Category: Political issues

The justice we’ve been waiting for

For years, our televisions brought us the horror story that was Donald Trump. Last night, our televisions brought us something completely different: an end to the despair that Trump and the Republican Party would inevitably get away with everything. It should now be clear to all that Donald Trump and many others are going to prison. There will be many charges from the U.S. Department of Justice, the most damning of which will be seditious conspiracy.

I believe that Liz Cheney was speaking to history when she said this:

“Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.” To decent human beings, it is appalling that the Republican Party even continues to exist.

On Fox News last night, Tucker Carlson said, “They are lying, and we will not let them do it.” There is not much that we can do for those who still believe Tucker Carlson. But they are a minority, not more than 25 to 30 percent of the voting population. They do not have the power to prevent justice from being done. The events of January 6, 2021, were their Hail Mary effort to retain that power. That effort not only failed, it also made things much worse for them. The lies of Fox News cannot prevent the justice that is coming. More lies will only darken the stain that they carry into history. Among other things, the hearings will make sure that history has the full story of what happened during the Trump administration and on January 6, 2021.

The greatest danger now is that Republicans could regain a majority in the U.S. House or Senate after the November election. If they do, they will do everything possible to throw the country back into chaos. But, without control of the U.S. Department of Justice, which is out of Republican reach until January 2025, there is nothing that Republicans can do to stop Donald Trump and those who aided him from being put on trial.

If the Republican Party can raise up a whole new set of dangerous people who did not commit crimes for Trump and thus won’t go down with him, then we are not out of the woods. But Trump himself, and those who aided him, are history. They now have no power other than the power of their lies. The danger to the American republic now is not Donald Trump. It is the Republican Party.

The long, long culture war

Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Darrin M. McMahon. Oxford University Press, 2001. 262 pages.

Merely reading about the violent history of France is enough to get a case of PTSD. France, already damaged by the Protestant Reformation of the 16th Century, lurched from monarchy to revolution and then back again to monarchy. Though most of us are at least somewhat familiar with that history, what most of is did not know is that it was one long culture war, the very same culture war that we are still fighting today.

This culture war was between the Enlightenment — which then was new — and the mortal enemies of the Enlightenment, people on the right who have been with us since the Enlightenment’s beginnings. On the left was a new humanist philosophy that made no claim to being a divine revelation. Its roots were in reason. It was a European project, but this book limits itself to France, where the chief luminaries of the Enlightenment were men such as Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau.

Who were these mortal enemies of the Enlightenment? That can be answered accurately with a few words: the church and the authoritarian elite, but mostly the church. Most of the anti-philosophes, as this book calls them, were abbots and theologians. They saw Enlightenment philosophy as an evil conspiracy out to put an end to royalty and religion. In their minds, royalty and religion were the only forces capable of holding a society together. In France, their anti-Enlightenment evidence for this was the Reign of Terror after the 1789 revolution. These anti-philosophes were organized, and they produced a blizzard of books, tracts, and pamphlets to try to counteract the writings of the Enlightenment philosophes.

This old culture war, which raged white-hot from before the Revolution until the beginning of the Third Republic in 1870, was remarkably similar to the culture war through which we are living today. We could call it MFGA — Make France Great Again:

“…[T]he effort [was] to cleanse France of all trace of the Enlightenment and of the Revolution and to invest its inhabitants with a spiritual piety more intense than the eighteenth century had ever known. On the surface, this was a journey to the mythic past. But in truth the world that the men and women of the far Right aimed to create was not that of the ancien regime, the former regime. The world to which they hoped to return existed only in their minds.”

This book is above all a history of France, and McMahon has little to say about parallels with the present, which are obvious. He has little to say about the rest of Europe. I would venture to say that Britain handled the Enlightenment far better than France for two reasons: Henry VIII had conveniently gotten rid of the Catholic Church centuries before; and England’s royalty was more humane than France’s. McMahon does write, though, in describing how the enemies of the Enlightenment demonized their enemies: “Bequeathing an image of its enemy that long outlived it, the French Counter-Enlightenment, too, passed on a structure of opposition and a set of recurrent themes that would resurface in right-wing thought even to the present day.”

