It has now been 58 years since the shocking day on which John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, by Lee Harvey Oswald. I will not recount my memory of the events of that day and the several which followed it, but I will refer you to some relevant posts that touch on my memory of the fateful day, and of JFK’s legacy and place in history:
Category Archives: History
What Happened to America?
Theodore Dalrymple, in a typically brilliant column, “First Slowly, Then Quickly“, traces the corruption of language and values pertaining to the subject of sex; for example:
In a publication aimed at dermatologists, the Dermatology Times, we read in an article devoted to the treatment of the skin in transgender patients the following:
Patients of reproductive potential who are not…abstinent with penis-containing partners, 2 forms of contraception are required.
In other words, women who would like to be men but still have their ovaries and wombs can become pregnant by sexual intercourse with fertile men, the latter now being known as “penis-containing” persons….
At the same time as we are enjoined to think of biological sex as unimportant to the point of nonexistence, and to believe that men who can have babies by penis-containers are men in precisely the same sense that Tarzan was a man….
There are several wider cultural trends discernible in the current agitation over transsexualism, or whatever name one wishes to give it…
The first cultural trend is an increasing reluctance to accept any limitation whatsoever to the satisfaction of one’s desires that are placed by circumstances beyond one’s control, that is to say an exaggerated or exacerbated Prometheanism: You can be anything you want, without limitation, and therefore you do not have to accept anything you were born with as ineluctable….
The second trend is to magical thinking, despite the supposed rationality of our age and its vaunted defeat of superstition. We believe that we can change reality by means of mere verbal incantations…. Thus, if we go on saying long enough that women who take male hormones are men, and outlaw the opposite proposition, such women will become men.
The third trend is the worship of power. The object of deliberate language change is not to improve the state of the world, or even anyone’s state of mind, but the exertion and consolidation of power for its own sake….
The fourth trend is centralization of the marginal; that is to say, a marginal phenomenon such as transsexualism comes to occupy the center of intellectual attention. To employ a different metaphor, the tail wags the dog.
The fifth trend is to the increasing spinelessness or cowardice of much of the intelligentsia, who in this case have proved themselves astonishingly easy to intimidate, a pack of intellectual Neville Chamberlains (but Chamberlain had more excuse, for he had lived through the horror of the First World War, which he did not want to repeat). Nothing has proved too absurd for this intelligentsia to swallow; indeed, the swallowing of absurdity is easier for the intelligentsia than others, for rationalization is their métier. There is no point in being an intellectual if you think only what everyone else thinks.
Which leads to this:
The most important question is, What next?—for there will be a next, because transgressive reform is what gives meaning to life in the absence of any other meaning. My money is on incest, against which there is no rational argument these days, given the availability of birth control and abortion and the moral authority of mutual consent.
Dalrymple’s answer applies only to matters sexual. But his observations have broader implications for the fate of the West. The alarming reluctance among “wokesters” to accept natural limitations, magical thinking, centralization of the marginal, and spinelessness have burrowed into the social and economic fabric of the West. And encourage its subjugation by enemies who scoff at such “woke” delusions as transgenderism, “climate change”, “equity”, and the rest of the left’s “woke” agenda.
In America, these delusions have been accumulating since the onset of the so-called Progressive Era in the 1890s. That naissance (it was nothing like a renaissance) occurred on the (figurative) eve of my maternal grandparents’ marriage. My maternal grandmother was born in 1880 and lived to the age of 96. I was close to her from my early childhood until her death in 1977, when I was 36 years old..
She was a typical American woman of her generation, and of at least one generation to follow. She worked at a menial job until her marriage, bore and raised ten children, never traveled more than 150 miles from her home (until a late-life trip to visit a son in Florida), cooked on a wood-burning stove and lived without indoor plumbing until she was 70, never owned a TV set, and never drove a car. (For more about Grandma and her progeny, see this, this, and this.)
No thanks to the Progressive Era and all that it unleashed, the America of today isn’t my grandmother’s America. Nor is it my mother’s America. Nor is it the America that I grew up in.
What is it? And what happened to make it the way that it is?
Before I try to describe the America of today and explain how it came to be, I must try to describe what it was for most Americans in the first five decades of the twentieth century:
Life, for a significant fraction of the populace — a fraction that dwindled, swelled in the 1930s, and then dwindled sharply — was a fragile thing. It was threatened by disease, malnutrition, injury, lack of adequate shelter, and much else that (as of now) has been “conquered” by economic and scientific progress. (Economic progress occurred in spite of government action — see, for example, this, this, this, and this. Scientific progress has become regress, witness the government-funded plague known as Covid-19 and the wholesale hysteria known as “climate change”.)
Physical labor was central to life and fraught with dangers that were taken in stride.
Family ties were crucial because of the foregoing.
Religious belief was taken for granted and the central tenets of the Judeo-Christian tradition guided behavior (with the usual lapses that are endemic to human nature).
The vicissitudes of life and shared religious beliefs made community (but not communism) a real thing (not a faux construct fostered by “social” media).
Social life centered on family, church, and community.
Entertainment was largely home-made and wholesome.
One’s income and wealth were one’s own responsibility.
The super-rich promoted the arts, not thought control.
Immigrants entered the country legally and studied America’s Constitution and history to become citizens. (They weren’t allowed in the back door and released into the general population to burden taxpayers.)
Fairness was striking a deal and sticking to it (not claiming to be “owed” something because of one’s color, creed, or gender-confusion).
Sex was a fact of life, and there were only two sexes.
Homosexuality was an aberration that undercut the social fabric and was accordingly viewed as something to be shunned.
Race and racial differences (cultural, economic, criminal) were facts of life, not a “social construct”.
Crime was punished, quickly and with all due severity.
College was a privilege for the brightest, not a “right” to be thrown at millions who were unfit for it.
Politicians, despite their tendency toward mendacity and venality, were by-and-large to be trusted, as long as their power was circumscribed.
Washington was a far-off place (metaphorically if not geographically) that had little to do with daily life.
What’s wrong with that list? Nothing, as far as I can see. It’s anchored in reality.
How, then, did America come to be run by a cabal of super-rich “oligarchs”, politicians, bureaucrats, academics, and “journalists” who sneer at the list and reject it, in deed if not in word?
It happened one step backward at a time. America’s old culture, along with much of its liberty and (less visibly) its prosperity, was lost step by step through a combination of chicanery (by the left) and compromise (by “centrists” and conservative dupes). The process — the culmination of which is “wokeness” — has a long history and deep roots. Those roots are not in Marxism, socialism, atheism, or any of the other left-wing “isms” (appalling and dangerous they may be). They are, as I explain here, in (classical) liberalism, the supposed bulwark of liberty and prosperity.
An “ism” is only as effective as its adherents. The adherents of (classical) liberalism are especially ineffective in the defense of liberty because they are blinded by their own rhetoric. Take Deirdre McCloskey, for example, whom Arnold Kling quotes approvingly in a piece that I eviscerated recently:
The quality of life you personally lead, dear reader, is better than the lives of your thirty-two great-great-great-great grandparents. I’ll speak for myself. An Irish peasant woman digging pratties in her lazybed in 1805 or a Norwegian farmer of thirty acres of rock soil in Dimmelsvik in 1800 or the American daughter of poor English people in 1795 had brutish and short lives. Many of them could not read. Their horizons were narrow. Their lives were toilsome and bitter….
Richer and more urban people, contrary to what the magazines of opinion sometimes suggest, are less materialistic, less violent, less superficial than poor and rural people. Because people in capitalist countries already possess the material, they are less attached to their possessions than people in poor countries. And because they have more to lose from a society of violence, they resist it.
… The richer, more urban, more bourgeois people… have larger, not smaller, spiritual lives than their ancestors of the pastoral. They have more, not fewer, real friends than their great-great-great-great grandparents in “closed-corporate” villages. They have broader, not narrower, choices of identity than the one imposed on them by the country, custom, language, and religion of their birth. They have deeper, not shallower, contacts with the transcendent of art or science or God, and sometimes even of nature, than the superstitious peasants and haunted hunter-gatherers from whom we all descend.4
That drips with smugness and condescension. And it wildly mischaracterizes the wealthy “elites” who have taken charge in the West. As I will discuss, there is noting spiritual about them.
McCloskey, who is an economist of some note, should know better than to make what amounts to interpersonal utility comparisons. She writes as if she were able to evaluate the “utility” of the dead and weigh it against the “utility” of the living. No such evaluation is possible, even for the living. The dead are beyond reach, of course, but they certainly weren’t able to weigh their circumstances against the unpredictable circumstances of their descendants and find themselves wanting — materially or spiritually — relative to those as-yet-unborn descendants.
All that McCloskey has told is is that she (formerly he) views his/her way of life as superior to that of the unwashed masses, living and dead. Further, holding that view — which is typical of liberals classical and modern (i.e., statists) — he/she obviously believes that the superior way of life should be adopted by the unwashed — for their own good, of course. (If this isn’t to be accomplished by force, as statists would prefer, then by education and example. This would include, but not be limited to, choosing a new sexual identity if one is deluded enough to believe that he/she was “assigned” the wrong one at birth.)
It is hard to tell McCloskey’s attitude from that of a member of the “woke” elite, though he/she undoubtedly deny being such a person. I am willing to bet, however, that most of McCloskey’s ilk (if not he/she him/herself) voted enthusiastically for “moderate” Joe Biden because rude, crude Donald Trump offended their tender sensibilities (and threatened their statist agenda). And they did so knowing that Biden, despite his self-proclaimed “moderation”, was and is allied with leftists whose statist ambitions for the United States are an affront to every tenet of classical liberalism, not the least of which is freedom of speech. Shallowness, thy name is (classical) liberalism (when it is not never-Trump “conservativism”.)
What is a “wokester”, then? A “wokester” is someone with an anti-American agenda has become impatient with such trifles as freedom of speech and due process of law for those who oppose that agenda. Here is Bari Weiss on the subject:
Let me offer the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the Woke Revolution, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon.
It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools. And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.
So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.
Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.
In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully.
In this ideology, if you do not tweet the right tweet or share the right slogan, your whole life can be ruined. Just ask Tiffany Riley, a Vermont school principal who was fired—fired—because she said she supports black lives but not the organization Black Lives Matter.
In this ideology, the past cannot be understood on its own terms, but must be judged through the morals and mores of the present. It is why statues of Grant and Washington are being torn down. And it is why William Peris, a UCLA lecturer and an Air Force veteran, was investigated for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” out loud in class.
In this ideology, intentions don’t matter. That is why Emmanuel Cafferty, a Hispanic utility worker at San Diego Gas and Electric, was fired for making what someone said he thought was a white-supremacist hand gesture—when in fact he was cracking his knuckles out of his car window.
In this ideology, the equality of opportunity is replaced with equality of outcome as a measure of fairness. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, the course must have been defective. Thus, the argument to get rid of the SAT. Or the admissions tests for public schools like Stuyvesant in New York or Lowell in San Francisco.
In this ideology, you are guilty for the sins of your fathers. In other words: You are not you. You are only a mere avatar of your race or your religion or your class. That is why third-graders in Cupertino, California, were asked to rate themselves in terms of their power and privilege. In third grade.
In this system, we are all placed neatly on a spectrum of “privileged” to “oppressed.” We are ranked somewhere on this spectrum in different categories: race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Then we are given an overall score, based on the sum of these rankings. Having privilege means that your character and your ideas are tainted. This is why, one high-schooler in New York tells me, students in his school are told, “If you are white and male, you are second in line to speak.” This is considered a normal and necessary redistribution of power.
Racism has been redefined. It is no longer about discrimination based on the color of someone’s skin. Racism is any system that allows for disparate outcomes between racial groups. If disparity is present, as the high priest of this ideology, Ibram X. Kendi, has explained, racism is present. According to this totalizing new view, we are all either racist or anti-racist. To be a Good Person and not a Bad Person, you must be an “anti-racist.” There is no neutrality. There is no such thing as “not racist.”
Most important: In this revolution, skeptics of any part of this radical ideology are recast as heretics. Those who do not abide by every single aspect of its creed are tarnished as bigots, subjected to boycotts and their work to political litmus tests. The Enlightenment, as the critic Edward Rothstein has put it, has been replaced by the exorcism.
What we call “cancel culture” is really the justice system of this revolution. And the goal of the cancellations is not merely to punish the person being cancelled. The goal is to send a message to everyone else: Step out of line and you are next.
And:
It has worked. A recent CATO study found that 62 percent of Americans are afraid to voice their true views. Nearly a quarter of American academics endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences.
It has worked because it is the culmination of a decades of indoctrination in public schools and universities — indoctrination that derides and denies the America that I described earlier. It has worked because wealthy “elites” in positions of power — academic power, corporate power, media power, and governmental power — are among the indoctrinated are able to make it work. And if they are not indoctrinated, they are willing and able to make it work for their own enrichment and power.
Why would they do that? For the perquisites of being in power and being allied with the all-powerful state. Here, for example, is Theodore Dalyrmple, writing about Britain (though he could just as well be writing about America or another other rich Western nation):
Britain has pioneered and is now a world leader in a phenomenon that might be called legalized corruption or corruption without breaking the law. This allows private looting of funds raised by taxation and government borrowing on an unprecedented scale. Combined with the moral and intellectual corruption of such services as the police, who indulge in para-police activities such as eliminating hatred from the human breast while ignoring burglaries, arson, and assault, value for money has become a concept without meaning or application….
The state, said Bastiat, is the means by which everybody seeks to live at everyone else’s expense. (You need not believe that this is the only function of the state to see the truth, or strong element of truth, in Bastiat’s dictum.) But in the past what most people wanted from the state was a secure living and a decent pension rather than a pharaonic scale of living. In Britain, at least, Mrs. Thatcher opened the Pandora’s box of bureaucratic ambition, and out flew all those soi-disant chief executives, directors of operations, deputy directors of business development, etc., and now they will never return where they belong.
Seen in this light, the recent shindig or orgy [“climate change” conference] in Glasgow becomes rather more intelligible. There were 400 private jets said to have landed, like a swarm of bees (or is it vultures?) at Glasgow airport, for this event. It would be instructive to know how many of the owners of those jets owed their wealth in large part to favors done them by governments. Not all, probably, but many. We do not live in a liberal order, at least not liberal in the classical economic sense, but in a corporatist one, or one rather like the apartheid regime in South Africa, with its socialism and positive discrimination for one race. No doubt corporatism is to some extent inevitable because of the complexity of modern technology, which we cannot, or do not wish to, do without, but at least let us get our terminology right.
Michael Rectenwald goes beyond venality into dystopia:
According to Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chair of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the 4-IR [fourth Industrial Revolution] follows the first, second, and third Industrial Revolutions—the mechanical, electrical, and digital, respectively. The 4-IR builds on the digital revolution, but Schwab sees the 4-IR as an exponential takeoff and convergence of existing and emerging fields, including Big Data; artificial intelligence; machine learning; quantum computing; and genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. The consequence is the merging of the physical, digital, and biological worlds. The blurring of these categories ultimately challenges the very ontologies by which we understand ourselves and the world, including “what it means to be human.”5….
[I]f existing 4-IR developments are any indication of the future, then Schwab’s enthusiasm is misplaced, and the 4-IR is misrepresented. These developments already include internet algorithms that feed users prescribed news and advertisements and downrank or exclude banned content; algorithms that censor social media content and consign “dangerous” individuals and organizations to digital gulags; apps that track and trace covid suspects and report violators to the police; robot police with QR code scanners to identify and round up dissenters; and smart cities where everyone is a digital entity to be monitored, surveilled, and recorded, while data on their every move is collected, collated, stored, and attached to a digital identity and social credit score….
Many positive developments may come from the 4-IR, but unless it is taken out of the hands of the corporate-socialist technocrats, it will constitute a virtual prison.
Under the Great Reset governance model, states and favored corporations form “public-private partnerships” in control of governance. The configuration yields a corporate-state hybrid largely unaccountable to the constituents of national governments….
In Google Archipelago, I argued that leftist authoritarianism is the political ideology and modus operandi of what I call Big Digital, and that Big Digital is the leading edge of an emerging world system. Big Digital is the communications, ideological, and technological arm of an emerging corporate socialism. The Great Reset is the name that has since been given to the project of establishing this world system.
Just as Klaus Schwab and the WEF hoped, the covid crisis has accelerated the development of the Great Reset’s corporate-socialist statism. Developments advancing the Great Reset agenda include the Federal Reserve’s unrestrained printing of money, the subsequent inflation, the increasing taxation on everything imaginable, the increased dependence on the state, the supply chain crisis, the restrictions and job losses due to vaccine mandates, and the prospect of personal carbon allowances.10 Altogether, these and other such policies constitute a coordinated attack on the majority. Ironically, they also represent the “fairness” aspect of the Great Reset—if we properly understand fairness to mean leveling the economic status of the “average American” with those in less “privileged” regions. And this is one of the functions of woke ideology11—to make the majority in developed countries feel unworthy of their “privileged” lifestyles and consumption patterns, which the elite are in the process of resetting to a reduced and static new normal.
Over the past twenty-one months, the response to the covid-19 scourge has consolidated the monopolistic corporations’ grip on the economy on top, while advancing “actually-existing socialism” below. In partnership with Big Tech, Big Pharma, the legacy media, national and international health agencies, and compliant populations, hitherto “democratic” Western states are increasingly being transformed into totalitarian regimes modeled after China, seemingly overnight. I need not provide a litany of the tyranny and abuses. You can read about them on alternative news sites—until you can no longer read about them even there.12
The Great Reset, then, is not merely a conspiracy theory; it is an open, avowed, and planned project, and it is well underway.
As Rahm Emanuel infamously said, never let a serious crisis go to waste. In other words, exploit it to the hilt in order to increase the power and scope of government.
