Category: Political issues

---

Students chilling each other’s speech. AI image generated by Dall-E 3.

Today at the Atlantic, Greg Lukianoff has a piece with the headline “The latest victims of the free-speech crisis.” If there are free-speech issues on campus, and no doubt there are, is that really a crisis? Or is someone trying to distract us from the real crisis of free speech — the banning of books, laws threatening librarians with jail sentences, efforts to reverse New York Times v. Sullivan, and legislating — legislating! — what teachers can and cannot say. A recent article in Foreign Policy reports that these Republicans actions to limit speech are spreading abroad.

In right-wing (and centrist) propaganda, one of the most common ways of intentional deception is to create false equivalencies to slam the left. An excellent example is claiming that the property damage caused by the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020 was somehow just as bad, and just as serious a threat, as the violent right-wing attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. At the Capitol, people died in a violent attempt to stop the constitutional functions of government, subvert the will of American voters, and install a neofascist permanently in the White House.

Yes, BLM protesters lit a fire in the entryway of a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, on July 20, 2021. That was at 1:30 a.m. No one was hurt, and federal agents quickly extinguished the fire. They hurt their cause with such behavior, but BLM is not a threat to this country, unless it’s a threat to draw attention to racism, discrimination, racial inequality, and racially motivated violence against Black people.

I mention the false equivalency of the BLM and Capitol cases because I myself encountered it during the Thanksgiving holidays. I was told that “people like me” use January 6 to distract from the BLM protests. I of course replied that it’s the other way around. The implication was that the BLM protests were worse than January 6. I’m sure that many people think that, and, if they do, can we think of any reason for it other than racism?

Some of the contributors to Greg Lukianoff’s organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, are among the most right-wing and billionaire-run organizations in the country — the Bradley Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute. If Lukianoff’s efforts to protect free speech have ever attempted to hold conservatives accountable for their attacks on “woke” speech, I’m not aware of it.

Lukianoff, in other words, is a right-wing propagandist, and his foundation is a right-wing propaganda outfit. Lukianoff, and many others, use the red herring of free speech on campus to draw attention away from the organized and well-funded attacks on democracy from the right, attacks that use the coercive power of government whenever possible, as in Florida, Texas, and Tennessee. If Greg Lukianoff was really concerned about free speech instead of producing the propaganda for which he is paid, then he’d be writing crisis alerts about his billionaire contributors, the Republican party, and the corporatization of American universities.

A few lonely voices have tried to point out how right-wing propaganda is attempting to gaslight us on the matter of free speech. For example, “Remember This Article? It Was Conservative Propaganda, and a Lot of Us Fell for It.”

A more nuanced view from an academic, Wendy Brown, was published in the New York Times: “Why Angry Critics of Woke College Kids are Missing the Point.”

From the interview with Wendy Brown:

“We need to appreciate that young left activist outrage about a burning planet and grotesque inequality and murderous racial violence and gendered abuses of power is accompanied by disgust with the systems and the rules of engagement that have brought us here. Young left activists are pulling the emergency brake because it feels as if there’s no time for debate and compromise and incrementalism; because many see conventional norms and practices as having brought us to the brink and kept us stupid and inert….

“My point here is that if we just focus on this generation’s political style — and we have to remember youth style always aggravates the elders — we ignore their rage at the world they’ve inherited, and their desperation for a more livable and just one, and their critique of our complacency.”

I’m with the kids. The kids, after all, are the ones with no money to corrupt them, unlike Greg Lukianoff, his billionaires, and his friends in the think tanks and media.

---

Update:

European universities accept €260 million in fossil fuel money

---

---

This past Sunday (Nov. 5, 2023) the New York Times started hyping an utterly screwball poll saying that Trump was leading Biden by an average of four points in six swing states. Right-wing subscribers to the Times swooped into the comments section to gloat. Times pundits doubled down on their usual snide and superior lecturing of Democrats while repeating and amplifying the usual Republican fictions.