In America, the Enlightenment provided the basis for a new government and a new Constitution. But there were those in high places who hated the Enlightenment. McMahon mentions the Reverend Timothy Dwight, president of Yale from 1795 to 1817, who preached a sermon “in which he denounced the orchestrated plot, hatched by Voltaire, Frederick II, the Encyclopedists, and the Society of the Illuminati to destroy the Christian religion and the French monarchy.” That’s a conspiracy theory — from the president of Yale! According to Wikipedia, “Dwight was the leader of the evangelical New Divinity faction of Congregationalism — a group closely identified with Connecticut’s emerging commercial elite.”

Is there a traceable paper trail from then to now? I would say no. Rather, it’s that authoritarians and religionists never change. Their thought was just as ossified in the 18th Century as it is today. McMahon does mention, in his notes, a book from 1991 that I will read next: The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, which deals with how conservative forces have tried to prevent progress. McMahon also mentions the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), whom I first encountered during my student days and who is now back on my reading list.

McMahon quotes Whitehead: “The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.” Why that is so is easy enough to see. Those who abhor the ideas of reason, equality, and democracy will fight like hell against progress. They are baffled by how anyone could possibly want a world ruled by anyone other than preachers and kings.

The theater of intimidation


The U.S.S. Nimitz under the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Fleet Week, 2006. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

We all want to be as aware as possible of the political environment that we are immersed in. An important element to watch for is: Who is trying to intimidate us? How? Why? Are they trying to intimidate us with real power? Or are they bluffing? Intimidation is a key part of the right-wing playbook.

Consider what Madison Cawthorn wrote in an Instagram Post after he was defeated in a primary election on May 17: “The time for gentile [sic] politics as usual has come to an end. It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark MAGA to truly take command. We have an enemy to defeat, but we will never be able to defeat them until we defeat the cowardly and weak members of our own party. Their days are numbered.”

Cawthorn is a clueless amateur. His threats will appeal to other clueless amateurs, but Cawthorn has no power to make good on his threats. But intimidation may also come from real power, from those who are pros at the theater of intimidation.

Fleet Week is an annual event in San Francisco. Once I actually joined the crowd on the Golden Gate Bridge to watch an aircraft carrier loom up out of the fog over the Pacific and pass under the bridge, with its crew in dress whites standing at attention and lining the decks. The display of power was stunning and, I admit, even beautiful. I quickly recognized that it was theater. Part of the job of the U.S. Navy, during peacetime, is to display American naval power to the world. American naval power is certainly true power, but there is still an element of bluffing, as American military adventures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan show. Vladimir Putin has true power. But he also got caught bluffing when his army encountered the power of Ukraine.

The news this week was dominated by yet another school shooting. This one was in Texas, in the little town of Uvalde. The Uvalde police, it seems, at first tried to fudge the truth about their response. It turns out that they never went into the building to confront the shooter because they were afraid they might get shot. Instead, those cowboy Texans waited for federal help, from the U.S. Border Patrol. Two years ago, the Uvalde police department had boasted about its S.W.A.T. team, with a photo of the team in full costume. The boast included a warning to people not to be alarmed at the scary sight of the S.W.A.T. team. After the photo of the S.W.A.T. went viral, more than one person pointed out in social media that the real purpose was not to make Uvalde’s Latin community feel safer, but, rather, to intimidate them.

Whether it’s the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, the MAGA attack on the U.S. Capitol, militia rallies, Trump rallies, the practice of Trumpian politics, or just a dude with a gun on his hip, there is always an element of the theater of intimidation. Even the red MAGA caps are part of the costume in the theater of intimidation. It works. There are many people who still believe that Trump and his co-conspirators will never be brought to justice. I attribute that to the demoralization and intimidation that is such an important element of Trumpian politics. They want us to believe that we’ve already lost. But it’s theater.

