Political issues – Page 13

Self-defense?

A right-wing protester at a Trump rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Sept. 1, 2020. Source: Wikipedia.

Farhad Manjoo, in a column this morning in the New York Times, draws attention to a novel right-wing claim of self-defense, in which a right-winger with a gun points the gun at unarmed people, then claims self-defense out of fear that an unarmed person might take away the gun. Manjoo writes:

“And Rittenhouse’s gun was not just a danger to rival protesters. According to his own defense, the gun posed a grave threat to Rittenhouse himself — he said he feared being overpowered and then shot with his own weapon.”

This has come up again this week, in the trial for the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, who was killed by vigilantes after they saw him jogging and assumed he was a criminal. The Washington Post writes, “Travis McMichael testified that he raised his shotgun first to ‘de-escalate’ and scare Arbery off, drawing on his use-of-force training while employed with the Coast Guard. But he said that as Arbery ran toward him and finally made physical contact, he fired, afraid the man would get control of the weapon.”

With no verdicts as of today in either case, we don’t yet know whether juries will accept this kind of perverted logic. It would be a horrifying precedent. If a man with a gun points the gun at an unarmed person, doesn’t the unarmed person have a right to self-defense? Lacking a weapon, what are the options other than trying to grab the gun before the guy with the gun can shoot? The claim, clearly, is that the person with the gun has a right to self-defense, but the unarmed person does not have a right to self-defense.

Probably this question has come up before in other court cases. I don’t know. But it does seem clear that there is a connection to vigilantism. Police have the authority arrest and detain people. Vigilantes do not. This is a question that everyone who owns a gun should think about. It’s a question that should be discussed in every concealed carry class. Let’s hope that the courts will provide some clarity.

The intelligentsia and civil war

Etel Adnan in Marin County, California. Photo by Simone Fattal. Source: EtelAdnan.com.

The New York Times carried an obituary this morning for Etel Adnan, who died yesterday in Paris at the age of 96. I was saddened to hear this, because I knew Etel and her partner, Simone Fattal, during their Sausalito years, when I was living in San Francisco.

Etel was best known for her novel about the Lebanese civil war, Sitt Marie Rose. Part of what I find remarkable about Etel Adnan is how her literary reputation was built entirely on the work of small presses. As far as I know, none of her books was ever published by a commercial press. Etel and Simone had established their own micropress during the 1980s, the Post-Apollo Press. It was Post-Apollo that published Sitt Marie Rose, translated from the original French by Simone. Even in the early ’90s, inspired by Simone and Etel, I aspired to starting a micropress someday.

When I reflect on what I remember about Etel, what stands out is her sadness and grief about what civil war did to her country, Lebanon, and in particular to the immense damage of what war did to the city of Beirut, which Etel compared with San Francisco. The New York Times writes: “Her most widely acclaimed novel, Sitt Marie Rose, (1978) based on a true story, centers on a kidnapping during Lebanon’s civil war and is told from the perspective of the civilians enduring brutal political conflict. It has become a classic of war literature, translated into 10 languages and taught in American classrooms.”

As Simone and Etel drove me home to San Francisco one night after dinner in Sausalito, Etel asked me as we crossed the Golden Gate bridge to imagine how I would feel if San Francisco suffered such destruction. It was December, and she was bundled up in their Volvo like a Lebanese peasant (though she came from a wealthy family). Of the thousands of times I have crossed the Golden Gate bridge, I remember that time the best — stars over the Pacific, and the lights of San Francisco reflected in the bay. I always felt safe in San Francisco, a refuge from what is worst about America.

Today, the news is horrifying, and it’s getting worse. When we watched as the U.S. Capitol was attacked on January 6, we did not know that what we were seeing was an actual, organized, serious attempt at an authoritarian coup. New books have revealed much, but I expect the congressional hearings to reveal even more. The law is closing in on Trump’s enablers, and I have little doubt that Trump himself, and two or three of his children, will be indicted next year. At the very least, those indictments will be about financial crimes, and those crimes will be the easiest to prove. But, as Trump enablers such as Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, and a bunch of right-wing lawyers face the choice between longer prison sentences and testifying against Trump, I expect them to testify against Trump, and I expect the evidence to be damning.