Three days later, reality struck in the form of an actual real-world election. In the real world of elections, as opposed to the imaginary world that the media herd have bought into, Democrats won, bigtime, in multiple states, while MAGA Republicans got their you-know-whats handed to them.

I have no idea why political polling has gone haywire. Is it the “weighting” that pollsters apply? I have a hunch, though it’s untestable. When a pollster calls, more than 85 percent of the people who get the calls refuse to answer because of what they see on caller ID. My guess is that while most people roll their eyes and ignore the call, MAGA types are much more motivated to answer, because a poll gives them a way to register their rage and demoralization as their world falls apart. The hope of revenge is pretty much all they have left.

What’s frustrating is that there is no way for rational people to discipline the media for their malpractice. The New York Times thinks it knows better than everyone else, and nothing short of a major scandal (such as a reporter nailed for making stuff up) penetrates the Times’ unlimited faith in its own infallibility.

What we can do as rational people is to always keep in mind how Republican propagandists, starting in 1996 with the birth of Fox News, figured out how to use the principles of journalism to destroy journalism. For years, newspapers as a matter of principle refused to print the word “lie,” because that word wasn’t “objective,” even when reporting on Republican lies that journalists knew perfectly well were lies. That coincided with the rise of the internet and the ability to count clicks. Lies are designed to be provocative and thus get lots of clicks. Good government is boring to most people, which is why the media mostly ignore President Biden’s accomplishments. Whereas lies about Biden are never boring and thus get repeated and amplified by the mainstream media.

The New York Times poll that they hyped on Nov. 5 got lots of clicks. But the poll got the current political mindset of American voters exactly backwards, as the election on Nov. 7 showed. What’s worse is that the New York Times will learn nothing from this very public display of their own ongoing pattern not only of being wrong, but also of the now blind and baked-in pattern of being manipulated by right-wing propagandists. And worse still is that the mainstream media will never admit to having been a megaphone and amplifier to all the lies that led, starting in 1996 with the rise of Fox News, to an attempted right-wing coup against the government of the United States.

And they’re still not telling us that Trump is doomed, becaused they need the clicks.

---

Update:

The Biden campaign has sent letters to major media outlets scolding them for their distorted coverage of polls:

Biden campaign sends memo to media outlets asserting disparity in polling coverage

---

A Facebook meme

Prison, here they come

For several years, even a couple of my friends smirked at me for what they perceived was a fringy and starry-eyed position of mine — that Trump is going to prison. Maybe I didn’t make myself clear enough about the time line. It seemed obvious enough to me that it would take time for justice to catch up with Trump. Many people gave up on justice for Trump back in 2019, after Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, squelched Robert Mueller’s investigation and lied about what Mueller’s report concluded. The media fell for Barr’s distortions, partly because Mueller made such a fool of himself in front of Congress. But, if you actually read Mueller’s report rather than being schnookered by Barr’s spin, it was obvious that Trump was guilty as sin. And, in 2019, Trump had not even yet committed the worst of his many crimes — attempting to nullify an election, take over the U.S. government, and turn us into Russia.

Now here we are. The courts now have total control over Trump, including Trump’s mouth. Trump is powerless. Even his threats and menacing words have no power anymore, except insofar as they lead to gag orders. The evidence is damning, the penalties are severe, and Trump has no defense. Our abominable media and degenerate punditry, in spite of the evidence, continue to push the hits-friendly notion that prosecutors are overreaching, that the charges are weak, and that there are ways in which Trump can beat the charges. Such notions died this week — or should have died — when both Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, both of them evil lawyers, pleaded guilty to the charges in Georgia. This shows that Powell and Chesebro understood that the evidence against them is damning and that they would be convicted if they went to trial. And, even worse for Trump, Powell and Chesebro will now have to testify against all the others who have been charged in Georgia, including Trump, meaning that an already airtight case will now include damning eye-witness testimony from Trump’s co-conspirators.