In the present political environment, few pundits are willing to acknowledge that Trump and MAGA are in free fall toward the trash heap of history. One of the smartest pieces I’ve seen lately was in the Washington Post, “Why Trump’s 2024 chances are even worse than Georgia suggests.” The author, Jason Willick, quotes Richard Hofstadler: ” … [T]hird parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.” Trump, having stung, is going down. And, as he goes down, the bluffing will be exposed.

I’m not saying that right-wingers don’t do real harm with every ounce of real power that they can get. But they also use bluffing to augment their power and to do damage that, except for the theater of intimidation, they would not have been able to do. They’re scary. But they’re not as scary as they want to be, and they’re not as scary as they think they are.


Source: Facebook

Update:

Turning our political radar north


The countries of the Baltic Sea. Source: Global International Waters Assessment via Wikimedia Commons.

Today, Sweden and Finland formally applied for membership in NATO. (Washington Post story here.) This is a very big deal. Remember when the Neocon war hawks of the Bush-Cheney administration tried to teach us that diplomacy no longer matters and strove to establish an American empire armed to the teeth, fueled by oil, and aligned with authoritarian oil countries? And then, eight years after the Bush-Cheney administration, Putin’s friend Donald Trump wanted to destroy NATO with a U.S. withdrawal, and, like Bush-Cheney, sucked up to the oil countries (that includes Russia) rather than looking north. That kind of foolishness might have been weakly arguable then. But now, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the exposure of Russia’s weakness and Putin’s misjudgments, and a rapid realignment of the Western democracies, the Republican madness — oil and authoritarianism — is obvious.

It may seem surprising that this realignment happened so quickly — in a matter of weeks, really. Partly, of course, that was the product of diplomacy. (One of the miracles of the Biden administration is how quickly Biden re-professionalized the State Department after Trump turned it over to hacks with conflicts of interest.) But in fact the situation was changing before Russia invaded Ukraine. This short report from the RAND Corporation, dated September 15, 2021, is about how three key Nordic countries — Norway, Sweden, and Finland — had in recent years become increasingly concerned about deteriorating relations with Russia:

“Overall, Norway, Sweden, and Finland have dramatically shifted their plans and actions in response to Russian threats in the European Arctic. For the United States, this change could represent an opportunity to further strengthen cooperation with its key allies and partners, helping to enhance security in the region and better counter Russian challenges in the northernmost reaches of Europe.”

If Republicans had remained in control, the consequences for the West would have been disastrous as the strategic and economic opportunities were lost and as the U.S. acted in favor of the Russia kleptocracy rather than our allies, the European democracies.

Norway has been a member of NATO since its beginning, in 1949. The admission of Sweden and Finland probably would be almost automatic, but Turkey has thrown some sand into the gears. Turkey’s reservations (mentioned in the Washington Post story above) seem rather silly, but it’s easy to suspect that Turkey’s underlying gripe (other than blowing a kiss at Putin) is that, as the Arctic becomes more and more important in a warming climate and as the world turns away from oil, Mediterranean countries such as Turkey become less and less important. One of the great advances from making oil obsolete will be making the oil countries obsolete. The Baltic Sea will become the new Mediterranean.

It was a book about the economic future of Scotland that first got me thinking about how important the Arctic will become as the climate warms, as ice melts, and as a navigable sea route to Asia opens up through the Baltic Sea. Russia and the Baltic countries are already preparing for the economic changes this will bring. Sweden and Finland joining NATO, I would think, will have economic consequences for the West far beyond its consequences for mutual security and defense.

The old kleptocratic order based on oil created billionaires literally by the thousands. Many of those billionaires are oligarchs like Putin who also have countries to rule and interests to protect. They won’t go down easily, no matter how many yachts we confiscate. This is what is behind much of the geopolitical drama through which we are living at present. Trump, a puppet of that old order, did everything he could to swing the United States away from a new order and toward the old. But four years under Trump wasn’t enough to convert the institutions of democracy into the tools of an autocrat (drain the swamp!) and turn the United States into Russia. If Republicans gain full control of the government again, it’s hard to imagine any result other than geopolitical disaster. If there is a next time, they’ll move faster and more ruthlessly.

