad was so agitated. All he wanted to do was talk about T____ and what he was seeing happening. He was really nervous. He was just, like, “Please tell me T___’s not going to win…. I saw this once before. And I’m seeing it again, and the Republicans, they’re just falling in lockstep behind him.”

I remember saying: “Dad, what’s really different about America today from Germany in the 1930s is that our democracy is really strong. Our institutions are strong. So, even if you had a T____ come into power, the institutions would hold strong.” Of course, then T____ won. My dad would draw all these parallels. The brownshirts and the attacks on the media and the attacks on education and on books. And he’s just, like, “I’m seeing it all again here”. And that’s really what shook me out of my complacency…  And I was like, am I being naive to think that we’re different?

That’s when I started to follow the data. And then, watching what happened to the Republican Party really was the bigger surprise — that, wow, they’re doubling down on this almost white supremacist strategy…. And then I was like, Oh my gosh. The only way this is a winning strategy is if you begin to weaken the institutions; this is the pattern we see in other countries…. These two factors [the status of the government and how people are organizing] are emerging here, and people don’t know.

… When people think about civil war, they think about the first civil war [and think] that’s what a second one would look like. And, of course, that’s not the case at all. People [need to] conceptualize what a 21st-century civil war against a really powerful government might look like.

After January 6th of last year, … I wasn’t surprised, right? People who study this, we’ve been seeing these groups have been around now for over 10 years. They’ve been growing. I know that they’re training. They’ve been in the shadows, but we know about them. I wasn’t surprised.

The biggest emotion was just relief, oh my gosh, this is a gift. Because it’s bringing it out into the public eye in the most obvious way. And the result has to be that we can’t deny or ignore that we have a problem. Because it’s right there before us. And what has been surprising, actually, is how hard the Republican Party has worked to continue to deny it and to create this smokescreen — and in many respects, how effective that’s been, at least among their supporters.

Even the most public act of insurrection, probably a treasonous act that 10, 20 years ago would have just cut to the heart of every American, there are still real attempts to deny it. But it was a gift because it brought this cancer that those of us who have been studying it, have been watching it growing, it brought it out into the open.

Does it make you at all nervous when you think about the percentage of people who were at, say, January 6th who have some military or law enforcement connection?

Yes. The CIA also has a manual on insurgency…. It was written to help the U.S. government identify very, very early stages of insurgency… What are signs that we should be looking out for?

The manual talks about three stages. The first stage is pre-insurgency. That’s when you start to have groups beginning to mobilize around a particular grievance. It’s oftentimes just a handful of individuals who are just deeply unhappy about something. They begin to articulate those grievances [and] to try to grow their membership.

The second stage is called the incipient conflict stage. And that’s when these groups begin to build a military arm. Usually a militia. And they start to obtain weapons and get training. They’ll start to recruit from the ex-military or military and law enforcement….

When the CIA put together this manual, it’s about what they’ve observed … in other countries. It’s just shocking, the parallels. In the second stage, you start to have a few isolated attacks….The danger in this stage is that governments and citizens aren’t aware that this is happening. So when an attack occurs, it’s usually just dismissed as an isolated incident, and people are not connecting the dots.

And because they’re not connecting the dots, the movement is allowed to grow until you have open insurgency, when you start to have a series of consistent attacks, and it becomes impossible to ignore.

… Here in the United States, because we had a series of long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we’ve had more than 20 years of returning soldiers… This creates a ready-made subset of the population that you can recruit from.

What do you say to people who charge that this is all overblown?

… Groups — we’ll call them violence entrepreneurs, the violent extremists who want to tear everything down and want to institute their own radical vision of society — they benefit from the element of surprise, right? They want people to be confused when violence starts happening…. Which is why people who lived through the start of the violence in Sarajevo or Baghdad or Kyiv, they all say that they were surprised. And they were surprised in part because they didn’t know what the warning signs were.