The rise of an organized authoritarian power structure is scary enough, but the gullibility of Americans is even scarier. Recent polls show that a majority of Americans may be willing to go right on voting for Republicans. We have no choice but to imagine the worst. If the Republican Party either steals or wins the national elections in 2024, then that will be the end of the American democracy and the end of the rule of law. Part of what I find I find incomprehensible about the politics and religion of America’s non-intelligentsia is that they imagine they would prosper under such a regime. No they wouldn’t. As soon as a right-wing authoritarian government was installed beyond the reach of democracy and the rule of law, ignorant Republican voters would feel the other end of the stick as the country’s wealth is transferred ever more quickly from the bottom to the top. A right-wing authoritarian government in the United States could never be stable. At least half of the population — largely those in the cities and on the coasts — would never put up with it. The Republican Party and its propaganda would ensure that there are brownshirts, scapegoats, and turmoil. Sham right-wing-run elections would never permit a democratic change of government. What alternative would be left other than civil war?

Already, authoritarian governments are working to escalate the turmoil. A story in the Times of London on November 13 reports that Britain’s most senior military officer has warned that the risk of an accidental war with Russia is now greater than at any time since the Cold War. There are increasing fears that Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine. British troops have been sent to the Polish border with Belarus because Belarus is trying to create a crisis by flying in migrants from the Middle East and sending them to the Polish border. Things such as this get little attention in the dysfunctional and not-very-smart American media.

I’ve tried to do some Googling to determine what has been written about intelligentsias in time of war. Most of what has been written is about Russia. But intelligentsias, at many times in many places, have seen and understood what others are slow to see and understand. It happened in Russia. It happened in Germany. It happened in Etel’s Lebanon. And now the United States could be well on its way. I’m afraid I was mistaken when I thought that this country was out of the woods when Trump left the White House. I still believe that Trump will go to prison. But that is not enough, as it has become increasingly clear that the Republican Party, post-Trump, will continue to try to establish a right-wing authoritarian government beyond the reach of law and fair elections. The details about their intentions grow ever uglier — for example, Michael Flynn’s remark about “one religion.”

In my Googling, I found this, written in 1972 by Richard Hamilton for Dissent magazine:

“In the world view of liberal intellectuals, those persons who share decent and humane values form a tiny minority standing on the edge of an abyss. In that world view they are always standing there, the problem being that there are so few people who share those values and so many potentially powerful and, if aroused, dangerous groups present in the society. The best one can hope for is that the threatening groups remain quiescent, that they not be aroused.

“The American liberal finds himself in a difficult world; he is sincere, concerned about the pressing problems in the society, willing to see changes made, but he also is trapped by the inexorable dictates of the situation. If these hostile groups were to be aroused (at one time the dangerous lower middle class was the problem, now there is also the dangerous white working class), the liberal minority would be unable to stem the reaction that would follow.”

As always, my disclaimer is that no one knows what is going to happen in the future. But my fear is this: If the American right wing succeeds in installing a Putin-style government, which is their clear intent, then there is a future in which this country is torn apart by civil war.

Centrist authoritarians

A radical centrist disciplines a partisan. George Cruikshank, 1839, Wikimedia Commons.

I believe it was Paul Krugman who came up with the term “radical centrists.” Here’s how I would define them: Smug, preening, mediocre intellectuals who strut their undoubted moral superiority, claiming an ability to see “both sides” and believing themselves to be innocent of bias and “partisanship.”

Radical centrism has had a long run. We have a track record now about where radical centrism got us as a political practice. It brought us the “Third Way” of the Clinton administration. It badly tainted and weakened the Obama administration, always blocking progress while averting its eyes from growing threats from the right. Centrism is always about the left conceding to the right, and rarely or never the other way around. Fortunately the Biden administration seems to understand this. It’s not the progressives who are making trouble for Biden, it’s the narcissistic “moderates” such as Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema. If people like Manchin and Sinema truly were centrists, they’d be pulling Republicans on board rather than blocking Democrats. Centrists are blind to the one-sidedness of their centrism. That blindness is part of the syndrome. Like fundamentalism, centrism needs to simplify the world to make it comprehensible and comfortable. That both sides are just the same is a centrist axiom, even though nothing is like that in the real world. It is a projection of the centrist mind.

As damaging as centrism has been as a political practice, I would argue that it has done just as much harm as a media practice. Radical centrist pundits and authors imagine that they are doing some kind of principled public service. But what they really have done is serve as apologists for the radical right, paralyzing — for years — any effort to rein in the radical right before the U.S. found itself right on the brink of fascism, Reichstag moment included. Warnings from the left were ignored and vilified as “partisan.” Right-wing lies weren’t just unchallenged; they were amplified and dignified with “equal treatment.” Anything partisan is automatically wrong, you see, because only centrists can see clearly.