I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. As long as the Republican Party — the clueless tool of the .1 percent — can be kept out of power, and as long as the .1 percent who own their own countries don’t start using their nukes (big if’s unfortunately), then the immense military and economic power of the U.S. can help lead the progress toward a new order — more democratic, more sustainable, more fair, and with a prosperity more equally shared. The alternative is a United States fleeced of its wealth by kleptocrats and beaten down by a white Christian police state.

Centrist misdirection

After an 18-year-old with an AR-15 killed 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket, The Atlantic was quick out of the gate with a piece typical of its radical centrism. The article was “America’s Gun Plague,” by David Frum.

Was the shooter a left-wing extremist? asks Frum in the first paragraph. A vegan animal-rights zealot? But of course it was neither. It was yet another right-wing crazy cracked up on right-wing propaganda.

In the fourth paragraph, Frum writes: “The crucial variable in mass shootings is not ideas but weapons. We cannot control ideas or speech and should not attempt to do so even if we could.”

Sorry, Mr. Frum, but you can’t change the subject to guns. We’re not talking here about “ideas.” We’re talking about noxious, dangerous, right-wing lies, knowingly weaponized by the Republican Party as political propaganda and retailed virtually everywhere — from the halls of Congress to the most noxious internet hidey-holes of right-wing radicals.

The Atlantic, for the most part, is thoughtful and even wise. But The Atlantic also frequently publishes addled-headed pieces by radical centrists claiming to be enlightened defenders of free speech who are horrified by what they see to their left but blind to what is on their right. They crank out breathless article after breathless article about campus leftists (as with the piece in the cover story above).

Centrists, you see, are not capable of doubt about whether they hold the moral high ground. They are absolutely certain that they do. Centrists used to throw around the term “moral leveling” as an insult aimed at the left. Their point was that “ideas have consequences” and that standards and principles exist against which we can claim that some ideas are better than other ideas. Good. But in their blindness, centrists cannot see that they are the greatest moral levelers of all. If the center is the high ground, then it is necessary for centrists to see equally serious wrongness both to the left and to the right. Thus centrists are mired in one of the most dangerous fallacies of our times — false equivalence.

The New York Times, this morning, bless its heart, does not fall into any centrist fallacies. The Times, with little to say about guns, puts this piece in the second most prominent position on its web site: “A Fringe Conspiracy Theory, Fostered Online, Is Refashioned by the G.O.P.” Yes. That’s the problem.

Centrists like Frum do often write about the dangers of Trumpism. But it also seems that, for every piece (or paragaph, or book chapter) critical of the right, they feel it’s necessary to come up with some kind of piece or paragraph or book chapter equally critical of the left. If they didn’t, then how would they display their centrism and their moral superiority?

My view is that, when the history of post-Reagan America up through the Trump era is written, the unintentional blindness of centrists will have done as much damage to the republic as right-wing radicals. Though centrist blindness is dim-witted and unintentional (sadly, they’re not as smart as they think they are), their misdirection is entirely intentional and calculated.

One of the reasons the right wing in this country has become so dangerous is that they have figured out how to weaponize the Constitution. The Second Amendment is cover for right-wingers and their militias armed to the teeth for the purpose of intimidation and the creation of fear even when they’re not shooting anyone. (“When do we get to use the guns?” they ask their politicians.) And the First Amendment is cover for the alternate reality blended with rage that is created by right-wing propaganda. Centrists like Frum call it “ideas.” A centrist will tell you that the remedy for twisted speech is more speech and better speech, not attempts to control speech. Does it follow that the remedy for guns is more guns and better guns rather than attempts to control guns? That seems to be the slippery slope we’re on, thanks to the right-wing weaponization of our Constitution.

I don’t claim to have an answer for the booby-traps in the American Constitution that right-wing radicals are exploiting. But one thing is clear to me: Radical centrists don’t have any answers either.