But also because people had a vested interest in distracting them or denying it so that when an attack happened, or when you had paramilitary troops sleeping in the hills outside of Sarajevo, they would make up stories. You know, “We’re just doing training missions”…

I wish it were the case that by not talking about it we could prevent anything from happening. But the reality is, if we don’t talk about it, [violent extremists] are going to continue to organize, and they’re going to continue to train. There are definitely lots of groups on the far right who want war. They are preparing for war. And not talking about it does not make us safer.

What we’re heading toward is an insurgency, which is a form of a civil war. That is the 21st-century version of a civil war, especially in countries with powerful governments and powerful militaries, which is what the United States is. And it makes sense. An insurgency tends to be much more decentralized, often fought by multiple groups…. Sometimes they coordinate their behavior. They use unconventional tactics. They target infrastructure. They target civilians. They use domestic terror and guerrilla warfare. Hit-and-run raids and bombs.

We’ve already seen this in other countries with powerful militaries, right? The IRA took on the British government. Hamas has taken on the Israeli government. These are two of the most powerful militaries in the world….

Here it’s called leaderless resistance. That method of how to defeat a powerful government like the United States is outlined in what people are calling the bible of the far right: “The Turner Diaries,” which is this fictitious account of a civil war against the U.S. government. It lays out how you do this. And one of the things it says is, do not engage the U.S. military. You know, avoid it at all costs. Go directly to targets around the country that are difficult to defend and disperse yourselves so it’s hard for the government to identify you and infiltrate you and eliminate you entirely.

Are these the things that will be or just that may be?

I can’t say when it’s going to happen. I think it’s really important for people to understand that countries that have these two factors, who get put on this watch list, have a little bit less than a 4 percent annual risk of civil war. That seems really small, but it’s not. It means that, every year that those two factors continue, the risk increases.

The analogy is smoking. If I started smoking today, my risk of dying of lung cancer or some smoking-related disease is very small. If I continue to smoke for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years, my risk eventually of dying of something related to smoking is going to be very high if I don’t change my behavior.

I think that’s one of the actually optimistic things: We know the warning signs. And we know that if we strengthen our democracy, and if the Republican Party decides it’s no longer going to be an ethnic faction that’s trying to exclude everybody else, then our risk of civil war will disappear. We know that. And we have time to do it. But you have to know those warning signs in order to feel an impetus to change them.

Goodbye Norms, Hello Power

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Ezra Klein points out that when Senator McConnell refused to have the Senate consider a Democrat’s Supreme Court nomination and then rushed through a Republican’s, nothing he did was “against the rules”. That doesn’t mean Washington is the same as before:

McConnell … didn’t steal any seats. Nothing he did was against the rules, which was why Democrats found themselves powerless to stop him. Liberals, in their anger, have too often ignored the logic of McConnell’s actions. He understood what too many have ignored: America’s age of norms is over. This is the age of power. And there’s a reason for that.

Let’s start here: The Supreme Court has changed. In the ’50s and ’60s, you would have had a hard time inferring a justice’s political background from his votes, as this analysis by Lee Epstein and Eric Posner shows. In the ’90s, Byron White, a Democratic appointee, had a more conservative voting record than all but two of the Republican-appointed justices — Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist. John Paul Stevens, an anchor of the court’s liberal wing until his retirement in 2010, was appointed by Gerald Ford, a Republican.

But this record of independence was understood, by the parties that produced it, as a record of failure. The vetting process by which nominees are chosen was revamped to all but guarantee ideological predictability. In recent years, “justices have hardly ever voted against the ideology of the president who appointed them,” Epstein and Posner find.

… Ideological polarization is colliding with America’s peculiar political institutions…. Our political system is not designed for political parties this different…. It wasn’t designed for political parties at all. The three branches of our system were intended to check each other through competition. Instead, parties compete and cooperate across branches, and power in one can be used to build power in another — as McConnell well understood.