Therein lies the story of the dissolution of America (and the West). Trust in government, whether sincere or cynical, has displaced personal responsibility, which was — with other aspects of virtue — the mainspring of the American character. The mainspring wore down under the pressure of Progressivism, the crisis that was the Great Depression, the growth of government spawned by that crisis, the false sense of security generated by the welfare state, and — paradoxically — just enough prosperity (for which proponents of the welfare state falsely claim credit) to make Americans (figuratively and too often literally) fat, dumb, and happy.
Economic security — or the illusion of it — is an enemy of liberty. And the failure of liberty eventually brings about the failure of economic security because “Big Brother” destroys the initiative (springing from personal responsibility) that makes possible true prosperity, which the printing of money cannot sustain.
“Big Brother” not only destroys personal responsibility, he also destroys the communal esprit that is animated by mutual trust, respect, and beneficial cooperation. In other words “Big Brother” destroys the essence of liberty. And, to that end, “Big Brother” has become the manservant of “wokeness”.
Other related posts:
Social Norms and Liberty
Facets of Liberty
1963: The Year Zero
Turning Points
Election 2020: Liberty Is at Stake
“We Believe”
Thinking about Thinking and Other Things — Beliefs, Herds, and Oppression
Centrism:The Path to Dystopia
Presidents: Key Dates and Various Trivia
I have updated “Presidents: Key Dates and Various Trivia” to reflect the election installation of J.R. Biden (Jr.) as 46th President of the United States.
Trump’s Popularity: A Summing Up
For most of his term as president, Donald Trump was more popular than Barack Obama was at the same points during Obama’s presidency:
That Trump failed of re-election can be chalked up to a combination of four things: fraud, a determined effort by Democrats to get out the vote, anti-Trump enthusiasm, and the decline in Trump’s popularity during the fourth year of his presidency. Even the resurgence between weeks 183 and 196 (due mainly to the Hunter Biden affair) couldn’t save him.
Will Trump remain influential within the Republican Party? Will he form a third party? If he does, will it be self-sustaining or will it fade away like Ross Perot’s party and the Tea Party movement?
Stay tuned….
Churchill’s “Divisiveness”
Sir Winston Churchill said many memorable things in his long and eloquent life. Nowadays, much of what he said would be considered “divisive”, that is, espousing the defense of liberty and reason. Here are some examples (drawn from this site):
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!
Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities… because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.
There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.
A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.
Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
“It’s Tough to Make Predictions, Especially about the Future”
A lot of people have said it, or something like it, though probably not Yogi Berra, to whom it’s often attributed.
Here’s another saying, which is also apt here: History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.
I am accordingly amused by something called cliodynamics, which is discussed at length by Amanda Rees in “Are There Laws of History?” (Aeon, May 2020). The Wikipedia article about cliodynamics describes it as
a transdisciplinary area of research integrating cultural evolution, economic history/cliometrics, macrosociology, the mathematical modeling of historical processes during the longue durée [the long term], and the construction and analysis of historical databases. Cliodynamics treats history as science. Its practitioners develop theories that explain such dynamical processes as the rise and fall of empires, population booms and busts, spread and disappearance of religions. These theories are translated into mathematical models. Finally, model predictions are tested against data. Thus, building and analyzing massive databases of historical and archaeological information is one of the most important goals of cliodynamics.
I won’t dwell on the methods of cliodynamics, which involve making up numbers about various kinds of phenomena and then making up models which purport to describe, mathematically, the interactions among the phenomena. Underlying it all is the practitioner’s broad knowledge of historical events, which he converts (with the proper selection of numerical values and mathematical relationships) into such things as the Kondratiev wave, a post-hoc explanation of a series of arbitrarily denominated and subjectively measured economic eras.
In sum, if you seek patterns you will find them, but pattern-making (modeling) is not science. (There’s a lot more here.)
Here’s a simple demonstration of what’s going on with cliodynamics. Using the RANDBETWEEN function of Excel, I generated two columns of random numbers ranging in value from 0 to 1,000, with 1,000 numbers in each column. I designated the values in the left column as x variables and the numbers in the right column as y variables. I then arbitrarily chose the first 10 pairs of numbers and plotted them:
As it turns out, the relationship, even though it seems rather loose, has only a 21-percent chance of being due to chance. In the language of statistics, two-tailed p=0.21.
Of course, the relationship is due entirely to chance because it’s the relationship between two sets of random numbers. So much for statistical tests of “significance”.
Moreover, I could have found “more significant” relationships had I combed carefully through the 1,000 pairs of random number with my pattern-seeking brain.
But being an honest person with scientific integrity, I will show you the plot of all 1,000 pairs of random numbers:
I didn’t bother to find a correlation between the x and y values because there is none. And that’s the messy reality of human history. Yes, there have been many determined (i.e., sought-for) outcomes — such as America’s independence from Great Britain and Hitler’s rise to power. But they are not predetermined outcomes. Their realization depended on the surrounding circumstances of the moment, which were myriad, non-quantifiable, and largely random in relation to the event under examination (the revolution, the putsch, etc.). The outcomes only seem inevitable and predictable in hindsight.
Cliodynamics is a variant of the anthropic principle, which is that he laws of physics appear to be fine-tuned to support human life because we humans happen to be here to observe the laws of physics. In the case of cliodynamics, the past seems to consist of inevitable events because we are here in the present looking back (rather hazily) at the events that occurred in the past.
Cliodynametricians, meet Nostradamus. He “foresaw” the future long before you did.
Obamagate
In case you haven’t seen my page “Obamagate (a.k.a. Spygate and Russiagate)“, which I’ve just updated, I’m reproducing it below. But you should go there from time to time because the list of related reading at the bottom of the page keeps growing, and is certain to expand greatly in the coming weeks and months.
I have added to the list of related reading at the bottom of this page many times since publishing it on August 31, 2018. There have, however, been only two substantive revisions (noted by boldface), neither of which has altered my original thesis about the origin and purposes of the conspiracy. On 05/03/20 I included former FBI director James Comey as a full-fledged member of the post-election phase of the conspiracy, based on Andrew McCarthy’s article of 05/02/20 (see “related reading”). On 05/12/20 I limited former deputy AG Sally Yates’s role to the post-election phase (based on McCarthy’s article), and (based on Francis Menton’s article of 5/11/20) I acknowledged the possibility that the post-election phase of the conspiracy was really meant to be a coverup of the pre-election attempt to discredit Trump with the Steele dossier. Also, in view of the confirmation of Obama’s central role in the conspirace, which I had posited from the beginning, I began on 05/11/20 to refer to the affair as Obamagate.
The persecution of General Flynn, as it turns out, was an essential element of the post-election coverup attempt. See McCarthy’s article of 05/20/20 for a complete explanation.
Neither Donald Trump nor anyone acting on his behalf colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
The original story about collusion, the Steele Dossier, was cooked up by the White House and the Clinton campaign. The story was then used to launch a three-pronged attack on Trump and the Trump campaign. The first prong was to infiltrate and spy on the campaign, seeking (a) to compromise campaign officials and (b) learn what “dirt” the campaign had on Clinton. The second prong was to boost Clinton’s candidacy by casting Trump as a dupe of Putin. The third prong was to discredit Trump, should he somehow win the election, in furtherance of the already-planned resistance to a Trump administration. (According to Menton, the effort to discredit Trump may have been just a welcome side effect of the underlying effort to deflect attention from Obama’s role in the pre-election conspiracy to defeat Trump.)
The investigation led by Robert Mueller is a continuation and expansion of FBI investigations that had been aimed at “proving” a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. Mueller’s investigation was expanded to include the possibility that Trump obstructed justice by attempting to interfere with the FBI investigations. All of this investigatory activity was and is intended to provide ammunition for Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. That would leave a Republican in the White House, but — as with the forced resignation of Nixon — it would weaken the GOP, cause a “Blue wave” election in 2018, and result in the election of a Democrat president in 2020.
(Aside: The effort to brand Trump as a dupe of Russia is ironic, given the anti-anti-communist history of the Democrat party, Barack Obama’s fecklessness in his dealings with Russia, and his stated willingness to advance Russia’s interests while abandoning traditional European allies. Then there was FDR, who was surrounded and guided by Soviet agents.)
Why was it important to defeat Trump if possible, and to discredit or remove him if — by some quirk of fate — he won the election?
- First, Obama wanted to protect his “legacy”, which included the fraudulent trifecta of Obamacare, the Iran nuclear deal, and the Paris climate accord. The massive increase in the number of federal regulations under Obama was also at risk, along with his tax increase, embrace of Islam, and encouragement of illegal immigration (and millions of potential Democrat voters).
- Second, members of the Obama administration, including Obama himself, were anxious to thwart efforts by the Trump campaign to obtain derogatory information about Hillary Clinton. Such information included, but was not limited to, incriminating e-mails that Russians had retrieved from the illegal private server set up for Clinton’s use. That Obama knew about the private server implicated him in the illegality.
In sum, helping Hillary win — with the aid of the CIA, Justice Department, and FBI — was supposed to protect Obama and his “legacy”. One way of doing that was to ensure a victory by Hillary. (The Obama-directed whitewash of her illegal e-mail operation was meant to defuse that issue.) The other way of protecting Obama’s “legacy” was to cripple Trump’s presidency, should he somehow manage to win, and thus hinder Trump’s effectiveness. The media could be counted out to fan the flames of resistance, as they have done with great vigor.
The entire Obamate operation is reminiscent of Obama’s role in the IRS’s persecution of conservative non-profit groups. Obama spoke out against “hate groups” and Lois Lerner et al. got the message. Lerner’s loyalty to Obama was rewarded with a whitewash by Obama’s. Department of Justice and FBI.
In the case of Obamagate, Obama expressed his “concern” about Russia’s attempt to influence the election. Obama’s “concern” was eagerly seized upon by hyper-partisan members of his administration, including (but not limited to):
Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s confidante and chief strategist
CIA Director John (the Red) Brennan (probably Obama’s action officer for the operation)
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
National Security Adviser Susan Rice
Attorney General Loretta Lynch
Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, who became Acting Attorney General in the first weeks of the Trump administration, and who was fired for refusing to defend Trump’s “travel ban” (which the Supreme Court ultimately upheld). (Yates didn’t become involved in the conspiracy until after the election, as indicated by Susan Rice’s memo of January 20, 2017, in which she notes that Obama asked Yates and Comey to stay behind after the end of a meeting of January 5, 2020, presumably so that he could fill them in on the effort to frame General Flynn and discuss how they were to deal with the incoming administration. Again, see Menton’s piece dated May 11, 2020 in “related reading”.)
Deputy Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr, a subordinate of Sally Yates and Christopher Steele’s contact in the Department of Justice
Nelli Ohr, wife of Bruce Ohr, who was hired by Fusion GPS to do opposition research for the Clinton campaign
Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe
FBI General Counsel James Baker, in charge of FISA requests and leaker of the Steele Dossier (possibly a dupe)
Peter Strzok, chief of the FBI’s counterintelligence section;
Lisa Page, the FBI attorney (and Strzok’s paramour), who (with Strzok) was assigned to the Mueller investigation.
What about FBI Director James Comey? He was initially an outsider, a nominal Republican in a Democrat administration, and possibly a willing dupe at first (see the pieces by VDH dated August 7, 2018, and Margot Cleveland dated December 20, 2019. But if he was initially a willing dupe with his own agenda, it seems that he had became a full-fledged conspirator by the time of Trump’s inauguration (see the piece by Andrew McCarthy dated May 2, 2020).
Related reading, in chronological order:
National Sentinel: “The Spygate Files: Timeline to the Biggest Political Scandal in American History”
Paul Roderick Gregory, “The Timeline of IRS Targeting of Conservative Groups“, Forbes, June 25, 2013
Jay Sukelow, “Obama’s Fingerprints All Over IRS Tea Party Scandal“, Fox News Opinion, October 20, 2013
Andrew C. McCarthy, “Obama’s Growing Conflict of Interest in the Clinton E-mail Scandal“, National Review, February 3, 2016
Miles Terry, “President Obama’s IRS Scandal: Seven Years & Counting“, ACLJ, August 2016
Andrew C. McCarthy, “Obama’s Conflict Tanked the Clinton E-mail Investigation — As Predicted“, National Review, September 26, 2016
Andrew C. McCarthy, “The Obama Administration’s Uranium One Scandal“, National Review, October 21, 2017
Andrew C. McCarthy, “Was the Steele Dossier the FBI’s ‘Insurance Policy’?“, National Review, December 23, 2017
Andrew C. McCarthy, “Clinton-Obama E-mails: The Key to Understanding Why Hillary Wasn’t Indicted“, National Review, January 23, 2018
George Parry, “Did Fusion GPS’s Anti-Trump Researcher Avoid Surveillance With A Ham Radio?“, The Federalist, March 2, 2018
Andrew C. McCarthy, “In Politicized Justice Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures“, National Review, May 19, 2018
Andrew C. McCarthy, “The Real Origination Story of the Trump-Russia Investigation“, National Review, May 22, 2018
Sharyl Atkisson, “8 Signs Pointing to a Counterintelligence Operation Deployed Against Trump’s Campaign“, The Hill, May 23, 2018
Julie Kelly, “The Open Secret of the FBI’s Investigation of Trump’s Campaign“, American Greatness, May 25, 2018
Roger Kimball, “For Your Eyes Only: A Short History of Democrat-Spy Collusion“, Spectator USA, May 25, 2018
Daniel John Sobieski, “Jarrett and Obama Are Behind Spygate“, American Thinker, May 26, 2018
Francis Menton, “‘Russia’: Bona Fide Basis for Investigation or Preposterous Cover Story?“, Manhattan Contrarian, May 27, 2018
Michael Barone, “Obama’s Spying Scandal Is Starting to Look a Lot Like Watergate“, New York Post, May 27, 2018
C. Michael Shaw, “Spygate Is a Bigger Scandal Than Watergate“, The New American, May 28, 2018
David Harsanyi, “Obama Says ‘I Didn’t Have Scandals.’ So What Are All These?“, The Federalist, May 29, 2018
Andrew C. McCarthy, “The Obama Administration’s Hypocritical Pretext for Spying on the Trump Campaign“, National Review, May 29, 2018
Andrew C. McCarthy, “Yes, the FBI Was Investigating the Trump Campaign When It Spied“, National Review, May 30, 2018
Scott Johnson, “The Curious Case of Mr. Downer“, Power Line, June 1, 2018
C. Michael Shaw, “FBI’s Violation of Rules in Spying on Trump Campaign Further Exposes Deep State“, The New American, June 1, 2018
Jason Veley, “Confirmed: Barack Obama Was Running the Entire Spygate Operation That Violated Federal Law to Spy on Trump Campaign Officials“, Natural News, June 1, 2018
MJA, “Peter Strzok Asks Lisa Page: ‘You Get All Your OCONUS Lures Approved?’“, iOTWReport.com, June 5, 2018
Andrew C. McCarthy, “Clinton E-mails: What the IG Report Refuses to Admit“, National Review, June 19, 2018
George Neumayr, “Mueller Has Strzok Out“, The American Spectator, June 20, 2018
Alex Swoyer, “Sen. Lindsey Graham Quizzes Inspector General over Peter Strzok’s ‘Insurance Policy’ Text“, The Washington Times, June 21, 2018
George Neumayr, “Hillary’s Fiends in High Places“, The American Spectator, June 22, 2018
Lee Smith, “Seven Mysterious Preludes to the FBI’s Trump-Russia Probe“, RealClearInvestigations, June 26, 2018
John Solomon, “Memos Detail FBI’s ‘Hurry the F Up Pressure’ to Probe Trump Campaign“, The Hill, July 6, 2018
Scott Johnson, “The Brennan Factor Revisited“, Power Line, July 20, 2018
John Hinderaker, “First Thoughts on the Carter Page FISA Application“, Power Line, July 21, 2018
John Hinderaker, “The Associated Press Lies about the FISA Application“, Power Line, July 22, 2018
Michael Ledeen, “Why Are the Democrats and the Spooks Suddenly So Ferociously Anti-Putin?” PJ Media, July 22, 2018
Thomas Lifson, “Ten Problems with the Release of the Heavily Redacted FISA Warrants on Carter Page“, American Thinker, July 22, 2018
Hans A. von Spakovsky, “The Clinton State Department Major Security Breach That Everyone Is Ignoring“, The Heritage Foundation, July 22, 2018
Steve Byas, “Does Strzok Have a Perjury Problem?“, The New American, July 23, 2018
Daniel J. Flynn, “Did the FBI Lie to the FISA Court?“, The American Spectator, July 23, 2018
Victor Davis Hanson, “Just How Far Will the Left Go?“, American Greatness, July 23, 2018
Scott Johnson, “Devin Nunes Vindicated“, Power Line, July 23, 2018
Andrew C. McCarthy, “FISA Applications Confirm: The FBI Relied on the Unverified Steele Dossier“, National Review, July 23, 2018
Ed Morrissey, “Reuters: Butina Met with Two ‘Senior’ Government Officials — in 2015“, Hot Air, July 23, 2015
Jason Beale, “James Comey’s Own Words Suggest FBI, DOJ Hid Dossier Funding From The FISA Judge“, The Federalist, July 24, 2018
Victor Davis Hanson, “Russianism“, National Review, July 24, 2018
Dennis Prager, “The Greatest Hysteria in American History“, RealClearPolitics, July 24, 2018
Ned Ryun, “None Dared Call It Treason … When It Was a Democrat“, American Greatness, July 24, 2018
Katarina Trinko, “What the Carter Page FISA Warrant Reveals about the Trump-Russia Investigation“, The Daily Signal, July 24, 2018
Jason Beale, “It’s Suspicious That The FBI And DOJ Didn’t Check Into Christopher Steele’s Leaks To The Press“, The Federalist, July 25, 2018
Julie Kelly, “Vindication for Carter Page“, American Greatness, July 25, 2018
Mollie Hemingway, “Media Gaslighting Can’t Hide Fact Trump Campaign Was Spied On“, The Federalist, July 26, 2018
Paul Mirengoff, “What the FBI Didn’t Tell the FISA Court“, Power Line, July 27, 2018
Scott Johnson, “The Story So Far“, Power Line, July 29, 2018
Willis Krumholz, “The Facts Behind The Trump Tower Meeting Are Incriminating, But Not For Trump“, The Federalist, July 30, 2018
Dan Perkins, “The FBI, Hillary’s Computers, and the Russians“, American Thinker, July 30, 2018
Ned Ryun, “Americans Need Clear Answers on FISA Abuse“, American Greatness, July 30, 2018
Scott Johnson, “Contra the Dross of Doss (3)“, Power Line, July 31, 2018
Margot Cleveland, “If You Inspect The FISA Applications Closely, More Mysteries Arise About Joseph Mifsud“, The Federalist, August 2, 2018
George Neumayr, “Never Forget the Brennan-Brit Plot to Nail Trump“, The American Spectator, August 3, 2018
Byron York, “!2 Times Christopher Steel Fed Trump-Russia Allegations to the FBI after the Election“, Washington Examiner, August 3, 2018
Victor Davis Hanson, “The Police Were Not Policed“, National Review, August 7, 2018
Byron York, “Emails Show 2016 Links among Steele, Ohr, Simpson — with Russian Oligarch in Background“, Washington Examiner, August 8, 2016
John Solomon, “The Handwritten Notes Exposing What Fusion GPS Told DOJ About Trump“, The Hill, August 9, 2018
George Neumayr, “Strzok Out, Ohr In“, The American Spectator, August 13, 2018
Lee Smith, “2016 Trump Tower Meeting Looks Increasingly Like a Setup by Russian and Clinton Operatives“, RealClearInvestigations, August 13, 2018
Margot Cleveland, “New Info Indicates Clinton-Funded Oppo Research Launched FBI’s Trump Investigation“, The Federalist, August 14, 2018
Margot Cleveland, “Notes Suggest FBI Employees Plotted To Keep Using Steele After He Broke FBI Rules“, The Federalist, August 14, 2018
Chuck Ross, “Fusion GPS Founder Shared ‘False Story’ About GOP Lawyer In Meeting With DOJ’s Bruce Ohr“, The Daily Caller, August 14, 2018
Margot Cleveland, “How Bruce Ohr Could Implicate High-Ranking Obama Officials In Spygate“, The Federalist, August 15, 2018
Margot Cleveland, “New Details Show Firing Strzok Didn’t Remove All The Compromised FBI Agents Involved In Russiagate“, The Federalist, August 15, 2018
Adam Mill, “Bruce Ohr May Have Broken More Than The Law By Pushing His Wife’s Opposition Research To The FBI“, The Federalist, August 16, 2018
Steve Baldwin, “Did Trump Really Save America from Socialism?“, The American Spectator, August 16, 2018
Kimberley Strassel, “What Was Bruce Ohr Doing?“, The Wall Street Journal, August 16, 2018
Catherine Herridge, “DOJ’s Bruce Ohr Wrote Christopher Steele Was ‘very concerned about Comey’s firing — afraid they will be exposed’“, Fox News, August 17, 2018
George Neumayr, “John Brennan, a Security Risk from the Start“, The American Spectator, August 17, 2018
u/lonestarbeliever, “Connecting Some Dots“, Reddit, August 21, 2018 (This illustrates the ease with which conspiracy theories can be constructed, which isn’t to say that it’s wrong.)