Note: The cover story for The Atlantic cover above (September 2015) was “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Is what college students want to hear and don’t want to hear really a problem? It may well be, for all I know. Maybe I’ll even worry about it a little in my spare time. But in 2022 centrists are still cranking out breathless warnings about speech on campus — in their articles as well as their books — even as the right actively works to crush the American democracy and its institutions, to ban books, to make laws restricting speech, to whitewash and dictate what students can be taught, and to punish corporations for disagreeing with Republicans, all the while loudly retailing their false alternate reality to keep susceptible minds confused and enraged. If centrists would come to their senses they could be very helpful. But I have never been able to get through to a centrist, any more than I’ve ever been able to get through to a right-winger.

Who’s afraid of the Ninth Amendment?


May 3, 2022. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

There is an unspoken rule among legal eagles that ordinary people (like me) should not try to interpret the Constitution. The reason is that constitutional law (legal eagles use the term “jurisprudence”) is very complicated and embodies a long history of Supreme Court case law about which we non-experts are expected to know nothing.

Fine. I know nothing.

But what about this:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

That is the Ninth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and it is part of the original Bill of Rights ratified in 1791. Could anything be clearer? And yet, for many years, legal eagles have put forth the idea that the Ninth Amendment does not contain any “substantive rights,” but rather that it is “a statement on how to read the Constitution.” Here’s how people like me, who know nothing, would read it: The authors of the Constitution knew perfectly well that authoritarians and preachers would claim that any right not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution does not — and can never! — exist, and that authoritarians and preachers would try to use the law to dictate how others live.

The U.S. Supreme Court is clearly terrified of the Ninth Amendment and has almost completely ignored it in centuries of “jurisprudence.” A 1947 case (United Public Workers v. Mitchell) actually had the effect of putting a limit on the Ninth Amendment. The Ninth Amendment is obliquely referenced in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the case having to do with a private right to use contraceptives, but that ruling was based on the Fifth Amendment, not the Ninth. There actually is still disagreement on whether a right to privacy exists, because privacy is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.

Now comes the right-wing hack Samuel Alito, who actually writes in the document leaked from the Supreme Court this week: “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision. …”

Coming from a Supreme Court justice, no less, that sounds to me perversely and knowingly anti-constitutional — not to mention that it sounds like propaganda, which know-nothings who know even less than I do will fall for. Alito is disparaging (and then denying) a right not enumerated in the Constitution, with reference to a made-up right-wing legal theory rather than the actual text of the Constitution.

The New Yorker writes: “If a right isn’t mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, Alito argues, following a mode of reasoning known as the history test, then it can only become a right if it can be shown to be ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.’ ” Really? Is that in the Constitution? But what do I know. These people get their instructions directly from God and billionaires.

But it seems clear to me that Alito’s concept of “jurisprudence” boils down to this: There can be no such thing as moral progress, because the concept of rights, justice, and equality are ossified, locked down, and cannot advance beyond the state of moral progress that had been achieved by the year 1791, when many members of the government and even the universities owned slaves. No wonder it took so long even to end slavery or to allow women to vote. And now the Supreme Court is not merely blocking constitutional rights, it’s taking them away.

Everyone has moral qualms about abortion. No one thinks that abortion is a good thing. But that’s not the question. The question is whether a minority’s moral views can override the Constitution and start putting people with different views in prison. And we know what these people really want and what their project is. We know this isn’t over and that right-wing religionists — a minority — will now move on to take away other constitutional rights, always the rights of the people they don’t like, and always with a particular, peculiar, vindictive viciousness toward anything having to do with sex.

There are so many things I’d like to say about the meanness of the people who consider themselves our moral superiors and intend to lord it over us, but so far I’ve still got a weak grip on civility. That’s really hard work these days.

The world we’d like to live in

A Brief History of Equality. Thomas Piketty, Harvard University Press, April 19, 2022. 274 pages.

Is much of the world better off now than it was, say, 200 years ago? Yes, undoubtedly, says Thomas Piketty. He does not use the words “the arc of justice,” but I would. The transcendentalist theologian Theodore Parker was quite right when, around 1840, he perceived the arc of justice. The great moral emergency of Parker’s time was slavery. And the exploitations of colonialism were just getting started in Parker’s time.