We hardly need to mention the federal indictments brought by Jack Smith. The federal case against Trump and his co-conspirators will be just as airtight and just as damning as the Georgia cases. The whole sorry lot of them are headed for prison, except for those who are clever enough to plead guilty while there is still time. And I haven’t even mentioned the civil case in New York that will expose Trump’s true net worth (which may well be negative if all the loans were called in) and ruin Trump financially.

The House of Representatives

The present chaos in the U.S. House of Representatives is extremely revealing. Some are calling it a Republican civil war. Maybe. But I think there is a good chance that, between now and, say, April, the Trumpists will capitulate, when they finally see that Trump is truly and completely doomed. If the Trumpists can find new leadership (Jim Jordan seems to be a favorite, though he is as dumb as a rock), then there may well be a Republican civil war in 2024 in which the MAGA forces of chaos and fascism struggle with the corporate wing of the Republican party, the wing of the party that provides most of the money and which has no interests other than still lower taxes on the rich, more deregulation, a government in the hands of hacks owned by the party, law enforcement used only against the poor, and right-wing courts that won’t stand in the way of money and corruption. We shall see. But one thing we can see clearly in the House is that many Republicans who are cowardly and silent in public are struggling behind the scenes to regain control of the Republican Party for the corporate wing. There is nothing good to be said about the Republicans who are resisting MAGA. They are still vile human beings and enemies of democrary, every last one of them.

What is conservatism?

For a long time, I’ve been making a claim here that I don’t have the credentials to make. Nevertheless, it’s a claim that I believe to be true, and a claim for which much evidence and strong arguments exist (including the evidence right before our eyes at present in the Republican Party, MAGA world, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the white churches, particularly the execrable Southern Baptist Convention). The evidence is equally visible in history, if we bother to look for it. That claim is that all conservatives — and certainly all authoritarians — are cognitively and morally defective.

I recently came across an excellent paper written in 2004 by Philip E. Agre, a humanities professor and AI researcher who then was on the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles. The article is “What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?“. Agre gets straight to the point in the opening lines:

Q: What is conservatism?

A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?

A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

And:

Conservatism in every place and time is founded on deception. The deceptions of conservatism today are especially sophisticated, simply because culture today is sufficiently democratic that the myths of earlier times will no longer suffice.

My moral case against conservatives can be stated very simply: If a person wishes to use deception, inequality, and injustice as a tool for dominating others, depriving others of human goods that they claim for themselves, then that person is morally defective — not just morally wrong, but morally defective.

What might we say about aristocratic societies that actually were stable, for example, 19th Century Britain? Agre would say that the aristocracy was stable (at least, more stable than in France) because the lower classes in Britain had internalized their inferiority and their subordination. That is, they actually believed that the aristocracy were somehow superior and were thus entitled to rule. Agre again:

This is a central conservative argument: freedom is impossible unless the common people internalize aristocratic domination. Indeed, many conservative theorists to the present day have argued that freedom is not possible at all. Without the internalized domination of conservatism, it is argued, social order would require the external domination of state terror. In a sense this argument is correct: historically conservatives have routinely resorted to terror when internalized domination has not worked. What is unthinkable by design here is the possibility that people might organize their lives in a democratic fashion.

This is why MAGA types collect armaments and long for civil war — domination by terror, because some people refuse to internalize their inferiority and must be taught their place. Trump encourages this, formerly in dog whistles, but eventually in plain language. (See, in the New Yorker, “A President Asking for Civil War,” July 12, 2022.)

Neoliberalism as conservative derp

The theme of the Fall 2023 issue of Dissent Magazine asks the question, “Is neoliberalism dead?” (I certainly hope the answer is yes.) There is an excellent interview with Brad DeLong, an economics professor at UC-Berkeley who saw neoliberalism up close in the Clinton administration. DeLong describes the American form of neoliberalism, as it arose during the Reagan era, thus:

It was the belief that social democracy had greatly overreached and had created a society in 1979 that was too bureaucratic, too rigid, and also too equal: the rich needed to be richer so they would be incentivized to create jobs, and the poor needed to be poorer so they would be incentivized to work.