Scott Johnson, “The Weiner Laptop Revisited“, Power Line, August 23, 2018
Paul Sperry, “Despite Comey Assurances, FBI Failed To Examine Vast Bulk Of Weiner Laptop Emails“, The Federalist, August 24, 2018
Bre Payton, “FBI Agent Says DOJ Used Leaked Stories It Planted To Get FISA Warrants“, The Federalist, August 28, 2018
Jay Greenberg, “Bruce Ohr Testimony Exposes Even Deeper Cesspit of FBI Corruption“, Neon Nettle, August 29, 2018
Thomas Lifson, “Ohr Speaks! (Behind Closed Doors“, American Thinker, August 29, 2018
Aaron Klein, “Email Logs Reveal Correspondence Between Clinton Associate, Fusion GPS, and Russians at Trump Tower Meeting“, Breitbart.com, August 31, 2018
Laura Barrón-López, “Bruce Ohr, FBI Together Attempted to Flip Russian Oligarchs to Gather Information on Trump Campaign: Report“, Washington Examiner, September 1, 2018
Paul Mirengoff, “The FBI’s Anti-Trump Leak Strategy“, Power Line, September 10, 2018
Thomas Lifson, “Newly Revealed Texts Reveal Strzok and Page Conspired to Release Information Intended to Damage Trump on Russiagate“, American Thinker, September 11, 2018
Paul Minrengoff, “The FBI’s Anti-Trump Leak Strategy, Part Two“, Power Line, September 12, 2018
Andrew C. McCarthy, “Reading the FISA Redactions“, National Review, September 14, 2018
Andrew C. McCarthy, “In the Russia Probe, It’s ‘Qui S’excuse S’accuse’“, National Review, September 15, 2018
Scott Johnson, “Whose Stuff Did Steele Shovel?“, Power Line, September 18, 2018
Michael Barone, “The Air Has Seeped Out of the Russia/Collusion Balloon“, Washington Examiner, September 19, 2018
John Solomon, “Collusion Bombshell: DNC Lawyers Met with FBI on Russia Allegations before Surveillance Warrant“, The Hill, October 3, 2018
John Solomon, “FBI’s Smoking Gun: Redactions Protected Political Embarrassment, Not ‘National Security’“, The Hill, October 7, 2018
Scott Johnson, “What We Have Learned So Far“, Power Line, October 30, 2018
Scott Johnson, “What We Have Learned So Far” [2], Power Line, November 11, 2018
John Hinderaker, “The Ultimate Fake News”, Power Line, November 18, 2018
George Neumayr, “Why Britain Doesn’t Want Trump to Declassify Obamagate Docs“, The American Spectator, November 27, 2018
Margot Cleveland, “New Details Reinforce That The FBI Used Fake Pretexts To Start Investigating Trump“, The Federalist, November 30, 2018
John Solomon, “Trump, Russia and Lessons from the Mob: Did ‘Godfathers’ Steer Collusion Probe?“, The Hill, November 30, 2018
Sidney Powell, “New Facts Indicate Mueller Destroyed Evidence, Obstructed Justice“, The Daily Caller, December 16, 2018
Fuzzy Slippers, “IG Report: Strzok, Page iPhones Wiped Clean, Thousands of Texts Destroyed Before IG Could Review Them“, Legal Insurrection, December 16, 2018
Lee Smith, “New Documents Suggest the Steele Dossier Was a Deliberate Setup for Trump“, The Federalist, January 2, 2019
Jed Babbin, “The Most Successful Coverup“, The American Spectator, January 7, 2019
Paul Mirengoff, “Report: FBI Opened Inquiry into Whether Trump Was Working for the Russians“, Power Line, January 11, 2019
Scott Johnson, “More Mueller Madmess“, Power Line, January 12, 2019
C. Michael Shaw, “Whistleblowr: Obama-era Deep State Surveillance Program Spied on Trump, Judges, Others“, The New American, January 12, 2019
Andrew C. McCarthy, “FBI Russia Investigation Was Always about Trump“, Fox News, January 13, 2019
Gregg Jarrett, “An FBI That Is Corrupt and Dishonest — Latest Reports Offer Only More Proof“, Fox News, January 14, 2019
Mollie Hemingway, “Top Mueller Officials Coordinated with Fusion GPS Spouse in 2016“, The Federalist, January 17, 2019
Catherine Herridge and Cyd Upson, “New Details of 2016 Meeting with Trump Dossier Author Conflict with Dems’ Timeline“, Fox News, January 28, 2019
Scott Johnson, “Coup’s Next“, Power Line, February 16, 2019 (a roundup of links to commentary about Andrew McCabe’s admission of the FBI’s attempt to remove Trump from office)
Andrew McCarthy, “McCabe, Rosenstein, and the Real Truth about the 25th Amendment Coup Attempt“, Fox News, February 16, 2019
Francis Menton, “Comments on Andrew McCabe and the FBI Coup Plotters“, Manhattan Contrarian, February 16, 2019
Victor Davis Hanson, “Autopsy of a Dead Coup“, American Greatness, February 17, 2019
Greg Re, “Lisa Page Admitted Obama DOJ Ordered Stand-Down on Clinton Email Prosecution, GOP Rep Says“, Fox News, March 12, 2019
Greg Re, ” DOJ Reached Agreement with Clinton Lawyers to Block FBI Access to Clinton Foundation Emails, Strzok Says“, Fox News, March 14, 2019
Margot Cleveland, “Did Peter Strzok Lie, Or Was There A Spy Targeting The Trump Campaign? “, The Federalist, March 19, 2019
Dan Mills, “Lisa Page Transcripts Reveal Huge Preferences For Clinton During Email Scandal Investigation“, The Federalist, March 19, 2019
Andrew C. McCarthy, “After Mueller’s Exoneration of Trump, Full Disclosure“, National Review, March 23, 2019
Sharyl Atkisson (eponymous blog), “— Media Mistakes in the Trump Era: The Definitive List“, as of March 24, 2019
William P. Barr, Letter to the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, March 24, 2019
Sean Davis, “In Letter To Congress, Attorney General Confirms Mueller Found No Evidence Of Collusion By Trump“, The Federalist, March 24, 2019
Margot Cleveland, “Who Launched An Investigation Into Trump’s Campaign Before Crossfire Hurricane?“, The Federalist, March 25, 2019
William L. Krumholz, “Russiagate’s Damage To The Country Will Take Years To Realize“, The Federalist, March 25, 2019
Jeffrey Lord, “What Did Obama Know and When Did He Know It?“, The American Spectator, March 25, 2019
Adam Mill, “In New York, Deputy U.S. Attorney Jumps Sinking Russiagate Ship“, The Federalist, March 25, 2019
Adam Mill, “No, Barr’s Summary Of The Mueller Report Does Not Support Trump’s Alleged Obstruction“, The Federalist, March 25, 2019
Andrew C. McCarthy, “How Long Has Mueller Known There Was No Trump-Russia Collusion?“, Fox News, March 26, 2019
Sean Davis, “The Only 2016 Campaign That Deliberately Colluded With Russians Was Hillary Clinton’s“, The Federalist, March 28, 2019
Melissa Mackenzie, “Mueller Russia Hoax: Keep Yer Eye on the Ball“, The American Spectator, March 28, 2019
George Parry, “Was Mueller’s Investigation a Cover Up?“, The American Spectator, March 28, 2019
Victor Davis Hanson, “The Tables Turn in Russian Collusion Hunt“, American Greatness, March 31, 2019
Victor Davis Hanson, “All the Progressive Plotters“, American Greatness, April 8, 2019
Mollie Hemingway, “AG Barr Confirms Multiple Intel Agencies Implicated in Anti-Trump Spying Operation“, The Federalist, March 10, 2019
Madeline Osburn, “Top FBI Lawyer Testified Rosenstein Discussed Removing Trump from Office“, The Federalist, April 10, 2019
Mollie Hemingway, “New York Times Admits Obama Admin Deployed Multiple Spies Against Trump Campaign In 2016“, The Federalist, May 2, 2019
Joseph DiGenova (interview), “Obama Knew about CIA Chief John Brennan’s Illicit Anti-Trump Targeting Scheme!“, YouTube, May 14, 2019
John Solomon, “State Department’s Red Flag on Steele Went to a Senior FBI Man Well before FISA Warrant“, The Hill, May 14. 2019
Andrew C. McCarthy, “The Steele Dossier and the ‘VERIFIED APPLICATION’ That Wasn’t“, National Review, May 18, 2019
Victor Davis Hanson, “He Did It, Not Me!“, American Greatness, May 19, 2019
Thomas Lifson, “Joe DiGenova Blows the Lid off the Real Scandal: The Russia Hoax Was a Cover-up Effort for Obama’s Political Spying since 2012“, American Thinker, May 28, 2019
Stephen F. Cohen, “How Did Russiagate Begin?“, The Nation, May 30, 2019
Jed Babbin, “Who Ran Crossfire Hurricane?“, The American Spectator, June 3, 2019
Margot Cleveland, “Why Did The Obama Administration Ignore Reports Of Russian Election Meddling?“, The Federalist, June 4, 2019
Jay Sekulow, “Obama Administration’s Anti-Trump Actions Revealed in Newly Disclosed Documents“, Fox News, June 25, 2019
Paul Sperry, “Justice Dept. Watchdog Has Evidence Comey Probed Trump, on the Sly“, RealClearInvestigations, July 22, 2019 (This supports my view that Comey was acting on his own, for his own reasons, and was at most a “useful idiot” for the concerted, Brennan-led effort to frame Trump.)
Jed Babbin, “The Comey-Brennan Conspiracy to Violate Trump’s Civil Rights“, The American Spectator, September 2, 2019 (Did Comey and Brennan conspire knowingly, or did Comey happen to act in ways that served Brennan’s conspiracy? We shall see — maybe.)
George Parry, “Michael Flynn Graymails the Government“, The American Spectator, September 16, 2019 (Will the FBI risk disclosure of its dirty tactics in its persecution of Michael Flynn? Flynn’s new lawyer thinks it won’t.)
Krystina Skurk, “Andrew McCarthy Unveils the Real Russia Collusion Narrative“, The Federalist, October 11, 2019
Michael Horowitz, Inspector General of the Department of Justice, “Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation“, December 9, 2019
Margot Cleveland, “IG Report Hints James Comey Was In On FBI’s FISA Misconduct“, The Federalist, December 20, 2019
Alan J. Favish, “The Horowitz Report: Yes, It Gets Worse“, American Thinker, December 22, 2019
Victor Davis Hanson, “Impeachment Fallouts“, National Review, December 31, 2019
James Re, “James Comey Focus of FBI Leak Investigation, Report Says“, Fox News, January 16, 2020 (This report, about which I have no doubts, doesn’t contradict my view that Comey was a useful idiot of the conspirators, who happened to advance the conspiracy while trying (a) to stay on Trump’s good side and (b) trying to undermine him after (a) failed.)
Paul R. Gregory, “Why Was the Steele Dossier Not Dismissed As a Fake?“, Defining Ideas, February 3, 2020
David Krayden, “Former NSC Chief: John Brennan Buried Evidence That Putin Actually Favored Hillary in 2016“, The Daily Caller, April 23, 2020
Susan Davis, “Explosive New Flynn Documents Show FBI’s Goal Was ‘To Get Him Fired’“, The Federalist, April 29, 2020
Chrissy Clark, “Christopher Steele Testifies Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice Knew about Anti-Trump Research“, The Federalist, April 29, 2020
Sean Davis, “BREAKING: FBI Closed Flynn Case, Dubbed ‘Crossfire Razor,’ In Early 2017, Until Strzok Ordered It To Stay Open“, The Federalist, April 30, 2020
Chuck Ross, “Text Messages Reveal Peter Strzok Intervened FBI’s Planned Closure of Michael Flynn Investigation“, The Daily Signal, April 30, 2020
Tristan Justice, “Comey Bragged About Violating FBI Policy To Ambush Flynn In Corrupt Setup“, The Federalist, April 30, 2020
Andrew C. McCarthy, “The FBI Set Flynn Up to Preserve the Trump–Russia Probe“, National Review, May 2, 2020
Neo, “John Brennan Again“, The New Neo, May 4, 2020
Margot Cleveland, “Your Guide to the Obama Administration’s Hit on Michael Flynn“, The Federalist, May 4, 2020
Mary Chastain, “DOJ Documents: Rosenstein Expanded Russia Probe Beyond Scope, Obama and Biden Knew Details From Flynn’s Wire-Tapped Calls“, Legal Insurrection, May 8, 2020
Mollie Hemingway, “Obama, Biden Oval Office Meeting On January 5 Was Key To Entire Anti-Trump Operation“, The Federalist, May 8, 2020
Margot Cleveland, “Why Did Obama Tell the FBI to Hide Its Activities from the Trump Administration?“, The Federalist, May 11, 2020
Francis Menton, “So What Was the Russia Hoax Really About?“, Manhattan Contrarian, May 11, 2020
Jeffrey Lord, “Obamagate“, The American Spectator, May 12, 2020
I Knew (of) a Man Who Knew (of) a Man …
… who, etc., etc., knew (of) George Washington.
A bit of trivia for this, the 288th anniversary of Washington’s birth on February 22, 1732 (New Style date). Washington served as president from April 30, 1789 to March 4, 1797. He died on December 14, 1799.
Martin Van Buren (8th president) was born on December 5, 1782, and was 6 to 14 years old during Washington’s presidency. Van Buren was therefore had memories of the first presidency. Van Buren served as president from March 4, 1837, to March 4, 1841. He died on July 24, 1862.
Rutherford B. Hayes (19th president) was born on October 4, 1822, and was 14 to 18 years old during Van Buren’s presidency. Hayes served as president from March 4, 1877, to March 4, 1881. He died on January 17, 1893.
William Howard Taft (27th president) was born on September 15, 1857, and was 19 to 23 years old during Hayes’s presidency. Taft served as president from March 4, 1909, to March 4, 1913. He died on March 8, 1930.