Though the Atlantic remains one of America’s best publications, it is nevertheless a refuge, a training ground, and a well-paying employer of the country’s most well-known and most radical of radical centrists. The Atlantic proved that yet again with a new piece yesterday with the title “The Experts Somehow Overlooked Authoritarians on the Left.” The piece was written by Sally Satel, a right-wing psychiatrist who works for the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. A key assumption of radical centrists is that everything is symmetrical with themselves at the fulcrum of virtue. To a radical centrist, if a vice such as authoritarianism exists on the right, then it also must exist on the left. If there is an existential threat from the right (say, fascism, insurrection, and coup), then there also must be an equally severe existential threat from the left. Hence all the shrill warnings about “cancel culture,” a hobgloblin of the centrist mind. Centrists do sometimes warn about threats from the right, but such warnings must always be “balanced” by a symmetrical warning about the left. Such things as authoritarianism and cancel culture must be found on the left, as centrist self-protection against cognitive breakdown.

Fortunately, the damage done by so many years of being instructed by centrists is being exposed. Eric Levitz wrote about it last June in New York Magazine, “The delusions of the radical centrist.” An old colleague of mine in the newspaper business, Dan Froomkin, has a web site devoted to monitoring centrist bias in the media, Press Watch.

It’s bad manners for me to quote Levitz’s conclusion after his longish and thoughtful piece, but here it is: “But America does not need more highbrow apologetics for the conservative movement, nor sophistry that conflates the pathologies of each major party. And unfortunately, this era’s most prominent iconoclasts seem less interested in honestly criticizing America’s lesser evil, than running interference for its greater one.”

That, I would say, is an understatement.

Apple News+

There are two versions of Apple News. The free version, called just “Apple News,” is on all Macintosh computers, iPads, and iPhones. The subscription version, called “Apple News+”, costs $9.99 a month.

For some years, I had casually used the free version on my iPhone, because it often showed me things that I had missed on my daily rounds of a long list of newspapers, magazines, and web sites. After I upgraded to a new version of iOS, some ads appeared for the subscription version. I looked through the long list of publications that are available and immediately subscribed.

Getting news from Europe to Americans is just one example of how Apple News+ can expand our reading horizons. One of the reasons we Americans know too little about Europe (and the world, for that matter) is that American media (including the New York Times) don’t cover Europe well. For years, I had longed for access to the Times of London, but it was hard to justify the cost. Nor did I want yet another password to manage. A part of the hassle of managing subscriptions to paywalled publications is the aggravation of signing in. With the New York Times and Washington Post, I deal with that by always having a tab open to their “my account” pages. Subscriptions to the New York Times and Washington Post, by the way, are expensive and are not included in Apple News+. Part of the appeal and convenience of Apple News Plus is that you don’t have to sign in to read any of the publications you follow. That’s all handled through your Apple ID, so you’re always signed in to the publications you want to see.

Many times, I have been tempted to resubscribe to the Economist. But an Economist subscription costs about the same as the New York Times, and the sign-in problem was a big deterrent. Apple News+ lets you subscribe to the Economist through Apple News+ and pay for it monthly through Apple. With access to the Times of London and the Economist, suddenly I have new windows into Europe. Previously I had only the Guardian, the Irish Times, and the Herald of Scotland. (As far as I can tell, Der Spiegel’s English edition is not included in Apple News+.) The Times of London, by the way, seems to cover Scotland quite well.

Another newspaper that is included in Apple News+ is the Wall Street Journal, still a good newspaper in spite of its wingnut editorial department. Two North Carolina newspapers are included, the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer. Both those state newspapers are greatly diminished, but they’re all we’ve got for state coverage.

Magazines include Scientific American, the New Yorker, Wired, the Atlantic, and MacWorld. There is a long list of niche magazines, to which I subscribed to only one lest I be overwhelmed by niche magazines. That exception was Octane, a niche magazine about classic cars.

Some people like reading on their phones. I do not, even though I have a large iPhone 12. It’s on a big iMac screen that Apple News+ excels. The presentation is often just as good as a publication’s web site. There are some ads, but they’re not terribly intrusive.

In short, for news junkies and those who make a serious effort to keep up with the world’s news sources, Apple News+ is both a bargain and a convenient way of centralizing lots of sources.

One thing is missing. Much of what we need to know is to be found in papers from academics and think tanks. That stuff has been privatized. It is very hard to get and also very expensive, unless one has access through a university’s accounts. It’s a cartel that needs to be broken. There is a movement crusading for open access publishing in academia. Apple probably could break that cartel if they wanted to.