In other words, aristocracy. This begs a question: What do Republican deplorables in red states who don’t have a pot to piss in get out of aristocracy? I think the answer to that is clear. They get domination over all the people they don’t like, and, as lackeys, they get more of the crumbs that fall from the aristocratic table.

Incremental progress?

Could the U.S. yet fall backward into neofascism, in spite of Trump’s ruin and the disgusting but welcome spectacle of the Republican circus-train train wreck? On that I make no predictions, because we are still in a state of chaos and all sorts of things could go wrong. But I do think that a strong possibility for the future is some real progress, probably modest and incremental, but progress. I was wrong about Biden. In 2020, I thought that a Biden administration would be like a third term of the Obama administration — timid, staffed by neoliberals, eager for bad bargains with Republicans, and rudely dismissive of progressives like me. But Biden gets it. Dissent Magazine again:

After the Biden inauguration, many on the left settled down to await a familiar sequence of post-election equivocation and retreat. But a number of observers with no special affection for Biden have concluded that 2021 ended up marking some kind of a departure — if not quite the end of neoliberalism, at least the end of the bipartisan austerity consensus that has stifled American politics since the last days of disco. Corey Robin wrote that “No president since Ronald Reagan has achieved a more ambitious domestic legislative agenda in his first year than Joe Biden.” Cédric Durand, writing for the New Left Review, detected “a structural break in the regulation of capitalism.”

I’m not making any predications about progress, I’m only expressing hope. But one thing is clear. That’s that almost all of those who tried to pull off the Trump coup are headed for prison. Republicans have no leadership, no team of evil people capable of planning anything like Trump’s capture of the White House and his attempt to stay there after losing an election. Even the propagandists who provided weaker minds with ideas have been weakened and almost neutralized — Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson. Fox News can still wind people up, but with no one but feckless idiots such as Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie Taylor Greene to do the wet work, and with contributions to Republicans running way behind Democrats, how can the Republican Party, in the next year, build another machine capable of winning (or even stealing) a national election?

For now, though, let’s just enjoy the circus. They are terrible people, and they deserve everything they get, and worse.

Guilty

---

Yuck.

The whole world is laughing at David Brooks, the conservative columnist for the New York Times who sees himself as a great moral oracle and moral leader. Brooks posted a picture on X (formerly known as Twitter) of the hamburger he had bought at the Newark Airport. His tweet said: “This meal just cost me $78 at Newark Airport. This is why Americans think the economy is terrible.”

He was instantly busted by people on Twitter, who pointed out that the hamburger and fries had cost $18, and that the remaining $55 was the bar tab — whisky, apparently.

Brooks, like his conservative colleague Ross Douthat, also a conservative columnist at the New York Times, is actually pretty lucid and reasonable much of the time. But it’s important to keep in mind that the New York Times has some very hard-ass copy editors, and Brooks’ and Douthat’s columns have to get through those copy editors before they get into print.

Maybe it’s a cheap shot on my part, but I’m going to take this opportunity to interpret the hamburger tweet as evidence for my argument that all conservative discourse is derp, because there’s always something not quite right, both morally and cognitively, inside a conservative mind. I’ve written on that subject here, here, and here.

Had Brooks had too many glasses of Scotch? Maybe. But that’s no excuse. A normal mind, even on the fourth whisky, would look at the $78 tab and think, “Dang. I just spent $17.78 on a hamburger and $55 on Scotch.” But not Brooks. He’s a great moral oracle and moral leader, after all, so he moralizes, spins, and lies, without any real reflection, all in one short tweet. He trusts his conservative gut. It’s a given to him that non-conservatives are always the ones who are mistaken. He can’t even be fair and rational about evaluating what is literally right under his nose. He baits us — trolls us, even — with the deception.

Show me a conservative, any conservative, and I’ll show you someone with some wires crossed inside their head.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

---

A malignant narcissist’s last resort: If you won’t adore me, at least be afraid of me.