To see this progress in perspective, it’s necessary to be aware of just how terrible things have been for most people for most of history. That’s what the first half of Piketty’s book is about. The title of this book could as easily be “A Brief History of Inequality.” If we failed to learn about historical inequality in school, it may not be entirely the fault of our educations. There is a great deal of new research on inequality. For example, Piketty several times refers to inheritance archives from 19th Century France. The bottom 50 percent of the population, even today, inherit nothing and own almost nothing. In fact they may be deeply in debt. At this stage of history, those who have benefited most from a reduction in inequality are the 40 percent between the bottom 50 percent and the top 10 percent — the middle class.

The top 10 percent, and especially the top 1 percent, are obscenely rich, as always. The gains of the middle class are quite new, with most of that progress owed to the type of reforms that Franklin Roosevelt introduced in the U.S. after the Great Depression. There has been some backsliding since 1980, as the age of Reaganism, Thatcherism, and neoliberalism gained control. Piketty writes that neoliberalism is now discredited, especially after the financial crisis of 2008. But little progress has been made beyond neoliberalism because of political gridlock. It was, of course, the political struggles of organized progressives, going back for more than 200 years, that have made possible the gains in equality and social justice.

It is sometimes hard for caring human beings to believe that there actually are people — lots of them — who hate the idea of equality, democracy, and justice, and who fight for a jackboot world that is unequal, undemocratic, unfair, and unjust. It’s easier now, post-Trump. We know who they are, we know what they want, and we’ve had a glimpse of just how they would use power to keep people down. The ironic thing is that many of the bottom-rung infantry in the fight against justice don’t have a pot to piss in, but through the magic of fascism they buy into a politics that benefits only the top 10 percent.

In the second half of this book, Piketty outlines his thoughts on what must be done if progress is to continue. Progressive taxation, with heavy taxes on the filthy rich, is essential, as is investment in education and health care. But Piketty describes many other ideas still to be invented — for example, a universal inheritance, in which the wealth of the super-rich is taxed to provide a modest “inheritance” even for the poorest, to be paid at the age of 25, so that everyone has the means of getting a start in life.

Piketty’s ideas, I believe, provide an important and pragmatic piece of a pretty much complete theory of politics and activism. That politics, acknowledging the advances of the Enlightenment, would be heavily based on John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. The next step is to consider William A. Edmundson’s argument that only democratic socialism can meet the requirements of A Theory of Justice. From there forward, Piketty provides not only a historical base that justifies the need for a new kind of economics, but also the outlines of a blueprint on how to continue that work.

It is not polite to quote an author’s last paragraph. But in this case I’m going to do it, because it captures so well why I think it is important to read this book:

This … will also require active citizens. The social sciences can contribute to this, but it goes without saying that they will not suffice. Only powerful social mobilizations, supported by collective movements and organizations, will allow us to define common objectives and transform power relationships. By what we ask of our friends, our networks, our elected officials, our preferred media, our labor union representatives, and by our own actions and participation in collective deliberation and social movements each of us can make socioeconomic phenomena more comprehensible and help grasp the changes that are occurring. Economic questions are too important to be left to others. Citizens’ reappropriation of this knowledge is an essential stage in the battle for equality. If this book has given readers new weapons for this battle, my goal will have been fully realized.

It’s true that Piketty’s densely academic style is not easy to read. But this book, unlike Piketty’s massive previous books, is only 274 pages.

Why do the media try to scare liberals?


Presidents Macron and Biden in Cornwall, June 2021. White House photo. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Before the people of France voted on Sunday, the media were filled with stories suggesting that Marine Le Pen just might win. Bunk. Marine Le Pen was never going to win. The result was 58.5 to 41.5. In the United States, an election like that would be considered a historic landslide.

Now that the election is over, the media are filled with stories over-emphasizing the obstacles that Macron faces in France. And the Atlantic — the Atlantic! — has a silly piece today saying that Le Pen won even though she lost: Macron Won. And So Did the Far Right.

Bunk, bunk, bunk, and bunk.

And by the way I worry about the Atlantic, which increasingly is running clickbait in its online edition.