As for newspapers and magazines, much has changed. The Times of London today is nothing like the old gray lady it was when I first bought copies of it in London in the 1980s. Many publications still exist but have gone to hell in a basket — Newsweek, for example. Fox News is in Apple News+, making an ax-grinding fool of itself as always. Wired, though provocative, seems to be just as wrongheaded as it always was. The Atlantic’s print version maintains a high standard, but their web site indulges in clickbait. Fox News notwithstanding, and though there is plenty of fluff, Apple News+ seems to have steered away from fringe publications on both the right and the left, as though the word came down from on high at Apple that their mission is to be informative, not provocative. Imagine that.

Here is Apple’s complete list of publications.

A profile in courage

Rep. Barbara Lee at an anti-war powers protest in 2020. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Twice in my life I have had the experience of living through a period of great collective danger, periods in which many of the American people completely lost their minds. One of those times was November 2016, when, though he lost the popular vote by 2.87 million votes, the criminally depraved Donald Trump was installed as president of the United States. The other time was the period after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when a mass madness of war fever swept over the United States.

Three days after 9/11 — three days! — a bill was rushed through the U.S. Congress giving President George Bush, vice president Dick Cheney, and their war-hungry cabinet a blank check to use the U.S. military pretty much anywhere they saw fit, if the two Republicans in the White House claimed that it had to do with terrorism. That bill passed 98-0 in the U.S. Senate and 420-1 in the U.S. House of Representatives. The only person to vote against it was Rep. Barbara Lee, who still represents California’s 13th congressional district (Oakland and northern Alameda county). The Washington Post reminds us of this in an article today about Barbara Lee: “She was the only member of Congress to vote against war in Afghanistan. Some called her a traitor.”

Sometimes people are right for the wrong reasons. But Barbara Lee was right for the right reasons. She said, on the House floor: “However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint. Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, ‘Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.’”

Many Americans subsequently come to their senses after an epidemic of madness, though many never do. I was proud of Barbara Lee then, and I am even more proud of her now. As for the Trump madness, it rages on.

I listened to President Biden’s address to the nation on Afghanistan yesterday. Insofar as I know anything about the situation and remember some history, I did not detect any attempt by Biden to mislead us or any attempt to rewrite history. Republicans, on the other hand, went as far as erasing from their web sites any references to the deal that Trump made with the Taliban last year. And, today, Republican mouths are running fast and loud to rewrite history and blame Biden for Afghanistan.

Tom Nichols gets it right in an article yesterday in The Atlantic, “Afghanistan Is Your Fault.” On the whole, that is true, because the beginning of the disaster in Afghanistan had almost total support from the American people. What have we learned?

Church culture

A tent revival

I drove out during the cool of the evening yesterday to pick up the mail and look for more canning jars. At Sandy Ridge up near the Virginia line, people were gathering under a big tent for a tent revival. I stopped to take pictures, but I kept well back from the tent, assuming that I would quickly be identified as an outsider up to no good. I watched for a few minutes, though, and it was easy to see that this was a social occasion. Most of the people clearly knew each other. To them, I think, it was an occasion for dressing up just a little and spending a pleasant summer evening fanning themselves and exchanging gossip.

I envy them for the social part. Country churches, had they not aligned themselves with such an ugly politics, could serve as social glue in places where social glue is badly needed. Nor am I just guessing at the politics being offered at this particular tent revival. The preacher behind this tent revival ran for county commissioner a few years ago but lost in the Republican primary. After losing, he set up a little church in a vacant building across the road from this tent. I think the vacant building formerly was a garage. When he was running for commissioner, he ran his campaign from Facebook, where his theology and his politics were on full display. If you’ve read about some of the preachers who recently tried to take over the Southern Baptist church, then you know the type.

If there is an opposite of church culture, I think it would be pub culture. I would argue that one of the reasons rural American culture is falling apart is that church culture has become such a poison. Church culture is highly antagonistic to pub culture. Churches have done everything possible to prevent and kill pub culture. The real reason, I would argue, is competition. Even now, in the state of North Carolina, alcohol cannot be sold on Sunday mornings. Given a choice between a healthy pub culture and church culture, most people would choose pub culture, as they still do all over the British Isles and Ireland.