Politically, they are doomed. The very devil would have to intervene with some sort of devil-miracle to prevent a wipeout of Republicans in the 2024 elections. Not only are Trump and his operatives politically doomed, their lives are over. Some of them are old enough to die in prison.

These criminals actually occupied the White House. That’s how close we came to fascism. They were off to a good start, but four years was not enough for them to turn us into Russia. That, of course, was their intention. Elections would no longer matter. With a bit more work, the lower courts wouldn’t be able to touch them. The Supreme Court would protect them. Then they’d divvy up the economy, and it would be full steam ahead in the process of looting America, the same way Putin and his friends looted Russia. They’d all fly around in private jets (including Supreme Court justices). They’d all buy fancy properties (as the Russians have done, and including Supreme Court justices) in all the places where the global oligarchy go to live it up on the loot they’ve extracted by turning their home countries into corrupt shit-hole countries.

The leaders of this conspiracy to turn the United States into Russia are finished. But the big problem now is that we are left with the fools who not only supported them but who continue to support them. That’s no more than 30 percent of the voting population. At the national level, there are not enough of them to be dangerous — at least, not unless one of the many wannabes succeeds in becoming the new Trump and some stupid “independents” fall for it, as they did for Trump. Right-wing Republicans can continue to do damage only in the red states where they are in power. It’s going to take years, unfortunately, for them to die off. Most young people detest them, which is a major driver of right-wing panic and their attempts to lock themselves into power, legally if possible and illegally if they think they can get away with it. They are terrified of the future, because there is no place for them there.

What amazes me is that the hometown deplorables thought they had something to gain from the corruption and criminalization of the American government. The deplorables seem to actually believe that criminals like the people in these mug shots somehow care about them. Or maybe it’s that the deplorables are so motivated by such pure spite that they’d be OK with even greater marginalization, and ever-smaller pieces of the pie, as long as the people they’ve been taught to hate are kicked around even worse than they are themselves.

Though the fascist dream of a fascist America has been crushed for now, their propagandists are still active. The dreams of the propagandists seem to have been reduced to violence. With elections now beyond them, violence is their only hope. Sarah Palin said yesterday that a civil war is going to happen if the prosecution of Trump continues. Dream on, Sarah Palin. Tucker Carlson wanted to ask Trump about civil war. That’s a pretty dream if you’re a fascist, but the truth is that the troops are no longer available for the civil war they dream of. I’m reminded of the Vietnam era, when the peaceniks often said, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” Today it’s, “What if the fascists gave a civil war and nobody came?” The cream of the fascist crop went to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and they got neutralized by justice. The deplorables now know that they’ve lost, though they’re still in the rage and denial stage.

The courts are dealing with the criminals. But it’s up to us to deal with the hordes of hometown deplorables and their rage. They’re all around us. But there’s nothing they can do now with their rage, other than go after school boards and harass their scapegoats. Some true believers with lots of guns will, as usual, go on shooting expeditions that they won’t survive.

As recently as August 2, David Brooks wrote a piece in the New York Times with the headline “What if we’re the bad guys here?” He’s reviving yet again the terrible idea that it’s Democrats and other decent human beings who are somehow responsible for Trumpism, rather than the deplorables. Even if life for the deplorables isn’t fair (it isn’t), that’s no excuse for fascism. The deplorables might benefit from studying the history of African-Americans (rather than erasing them from the history taught in schools), whose lot was — and is — far worse than the deplorables, but who chose good leaders and a rational path to progress. I just saw a new and very true meme on Facebook — that those who deny history fully intend to repeat it.

I very much believe that there is something cognitively and morally broken — deranged — in those who still see Trump as a hero. They are just not decent human beings, and they are not fit for decent human company. Yet there they are, and we have to deal with them. That’s why civility is more important than ever. We’re surrounded by them. If they’re civil to us, then we can be civil to them. (Start preparing yourself now for the next Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings.) Most of them will never change, and it’s going to take years for them to die off. Economic justice — better lives for working people rather than more billionaires, the very thing that Republicans most oppose — is a major part of the longterm solution. Educating their children is one of the biggest challenges, because the deplorables (and their leaders and propagandists) don’t want children educated. They want children to be deplorable.