Dwight D. Eisenhower (34th president) was born on October 14, 1890, and was 18 to 22 years old during Taft’s presidency. Eisenhower served as president from January 20, 1953, to January 20, 1961. He died on March 28, 1969.
Donald J. Trump (45th president) was born on June 14, 1946, and was 6 to 14 years old during Eisenhower’s presidency. Trump’s presidency began on January 20, 2017.
From Washington to Trump: 5 degrees of separation.
(For more facts about presidents, see “Presidents: Key Dates and Various Trivia“.)
FDR’s Fascism, Underscored
I have written before about FDR’s fascistic methods. See, for example, “FDR and Fascism” and “FDR and Fascism: More Data“. If you’re wondering how FDR could have been a fascist when he was a bitter enemy of the openly fascistic Axis powers, you need to understand what constitutes fascism (which is a thing apart from the dictatorships that prevailed in Germany, Italy, and Japan). A good definition (no longer online) was found in an earlier version of Wikipedia‘s article about fascism:
Fascism is a system in which the government leaves nominal ownership of the means of production in the hands of private individuals but exercises control by means of regulatory legislation and reaps most of the profit by means of heavy taxation. In effect, fascism is simply a more subtle form of government ownership than is socialism.
The two posts that I link to in the first paragraph give some examples of FDR’s brand of fascism. Paul Kengor, in “Franklin Delano Quid Pro Quo“, lays it on with a trowel. There was nothing subtle about FDR’s political thuggery. And it was orders of magnitude worse than Trump’s alleged pressuring of Ukraine for personal political gain:
[I]f you want to see a president who engaged in using explicitly public funds for his own explicitly political interests, look no further than FDR. In fact, no one did it more. What Trump is alleged to have done one time to Ukraine, well, FDR did incessantly to his own citizenry.
To show this, I’ll make things really easy, citing a single source: scholar and historian Dr. Burton Folsom. Among Folsom’s books on FDR, go to just one, his New Deal or Raw Deal?, published in 2008 by Simon & Schuster — a dozen years ago, long before anyone could ever imagine Donald Trump even seeking the presidency. Numerous books on FDR could be cited, but here I’ll stick with just this one.
Starting around page 85 of the book, Folsom addresses the first of at least a dozen examples of FDR abusing his powers and the public purse.
FDR’s chief instrument for shaking down his targets was the crown jewel of his New Deal: the WPA, the Works Progress Administration. The WPA was at the core of the New Deal and FDR’s vast administrative state. Quite literally tons of taxpayer coin went into this massive relief program, which FDR, in turn, redirected for political manipulation. For the record, WPA picked up from where FERA, the Federal Emergency Relief Act, left off. The wildly disproportionate share of FERA money that went to states like Pennsylvania (second only to Illinois in funds received), a state that had gone for Herbert Hoover in 1932, but which FDR hoped to flip in 1936, was scandalous and undoubtedly heavily influenced by the president’s political considerations.
But let’s stick with the WPA, under which FDR reformulated relief from FERA. WPA become the cash cow that FDR would milk not only for public jobs but for political patronage.
“The inefficiency and uselessness of many WPA projects was a serious problem,” Dr. Folsom writes, “but a greater problem was the increased politicization of relief under the WPA.” President Roosevelt had “much discretion in allocation and distributing” WPA money, not unlike a president’s discretion in allocating and distributing foreign aid — though worse because foreign policy is constitutionally the president’s prerogative. As Folsom notes, FDR would choose “which states would receive what,” and the main problem was that this “made relief a game of political manipulation,” at least in the hands of a manipulative president like Franklin Roosevelt. “The problems that plagued the FERA would sharply increase under WPA because more money was at stake,” Folsom notes. “Governors worried that their states would not get their ‘fair share’ of federal tax booty, and so they came to Washington, hats in hand, to curry favor with Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, who became the WPA director, and other New Deal administrators.”…
“Although Roosevelt and Hopkins said they would not use WPA and other relief organizations to play politics,” Folsom notes, “the evidence suggests again and again that that is exactly what they allowed to happen.”
That’s for sure. And Folsom’s book is full of them. Every Republican (and every Democrat) involved in the Trump impeachment trail should grab a copy of Folsom’s book and read through the examples. Again, I’ll make it easy for them. Here’s a summary:
- Pages 85–88 are loaded with quid pro quo specifics on the WPA
- Page 92, last paragraph, is solid quid pro quo on the WPA
- Page 117, middle paragraph, on Social Security
- Page 135, the indented quote from Raymond Moley regarding FDR’s attitude
- Page 157, next to last paragraph, is quid pro quo with FDR and Kansas City boss “Big Tom” Pendergast
- Page 167 is quid pro quo on IRS investigations
- Pages 170–77 are loaded with patronage quid pro quo by FDR
- Page 184, middle of the page, quote from Sen. Hiram Johnson on subsidies for votes
- Page 185 shows quid pro quo with FDR and the black vote
- Pages 187–91 show tables regarding votes and where federal funds went
- Pages 196–200 show federal funds used to court senators in FDR’s court-packing scheme
Read them and weep. It’s disgusting. To repeat all of them here would take several thousand words and constitute a virtual cut and paste from Folsom’s book. Still, I’ll note a few of them.
Harry Hopkins was well aware of the abuses taking place. He received mail regularly from people all over the country who were denied federal jobs or fired because of their political views or affiliations. There were so many of these letters that they’re today housed in state-by-state files at the National Archives in Washington in a large file labeled “WPA — Political Coercion.” The New Jersey file is especially fat. One WPA worker complained, “You are either on the WPA or employed in some government department and by virtue thereof you owe a duty to the [Democratic] Party to do your part in making the canvass.”
Of course.
Gavin Wright, a scholar and economist who carefully analyzed WPA spending state by state, concluded, “WPA employment reached peaks in the fall of election years. In states like Florida and Kentucky — where the New Deal’s big fight was in the primary elections — the rise of WPA employment was hurried along in order to synchronize with the primaries.”
FDR and his Democrat buddies were using WPA funds like a party war chest to help them win elections.
FDR’s own advisers were taken aback by his scheming, his ruthlessness, his ego. Particularly shocked was FDR’s speechwriter, Raymond Moley, who provided an assessment of FDR that we now hear every day from Democrats about Donald Trump. Moley was struck by “the utter lack of logic of the man [FDR], the scantiness of his precise knowledge of things that he was talking about, by the gross inaccuracies in his statements, by the almost pathological lack of sequence in his discussion, by the complete rectitude that he felt as to his own conduct.” He went on, adding that he was appalled at FDR’s “immense and growing egotism that came from his office, by his willingness to continue the excoriation of the press and business in order to get votes for himself, by his indifference to what effect the long-continued pursuit of these ends would have upon the civilization in which he was playing a part.” Moley was aghast at how FDR’s “political habits” were fueled by “the added influence of a swollen ego.” This was so bad, felt FDR’s own speechwriter, that he considered the president “dangerous in the extreme.”
Again, that appraisal sounds like any modern Democrat’s take on Donald Trump: the scant knowledge, the gross inaccuracies in statements, the dangerously swollen ego, the excoriation of the press, the extreme and almost “pathological” behavior, etc. But of course, here was a Democrat on a Democrat — an FDR speechwriter on FDR. And FDR is a hero to Democrats, the patron saint of their party….
Folsom also describes attempts by FDR to influence entire voting blocs, including black Americans. His analysis is backed by hard data, with several pages of tables.
Importantly, these are only some examples from a single book. Almost any non-hagiographic biography of FDR shows abuses like these. His vicious pursuit against Andrew Mellon, for example, again with the power of the public largesse behind him, and his extraordinary effort to nationalize everyone’s gold, are other stunning abuses of power. As to Mellon, the immensely talented former Treasury secretary was just one victim of FDR’s misuse of the IRS to punish, silence, and even ruin his political opponents. I personally knew one of Mellon’s nephews. He was extremely bitter at FDR for what FDR did to his uncle — an honorable man and dedicated public servant who ultimately was fully exonerated, even though the president’s lawyers went after Mellon like a pack of wolves with unlimited government dollars behind them.
“Roosevelt absolutely tried to ruin my uncle’s life,” Mellon’s nephew told me. “It was vicious.”
Folsom unavoidably addresses this as well. Mellon, he notes, became the object of a “massive and unrelenting IRS investigation.” Elmer Irey, head of the Intelligence Unit at FDR’s IRS, later confessed that “the Roosevelt administration made me go after Andy Mellon.” No less than Walter Lippmann would call FDR’s indictment of Mellon “an act of profound injustice.” This was done in large part to discredit the Mellon tax cuts that spurred the vast economic prosperity of the 1920s, given that FDR was literally pushing for a 99.5 percent tax rate on incomes over $100,000. He wanted to smear Mellon in order to smear the Mellon free-market philosophy….
As for FDR’s abusive antics, everyone knew about them, from congressmen to reporters. “The furor over the WPA and vote buying became so loud,” notes Folsom, “that Senator Carl Hatch of New Mexico introduced a bill barring WPA workers, and certain other appointees, from political activity.”
Moreover, most FDR historians know about this side of their man. They shrug it off. They treat their beloved New Dealing president with a wink and grin, chuckling at FDR’s wonderful political “horse-trading.” Like LBJ’s stunts — including spying on the Goldwater campaign in 1964 — they treat it like it’s fun, cute, endearing. (“Oh, yes, good ol’ Lyndon!”) Everyone does it, they shrug — until they judge that maybe a Republican might have done something like it, even just once. Put any one of these FDR–LBJ abuses in the hands of a Nixon or a Trump, and it’s impeachment time, baby….
Naturally, liberals today, in 2020, will ignore this. If you actually get this information in their face, they’ll dismiss it as whataboutism. But that’s nonsense, and unfair. Even if Trump were guilty as charged with the Ukraine, why would you impeach and remove a president for a onetime offense of something that the likes of FDR did daily throughout the worst decade and crisis in American history? It would be damned unjust. I personally couldn’t do it, regardless of whether I liked or voted for Donald Trump. Fair-minded people should understand that. Trump supporters will. And that’s yet another reason why they’ll ignore the Democrats’ histrionics about Donald Trump’s allegedly impeachable and removable abuse of power.
The left’s unremitting defense of FDR in the face of his well known, well documented strong-arm tactics is just another symptom of the left’s moral elasticity.
Peak Civilization?
Here is an oft-quoted observation, spuriously attributed to Socrates, about youth:
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
Even though Socrates didn’t say it, the sentiment has nevertheless been stated and restated since 1907, when the observation was concocted, and probably had been shared widely for decades, and even centuries, before that. I use a form of it when I discuss the spoiled children of capitalism (e.g., here).
Is there something to it? No and yes.
No, because rebelliousness and disrespect for elders and old ways seem to be part of the natural processes of physical and mental maturation.
Not all adolescents and young adults are rebellious and disrespectful. But many rebellious and disrespectful adolescents and young adults carry their attitudes with them through life, even if less obviously than in youth, as they climb the ladders of various callings. The callings that seem to be most attractive to the rebellious are the arts (especially the written, visual, thespian, terpsichorial, musical, and cinematic ones), the professoriate, the punditocracy, journalism, and politics.
Which brings me to the yes answer, and to the spoiled children of capitalism. Rebelliousness, though in some persons never entirely outgrown or suppressed by maturity, will more often be outgrown or suppressed in economically tenuous conditions, the challenges of which which almost fully occupied their bodies and minds. (Opinionizers and sophists were accordingly much thinner on the ground in the parlous days of yore.)
However, as economic growth and concomitant technological advances have yielded abundance far beyond the necessities of life for most inhabitants of the Western world, the beneficiaries of that abundance have acquired yet another luxury: the luxury of learning about and believing in systems that, in the abstract, seem to offer vast improvements on current conditions. It is the old adage “Idle hands are the devil’s tools” brought up to date, with “minds” joining “hands” in the devilishness.
Among many bad things that result from such foolishness (e.g., the ascendancy of ideologies that crush liberty and, ironically, economic growth) is the loss of social cohesion. I was reminded of this by Noah Smith’s fatuous article, “The 1950s Are Greatly Overrated“.
Smith is an economist who blogs and writes an opinion column for Bloomberg News. My impression of him is that he is a younger version of Paul Krugman, the former economist who has become a left-wing whiner. The difference between them is that Krugman remembers the 1950s fondly, whereas Smith does not.
I once said this about Krugman’s nostalgia for the 1950s, a decade during which he was a mere child:
[The nostalgia] is probably rooted in golden memories of his childhood in a prosperous community, though he retrospectively supplies an economic justification. The 1950s were (according to him) an age of middle-class dominance before the return of the Robber Barons who had been vanquished by the New Deal. This is zero-sum economics and class warfare on steroids — standard Krugman fare.
Smith, a mere toddler relative to Krugman and a babe in arms relative to me, takes a dim view of the 1950s:
For all the rose-tinted sentimentality, standards of living were markedly lower in the ’50s than they are today, and the system was riddled with vast injustice and inequality.
Women and minorities are less likely to have a wistful view of the ’50s, and with good reason. Segregation was enshrined in law in much of the U.S., and de facto segregation was in force even in Northern cities. Black Americans, crowded into ghettos, were excluded from economic opportunity by pervasive racism, and suffered horrendously. Even at the end of the decade, more than half of black Americans lived below the poverty line:
Women, meanwhile, were forced into a narrow set of occupations, and few had the option of pursuing fulfilling careers. This did not mean, however, that a single male breadwinner was always able to provide for an entire family. About a third of women worked in the ’50s, showing that many families needed a second income even if it defied the gender roles of the day:
For women who didn’t work, keeping house was no picnic. Dishwashers were almost unheard of in the 1950s, few families had a clothes dryer, and fewer than half had a washing machine.
But even beyond the pervasive racism and sexism, the 1950s wasn’t a time of ease and plenty compared to the present day. For example, by the end of the decade, even after all of that robust 1950s growth, the white poverty rate was still 18.1%, more than double that of the mid-1970s:
Nor did those above the poverty line enjoy the material plenty of later decades. Much of the nation’s housing stock in the era was small and cramped. The average floor area of a new single-family home in 1950 was only 983 square feet, just a bit bigger than the average one-bedroom apartment today.
To make matters worse, households were considerably larger in the ’50s, meaning that big families often had to squeeze into those tight living spaces. Those houses also lacked many of the things that make modern homes comfortable and convenient — not just dishwashers and clothes dryers, but air conditioning, color TVs and in many cases washing machines.
And those who did work had to work significantly more hours per year. Those jobs were often difficult and dangerous. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration wasn’t created until 1971. As recently as 1970, the rate of workplace injury was several times higher than now, and that number was undoubtedly even higher in the ’50s. Pining for those good old factory jobs is common among those who have never had to stand next to a blast furnace or work on an unautomated assembly line for eight hours a day.
Outside of work, the environment was in much worse shape than today. There was no Environmental Protection Agency, no Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act, and pollution of both air and water was horrible. The smog in Pittsburgh in the 1950s blotted out the sun. In 1952 the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. Life expectancy at the end of the ’50s was only 70 years, compared to more than 78 today.
So life in the 1950s, though much better than what came before, wasn’t comparable to what Americans enjoyed even two decades later. In that space of time, much changed because of regulations and policies that reduced or outlawed racial and gender discrimination, while a host of government programs lowered poverty rates and cleaned up the environment.
But on top of these policy changes, the nation benefited from rapid economic growth both in the 1950s and in the decades after. Improved production techniques and the invention of new consumer products meant that there was much more wealth to go around by the 1970s than in the 1950s. Strong unions and government programs helped spread that wealth, but growth is what created it.
So the 1950s don’t deserve much of the nostalgia they receive. Though the decade has some lessons for how to make the U.S. economy more equal today with stronger unions and better financial regulation, it wasn’t an era of great equality overall. And though it was a time of huge progress and hope, the point of progress and hope is that things get better later. And by most objective measures they are much better now than they were then.
See? A junior Krugman who sees the same decade as a glass half-empty instead of half-full.
In the end, Smith admits the irrelevance of his irreverence for the 1950s when he says that “the point of progress and hope is that things get better later.” In other words, if there is progress the past will always look inferior to the present. (And, by the same token, the present will always look inferior to the future when it becomes the present.)
I could quibble with some of Smith’s particulars (e.g., racism may be less overt than it was in the 1950s, but it still boils beneath the surface, and isn’t confined to white racism; stronger unions and stifling financial regulations hamper economic growth, which Smith prizes so dearly). But I will instead take issue with his assertion, which precedes the passages quoted above, that “few of those who long for a return to the 1950s would actually want to live in those times.”
It’s not that anyone yearns for a return to the 1950s as it was in all respects, but for a return to the 1950s as it was in some crucial ways:
There is … something to the idea that the years between the end of World War II and the early 1960s were something of a Golden Age…. But it was that way for reasons other than those offered by Krugman [and despite Smith’s demurrer].
Civil society still flourished through churches, clubs, civic associations, bowling leagues, softball teams and many other voluntary organizations that (a) bound people and (b) promulgated and enforced social norms.
Those norms proscribed behavior considered harmful — not just criminal, but harmful to the social fabric (e.g., divorce, unwed motherhood, public cursing and sexuality, overt homosexuality). The norms also prescribed behavior that signaled allegiance to the institutions of civil society (e.g., church attendance, veterans’ organizations) , thereby helping to preserve them and the values that they fostered.
Yes, it was an age of “conformity”, as sneering sophisticates like to say, even as they insist on conformity to reigning leftist dogmas that are destructive of the social fabric. But it was also an age of widespread mutual trust, respect, and forbearance.
Those traits, as I have said many times (e.g., here) are the foundations of liberty, which is a modus vivendi, not a mystical essence. The modus vivendi that arises from the foundations is peaceful, willing coexistence and its concomitant: beneficially cooperative behavior — liberty, in other words.