We do have places here that serve alcohol. But a healthy pub culture does not exist. On the way to Walnut Cove there is a motorcycle bar. I believe it is loosely aligned with one or more militias. On the other side of Danbury, in a nice spot overlooking the Dan River, there is a place that might have succeeded if people in these parts understood pub culture. I am among those who will never go back again, though, because the atmosphere is so ugly and the music is so loud. Those who won’t go back tell similar versions of the same story: friends of the musicians tell people to shut up so they can hear the music, and people who want to talk ask the musicians to keep it down. The owner of the place is so undiplomatic that he makes things worse. And so the vibe is terrible. A pub can’t be a concert hall and a place for friends to drink at the same time. Certainly, in Ireland, the music and noise in a popular pub might go on until late at night. But the locals also know when they can go for a quiet drink and when the place will be a party.

Mental health people tell us that drinking is healthiest when it’s social. In places like this, social drinking is pretty much totally unsupported. Instead, people stop at Dollar Generals and gas stations for beer. Recently, on my way to buy groceries, I passed the ABC store in Walnut Cove a few minutes before opening time. There were a dozen people lined up to buy liquor at 9:30 a.m. Alcoholism is a major rural problem, but social drinking in a form that could serve as healthy social glue is unsupported and almost unknown.

There is little charm anymore in rural American culture, as far as I can tell. Most rural people these days crave a suburban lifestyle, not a rural lifestyle — that is, a lifestyle that revolves around cars, without the slightest effort toward self-sufficiency or any kind of interaction with the outdoors. Even deer hunters rarely stalk deer on foot in the woods anymore. Instead, they set up deer feeders (containing corn) and then put up blinds or stands that they can drive to and in which they can sit and shoot deer. (Walmart sells blinds and deer stands.) I have met one local “coon hunter” whom a neighbor invites to hunt in our woods. I’m not sure that I’m on board with killing raccoons for sport (in spite of the damage that one has done to my tomatoes), but at least the coon hunter does it in the traditional way — on foot, in the woods, at night. I liked this coon hunter, actually. He said he didn’t know why, but that there was something spooky and exciting about being in the woods at night. “It’s primal,” I offered. “That’s it,” he said, “primal.” So he is one unsuburbanized person, at least, who is still in touch with traditional rural culture. He’d probably go to pubs, if there were any. The woods are his church, my guess would be.

I would argue that, decades ago, we passed the point at which rural white churches served any healthy purpose. Instead, the purpose they chiefly serve is to reinforce the grievances and identity that the Republican Party requires to retain its hold on rural America. Churches now operate as social wedges, not social glue. If we liberals were half as anti-freedom as authoritarians think we are, we’d close the churches and open some pubs to save some rural souls.

By the way, not one single mask was in sight at that tent revival.

It was much worse than I thought

Until this week, I would have thought that all the events that occurred between election day (Nov. 4, 2020) and the Capitol insurrection (Jan. 6, 2021) were just the random, malignant thrashings of disinformed idiots. But now it appears that there actually was a plan and a conspiracy to overturn the election. The key to that conspiracy was to throw the election to the U.S. House of Representatives. The 12th amendment to the Constitution provides for this if no candidate has an absolute majority of electoral votes. Who becomes president is then decided by the House of Representatives, with the delegation from each state voting en bloc. That is, each state gets only one vote.

Could the plot have succeeded if the House of Representatives had decided the election? The math on that is beyond my ability, but I will point out that, in the 50 states, there are 27 Republican governors and 23 Democratic governors.

Even though, all along, many of the connectable dots were consistent with such a conspiracy, I was skeptical that it could have been a serious attempt at overthrowing the government, simply because it was so hard to imagine that anyone would be so stupid and so evil as to attempt such a thing. The odds of success were poor, the consequences of getting caught would be severe, and the damage to American democracy and rule of law would have been fatal. In fact would have amounted to the cold-blooded murder of the U.S. democracy and rule of law.

Now there is a smoking gun. On Friday, the Justice Department provided Congress with notes on a call that Trump made to the acting attorney general and his deputy on Dec. 27. Trump threatened to fire them. He demanded that the Justice Department declare the election corrupt. They told Trump that they couldn’t do that and that there was no evidence that the election was corrupt. “Just say that the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me and the [Republican] Congressmen,” Trump told them.

Ten days later, a Trumpist mob stormed the U.S. Capitol while Congress was meeting to certify the results of the election. Inside the Capitol, Republicans already were attempting to block certification of the election. The votes of eight Republican senators and 139 Republican members of the House of Representatives are on record. Their names are known. Some of them talked to Trump that day or spoke at the Trump rally outside the Capitol. The notes on Trump’s phone call to the Justice Department show that some of those Republicans were co-conspirators. All of them violated their oaths of office.