The Supreme Court is a strange institution — the final word on the law, but with no way to enforce its decisions; clearly political, but supposed to stand above politics; composed of nine bickering individuals, but posing as the impartial voice of the Constitution — and we have papered over its peculiarities with traditions of continuity and restraint. We ask senators to judge nominees by their qualifications, not their ideas. We ask justices to uphold past decisions they believe are wrong, even immoral. At least, we did. In recent years, the political importance of the court has overwhelmed the norms that (somewhat) insulated it from politics.

As I wrote: “There is perhaps no single vote members of the U.S. Senate take with as much long-term ideological importance than that of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, and asking them to keep that vote, and that vote alone, separate from the ideological promises they make to their voters, and to themselves, is bizarre.” The old norm worked when party conflict was mild enough to create a court that felt, and perhaps was, largely nonpartisan. But those days are long gone.

Making matters worse is that the Supreme Court has gone from being undemocratic to being anti-democratic. Lifetime appointments are iffy under the best of circumstances, but the vagaries of retirements and deaths have given Republicans a control that makes a mockery of the public will. Five of the court’s six Republican justices were appointed by presidents who initially took office after losing the popular vote (and, in the case of George W. Bush, after a direct intercession by five of the court’s conservatives in Bush v. Gore). D____ T____ was able to make more appointments in one term than Barack Obama was able to make in two.

You might think that the minoritarian nature of this Supreme Court would produce a restrained majority, one fearful of falling too far afoul of public opinion. It has not. To read the flurry of decisions and concurrences and dissents in Dobbs is to read less about abortion and rights than you might expect. Much of the text is a debate over the legal principle of stare decisis, which directs the court to respect precedent when making decisions.

Stare decisis helps solve a particular problem for the Supreme Court, which must prove itself an institution operating across time, not simply an amalgamation of nine voices at any given moment. When it resists the impulse to overturn past decisions, the court builds in a continuity beyond what the opinions of its members would offer.

Roe was already revisited, in the 1992 Casey decision, and left mostly standing. Under the norms that have governed the court for decades, Roe should have been safe, not because the majority agrees with it today, but because the Supreme Court does not upend settled law based on what the majority believes today.

This is the subject of Chief Justice John Roberts’s disappointed concurrence. “Surely we should adhere closely to principles of judicial restraint here, where the broader path the court chooses entails repudiating a constitutional right we have not only previously recognized, but also expressly reaffirmed applying the doctrine of stare decisis.” The dissent of the liberals thrums with even deeper anger: “Here, more than anywhere, the court needs to apply the law — particularly the law of stare decisis.”

But stare decisis, as the justices know far better than I do, is not a law. And so, in his majority opinion, Samuel Alito brushes it aside….

The argument Alito makes throughout his opinion is simple: The court can err. When it has erred, it must correct itself. Make all the fancy arguments about stare decisis you want, but if a decision is wrong, then it’s wrong, and it must be revisited. To take his perspective for a moment: There is something maddening about being appointed to a seat on the land’s highest court but told to leave standing the decisions you and four of your colleagues consider most noxious.

On some level, he is right. Stare decisis makes little sense. The problem is that, without it, the Supreme Court itself makes even less sense. It is just nine costumed political appointees looking for the votes they need to get the outcomes they want. And the further we travel down that road, the more the mystique that sustains the court dissolves. There is no rule, really, that the Supreme Court must be obeyed as the final word in constitutional interpretation — that, too, is a norm, and one that the court has no power to enforce. If all the Supreme Court is left with are the rules, soon enough there will be no Supreme Court to speak of.

So what would it look like to rebuild the rules and norms of the Supreme Court so they made sense in a polarized era — so that it could be an institution that moderated our political conflicts, rather than worsening them? It got little notice, but there was, recently, a thorough and important effort to think through that question. It will be the subject of next week’s column.

Unquote.

If what Mr. Klein says in his next column is worth sharing, I will.