The people of France have not lost their minds. I would argue that the results of the French election show that, even though the French people have some issues with Macron, they are far from damned-fool enough to hand the country over to a right-winger. In the first round of voting, remember, the candidate who placed third was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, often identified as a leftist firebrand. In the first round, Mélenchon got 22 percent of the vote, just short of Le Pen, who got 23.2. In other words, the solid left in France is as strong as the solid right. And in the final election, with Macron’s strong support from the center, did anyone really think that all those leftists would vote for Le Pen?

I’m all for keeping voters on their toes and vigilant about the threat from the right. But can we keep it real?

One of the reasons this matters is that the same thing is happening in the United States. The media still maintain that Trump is going to run again in 2024. Trump scare stories are guaranteed clickbait. As I have said before, there is not a snowball’s chance that Trump will run again in 2024. If he did (in a fair election, anyway), he’d lose even more of the popular vote than he lost in 2016 and 2020. Whatever the MAGA crowd may think, most Americans know what Trump is. A slim majority, at least, have always known what Trump is, and Americans increasingly despise him. Even Republicans in Congress despise him, though they still have to kiss Trump’s … uh, ring. After the January 6 committee in the U.S. House hold their hearings on Trump’s coup attempt and the indictments start, Trump’s future will be prison, not the White House.

Sure, like the French with Macron, some Americans have issues with Biden. Young people, according to a new poll, have little enthusiasm for Biden. But who can believe that young people eager for progress would vote for a Trump because they have issues with Biden?

Unless the right-wing inability to adapt to change and to understand an ever-more-complex world causes right-wing huns to go extinct the way the Neanderthals did, we’re always going to have to deal with a certain percentage of right-wing huns in the population and people like Trump who will try to deceive them, inflame them, and ride them to power.

But we are a majority, and huns cannot win unless multiple failures happen at the same time — some form of manipulation (Julian Assange, James Comey, Vladimir Putin), a wall of lies (Rupert Murchoch), some form of legalized cheating (under development in multiple states), widespread media malpractice in the face of the right-wing wall of lies (her emails!), and undemocratic flukes such as the American Electoral College.

Republican strategy, of course, is try to try to take power through those multiple failures. Our job is to stop them, on all fronts. We failed in 2016 and succeeded in 2020. It’s not impossible that the sane-though-regressive element of the Republican Party (think Liz Cheney) will regain control after Trump goes down. But, if they don’t, the Republican Party will cook up for 2024 something just as monstrous as Trump.

Still, they can’t win unless several things go wrong at the same time. There’s a good comparison to aircraft safety. An airliner can almost always recover from a single failure. But if two or more things go wrong at the same time, watch out. As for France, its democracy is strong and its elections are fair. Our media, however, have some dangerous problems.

Update 1: Jennifer Rubin, bless her heart, gets it right in the Washington Post, even if the headline writer stayed in defensive mode: Macron may have won comfortably. But this is no time to let down our guard.

Update 2: Adam Gopnik, in the New Yorker, seems to agree with me:

The fact is that, in difficult circumstances, Macron has managed to win the Presidency twice—a sign that he is resilient, despite being supposedly enfeebled, and that the political reservoir of common sense in France remains. The degree to which the American press—and, to be sure, segments of the French—insists on casting his victory as a kind of moral defeat, is genuinely bewildering.

Oil: Why can’t we ever learn?


The 1935 Mercedes-Benz 770 that belonged to Emperor Hirohito. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Here we are once again in that most familiar of geopolitical pickles. The advocates of progress and democracy still have the oil leash tight around their necks, jerking them around and holding them back. The other end of the leash is held by oligarchs, despots, and the greediest and most powerful corporations in the world. We could have freed ourselves by now, but we haven’t. We like our oil too much.

I must hasten to confess how much fun it has been to have lived during the Oil Age. Cars! Labor-saving machines! World travel for the middle class! McMansions, heated and cooled! Lots of food! Lots of stuff! It has been a wonderful lifelong party, with oil in the punchbowl. The industrialization made possible by coal certainly changed the world, but it has been oil, more than any other thing, that has shaped the world we live in now and that made possible a precarious global population of 7.75 billion. The price of punch fluctuates, but the bowl is always full, at least in the rich countries. Back in the 1970s when they told us that we were running out of oil, they were wrong, and they probably were lying.