We do know, at least, that the Justice Department would not join Trump’s conspiracy. Even the odious Bill Barr had resigned on Dec. 14. A new book by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker says that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other top generals were afraid that Trump would attempt a coup. According to the book, Milley said, “This is a Reichstag moment. The gospel of the Führer.”

Those who know their history see the connections.

I am not out on a limb here in smelling treason and conspiracy. Since Friday, several stories have appeared in the media that I believe show that Washington’s elite now realize that there was a plot and a conspiracy to overturn the election and install Trump as Führer. A piece in The Atlantic, I think, is particularly credible, because the Atlantic is so closely aligned with Washington’s political and media elite. The piece is “The Insurrection Was Just Part of the Plot: The full contours of Trump’s effort to overturn the election are coming into view.”

I am confident that congressional investigations and the U.S. Justice Department will bring everything to light. Everyone who was part of the conspiracy must be brought to justice. Even more important, I think, is that history must have the full story. As for the Republican Party, having proven itself willing to set fire to the U.S. democracy to preserve its own power, I am not confident that it will ever truly get what it deserves, simply because so many Americans are so gullible and so stupid, and because I don’t expect oligarchs to cease their attacks on democracy until they are taxed out of existence.

Martin Chuzzlewit

Pinch starts homeward with the new pupil. Hablot Knight Brown (also known as Phiz). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In our era, Charles Dickens is neglected and undervalued. Martin Chuzzlewit surely is one of Dickens’ most neglected and undervalued novels. For reasons that I was completely unprepared for, now would be a good time for a Dickens revival, not to mention a Martin Chuzzlewit revival.

The last villain I would have expected to mention in a review of a Charles Dickens novel is Donald John Trump (whose name happens to have a Dickensian ring to it). But it’s not Trump himself who appears in the novel. It’s the red-cap wearing, snuff-dribbling, dumb-as-rocks and in-your-face Trumpists who appear in the novel, fine Americans all.

Wikipedia writes, citing Hesketh Pearson (1949), “Dickens’s scathing satire of American modes and manners in the novel won him no friends on the other side of the Atlantic, where the instalments containing the offending chapters were greeted with a ‘frenzy of wrath.’ As a consequence Dickens received abusive mail and newspaper clippings from the United States.”

Martin Chuzzlewit was published in serial form between 1842 and 1844. Dickens had visited America in 1842. Clearly he had some things he wanted to say about Americans, so, in Chuzzlewit, Dickens has two characters visit America. This visit to America is peripheral to the plots, so clearly it was a device for conveying Dickens’ disgust with the hypocrisy of Americans — or, at least, with the hypocrisy of certain Americans. Americans in Chuzzlewit are always going on about liberty, their own liberty, liberty that they deny to others, up to and including slavery. Two years after the Civil War, in 1867, Dickens returned to America and backpedaled on his criticism, calling it satire (which of course it was).

Maybe Dickens believed in 1867 that Americans, having gone to war because of it, had confonted and corrected themselves on matters of liberty. If that’s what he thought, he would have been wrong. In How the South Won the Civil War, the historian Heather Cox Richardson describes how Southern values — “a rejection of democracy, an embrace of entrenched wealth, the marginalization of women and people of color” — not only lived on but also migrated west, encoded as the myth of the ruggedly independent cowboy. Today’s Trumpists, Richardson shows, are the very same people.

That they are the very same people also is what Dickens shows in Martin Chuzzlewit. It is to be regretted that Dickens ever backpedaled on those insights. There have been times in American history when it might have been possible to imagine that America had changed and turned over a new leaf — for example, July 2, 1964, when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act; or November 4, 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president. Now we know that we might as well say that we are still fighting the battles of the Civil War and that we just came through one of the most dangerous battles since Appomattox.

But enough about Trump and Trumpists, who seem to intrude into everything these days, for the purpose of exercising their liberty to drag everyone down with them (public health and the climate of the planet, for example, not to mention, as always, the tyranny of the rich). One of the reasons I read novels is to escape from all that.

Back in England, if I had to choose one word for what drives Dickens’ novels and motivated Dickens to write them, that word would be character. By that I mean character not in the sense of “Tom Pinch is a character in Martin Chuzzlewit.” Rather, I mean the character of the characters, as in the Oxford definition, “the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual.” Charles Dickens, I must imagine, quietly studied the character of the people around him, no less than did Sigmund Freud. Dickens obviously did not like much (maybe most) of what he saw. He chose satire as his vehicle. As for Dickens’ lovable characters (Tom Pinch, for example), they are not perfect. During the course of the story they will learn, and by the end of the story they will be changed.