The decade and a half after the end of World War II wasn’t an ideal world of utopian imagining. But it approached a realizable ideal. That ideal — for the nation as a whole — has been put beyond reach by the vast, left-wing conspiracy that has subverted almost every aspect of life in America.
What happened was the 1960s — and its long aftermath — which saw the rise of capitalism’s spoiled children (of all ages), who have spat on and shredded the very social norms that in the 1940s and 1950s made the United States of America as united they ever would be. Actual enemies of the nation — communists — were vilified and ostracized, and that’s as it should have been. And people weren’t banned and condemned by “friends”, “followers”, Facebook, Twitter, etc. etc., for the views that they held. Not even on college campuses, on radio and TV shows, in the print media, or in Hollywood moves.
What do the spoiled children have to show for their rejection of social norms — other than economic progress that is actually far less robust than it would have been were it not for the interventions of their religion-substitute, the omnipotent central government? Well, omnipotent at home and impotent (or drastically weakened) abroad, thanks to rounds of defense cuts and perpetual hand-wringing about what the “world” might think or some militarily inferior opponents might do if the U.S. government were to defend Americans and protect their interests abroad?
The list of the spoiled children’s “accomplishments” is impossibly long to recite here, so I will simply offer a very small sample of things that come readily to mind:
California wildfires caused by misguided environmentalism.
The excremental wasteland that is San Francisco. (And Blue cities, generally.)
Flight from California wildfires, high taxes, excremental streets, and anti-business environment.
The killing of small businesses, especially restaurants, by imbecilic Blue-State minimum wage laws.
The killing of businesses, period, by oppressive Blue-State regulations.
The killing of jobs for people who need them the most, by ditto and ditto.
Bloated pension schemes for Blue-State (and city) employees, which are bankrupting those States (and cities) and penalizing their citizens who aren’t government employees.
The hysteria (and even punishment) that follows from drawing a gun or admitting gun ownership
The idea that men can become women and should be allowed to compete with women in athletic competitions because the men in question have endured some surgery and taken some drugs.
The idea that it doesn’t and shouldn’t matter to anyone that a self-identified “woman” uses women’s rest-rooms where real women and girls became prey for prying eyes and worse.
Mass murder on a Hitlerian-Stalinist scale in the name of a “woman’s right to choose”, when she made that choice by (in almost every case) engaging in consensual sex.
Disrespect for he police and military personnel who keep them safe in their cosseted existences.
Applause for attacks on the same.
Applause for America’s enemies, which the delusional, spoiled children won’t recognize as their enemies until it’s too late.
Longing for impossible utopias (e.g., “true” socialism) because they promise what is actually impossible in the real world — and result in actual dystopias (e.g., the USSR, Cuba, Britain’s National Health Service).
Noah Smith is far too young to remember an America in which such things were almost unthinkable — rather than routine. People then didn’t have any idea how prosperous they would become, or how morally bankrupt and divided.
Every line of human endeavor reaches a peak, from which decline is sure to follow if the things that caused it to peak are mindlessly rejected for the sake of novelty (i.e., rejection of old norms just because they are old). This is nowhere more obvious than in the arts.
It should be equally obvious to anyone who takes an objective look at the present state of American society and is capable of comparing it with American society of the 1940s and 1950s. For all of its faults it was a golden age. Unfortunately, most Americans now living (Noah Smith definitely included) are too young and too fixated on material things to understand what has been lost — irretrievably, I fear.
I was going to append a list of related posts, but the list would be so long that I can only refer you to “Favorite Posts” — especially those listed in the following sections:
I. The Academy, Intellectuals, and the Left
II. Affirmative Action, Race, and Immigration
IV. Conservatism and Other Political Philosophies
V. The Constitution and the Rule of Law
VI. Economics: Principles and Issues
VIII. Infamous Thinkers and Political Correctness
IX. Intelligence and Psychology
X. Justice
XI. Politics, Politicians, and the Consequences of Government
XII. Science, Religion, and Philosophy
XIII. Self-Ownership (abortion, euthanasia, marriage, and other aspects of the human condition)
XIV. War and Peace
American Foreign Policy: Feckless no More?
In “The Subtle Authoritarianism of the ‘Liberal Order’“, I take on the “liberals” of all parties who presume to know what’s best for all of us, and are bent on making it so through the power of the state. I also had in mind, but didn’t discuss, the smug “liberals” who have long presided over U.S. foreign policy.
One of the smuggies whom I most despise for his conduct of foreign policy is the sainted George H.W. Bush. War hero or not, he failed to protect America and its interests on two notable occasions during his presidency.
The first occasion came during the Gulf War. I have this to say about it in “The Modern Presidency: From TR to DJT”:
The main event of Bush’s presidency was the Gulf War of 1990-1991. Iraq, whose ruler was Saddam Hussein, invaded the small neighboring country of Kuwait. Kuwait produces and exports a lot of oil. The occupation of Kuwait by Iraq meant that Saddam Hussein might have been able to control the amount of oil shipped to other countries, including Europe and the United States. If Hussein had been allowed to control Kuwait, he might have moved on to Saudi Arabia, which produces much more oil than Kuwait. President Bush asked Congress to approve military action against Iraq. Congress approved the action, although most Democrats voted against giving President Bush authority to defend Kuwait. The war ended in a quick defeat for Iraq’s armed forces. But President Bush decided not to allow U.S. forces to finish the job and end Saddam Hussein’s reign as ruler of Iraq.
And the rest is a long, sad history of what probably wouldn’t have happened in 2003 and the years since then.
What I didn’t appreciate when I wrote about Bush’s misadventure in Iraq was his utter fecklessness as the Soviet Union was collapsing. I learned about it from Vladimir Bukovsky‘s Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity. Bukovsksy is the “I” in the following passages from chapter 6 of the book:
George Bush and his Secretary of State Jim Baker … outdid everyone [including Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan], [in] opposing the inevitable disintegration of the USSR until the very last day.
“Yes, I think I can trust Gorbachev,”—said George Bush to Time magazine just when Gorbachev was beginning to lose control and was tangled hopelessly in his own lies—“I looked him in the eye, I appraised him. He was very determined. Yet there was a twinkle. He is a guy quite sure of what he is doing. He has got a political feel.” [Like father, like son.]
It is notable that this phrase is illogical: if your opponent “believes deeply in what he is doing” does not necessarily mean that he is trustworthy. After all, Hitler also “believed deeply in what he was doing.” But the thought that their aims were diametrically opposed did not enter George Bush’s head. It is not surprising that with such presidential perspicacity, their top-level meeting in Malta (2-3 December 1989) was strongly reminiscent of a second Yalta: in any case, after this the US Department of State invariably maintained that the growing Soviet pressure on the Baltics was “an internal USSR matter.” Even two months prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union Bush, on a visit to Kiev, exhorted Ukraine not to break away.
The extent to which Bush’s administration did not understand the Soviet games in Europe is clear from its position on the reunification of Germany. Secretary of State Baker, who hurried to Berlin immediately after the fall of the Wall, evaluated this event as a demonstration of Gorbachev’s “remarkable realism. To give President Gorbachev his due, he was the first Soviet leader to have the daring and foresight to allow the revocation of the policy of repressions in Eastern Europe.”
And possibly in gratitude for this, Baker’s main interest was to respect the “lawful concern” of his eastern partner by slowing down the process of reunification by all means [quoting Baker:]
In the interest of overall stability in Europe, the move toward reunification must be of a peaceful nature, it must be gradual, and part of a step-by-step process.
The plan he proposed was a total disaster, for it corresponded completely to the Soviet scheme of the creation of a “common European home”: it was envisaged at first to reinforce the European Community, the Helsinki process and promote the further integration of Europe. All this, naturally, without undue haste but “step by step” over the passage of years [again quoting Baker:]
As these changes proceed, as they overcome the division of Europe, so too will the divisions of Germany and Berlin be overcome in peace and freedom.
Furthermore, even without consulting Bonn, he rushed to embrace the Kremlin’s new puppets in Eastern Germany in order to signal “US intentions to try to improve the credibility of the East German political leadership and to forestall a power vacuum that could trigger a rush to unification.” And this was in January 1990, i.e. shortly before the elections in the GDR that actually solved the key question: would Germany reunite on Soviet conditions, or Western ones? Luckily the East Germans were less “patient” and smarter: knowing well what they were dealing with, they voted for immediate reunification, ignoring Baker and the pressure of the whole world.
Why, then, did the West and the USA with its seemingly conservative, even anti-communist administration, yearn for this “stabilization” or, to put it more simply, salvation of the Soviet regime?
Let us allow that Baker was ignorant, pompous and big-headed, dreaming of some kind of global structures “from Vancouver to Vladivostok”, of which he would be the architect362 (“the Baker doctrine”). I remember at one press-conference I even suggested introducing a unit of measurement for political brainlessness—one baker (the average man in the street would be measured in millibakers). At the very height of the bloody Soviet show in Bucharest at Christmas in 1989, he stated that “They are attempting to pull off the yoke of a very oppressive and repressive dictatorship. So I think that we would be inclined probably to follow the example of France, who today has said that if the Warsaw Pact felt it necessary to intervene on behalf of the opposition, that it would support that action.” The new pro-Soviet policy of the USA after the top-level meeting in Malta he explained by saying that “the Soviet Union has switched sides, from that of oppression and dictatorships to democracy and change.” This was said at the moment when the Soviet army was smashing the democratic opposition in Baku, killing several hundred people people (which Baker also “treated with understanding”). But Baker was not alone, and this cannot be explained away by sheer stupidity. That is the tragedy, that such an idiotic position was shared by practically all Western governments, including the conservative ones.
Baker and Bush, what a team.
America’s enemies will do what they will do, whether our “leaders” are nice to them or confront them. And when they are confronted forcefully (and even forcibly), they are more likely to be deterred (and even prevented) from acting against America.
For most of the past century, U.S. foreign policy has been run by smug “liberals” who have projected their own feelings onto the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ho, Putin, Saddam, and the ayatollahs. And where has it landed us? Scrambling from behind to win in World War II, on the defensive against Communist expansion, losing or failing to win wars against vastly inferior enemies, and giving our enemies time (and money) in which to arm themselves to attack our overseas interests and even our homeland. This tragic history has been abetted by hand-wringing from the usual suspects in the academy, the media, the foreign-policy tea-leaf-reading-signal-sending society, the left generally (though I am being redundant), and “liberals” of all political persuasions who are feckless to the core when it comes to dealing with domestic and foreign thugs.
Enough! I hope and believe that’s what President Trump just said, in effect, when he authorized the killing of Iran’s General Soleimani.
Related posts:
A Grand Strategy for the United States
The Folly of Pacifism
Transnationalism and National Defense
The Folly of Pacifism, Again
September 20, 2001: Hillary Clinton Signals the End of “Unity”
Patience as a Tool of Strategy
The War on Terror, As It Should Have Been Fought
The Cuban Missile Crisis, Revisited
Preemptive War
Preemptive War and Iran
Some Thoughts and Questions about Preemptive War
Defense as an Investment in Liberty and Prosperity
The Barbarians Within and the State of the Union
The World Turned Upside Down
Utilitarianism and Torture
Defense Spending: One More Time
The President’s Power to Kill Enemy Combatants
My Defense of the A-Bomb
Pacifism
LBJ’s Dereliction of Duty
Terrorism Isn’t an Accident
The Ken Burns Apology Tour Continues
Planning for the Last War
A Rearview Look at the Invasion of Iraq and the War on Terror
Preemptive War Revisited
It’s a MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD World
The Folly of Pacifism (III)
MAD, Again
“MAD, Again”: A Footnote
More MADness: Mistaking Bureaucratic Inertia for Strategy
World War II As an Aberration
Reflections on the “Feel Good” War
Not-So-Random Thoughts (XXV)
“Not-So-Random Thoughts” is an occasional series in which I highlight writings by other commentators on varied subjects that I have addressed in the past. Other entries in the series can be found at these links: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, and XXIV. For more in the same style, see “The Tenor of the Times” and “Roundup: Civil War, Solitude, Transgenderism, Academic Enemies, and Immigration“.
CONTENTS
The Real Unemployment Rate and Labor-Force Participation
Is Partition Possible?
Still More Evidence for Why I Don’t Believe in “Climate Change”
Transgenderism, Once More
Big, Bad Oligopoly?
Why I Am Bunkered in My Half-Acre of Austin
“Government Worker” Is (Usually) an Oxymoron
The Real Unemployment Rate and Labor-Force Participation
There was much celebration (on the right, at least) when it was announced that the official unemployment rate, as of November, is only 3.5 percent, and that 266,000 jobs were added to the employment rolls (see here, for example). The exultation is somewhat overdone. Yes, things would be much worse if Obama’s anti-business rhetoric and policies still prevailed, but Trump is pushing a big boulder of deregulation uphill.
In fact, the real unemployment rate is a lot higher than official figure I refer you to “Employment vs. Big Government and Disincentives to Work“. It begins with this:
The real unemployment rate is several percentage points above the nominal rate. Officially, the unemployment rate stood at 3.5 percent as of November 2019. Unofficially — but in reality — the unemployment rate was 9.4 percent.
The explanation is that the labor-force participation rate has declined drastically since peaking in January 2000. When the official unemployment rate is adjusted to account for that decline (and for a shift toward part-time employment), the result is a considerably higher real unemployment rate.
Arnold Kling recently discussed the labor-force participation rate:
[The] decline in male labor force participation among those without a college degree is a significant issue. Note that even though the unemployment rate has come down for those workers, their rate of labor force participation is still way down.
Economists on the left tend to assume that this is due to a drop in demand for workers at the low end of the skill distribution. Binder’s claim is that instead one factor in declining participation is an increase in the ability of women to participate in the labor market, which in turn lowers the advantage of marrying a man. The reduced interest in marriage on the part of women attenuates the incentive for men to work.
Could be. I await further analysis.
Is Partition Possible?
Angelo Codevilla peers into his crystal ball:
Since 2016, the ruling class has left no doubt that it is not merely enacting chosen policies: It is expressing its identity, an identity that has grown and solidified over more than a half century, and that it is not capable of changing.
That really does mean that restoring anything like the Founders’ United States of America is out of the question. Constitutional conservatism on behalf of a country a large part of which is absorbed in revolutionary identity; that rejects the dictionary definition of words; that rejects common citizenship, is impossible. Not even winning a bloody civil war against the ruling class could accomplish such a thing.
The logical recourse is to conserve what can be conserved, and for it to be done by, of, and for those who wish to conserve it. However much force of what kind may be required to accomplish that, the objective has to be conservation of the people and ways that wish to be conserved.
That means some kind of separation.
As I argued in “The Cold Civil War,” the natural, least stressful course of events is for all sides to tolerate the others going their own ways. The ruling class has not been shy about using the powers of the state and local governments it controls to do things at variance with national policy, effectively nullifying national laws. And they get away with it.
For example, the Trump Administration has not sent federal troops to enforce national marijuana laws in Colorado and California, nor has it punished persons and governments who have defied national laws on immigration. There is no reason why the conservative states, counties, and localities should not enforce their own view of the good.
Not even President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would order troops to shoot to re-open abortion clinics were Missouri or North Dakota, or any city, to shut them down. As Francis Buckley argues in American Secession: The Looming Breakup of the United States, some kind of separation is inevitable, and the options regarding it are many.
I would like to believe Mr. Codevilla, but I cannot. My money is on a national campaign of suppression, which will begin the instant that the left controls the White House and Congress. Shooting won’t be necessary, given the massive displays of force that will be ordered from the White House, ostensibly to enforce various laws, including but far from limited to “a woman’s right to an abortion”. Leftists must control everything because they cannot tolerate dissent.
As I say in “Leftism“,
Violence is a good thing if your heart is in the “left” place. And violence is in the hearts of leftists, along with hatred and the irresistible urge to suppress that which is hated because it challenges leftist orthodoxy — from climate skepticism and the negative effect of gun ownership on crime to the negative effect of the minimum wage and the causal relationship between Islam and terrorism.
There’s more in “The Subtle Authoritarianism of the ‘Liberal Order’“; for example:
[Quoting Sumantra Maitra] Domestically, liberalism divides a nation into good and bad people, and leads to a clash of cultures.
The clash of cultures was started and sustained by so-called liberals, the smug people described above. It is they who — firmly believing themselves to be smarter, on the the side of science, and on the side of history — have chosen to be the aggressors in the culture war.
Hillary Clinton’s remark about Trump’s “deplorables” ripped the mask from the “liberal” pretension to tolerance and reason. Clinton’s remark was tantamount to a declaration of war against the self-appointed champion of the “deplorables”: Donald Trump. And war it has been. much of it waged by deep-state “liberals” who cannot entertain the possibility that they are on the wrong side of history, and who will do anything — anything — to make history conform to their smug expectations of it.
Still More Evidence for Why I Don’t Believe in “Climate Change”
This is a sequel to an item in the previous edition of this series: “More Evidence for Why I Don’t Believe in Climate Change“.
Dave Middleton debunks the claim that 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted the susequent (but not steady) rise in the globe’s temperature (whatever that is). He then quotes a talk by Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama-Huntsville Climate Research Center:
We have a change in temperature from the deep atmosphere over 37.5 years, we know how much forcing there was upon the atmosphere, so we can relate these two with this little ratio, and multiply it by the ratio of the 2x CO2 forcing. So the transient climate response is to say, what will the temperature be like if you double CO2– if you increase at 1% per year, which is roughly what the whole greenhouse effect is, and which is achieved in about 70 years. Our result is that the transient climate response in the troposphere is 1.1 °C. Not a very alarming number at all for a doubling of CO2. When we performed the same calculation using the climate models, the number was 2.31°C. Clearly, and significantly different. The models’ response to the forcing – their ∆t here, was over 2 times greater than what has happened in the real world….