President Jimmy Carter learned what happens to governments that try to wean people off of oil. It’s the only sensible government policy, but people won’t go along with it. Today, as many people see it, one of the chief responsibilities of government is to keep the cheap oil flowing. Republicans, and all the other servants of oligarchs, despots, and greed, are happy to oblige. It’s clear that we’ll never be weaned off of oil until we can keep the party going on some other punch — renewables, we hope.

Normally I stay home and mind my own business. But the computer went haywire in my four-year-old Fiat 500. That took me first to a garage about seven miles from home for a new battery, which I hoped would fix the problem. It didn’t, so I had to take the Fiat to the dealership in Winston-Salem, 25 miles away. (The problem was diagnosed as a bad wheel speed sensor at the left front wheel.) Everywhere I went, people were complaining about the price of gasoline. At the Fiat-Chrysler dealer, there was not a single Fiat on the lot. Americans (unlike Europeans) hate little Fiats, and most models of Fiat are not even sold in the U.S. anymore. Instead, the dealer’s lot was acres of enormous and heavy vehicles — big trucks and SUVs. That’s what most Americans drive these days. The assumption, clearly, is that the cheap gas will keep flowing. Many people, obviously, can afford gasoline (though they still complain about the price of it). Many poor people, on the other hand, spend nearly 20 percent of their income just on gasoline. Oil is one of the key reasons for the sorry state of our politics. Given a choice between progress and cheap gas, cheap gas will get most people’s vote.

Americans, per capita, use at least five time more oil per capita than the people of China or India. That is a geopolitical weakness for America. And just look at the problems that Germany is having at present because of its need for Russian gas.

This is not going to be a feckless lecture on driving smaller cars and using less gasoline. What we do as individuals is a drop in the bucket, which is part of why we feel so powerless. What matters globally is what the advocates of progress and democracy are politically empowered to do, which will require a loosening of the oil leash. As for our love for cars and our dependency on them, electric vehicles and renewable energy may bring new political possibilities by freeing us from the oil leash. That’s a benefit above and beyond the necessity of just going easier on the earth. Just think how our politics could change if oil no longer mattered.

I wonder, though, whether I will ever be able to buy an electric vehicle as efficient and affordable as my little Fiat. I don’t have the slightest need for a hulking 3-ton electric truck or SUV, but it’s likely that that’s what most Americans are going to want. There’s still something very crazy about that.

Update: Slate has posted a good article about this: “Are Gas Prices Too High? Or Is Your Car Too Big?: When it comes to oil shocks, we have the memory of goldfish.”

The Urkainian national anthem

The historian Heather Cox Richardson, in her daily post on Facebook, writes this morning:

“The Ukrainian people have done far more than hold off Putin’s horrific attack on their country. Their refusal to permit a corrupt oligarch to take over their homeland and replace their democracy with authoritarianism has inspired the people of democracies around the world.

“The colors of the Ukrainian flag are lighting up buildings across North America and Europe and musical performances are beginning with the Ukrainian anthem. Protesters are marching and holding vigils for Ukraine. The answer of the soldier on Ukraine’s Snake Island to the Russian warship when it demanded that he and his 12 compatriots lay down their weapons became instantly iconic. He answered: ‘Russian warship: Go f**k yourself.’

“That defiance against what seemed initially to be an overwhelming military assault has given Ukraine a psychological edge over the Russians, some of whom seem bewildered at what they are doing in Ukraine. It has also offered hope that the rising authoritarianism in the world is not destined to destroy democracy, that authoritarians are not as strong as they have projected.”

Though the Ukrainian national anthem sounds as though it was written for this very moment in history, its origins are in the 19th Century, and it was banned during the Soviet years: Shche ne vmerla Ukrainy i slava, i volia.

Nay, thou art not dead, Ukraine, see, thy glory’s born again,
And the skies, O brethren, upon us smile once more!
As in Springtime melts the snow, so shall melt away the foe,
And we shall be masters in our own home.