I can think of a dozen reasons for reading Dickens today beyond what I would call Dickens’ “re-relevance,” that is, the fact that, 180 years ago, he came to America and saw straight through us. (Unfortunately, as the arc of justice has moved on, some people never changed.) As I wrote here recently about Barnaby Rudge, Dickens’ style is worth studying for its cinematic qualities. His ability to evoke atmosphere is enormous. The setting, the dialogue, and even the weather will work together to create a powerful scene — for example, the opening scene of Barnaby Rudge inside an English tavern on a dark and stormy night.

In Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens spends several pages to take the reader on an absolutely thrilling stage coach ride (on top of the coach) from Salisbury to London. If I were a scholar and had the time, the first paper I’d want to write about Dickens would be a survey of his complete works for what people are eating — scrumptious or revolting as the scene requires, and always beautifully described. Dickens gives as much attention to costumes as to food. There also can be no doubt that, just as Dickens looked around him and was horrified at the ill treatment of human beings, he also was well aware of the suffering of animals, such as the birds in the bird shop in Chuzzlewit and the horses who draw the coaches on those thrilling, and rather dangerous, stage coach rides.

Yes, reading Dickens takes time. His style is not suited to reading fast, and his novels are long. Chuzzlewit is about 770 pages. I realized, while reading Chuzzlewit, that I identify with Dickens. I too look around me and am horrified at how bad and how deluded people can be. It’s easy to be angry. But Dickens never, ever sounds angry. Rather, he makes fun of crummy people. He lets their own words expose them for what they are. And his stories always deliver in the end exactly what his characters deserve. Here we are, 180 years later, still trapped in Dickens’ world with our work cut out for us, a world in which hardly anybody — whether good or bad — gets what they deserve.

How to keep on losing

People in these parts are still flying their Trump flags. Many are faded and tattered. This one has fallen and has been down for days.

The Republican Party, as it is currently constituted, and, given the course it’s on, cannot win another national election. The 2020 election made that clear. And yet, with the exception of a very few Republicans such as Liz Cheney who retain the ability to work with facts and reason, the Republican Party has chosen to double down on its losing politics. That begs a question: What’s the real goal? Do they actually believe that they can revive Trumpism into a winning politics? Or is there some other goal?

A Reuters-Ipsos poll in May found that 53 percent of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. For Americans as a whole, the number is 25 percent. Both numbers have dropped slightly since last November. What could possibly reverse that trend, given the indictments against Trump operatives that are in the works, the public hearings that Congress will hold, and the trials and guilty pleas of those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6? I fully expect that Trump will be indicted, too — the greatest perp walk in American history.

It does make sense that Republicans would have a competition to be the next Trump — people such as the governors of Florida and Texas, and some people who will soon be indicted, such as Matt Gaetz. But what’s in it for them other than some publicity and getting a piece of the Trump grift pie? There is no way to win an election with a politics that only 25 percent of the population will buy. And not only that, but Trumpists also don’t seem to realize that, every time they talk to the cameras, every time they pull off a move such as requiring a state’s students and faculty to state their political views (which just happened in Florida), they horrify reasonable Americans and drive their support even lower.

So what do they really want? We can only guess, or try to connect the dots, keeping in mind that different players may have different motivations. The most benign guess I can make would reflect the position of players such as Mitch McConnell, senator from Kentucky. What he wants, I think, is to use every erg of power he can muster to block progress and to protect a status quo which redistributes income (and power) up. Greater equality is the last thing that Mitch McConnell wants. Others, I’m afraid — and the Trumpier they are the truer it is — want to maximize turmoil, rage, division and disinformation, because that kind of environment best serves their purpose. There are many who believe (including some on the far left) that nothing can be changed without tearing everything down first. That Trumpian purpose aligns with the purposes of the non-NATO world, which wants a weaker America. They have been meddling, too, though it’s difficult to sort out foreign meddling from homegrown sabotage.

The media, unfortunately, benefit from turmoil and division. The more we are afraid that Trump or Trumpism is going to return to power and that Trump is going to get away with everything, the more the media benefit. And yet, we cannot turn our backs. The very best single source I know of for following ongoing events is Heather Cox Richardson’s daily posts on Facebook. She is a historian.