We’ve avoided disaster. Now we just need more time for the arc of the moral universe to continue its course toward justice — until, someday, as their numbers dwindle, as their children catch on, and as their churches serve the devil and go bankrupt, we leave these ugly souls behind forever.

---

Update:

It’s not just me. Anyone with a moral IQ above 98.6 can see it.

“Trump has ‘moral compass of an ax murderer,’ says Georgia Republican.

---

---

Source: Wikimedia Commons

A big problem with posting about current events is that it’s almost impossible to find photographs that are in the public domain. For a long time now, the world has been waiting for a criminal indictment of Donald Trump that comes with a mug shot. Police mug shots are public record and are therefore in the public domain. For whatever reason, no mug shots were provided with Trump’s previous indictments. But now, in Georgia, we’re promised that that will change.

According to Axios, the sheriff of Fulton County has said that Trump will be treated the same as any other person charged with a crime. “Unless somebody tells me differently, we are following our normal practices, and so it doesn’t matter your status, we’ll have a mugshot ready for you,” the sheriff said.

Time Magazine wrote a piece back in March saying that a genuine Trump mug shot would be a fundraising boon for Trump. That may be, since some people are that stupid. But for the rest of us, a Trump mug shot will lead to a grand outpouring of memes like nothing ever seen before. There will be a great feast and festival of snark and schadenfreude.

We know that Trump has until August 25 to turn himself in, but so far there has been no word on when his arraignment will happen.

I can’t wait.

By the way, speaking of feasts, the media have been feasting on polls saying that the Trump indictments cause Trump’s popularity (among Republicans) to rise. This is bunk. Trumpists are still in the anger and denial stage. Those who respond to polls of course say that the indictments make them more likely to vote for Trump. It’s the only way they can register their anger and denial. Polls fifteen months before an election are meaningless anyway.

I closely monitor the Facebook group of the Republican Party in my county. This county voted 78 percent for Trump in 2020. That Facebook group provides some insight into the state of mind of Trumpists in red, red counties. Mostly they’re not even talking about Trump. Very few Republicans even post anymore — only the most radical and angry ones. My impression is that it’s all starting to sink in. They’re figuring out that they’ve been deceived and taken for a ride by a con man, and that they’re now accountable for everything they’ve done and said in the past. The smarter ones may have started reaching the depression stage of grief, which I would call demoralization, when the grief is political. There is absolutely nothing in sight for them to lift their spirits or give them a win. Their future is lose, lose, lose, as far as the eye can see.

---

---

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. Peter Turchin, Penguin, June 2023. 352 pages.

---

It seems to me that most publications, and most of our useless and accursèd pundit class, are doing their best to ignore this book. I think I can see why. The political punditry don’t like to bother with scholars and ideas. That wouldn’t get many clicks, and it would interfere too much with the punditry’s pursuit of shallowness — politics as a horse race; who’s up and who’s down; working every day to keep us scared and to keep ratings (and clicks) up; profiting from polarization and wallowing in everything that promotes it.

Even those who have written about this book mostly miss the point. What’s important about this book is not whether the author, Peter Turchin, has a theory that can make predictions, which is all the pundits seem to want to write about. What’s important, and what nobody has written about, as far as I can tell from Googling, are the political factors that Turchin uses to measure the stability of political arrangements, and the course that states take when things become unstable.

By far, the most important factor is the “wealth pump.” It’s the wealth pump that transfers the wealth produced by the working classes to the governing elite — the ruling class — who hold the wealth and power. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. When that happens, as it did in the U.S. when the Reagan administration started the reversal of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal, something will break sooner or later, for two reasons. The first reason is the “immiseration” of working people. The second reason is that too much wealth at the top creates a surplus of rich people competing for power and a bigger share of the spoils. This competition tends to get uglier and uglier as frustrated elites increasingly break the rules (and destroy institutions in the process) to try to get ahead.