There is one model that’s not too bad, it’s the Russian model. You don’t go to the White House today and say, “the Russian model works best”. You don’t say that at all! But the fact is they have a very low sensitivity to their climate model. When you look at the Russian model integrated out to 2100, you don’t see anything to get worried about. When you look at 120 years out from 1980, we already have 1/3 of the period done – if you’re looking out to 2100. These models are already falsified [emphasis added], you can’t trust them out to 2100, no way in the world would a legitimate scientist do that. If an engineer built an aeroplane and said it could fly 600 miles and the thing ran out of fuel at 200 and crashed, he might say: “I was only off by a factor of three”. No, we don’t do that in engineering and real science! A factor of three is huge in the energy balance system. Yet that’s what we see in the climate models….
Theoretical climate modelling is deficient for describing past variations. Climate models fail for past variations, where we already know the answer. They’ve failed hypothesis tests and that means they’re highly questionable for giving us accurate information about how the relatively tiny forcing … will affect the climate of the future.
For a lot more in this vein, see my pages “Climate Change” and “Modeling and Science“.
Transgenderism, Once More
Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels, M.D.) is on the case:
The problem alluded to in [a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics] is, of course, the consequence of a fiction, namely that a man who claims to have changed sex actually has changed sex, and is now what used to be called the opposite sex. But when a man who claims to have become a woman competes in women’s athletic competitions, he often retains an advantage derived from the sex of his birth. Women competitors complain that this is unfair, and it is difficult not to agree with them….
Man being both a problem-creating and solving creature, there is, of course, a very simple way to resolve this situation: namely that men who change to simulacra of women should compete, if they must, with others who have done the same. The demand that they should suffer no consequences that they neither like nor want from the choices they have made is an unreasonable one, as unreasonable as it would be for me to demand that people should listen to me playing the piano though I have no musical ability. Thomas Sowell has drawn attention to the intellectual absurdity and deleterious practical consequences of the modern search for what he calls “cosmic justice.”…
We increasingly think that we live in an existential supermarket in which we pick from the shelf of limitless possibilities whatever we want to be. We forget that limitation is not incompatible with infinity; for example, that our language has a grammar that excludes certain forms of words, without in any way limiting the infinite number of meanings that we can express. Indeed, such limitation is a precondition of our freedom, for otherwise nothing that we said would be comprehensible to anybody else.
That is a tour de force typical of the good doctor. In the span of three paragraphs, he addresses matters that I have treated at length in “The Transgender Fad and Its Consequences” (and later in the previous edition of this series), “Positive Rights and Cosmic Justice“, and “Writing: A Guide” (among other entries at this blog).
Big, Bad Oligopoly?
Big Tech is giving capitalism a bad name, as I discuss in “Why Is Capitalism Under Attack from the Right?“, but it’s still the best game in town. Even oligopoly and its big brother, monopoly, aren’t necessarily bad. See, for example, my posts, “Putting in Some Good Words for Monopoly” and “Monopoly: Private Is Better than Public“. Arnold Kling makes the essential point here:
Do indicators of consolidation show us that the economy is getting less competitive or more competitive? The answer depends on which explanation(s) you believe to be most important. For example, if network effects or weak resistance to mergers are the main factors, then the winners from consolidation are quasi-monopolists that may be overly insulated from competition. On the other hand, if the winners are firms that have figured out how to develop and deploy software more effectively than their rivals, then the growth of those firms at the expense of rivals just shows us that the force of competition is doing its work.
Why I Am Bunkered in My Half-Acre of Austin
Randal O’Toole takes aim at the planners of Austin, Texas, and hits the bullseye:
Austin is one of the fastest-growing cities in America, and the city of Austin and Austin’s transit agency, Capital Metro, have a plan for dealing with all of the traffic that will be generated by that growth: assume that a third of the people who now drive alone to work will switch to transit, bicycling, walking, or telecommuting by 2039. That’s right up there with planning for dinner by assuming that food will magically appear on the table the same way it does in Hogwarts….
[W]hile Austin planners are assuming they can reduce driving alone from 74 to 50 percent, it is actually moving in the other direction….
Planners also claim that 11 percent of Austin workers carpool to work, an amount they hope to maintain through 2039. They are going to have trouble doing that as carpooling, in fact, only accounted for 8.0 percent of Austin workers in 2018.
Planners hope to increase telecommuting from its current 8 percent (which is accurate) to 14 percent. That could be difficult as they have no policy tools that can influence telecommuting.
Planners also hope to increase walking and bicycling from their current 2 and 1 percent to 4 and 5 percent. Walking to work is almost always greater than cycling to work, so it’s difficult to see how they plan to magic cycling to be greater than walking. This is important because cycling trips are longer than walking trips and so have more of a potential impact on driving.
Finally, planners want to increase transit from 4 to 16 percent. In fact, transit carried just 3.24 percent of workers to their jobs in 2018, down from 3.62 percent in 2016. Changing from 4 to 16 percent is a an almost impossible 300 percent increase; changing from 3.24 to 16 is an even more formidable 394 percent increase. Again, reality is moving in the opposite direction from planners’ goals….
Planners have developed two main approaches to transportation. One is to estimate how people will travel and then provide and maintain the infrastructure to allow them to do so as efficiently and safely as possible. The other is to imagine how you wish people would travel and then provide the infrastructure assuming that to happen. The latter method is likely to lead to misallocation of capital resources, increased congestion, and increased costs to travelers.
Austin’s plan is firmly based on this second approach. The city’s targets of reducing driving alone by a third, maintaining carpooling at an already too-high number, and increasing transit by 394 percent are completely unrealistic. No American city has achieved similar results in the past two decades and none are likely to come close in the next two decades.
Well, that’s the prevailing mentality of Austin’s political leaders and various bureaucracies: magical thinking. Failure is piled upon failure (e.g., more bike lanes crowding out traffic lanes, a hugely wasteful curbside composting plan) because to admit failure would be to admit that the emperor has no clothes.
You want to learn more about Austin? You’ve got it:
Driving and Politics (1)
Life in Austin (1)
Life in Austin (2)
Life in Austin (3)
Driving and Politics (2)
AGW in Austin?
Democracy in Austin
AGW in Austin? (II)
The Hypocrisy of “Local Control”
Amazon and Austin
“Government Worker” Is (Usually) an Oxymoron
In “Good News from the Federal Government” I sarcastically endorse the move to grant all federal workers 12 weeks of paid parental leave:
The good news is that there will be a lot fewer civilian federal workers on the job, which means that the federal bureaucracy will grind a bit more slowly when it does the things that it does to screw up the economy.
The next day, Audacious Epigone put some rhetorical and statistical meat on the bones of my informed prejudice in “Join the Crooks and Liars: Get a Government Job!“:
That [the title of the post] used to be a frequent refrain on Radio Derb. Though the gag has been made emeritus, the advice is even better today than it was when the Derb introduced it. As he explains:
The percentage breakdown is private-sector 76 percent, government 16 percent, self-employed 8 percent.
So one in six of us works for a government, federal, state, or local.
Which group does best on salary? Go on: see if you can guess. It’s government workers, of course. Median earnings 52½ thousand. That’s six percent higher than the self-employed and fourteen percent higher than the poor shlubs toiling away in the private sector.
If you break down government workers into two further categories, state and local workers in category one, federal workers in category two, which does better?
Again, which did you think? Federal workers are way out ahead, median earnings 66 thousand. Even state and local government workers are ahead of us private-sector and self-employed losers, though.
Moral of the story: Get a government job! — federal for strong preference.
….
Though it is well known that a government gig is a gravy train, opinions of the people with said gigs is embarrassingly low as the results from several additional survey questions show.
First, how frequently the government can be trusted “to do what’s right”? [“Just about always” and “most of the time” badly trail “some of the time”.]
….
Why can’t the government be trusted to do what’s right? Because the people who populate it are crooks and liars. Asked whether “hardly any”, “not many” or “quite a few” people in the federal government are crooked, the following percentages answered with “quite a few” (“not sure” responses, constituting 12% of the total, are excluded). [Responses of “quite a few” range from 59 percent to 77 percent across an array of demographic categories.]
….
Accompanying a strong sense of corruption is the perception of widespread incompetence. Presented with a binary choice between “the people running the government are smart” and “quite a few of them don’t seem to know what they are doing”, a solid majority chose the latter (“not sure”, at 21% of all responses, is again excluded). [The “don’t know what they’re doing” responses ranged from 55 percent to 78 percent across the same demographic categories.]
Are the skeptics right? Well, most citizens have had dealings with government employees of one kind and another. The “wisdom of crowds” certainly applies in this case.
Dangerous Millennials?
I return to Joel Kotkin’s essay, “America’s Drift Toward Feudalism“ (American Affairs Journal, Winter 2019), which I quoted recently and favorably. This is from the final passages of the essay:
In the world envisioned by the oligarchs [the ultrarich, especially the czars of Big Tech and financial institutions] and the clerisy [affluent professionals and members of the academic-goverment-information-media complex], the poor and much of the middle class are destined to become more dependent on the state. This dependency could be accelerated as their labor is devalued both by policy hostile to the industrial economy, and by the greater implementation of automation and artificial intelligence.
Opposing these forces will be very difficult, particularly given the orientation of our media, academia, and the nonprofit world, as well as the massive wealth accumulated by the oligarchs. A system that grants favors and entertainment to its citizens but denies them property expects little in return. This kind of state, Tocqueville suggested, can be used to keep its members in “perpetual childhood”; it “would degrade men rather than tormenting them.”
Reversing our path away from a new feudalism will require, among other things, a rediscovery of belief in our basic values and what it means to be an American. Nearly 40 percent of young Americans, for example, think the country lacks “a history to be proud of.” Fewer young people than previous generations place an emphasis on family, religion, or patriotism. Rather than look at what binds a democratic society together, the focus on both right and left has been on narrow identities incapable of sustaining a democratic and pluralistic society. The new generation has become cut off from the traditions and values of our past. If one does not even know of the legacies underpinning our democracy, one is not likely to notice when they are lost. Recovering a sense of pride and identification with America’s achievements is an essential component of any attempt to recover the drive, ambition, and self-confidence that propelled the United States to the space age. If we want to rescue the future from a new and pernicious form of feudalism, we will have to recover this ground.
To reverse neo-feudalism, the Third Estate—the class most threatened by the ascendency of the oligarchs and the clerisy—needs to reinvigorate its political will, just as it did during the Revolution and in the various struggles that followed. “Happy the nation whose people has not forgotten to how to rebel,” noted the British historian R. H. Tawney. Whether we can understand and defy the new feudalism will determine the kind of world our children will inherit.
There is altogether too much reification going on here. Take the final paragraph, for example, where Kotkin says that the Third Estate (the poor and middle class) “needs to invigorate its political will”. The Third Estate is an abstraction, not an actual association of persons united for the purpose of taking collective action.
Individual members of the Third Estate will do whatever it is that they choose to do and are capable of doing. One frightening possibility is that enough of them will take to the polls and increasingly tip the balance toward left-wing politicians who promise to share the wealth. Having followed Kotkin’s blog for some time, I doubt that that is an outcome he prefers, inasmuch as efforts to share the wealth are economically destructive — especially for members of the Third Estate.
For more about the economic status of Millennials (as an abstract group), see Timothy Taylor’s “About Millennials“.
What’s in a Name?
A lot, especially if it’s the name of a U.S. Navy ship. Take the aircraft carrier, for instance, which has been the Navy’s capital ship since World War II. The first aircraft carrier in the U.S. fleet was the USS Langley, commissioned in 1922. Including escort carriers, which were smaller than the relatively small carriers of World War II, a total of 154 carriers have been commissioned and put into service in the U.S. Navy. (During World War II, some escort carriers were transferred to the Royal Navy upon commissioning.)
As far as I am able to tell, not one of the the 82 escort carriers was named for a person. Of the 72 “regular” carriers, which includes 10 designated as light aircraft carriers, none was named for a person until CVB-49, the Franklin D. Roosevelt, was commissioned in 1945, several months after the death of its namesake. The next such naming came in 1947, with the commissioning of the Wright, named for Wilbur and Orville Wright, the aviation pioneers. There was a hiatus of 8 years, until the commissioning of the Forrestal in 1955; a ship named for the late James Forrestal, the first secretary of defense.
The dam burst in 1968, with the commissioning of John F. Kennedy. That carrier and the 11 commissioned since have been named for persons, only one of whom, Admiral of the Fleet Chester W. Nimitz, was a renowned naval person. In addition to Kennedy, the namesakes include former U.S. presidents (Eisenhower, T. Roosevelt, Lincoln, Washington, Truman, Reagan, Bush 41, and Ford), Carl Vinson (a long-serving chairman of the House Armed Services Committee), and John C. Stennis (a long-serving chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee). Reagan and Bush were honored while still living (though Reagan may have been unaware of the honor because of the advanced state of his Alzheimer’s disease).
All but the Kennedy are on active service. And the Kennedy, which was decommissioned in 2007, is due to be replaced by a namesake next year. But that may be the end of it. Wisdom may have prevailed before the Navy becomes embroiled in nasty, needless controversies over the prospect of naming of a carrier after Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump.
The carrier after Kennedy (II) will be named Enterprise — the third carrier to be thus named. Perhaps future carriers will take the dashing names of those that I remember well from my days as a young defense analyst: Bon Homme Richard (a.k.a, Bonny Dick), Kearsarge, Oriskany, Princeton, Shangri-La, Lake Champlain, Tarawa, Midway, Coral Sea, Valley Forge, Saipan, Saratoga, Ranger, Independence, Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise (II), and America.
And while we’re at it, perhaps the likes of Admiral William McRaven (USN ret.) will do their duty, become apolitical, and shut up.
The Modern Presidency: From TR to DJT
This is a revision and expansion of a post that I published at my old blog late in 2007. The didactic style of this post reflects its original purpose, which was to give my grandchildren some insights into American history that aren’t found in standard textbooks. Readers who consider themselves already well-versed in the history of American politics should nevertheless scan this post for its occasionally provocative observations.
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (1858-1919) was elected Vice President as a Republican in 1900, when William McKinley was elected to a second term as President. Roosevelt became President when McKinley was assassinated in September 1901. Roosevelt was re-elected President in 1904, with 56 percent of the “national” popular vote. (I mention popular-vote percentages here and throughout this post because they are a gauge of the general popularity of presidential candidates, though an inaccurate gauge if a strong third-party candidate emerges to distort the usual two-party dominance of the popular vote. There is, in fact, no such thing as a national popular vote. Rather, it is the vote in each State which determines the distribution of that State’s electoral votes between the various candidates. The electoral votes of all States are officially tallied about a month after the general election, and the president-elect is the candidate with the most electoral votes. I have more to say more about electoral votes in several of the entries that follow this one.)
Theodore Roosevelt (also known as TR) served almost two full terms as President, from September 14, 1901, to March 4, 1909. (Before 1937, a President’s term of office began on March 4 of the year following his election to office.)
Roosevelt was an “activist” President. Roosevelt used what he called the “bully pulpit” of the presidency to gain popular support for programs that exceeded the limits set in the Constitution. Roosevelt was especially willing to use the power of government to regulate business and to break up companies that had become successful by offering products that consumers wanted. Roosevelt was typical of politicians who inherited a lot of money and didn’t understand how successful businesses provided jobs and useful products for less-wealthy Americans.
Roosevelt was more like the Democrat Presidents of the Twentieth Century. He did not like the “weak” government envisioned by the authors of the Constitution. The authors of the Constitution designed a government that would allow people to decide how to live their own lives (as long as they didn’t hurt other people) and to run their own businesses as they wished to (as long as they didn’t cheat other people). The authors of the Constitution thought government should exist only to protect people from criminals and foreign enemies.
William Howard Taft (1857-1930), a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt, served as President from March 4, 1909, to March 4, 1913. Taft ran for the presidency as a Republican in 1908 with Roosevelt’s support. But Taft didn’t carry out Roosevelt’s anti-business agenda aggressively enough to suit Roosevelt. So, in 1912, when Taft ran for re-election as a Republican, Roosevelt ran for election as a Progressive (a newly formed political party). Many Republican voters decided to vote for Roosevelt instead of Taft. The result was that a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, won the most electoral votes. Although Taft was defeated for re-election, he later became Chief Justice of the United States, making him the only person ever to have served as head of the executive and judicial branches of the U.S. Government.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) served as President from March 4, 1913, to March 4, 1921. (Wilson didn’t use his first name, and was known officially as Woodrow Wilson.) Wilson is the only President to have earned the degree of doctor of philosophy. Wilson’s field of study was political science, and he had many ideas about how to make government “better”. But “better” government, to Wilson, was “strong” government of the kind favored by Theodore Roosevelt. In fact, it was government by executive decree rather than according to the Constitution’s rules for law-making, in which Congress plays the central role.
Wilson was re-elected in 1916 because he promised to keep the United States out of World War I, which had begun in 1914. But Wilson changed his mind in 1917 and asked Congress to declare war on Germany. After the war, Wilson tried to get the United States to join the League of Nations, an international organization that was supposed to prevent future wars by having nations assemble to discuss their differences. The U.S. Senate, which must approve America’s membership in international organizations, refused to join the League of Nations. The League did not succeed in preventing future wars because wars are started by leaders who don’t want to discuss their differences with other nations.