Some of my liberal friends seem to be even more afraid of Trump and Trumpism now than they were when Trump was in power. They seem to be concerned that I’ve had a Panglossian failure of my faculties because I don’t think that doom is inevitable. We always knew that Trump would smash as much furniture as possible on his way out. But Trump lost. He cost the Republican Party the White House and the Senate. The power of the state is no longer at Trump’s disposal. Trump can no longer use the power of government to (like Russia) harass the opposition and obstruct justice to cover up the crimes of the powerful. Neither Trump nor his style of politics has anywhere near the support it would take to return to power. The more noise they make, the more they lose.

The Republican Party is still very dangerous, to be sure. For decades, Republicans have had to lie to win elections. Lies are no longer enough. Now they also have to cheat. Republicans still have strongholds in the states, and they are hard at work to try to leverage that for every advantage possible, including trying to legalize cheating.

Thinking about today’s politics always seems to bring me back around to the question of character. What kind of people would lie and cheat to win elections, push rage, like crack, to the point that people actually would invade the Capitol with violent intent, and poison the American democracy to keep the rich rich (and untaxed) and the people they hate down? That kind of people can’t be reformed or reasoned with. They can only be contained. My view is that, not only is their power now contained at the national level, the law and norms that contain them are closing in, in the form of justice. A cracked-up, fact-free, completely unprincipled minority cannot seize or hold power without committing crimes. Seeing their leaders in prison should do a lot toward showing the Trumpian hordes that they’d best go home and rethink their lives.

An international recipe for progress

Scotland 2070: Healthy, Wealthy, Wise. Ian Godden, Hillary Sillitto, Dorothy Godden. College Publications (London), 2020. 218 pages.

What would it take for Scotland to attain the same level of wealth and wellbeing as the Nordic countries? This book lays out a fifty-year plan for accomplishing that. What’s remarkable about this book, though, is that its ideas easily translate to any country looking to the future.

I first became aware of this book from an article April 17 in the Guardian, “An independent Scotland could turn to Denmark for inspiration.” I ordered the book from Amazon.

Though one of the book’s subtitles is “An ambitious vision for Scotland’s future without the politics,” it’s not entirely true that there is no politics in the book. It’s pretty clear that the authors’ view is that Scotland can optimize its future only by breaking with the United Kingdom and becoming independent. The authors, though they are highly educated, are not scholars. They’re businesspeople. In the U.S., it’s generally safe to assume that businesspeople believe in conservative notions of small government, low taxes, keeping working people on the brink of starvation with no safety net so that they’ll work for cheap until they drop dead, crummy education, health care as a profit center rather than a means of keeping people healthy, and a manipulative and deceptive politics that ensures that people are preoccupied with cultural grievances and thus never figure out who is really eating their lunch. These Scottish businesspeople are the opposite of that. The central principle — a principle at last being advocated by America’s Democratic Party — is that government exists to serve the people. This is in opposition to the neoliberal principle that has reigned for decades, that government exists to serve private profit.

Twenty-five years ago I fell in love with Ireland on my first trip there. But Ireland has changed in the past 25 years, and not for the better. Ireland chose a low-tax, low-productivity, low-knowledge, low-education, low-equality neoliberal strategy. Global money thus poured into Ireland. The authors of this book use kinder language about Ireland’s mistakes. I’m more blunt. The way I’d put it is that Ireland greatly damaged itself and its people by becoming a global tax whore. But I’ve also been in Denmark a couple of times, where I admired the contrast between Denmark and Ireland and how Denmark has developed a prosperity that serves its people rather than the global rich. Scotland, on the other hand, has been pretty much in stasis, largely because Scotland is a tail wagged from Westminster. The United Kingdom — or should I say England — seems too inclined to waste time and opportunity by nursing its cultural hurts, which is holding Scotland back. If Scotland does become independent in the future, the power of global money would do everything possible to turn Scotland into another Ireland. The authors of this book understand that. It would be up to the people of Scotland to choose a better path by looking north rather than south, and that’s the point of this book.

Though it’s tempting to list the key points of this book’s vision, I think I won’t, because it’s a book worth reading no matter where one lives. I will say this, though. That vision of the role of government and the demands of the future have a great deal in common with the vision that President Biden has brought to Washington. California, America’s most progressive state, just announced a $75 billion budget surplus. Voodoo economics has had its day. It’s time to get serious about a sustainable green economy, with major new investments in education, health, and infrastructure broadly defined.

Go for it, Scotland.