Turchin, in brief but very telling examples from history, traces the rise and fall of states that rose, and then fell. His account of the fall of the Soviet Union is particularly helpful, as is his account of what went wrong in Russia during the 1990s as elites fought over, and divided up, everything that belonged to the Russian people. He also sheds a great deal of light on why the political systems of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus went in different directions after Putin came to power in Russia.

Probably the biggest reason that publications and the punditry are trying to ignore this book is that there is no way to spin it into a centrist morality tale. Someone is bound to slam the book as confirmation bias for liberals, if someone hasn’t already. Turchin does use the word “moderates” in one chapter, but by that he does not mean centrists. “Moderates” is the term he uses for people who initially participated in the violence and mayhem of rebellions but who become sick of violence and start working instead for a restoration of peace. People usually die — both peasants and elites — when the wealth pump pushes things all the way to disintegration and revolution.

I will not try to describe here what Turchin has to say about how far along the United States is on the path to disintegration, and what the possible outcomes are. But I will say this, and I don’t think that, as a liberal, I’m falling into the trap of confirmation bias. If we Americans are to save ourselves, the only solution is a new New Deal in which our ruling elites come to their senses and realize that, unless they use their political power to turn off the wealth pump, the 90 percent of the population at the bottom will use some means or other, including possibly violence, to turn it off for them. This, according to Turchin, in what happened during the New Deal. It wasn’t just Franklin Roosevelt. The ruling class of that time had looked over their shoulders and seen what was happening in Russia and Eastern Europe. And so the ruling class consented to new arrangements in which the 90 percent, the government, and the ruling class all worked together for an equitable sharing of wealth. (There was a serious flaw in that settlement, though, and we’re still paying for it. White people got a fair deal. Black people got Jim Crow.)

Can we turn the United States into Denmark? And how fast could we do it? That’s pretty much what it comes down to. You can imagine how hard that will be, given that the Republican Party’s system of disinformation and propaganda has convinced working people that turning the United States into Denmark is the worst thing that could ever happen to them. The truth is, turning the U.S. into Denmark would be the best thing that could ever happen to the deplorables. Strangely enough — and this book has given me a whole new level of respect for President Biden — that’s what Biden is trying to do, as quietly as possible and in as bipartisan a way as possible. Even we Democrats know far too little about Bidenomics. The media don’t write about it, because the media feed on conflict and failure rather than progress and success. For example, when inflation is rising, the media go on and on about it. When inflation is coming down, they change the subject back to conflict and failure. In the Republican propaganda bubble, no one even hears that inflation is coming down. Clearly Biden has a plan to force the media to write about economic success, by making Bidenomics a thing during the 2024 elections.

If you’re a liberal, this book will renew your confidence that we liberals are on the right track. It also occurred to me while reading this book that political and moral philosophy will get you to the very same place that Turchin treats as a science and which he calls “cliodynamics.” We liberals want to apply John Rawls’ theory of “justice as fairness” simply because it’s the right thing to do. The difference, from Turchin’s perspective, is that if you fail to pursue justice as fairness simply because it’s the right thing to do, then you’re on the road, inevitably, to violence and collapse.

In Roosevelt’s time, Americans did the right thing. For almost three decades after World War II, America was like Denmark. Can we do it again?

---

For those of us who have been saying for years that Trump is going to prison, this is no surprise. The wait has been miserable. But surely it’s safe to assume that the U.S. Department of Justice knows what it’s doing. And no doubt the DOJ has been particularly cautious and meticulous in a case like this one.

Obviously we’ll soon learn a lot from what comes out in court not only in this case but also in the other court cases that Trump is facing. But, just as important, we’re also about to learn a lot about the media and about the punditry.

Any media person who continues to push the notion that Trump will still somehow magically get away with everything, just to keep us anxious and angry, is a media person to whom we should pay no attention ever again. And any pundit who says that these indictments are a dark day for America is a pundit to whom we should never again pay attention. The Trump dark days are past. The dark days in American history were when Trump was in the White House. Today is a grand day in American history. One of the strongest blows ever for equal justice has been struck. We can cheer with our heads held high and with every meaningful principle on our side.