Warren Gamaliel Harding (1865-1923), a Republican, was elected in 1920 and inaugurated on March 4, 1921. Harding asked voters to reject the kind of government favored by Democrats, and voters gave Harding what is known as a “landslide” victory; he received 60 percent of the votes cast in the 1920 election for president, one of the highest percentages ever recorded. Harding’s administration was about to become involved in a major scandal when Harding died suddenly on August 3, 1923, while he was on a trip to the West Coast. The exact cause of Harding’s death is unknown, but he may have had a stroke when he learned of the impending scandal, which involved Albert Fall, Secretary of the Interior. Fall had secretly allowed some of his business associates to lease government land for oil-drilling, in return for personal loans.
There were a few other scandals, but Harding probably had nothing to do with any of them. Because of the scandals, most historians say that they consider Harding to have been a poor President. But that isn’t the real reason for their dislike of Harding. Most historians, like most college professors, favor “strong” government. Historians don’t like Harding because he didn’t use the power of government to interfere in the nation’s economy. An important result of Harding’s policy (called laissez-faire, or “hands off”) was high employment and increasing prosperity during the 1920s.
John Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) , who was Harding’s Vice President, became President upon Harding’s death in 1923. (Coolidge didn’t use his first name, and was known as Calvin.) Coolidge was elected President in 1924. He served as President from August 3, 1923, to March 4, 1929. Coolidge continued Harding’s policy of not interfering in the economy, and people continued to become more prosperous as businesses grew and hired more people and paid them higher wages. Coolidge was known as “Silent Cal” because he was a man of few words. He said only what was necessary for him to say, and he meant what he said. That was in keeping with his approach to the presidency. He was not the “activist” that reporters and historians like to see in the presidency; he simply did the job required of him by the Constitution, which was to execute the laws of the United States. He continued Harding’s hands-off policy, and the country prospered as a result. Coolidge chose not run for re-election in 1928, even though he was quite popular.
Herbert Clark Hoover (1874-1964), a Republican who had been Secretary of Commerce under Coolidge, was elected to the presidency in 1928. He served as President from March 4, 1929, to March 4, 1933.
Hoover won 58 percent of the popular vote, an endorsement of the hands-off policy of Harding and Coolidge. Hoover’s administration is known mostly for the huge drop in the price of stocks (shares of corporations, which are bought and sold in places known as stock exchanges), and for the Great Depression that was caused partly by the “Crash” — as it became known. The rate of unemployment (the percentage of American workers without jobs) rose from 3 percent just before the Crash to 25 percent by 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression.
The Crash had two main causes. First, the prices of shares in businesses (called stocks) began to rise sharply in the late 1920s. That caused many persons to borrow money in order to buy stocks, in the hope that the price of stocks would continue to rise. If the price of stocks continued to rise, buyers could sell their stocks at a profit and repay the money they had borrowed. But when stock prices got very high in the fall of 1929, some buyers began to worry that prices would fall, so they began to sell their stocks. That drove down the price of stocks, and caused more buyers to sell in the hope of getting out of the stock market before prices fell further. But prices went down so quickly that almost everyone who owned stocks lost money. Prices of stocks kept going down. By 1933, many stocks had become worthless and most stocks were selling for only a small fraction of prices that they had sold for before the Crash.
Because so many people had borrowed money to buy stocks, they went broke when stock prices dropped. When they went broke, they were unable to pay their other debts. That had a ripple effect throughout the economy. As people went broke they spent less money and were unable to pay their debts. Banks had less money to lend. Because people were buying less from businesses, and because businesses couldn’t get loans to stay in business, many businesses closed and people lost their jobs. Then the people who lost their jobs had less money to spend, and so more people lost their jobs.
The effects of the Great Depression were felt in other countries because Americans couldn’t afford to buy as much as they used to from other countries. Also, Congress passed a law known as the Smoot-Hawley Tarrif Act, which President Hoover signed. The Smoot-Hawley Act raised tarrifs (taxes) on items imported into the United States, which meant that Americans bought even less from foreign countries. Foreign countries passed similar laws, which meant that foreigners began to buy less from Americans, which put more Americans out of work.
The economy would have recovered quickly, as it had done in the past when stock prices fell and unemployment increased. But the actions of government — raising tariffs and making loans harder to get — only made things worse. What could have been a brief recession turned into the Great Depression. People were frightened. They blamed President Hoover for their problems, although President Hoover didn’t cause the Crash. Hoover ran for re-election in 1932, but he lost to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), known as FDR, served as President from March 4, 1933 until his death on April 12, 1945, just a month before V-E Day. FDR was elected to the presidency in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944 — the only person elected more than twice. Roosevelt was a very popular President because he served during the Depression and World War II, when most Americans — having lost faith in themselves — sought reassurance that “someone was in charge”. FDR was not universally popular; his share of the popular vote rose from 57 percent in 1932 to 61 percent in 1936, but then dropped to 55 percent in 1940 and 54 percent in 1944. Americans were coming to understand what FDR’s opponents knew at the time, and what objective historians have said since:
- FDR’s efforts to bring America out of the Great Depression only made it worse.
- FDR’s leadership during World War II faltered toward the end, when he was gravely ill, and under the influence of well-placed Communists in the U.S. government, he allowed the Soviet Union to take over Eastern Europe.
FDR’s program to end the Great Depression was known as the New Deal. It consisted of welfare programs, which put people to work on government projects instead of making useful things. It also consisted of higher taxes and other restrictions on business, which discouraged people from starting and investing in businesses, which is the cure for unemployment.
Roosevelt did try to face up to the growing threat from Germany and Japan. However, he wasn’t able to do much to prepare America’s defenses because of strong isolationist and anti-war feelings in the country. Those feelings were the result of America’s involvement in World War I. (Similar feelings in Great Britain kept that country from preparing for war with Germany, which encouraged Hitler’s belief that he could easily conquer Europe.)
When America went to war after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt proved to be an able and inspiring commander-in-chief. But toward the end of the war his health was failing and he was influenced by close aides who were pro-communist and sympathetic to the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR). Roosevelt allowed Soviet forces to claim Eastern Europe, including half of Germany. Roosevelt also encouraged the formation of the United Nations, where the Soviet Union (now the Russian Federation) has had a strong voice because it was made a permanent member of the Security Council, the policy-making body of the UN. As a member of the Security Council, Russia can obstruct actions proposed by the United States. (In any event, the UN has long since become a hotbed of anti-American, left-wing sentiment.)
Roosevelt’s appeasement of the USSR caused Josef Stalin (the Soviet dictator) to believe that the U.S. had weak leaders who would not challenge the USSR’s efforts to spread Communism. The result was the Cold War, which lasted for 45 years. During the Cold War the USSR developed nuclear weapons, built large military forces, kept a tight rein on countries behind the Iron Curtain (in Eastern Europe), and expanded its influence to other parts of the world.
Stalin’s belief in the weakness of U.S. leaders was largely correct, until Ronald Reagan became President. As I will discuss, Reagan’s policies led to the end of the Cold War.
Harry S Truman (1884-1972), who was Vice President in FDR’s fourth term, became President upon FDR’s death. Truman was re-elected in 1948, so he served as President from April 12, 1945 until January 20, 1953 — almost two full terms.
Truman made one right decision during his presidency. He approved the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. Although hundreds of thousands of Japanese were killed by the bombs, the Japanese soon surrendered. If the Japanese hadn’t surrendered then, U.S. forces would have invaded Japan and millions of Americans and Japanese lives would have been lost in the battles that followed the invasion.
Truman ordered drastic reductions in the defense budget because he thought that Stalin was an ally of the United States. (Truman, like FDR, had advisers who were Communists.) Truman changed his mind about defense budgets, and about Stalin, when Communist North Korea attacked South Korea in 1950. The attack on South Korea came after Truman’s Secretary of State (the man responsible for relations with other countries) made a speech about countries that the United States would defend. South Korea was not one of those countries.
When South Korea was invaded, Truman asked General of the Army Douglas MacArthur to lead the defense of South Korea. MacArthur planned and executed the amphibious landing at Inchon, which turned the war in favor of South Korea and its allies. The allied forces then succeeded in pushing the front line far into North Korea. Communist China then entered the war on the side of North Korea. MacArthur wanted to counterattack Communist Chinese bases and supply lines in Manchuria, but Truman wouldn’t allow that. Truman then “fired” MacArthur because MacArthur spoke publicly about his disagreement with Truman’s decision. The Chinese Communists pushed allied forces back and the Korean War ended in a deadlock, just about where it had begun, near the 38th parallel.
In the meantime, Communist spies had stolen the secret plans for making atomic bombs. They were able to do that because Truman refused to hear the truth about Communist spies who were working inside the government. By the time Truman left office the Soviet Union had manufactured nuclear weapons, had strengthened its grip on Eastern Europe, and was beginning to expand its influence into the Third World (the nations of Africa and the Middle East).
Truman was very unpopular by 1952. As a result he chose not to run for re-election, even though he could have done so. (The “Lame Duck” amendment to the Constitution, which bars a person from serving as President for more than six years was adopted while Truman was President, but it didn’t apply to him.)
Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969), a Republican, served as President from January 20, 1953 to January 20, 1961. Eisenhower (also known by his nickname, “Ike”) received 55 percent of the popular vote in 1952 and 57 percent in 1956; his Democrat opponent in both elections was Adlai Stevenson. The Republican Party chose Eisenhower as a candidate mainly because he had become famous as a general during World War II. Republican leaders thought that by nominating Eisenhower they could end the Democrats’ twenty-year hold on the presidency. The Republican leaders were right about that, but in choosing Eisenhower as a candidate they rejected the Republican Party’s traditional stand in favor of small government.
Eisenhower was a “moderate” Republican. He was not a “big spender” but he did not try to undo all of the new government programs that had been started by FDR and Truman. Traditional Republicans eventually fought back and, in 1964, nominated a small-government candidate named Barry Goldwater. I will discuss him when I get to President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Eisenhower was a popular President, and he was a good manager, but he gave the impression of being “laid back” and not “in charge” of things. The news media had led Americans to believe that “activist” Presidents are better than laissez-faire Presidents, and so there was by 1960 a lot of talk about “getting the country moving again” — as if it was the job of the President to “run” the country instead of execution laws duly enacted in accordance with the Constitution.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963), a Democrat, was elected in 1960 to succeed President Eisenhower. Kennedy, who became known as JFK, served from January 20, 1961, until November 22, 1963, when he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
One reason that Kennedy won the election of 1960 (with 50 percent of the popular vote) was his image of “vigorous youth” (he was 27 years younger than Eisenhower). In fact, JFK had been in bad health for most of his life. He seemed to be healthy only because he used a lot of medications. Those medications probably impaired his judgment and would have caused him to die at a relatively early age if he hadn’t been assassinated.
Late in Eisenhower’s administration a Communist named Fidel Castro had taken over Cuba, which is only 90 miles south of Florida. The Central Intelligence Agency then began to work with anti-Communist exiles from Cuba. The exiles were going to attempt an invasion of Cuba at a place called the Bay of Pigs. In addition to providing the necessary military equipment, the U.S. was also going to provide air support during the invasion.
JFK succeeded Eisenhower before the invasion took place, in April 1961. JFK approved changes in the invasion plan that resulted in the failure of the invasion. The most important change was to discontinue air support for the invading forces. The exiles were defeated, and Castro has remained firmly in control of Cuba.
The failed invasion caused Castro to turn to the USSR for military and economic assistance. In exchange for that assistance, Castro agreed to allow the USSR to install medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. That led to the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Many historians give Kennedy credit for resolving the crisis and avoiding a nuclear war with the USSR. The Russians withdrew their missiles from Cuba, but JFK had to agree to withdraw American missiles from bases in Turkey.
The myth that Kennedy had stood up to the Russians made him more popular in the U.S. His major accomplishment, which Democrats today like to ignore, was to initiate tax cuts, which became law after his assassination. The Kennedy tax cuts helped to make America more prosperous during the 1960s by giving people more money to spend, and by encouraging businesses to expand and create jobs.
The assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963, in Dallas was a shocking event. It also led many Americans to believe that JFK would have become a great President if he had lived and been re-elected to a second term. There is little evidence that JFK would have become a great President. His record in Cuba suggests that he would not have done a good job of defending the country.
Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973), also known as LBJ, was Kennedy’s Vice President and became President upon Kennedy’s assassination. LBJ was re-elected in 1964; he served as President from November 22, 1963 to January 20, 1969. LBJ’s Republican opponent in 1964 was Barry Goldwater, who was an old-style Republican conservative, in favor of limited government and a strong defense. LBJ portrayed Goldwater as a threat to America’s prosperity and safety, when it was LBJ who was the real threat. Americans were still in shock about JFK’s assassination, and so they rallied around LBJ, who won 61 percent of the popular vote.
LBJ is known mainly for two things: his “Great Society” program and the war in Vietnam. The Great Society program was an expansion of FDR’s New Deal. It included such things as the creation of Medicare, which is medical care for retired persons that is paid for by taxes. Medicare is an example of a “welfare” program. Welfare programs take money from people who earn it and give money to people who don’t earn it. The Great Society also included many other welfare programs, such as more benefits for persons who are unemployed. The stated purpose of the expansion of welfare programs under the Great Society was to end poverty in America, but that didn’t happen. The reason it didn’t happen is that when people receive welfare they don’t work as hard to take care of themselves and their families, and they don’t save enough money for their retirement. Welfare actually makes people worse off in the long run.
America’s involvement in Vietnam began in the 1950s, when Eisenhower was President. South Vietnam was under attack by Communist guerrillas, who were sponsored by North Vietnam. Small numbers of U.S. forces were sent to South Vietnam to train and advise South Vietnamese forces. More U.S. advisers were sent by JFK, but within a few years after LBJ became President he had turned the war into an American-led defense of South Vietnam against Communist guerrillas and regular North Vietnamese forces. LBJ decided that it was important for the U.S. to defeat a Communist country and stop Communism from spreading in Southeast Asia.
However, LBJ was never willing to commit enough forces in order to win the war. He allowed air attacks on North Vietnam, for example, but he wouldn’t invade North Vietnam because he was afraid that the Chinese Communists might enter the war. In other words, like Truman in Korea, LBJ was unwilling to do what it would take to win the war decisively. Progress was slow and there were a lot of American casualties from the fighting in South Vietnam. American newspapers and TV began to focus attention on the casualties and portray the war as a losing effort. That led a lot of Americans to turn against the war, and college students began to protest the war (because they didn’t want to be drafted). Attention shifted from the war to the protests, giving the world the impression that America had lost its resolve. And it had.
LBJ had become so unpopular because of the war in Vietnam that he decided not to run for President in 1968. Most of the candidates for President campaigned by saying that they would end the war. In effect, the United States had announced to North Vietnam that it would not fight the war to win. The inevitable outcome was the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam, which finally happened in 1973, under LBJ’s successor, Richard Nixon. South Vietnam was left on its own, and it fell to North Vietnam in 1975.
Richard Milhous Nixon (1913-1994) was a Republican. He won the election of 1968 by beating the Democrat candidate, Hubert H. Humphrey (who had been LBJ’s Vice President), and a third-party candidate, George C. Wallace. Nixon and Humphrey each received 43 percent of the popular vote; Wallace received 14 percent. If Wallace had not been a candidate, most of the votes cast for him probably would have been cast for Nixon.
Even though Nixon received less than half of the popular vote, he won the election because he received a majority of electoral votes. Electoral votes are awarded to the winner of each State’s popular vote. Nixon won a lot more States than Humphrey and Wallace, so Nixon became President.
Nixon won re-election in 1972, with 61 percent of the popular vote, by beating a Democrat (George McGovern) who would have expanded LBJ’s Great Society and cut America’s armed forces even more than they were cut after the Vietnam War ended. Nixon’s victory was more a repudiation of McGovern than it was an endorsement of Nixon. His second term ended in disgrace when he resigned the presidency on August 9, 1974.
Nixon called himself a conservative, but he did nothing during his presidency to curb the power of government. He did not cut back on the Great Society. He spent a lot of time on foreign policy. But Nixon’s diplomatic efforts did nothing to make the USSR and Communist China friendlier to the United States. Nixon had shown that he was essentially a weak President by allowing U.S. forces to withdraw from Vietnam. Dictatorial rulers like do not respect countries that display weakness.
Nixon was the first (and only) President who resigned from office. He resigned because the House of Representatives was ready to impeach him. An impeachment is like a criminal indictment; it is a set of charges against the holder of a public office. If Nixon had been impeached by the House of Representatives, he would have been tried by the Senate. If two-thirds of the Senators had voted to convict him he would have been removed from office. Nixon knew that he would be impeached and convicted, so he resigned.
The main charge against Nixon was that he ordered his staff to cover up his involvement in a crime that happened in 1972, when Nixon was running for re-election. The crime was a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic Party in Washington, D.C. Because the Democratic Party’s headquarters was located in the Watergate Building in Washington, D.C., this episode became known as the Watergate Scandal.
The purpose of the break-in was to obtain documents that might help Nixon’s re-election effort. The men who participated in the break-in were hired by aides to Nixon. Details about the break-in and Nixon’s involvement were revealed as a result of investigations by Congress, which were helped by reporters who were doing their own investigative work.
But there is good reason to believe that Nixon was unjustly forced from office by the concerted efforts of the news media (most of which had long been biased against Nixon), Democrats in Congress, and many Republicans who were anxious to rid themselves of Nixon, who was a magnet for controversy.
Gerald Rudolph Ford (born Leslie King Jr.) (1913 – 2007), who was Nixon’s Vice President at the time Nixon resigned, became President on August 9, 1974 and served until January 20, 1977. Ford succeeded Spiro T. Agnew, who had been Nixon’s Vice President until October 10, 1973, when he resigned because he had been taking bribes while he was Governor of Maryland (the job he had before becoming Vice President).