And yes, there also is schadenfreude. There, the principles are not our side. Still, I refuse to feel any guilt about taking pleasure in watching them pay for what Trump and the Republican Party have put us through. Now we can look on and laugh as the Republican Party, which brought this on itself, splits right down the middle. And the people who gloated about liberal tears and repeatedly said to us “fuck your feelings” will whine, vent their rage, and come up with new conspiracy theories. But their demoralization is inevitable now, and, politically, that’s where we want them.

I’ve been saving a bottle of champagne for this moment left over from a canceled celebration after the horrible election of November 8, 2016. It’s too late tonight to pop a cork and properly celebrate. So I think I’ll save the champagne for next Tuesday, after Trump appears in court.

---

Source: Wikimedia Commons

---

I suspect, in retrospect, that the extension of the debt ceiling was always going to end the way it ended. I also suspect that the media and the political class were in cahoots and doing their best to make high drama out of nothing, to get the clicks and the attention. But we did learn some things.

The weakness and political stupidity of the Republican Party were on full display. It would be harder to do a better job of looking like a bunch of dangerous idiots if their actual intention was to cause sane and decent human beings to run screaming from Republicans, begging the Democratic Party to save them (which Joe Biden quietly did, where the debt ceiling is concerned). Republicans did at least have the good sense to keep quiet about cutting Social Security and Medicare, but you’ll remember how Republicans stepped right into Biden’s trap back in January during Biden’s State of the Union speech, when he taunted Republicans into claiming that they weren’t out to cut, or privatize, Social Security and Medicare, even though they’ve been trying to do that since 1935 for Social Security and 1965 for Medicare. As usual, only the most radical Republican voices were heard (though Kevin McCarthy, as usual, talked out of both sides of his mouth and smiled for all the cameras). It was clear what the radicals wanted. They wanted to force a default and throw the world economy into turmoil and the U.S. into recession, then blame Democrats for it.

There was more than a little media malpractice, too. After covering the issue like some kind of existential showdown in which Republican radicals had all sorts of imaginary power to crush us all, the legislation sailed through the House (314-117) and the Senate (63-36). Suddenly everyone but Joe Biden looked very silly. What was all that fuss about?

But the circus goes on. The media still pretend that the 2024 election will be another Trump-Biden referendum. That ain’t gonna happen. Trump is going to prison, and before he goes to prison he’s going to have a hard time being in three or four courtrooms at the same time. And would I be the first person to predict that, if a viable Democratic candidate can get up to speed within the next six or eight months, Biden will decide to retire? Even if Trump weren’t going to prison, he’s a loser, and Republicans know it — especially those Republicans in the House and Senate who voted to extend the debt ceiling. Those Republicans know that there aren’t nearly enough MAGA types in the country to win a national election. Trump, you’ll remember, has never gotten a majority, though a lot of foolish people in 2016 threw away their votes (and, by 2020, knew better).

Today’s media economy requires a circus. The media will make a circus out of nothing if they have to. My expectation is that, soon, the biggest and greatest circus in American history will begin — Trump on trial for a long list of crimes, maybe even espionage. The Republican Party will split wide open. If some of those Republicans were sane enough to vote to extend the debt ceiling, they still deserve to go down and stay down, though half crazy is better than completely crazy. No matter how hard the media tries to invent some kind of false balance between Democrats and Republicans, they won’t be able to succeed, with a boring political genius in the White House and a Republican pig circus day after day and month after month. And let’s not forget: Republicans at the national level no longer have enough power to be dangerous, as much as they’d like to be. The debt ceiling made that perfectly clear.

Still, above the stench of everything that has happened in the past few weeks, I think I detect a wee whiff of something clean and healthy. It smells like the first young buds of a return to normality, because chaos isn’t paying off anymore.

---

Update: President Biden’s address to the nation this evening from the Oval Office was brilliant. If you missed watching it live, you should be able to find it on YouTube.

---