Ford became the first Vice President chosen in accordance with the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment spells out procedures for filling vacancies in the presidency and vice presidency. When Vice President Agnew resigned, President Nixon nominated Ford as Vice President, and the nomination was approved by a majority vote of the House and Senate. Then, when Ford became President, he nominated Nelson Rockefeller to fill the vice presidency, and Rockefeller was elected Vice President by the House and Senate.
Ford ran for re-election in 1976, but he was defeated by James Earl Carter, mainly because of the Watergate Scandal. Ford was not involved in the scandal, but voters often cast votes for silly reasons. Carter’s election was a rejection of Richard Nixon, who had left office two years earlier, not a vote of confidence in Carter.
James Earl (“Jimmy”) Carter Jr. (1924 – ), a Democrat who had been Governor of Georgia, received only 50 percent of the popular vote. He was defeated for re-election in 1980, so he served as President from January 20, 1977 to January 20, 1981.
Carter was an ineffective President who failed at the most important duty of a President, which is to protect Americans from foreign enemies. His failure came late in his term of office, during the Iran Hostage Crisis. The Shah of Iran had ruled the country for 38 years. He was overthrown in 1979 by a group of Muslim clerics (religious men) who disliked the Shah’s pro-American policies. In November 1979 a group of students loyal to the new Muslim government of Iran invaded the American embassy in Tehran (Iran’s capital city) and took 66 hostages. Carter approved rescue efforts, but they were poorly planned. The hostages were still captive by the time of the presidential election in 1980. Carter lost the election largely because of his feeble rescue efforts.
In recent years Carter has become an outspoken critic of America’s foreign policy. Carter is sympathetic to America’s enemies and he opposes strong military action in defense of America.
Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911-2004), a Republican, succeeded Jimmy Carter as President. Reagan won 51 percent of the popular vote in 1980. Reagan would have received more votes, but a former Republican (John Anderson) ran as a third-party candidate and took 7 percent of the popular vote. Reagan was re-elected in 1984 with 59 percent of the popular vote. He served as President from January 20, 1981, until January 20, 1989.
Reagan had two goals as President: to reduce the size of government and to increase America’s military strength. He was unable to reduce the size of government because, for most of his eight years in office, Democrats were in control of Congress. But Reagan was able to get Congress to approve large reductions in income-tax rates. Those reductions led to more spending on consumer goods and more investment in the creation of new businesses. As a result, Americans had more jobs and higher incomes.
Reagan succeeded in rebuilding America’s military strength. He knew that the only way to defeat the USSR, without going to war, was to show the USSR that the United States was stronger. A lot of people in the United States opposed spending more on military forces; they though that it would cause the USSR to spend more. They also thought that a war between the U.S. and USSR would result. Reagan knew better. He knew that the USSR could not afford to keep up with the United States. Reagan was right. Not long after the end of his presidency the countries of Eastern Europe saw that the USSR was really a weak country, and they began to break away from the USSR. Residents of Berlin demolished the Berlin Wall, which the USSR had erected in 1961 to keep East Berliners from crossing over into West Berlin. East Germany was freed from Communist rule, and it reunited with West Germany. The USSR collapsed, and many of the countries that had been part of the USSR became independent. We owe the end of the Soviet Union and its influence President Reagan’s determination to defeat the threat posed by the Soviet Union.
George Herbert Walker Bush (1924 – 2019), a Republican, was Reagan’s Vice President. He won 54 percent of the popular vote when he defeated his Democrat opponent, Michael Dukakis, in the election of 1988. Bush lost the election of 1992. He served as President from January 20, 1989 to January 20, 1993.
The main event of Bush’s presidency was the Gulf War of 1990-1991. Iraq, whose ruler was Saddam Hussein, invaded the small neighboring country of Kuwait. Kuwait produces and exports a lot of oil. The occupation of Kuwait by Iraq meant that Saddam Hussein might have been able to control the amount of oil shipped to other countries, including Europe and the United States. If Hussein had been allowed to control Kuwait, he might have moved on to Saudi Arabia, which produces much more oil than Kuwait. President Bush asked Congress to approve military action against Iraq. Congress approved the action, although most Democrats voted against giving President Bush authority to defend Kuwait. The war ended in a quick defeat for Iraq’s armed forces. But President Bush decided not to allow U.S. forces to finish the job and end Saddam Hussein’s reign as ruler of Iraq.
Bush’s other major blunder was to raise taxes, which helped to cause a recession. The country was recovering from the recession in 1992, when Bush ran for re-election, but his opponents were able to convince voters that Bush hadn’t done enough to end the recession. In spite of his quick (but incomplete) victory in the Persian Gulf War, Bush lost his bid for re-election because voters were concerned about the state of the economy.
William Jefferson Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III) (1946 – ), a Democrat, defeated George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election by gaining a majority of the electoral vote. But Clinton won only 43 percent of the popular vote. Bush won 37 percent, and 19 percent went to H. Ross Perot. Perot, a third-party candidate, who received many votes that probably would have been cast for Bush.
Clinton’s presidency got off to a bad start when he sent to Congress a proposal that would have put health care under government control. Congress rejected the plan, and a year later (in 1994) voters went to the polls in large number to elect Republican majorities to the House and Senate.
Clinton was able to win re-election in 1996, but he received only 49 percent of the popular vote. He was re-elected mainly because fewer Americans were out of work and incomes were rising. This economic “boom” was a continuation of the recovery that began under President Reagan. Clinton got credit for the “boom” of the 1990s, which occurred in spite of tax increases passed by Congress while it was still controlled by Democrats.
Clinton was perceived as a “moderate” Democrat because he tried to balance the government’s budget; that is, he tried not to spend more money than the government was receiving in taxes. He was eventually able to balance the budget, but only because he cut defense spending. In addition to that, Clinton made several bad decisions about defense issues. In 1993 he withdrew American troops from Somalia, instead of continuing with the military mission there after some troops were captured and killed by natives. In 1994 he signed an agreement with North Korea that was supposed to keep North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, but the North Koreans continued to work on building nuclear weapons because they had fooled Clinton. By 1998 Clinton knew that al Qaeda had become a major threat when terrorists bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa, but Clinton failed to go to war against al Qaeda. Only after terrorists struck a Navy ship, the USS Cole, in 2000 did Clinton declare terrorism to be a major threat. By then, his term of office was almost over.
Clinton was the second President to be impeached. The House of Representatives impeached him in 1998. He was charged with perjury (lying under oath) when he was the defendant (the person being charged with wrong-doing) in a law suit. The Senate didn’t convict Clinton because every Democrat senator refused to vote for conviction, in spite of overwhelming evidence that Clinton was guilty. The day before Clinton left office he acknowledged his guilt by agreeing to a five-year suspension of his law license. A federal judge later found Clinton guilty of contempt of court for his misleading testimony and fined him $90,000.
Clinton was involved in other scandals during his presidency, but he remains popular with many people because he is good at giving the false impression that he is a nice, humble person.
Clinton’s scandals had more effect on his Vice President, Al Gore, who ran for President as the nominee of the Democrat Party in 2000. His main opponent was George W. Bush, a Republican. A third-party candidate named Ralph Nader also received a lot of votes. The election of 2000 was the closest presidential election since 1876. Bush and Gore each won about 48 percent of the popular vote (Gore’s percentage was slightly higher than Bush’s); Nader won 3 percent. The winner of the election was decided by outcome of the vote in Florida. That outcome was the subject of legal proceedings for six weeks. It had to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Initial returns in Florida gave that State’s electoral votes to Bush, which meant that he would become President. But the Supreme Court of Florida decided that election officials should violate Florida’s election laws and keep recounting the ballots in certain counties. Those counties were selected because they had more Democrats than Republicans, and so it was likely that recounts would favor Gore, the Democrat. The case finally went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided that the Florida Supreme Court was wrong. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered an end to the recounts, and Bush was declared the winner of Florida’s electoral votes.
George Walker Bush (1946 – ), a Republican, was the second son of a President to become President. (The first was John Quincy Adams, the sixth President, whose father, John Adams, was the second President. Also, Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd President, was the grandson of William Henry Harrison, the ninth President.) Bush won re-election in 2004, with 51 percent of the popular vote. He served as President from January 20, 2001, to January 20, 2009.
President Bush’s major accomplishment before September 11, 2001, was to get Congress to cut taxes. The tax cuts were necessary because the economy had been in a recession since 2000. The tax cuts gave people more money to spend and encouraged businesses to expand and create new jobs.
The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, caused President Bush to give most of his time and attention to the War on Terror. The invasion of Afghanistan, late in 2001, was part of a larger campaign to disrupt terrorist activities. Afghanistan was ruled by the Taliban, a group that gave support and shelter to al Qaeda terrorists. The U.S. quickly defeated the Taliban and destroyed al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan.
The invasion of Iraq, which took place in 2003, was also intended to combat al Qaeda, but in a different way. Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, had been an enemy of the U.S. since the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991. Hussein was trying to acquire deadly weapons to use against the U.S. and its allies. Hussein was also giving money to terrorists and sheltering them in Iraq. The defeat of Hussein, which came quickly after the invasion of Iraq, was intended to establish a stable, friendly government in the Middle East.
The invasion of Iraq produced some of the intended results, but there was much unrest there because of long-standing animosity between Sunni Muslims and Shi’a Muslims. There was also much defeatist talk about Iraq — especially by Democrats and the media. That defeatist talk helped to encourage those who were creating unrest in Iraq. It gave them hope that the U.S. would abandon Iraq, just as it abandoned Vietnam more than 30 years earlier. The country had become almost uncontrollable until Bush authorized a military “surge” — enough additional troops to quell the unrest.
However, Bush, like his father, failed to take a strategically decisive course of action. He should have ended the pretense of “nation-building”, beefed up U.S. military presence, and installed a compliant Iraqi government. That would have created a U.S. stronghold in the Middle East and stifled Iran’s moves toward regional hegemony, just as the presence of U.S. forces in Europe for decades after World War II kept the USSR from seizing new territory and eventually wore it down.
With Iraq as a U.S. base of operations, it would have been easier to quell Afghanistan and to launch preemptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear-weapons program while it was still in its early stages.
But the early failures in Iraq — and the futility of the Afghan operation (also done on the cheap) — meant that Bush had no political backing for bolder military measures. Further, the end of his second term was blighted by a financial crisis that led a stock-market crash, the failure of some major financial firms, the bailout of some others, and thence to the Great Recession.
The election of 2008 coincided with the economic downturn, and it was no surprise that the Democrat candidate handily beat the feckless Republican (in-name-only) candidate, John Sidney McCain III.
Barack Hussein Obama II (1961 – ) was the Democrat who defeated McCain. Obama, like most of his predecessors, was a professional politician, but most of his political experience was as a “community organizer” (i.e., rabble-rouser and shakedown artist) in Chicago. He was still serving in his first major office (as U.S. Senator from Illinois) when he vaulted ahead of Hillary Rodham Clinton and seized the Democrat nomination for the presidency. He served as President from January 20, 2009, until January 20, 2017.
Obama’s ascendancy was owed in large part to the perception of him as youthful and energetic. He was careful to seem moderate in his campaign rhetoric, though those in the know (party leaders and activists) were well aware of his strong left-wing leanings, which were revealed in his Senate votes and positions. Clinton, by contrast, was perceived as middle-of the-road, but only because the road had shifted well to the left over the years. It was she, for example, who propounded the health-care nationalization scheme known as HillaryCare. The scheme was defeated in Congress, but it was responsible in large part for massive swing of House seats in 1994, which returned the House to GOP control for the first time in 42 years.
Obama’s election was due also to a health dose of white “guilt”. Here was an opportunity for many voters to “prove” (and to brag about) their lack of racism. And so, given the experience of Iraq, the onset of the Great Recession, and a me-too Republican candidate, they did the easy thing by voting for Obama, and enjoyed the feel-good sensation that went with it.
At any rate, Obama served two terms (the second was secured by defeating Willard Mitt Romney, another feckless RINO). His presidency throughout both terms was marked by disastrous policies; for example:
- Obamacare, which drastically raised health-care costs and insurance premiums and added millions of freeloaders to Medicaid
- encouragement of illegal immigration, which imposes heavy burdens on middle-class taxpayers and is intended to swell the rolls of Democrat voters through amnesty schemes
- increases in marginal tax rates for individuals and businesses
- issuance of economically stultifying regulations at an unprecedented page
- nomination of dozens of left-wing judges and two left-wing Supreme Court Justices, partly to ensure “empathic” (leftist) rulings rather than rulings in accordance with the Constitution
- sharp reductions in defense spending
- meddling in Libya, which through Hillary Clinton’s negligence cost the lives of American diplomats
- Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server, in which Obama was complicit, and which resulted in the compromise of sensitive, classified information.
- a drastic military draw-down in Iraq, with immediately dire consequences (and a just-in-time reversal by Obama)
- persistent anti-white and anti-American rhetoric (the latter especially on foreign soil and at the UN)
- persistent anti-business rhetoric that, together with tax increases and regulatory excesses, killed the recovery from the Great Recession and put the U.S. firmly on the road to economic stagnation.
It should therefore have been a simple matter for voters to reject Obama’s inevitable successor: Hillary Clinton. But the American public has been indoctrinated in leftism for decades by public schools, the mainstream media, and a plethora TV shows and movies, with the result that Clinton acquired 5 million more popular votes, nationwide, than did her Republican opponent. The foresight of the Framers of the Constitution proved providential because her opponent carefully chose his battlegrounds and was handily won in the electoral college. Thus …
Donald John Trump (1946 – ) succeeded Obama and was inaugurated as President on January 20, 2017. He is only in the third year of his presidency, but has accomplished much despite a “resistance” movement that began as soon as his election was assured in the early-morning hours of November 9, 2016. (The “resistance”, which I discuss here, is a continuation of political and social trends that are rooted in the 1960s.)
These are among Trump’s accomplishments, many of them the result of a successful collaboration with both houses of Congress, which Republicans controlled for the first two years of Trump’s presidency, and the Senate, which remains under GOP control:
- the end of Obamacare’s requirement to buy some form of health-insurance or pay a “tax”, which penalized the healthy and forced many to do something that would otherwise not do
- discouragement of illegal immigration through tougher enforcement (against a huge, left-wing financed influx of illegals)
- decreases in marginal tax rates for individuals and businesses
- the repeal of many economically stultifying regulations and a drastic slowdown in the issuance of regulations
- nomination of dozens of conservative judges and two conservative Supreme Court Justices
- sharp increases in defense spending
- the beginning of the end of foreign adventures that are unrelated to the interests of Americans (e.g., the drawdown in Syria)
- relative stability in Iraq
- pro-American rhetoric on foreign soil and at the UN
- persistent pro-business rhetoric that, together with tax-rate cuts and regulatory reform, is helping to buoy the U.S. economy despite slowdowns elsewhere and Trump’s “trade war”, which is really aimed at creating a level playing field for American companies and workers.
This story will be continued.
More Presidential Trivia
The modern presidency began with the adored “activist”, Teddy Roosevelt. From TR to the present, there have been only four (of twenty) presidents who first competed in a general election as a candidate for the presidency: Taft, Hoover, Eisenhower, and Trump. Trump is alone in having had no previous governmental service before becoming president. There’s no moral to this story. Make of it what you will.
(See also “Presidents: Key Dates and Various Trivia“, to which this commentary has been added.)
That “Hurtful” Betsy Ross Flag
Fox News has the latest:
Two Democratic hopefuls have expressed their support for Nike after the sportswear company pulled sneakers featuring the Betsy Ross-designed American flag ahead of the Fourth of July holiday. The company did so after former NFL quarterback and Nike endorser Colin Kaepernick raised concerns about the shoes.
Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro told CBS News on Wednesday that he was “glad to see” Nike remove the shoes from the shelves, comparing the “painful” symbol to the Confederate flag.
“There are a lot of things in our history that are still very painful,” Castro explained. As an example, he cited “the Confederate flag that still flies in some places and is used as a symbol.”\
Former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke also approved of Nike’s decision, noting that “white nationalist groups” have “appropriated” the Betsy Ross flag.
“I think its really important to take into account the impression that kind of symbol would have for many of our fellow Americans,” he said, according to Jewish Insider senior political reporter Ben Jacobs.
As I understand it, the Betsy Ross flag, which became the symbol of the rebellious, united States (i.e., Colonies) in 1777, is “hurtful” because it dates from an era when slavery was legal in what became the United States. How that historical fact is “hurtful” to anyone is beyond me. The fact of slavery is reprehensible, but a flag that merely denotes America’s struggle for independence from Britain really has nothing to do with slavery, except in the slippery way that “social justice” warriors have just invented. (Clearly, they are running low on ideas.)
Well, if the Betsy Ross flag is “hurtful” to professional virtue-signalers and malcontents, it is certainly — and more legitimately — hurtful to me. I am a direct descendant of a man who, with three of his sons (one of whom I am also directly descended from), fought on the British side in the Revolutionary War. They had settled in the Colony of Pennsylvania in the 1750s and, perhaps not unwisely, chose to defend the Crown against presumptuous rebels like George Washington, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and 53 other signatories of the Declaration of Independence — all of whom used to be called patriots. (Washington, Jefferson, and many other signatories owned slaves, but that wasn’t why they rebelled; slavery was then still legal throughout the British Empire.)
In any event, because my ancestors were Loyalists, they fled to Canada at the end of the war. And from then until the birth of my father in the United States more than 130 years later, the ancestors in my paternal line of descent were Canadian and therefore (nominally, at least) subjects of the British monarch.
So if anyone has a right to be offended by the Betsy Ross flag, it is I. But I am not offended by the flag, though I am deeply offended by the useless twits who profess to be offended by it.
The Fall of America
Victor Davis Hanson, like many others before him (and like) me, sees the unraveling of America portended by Petronius’s The Satyricon (ca. 60 AD):
Certain themes … are timeless and still resonate today.
The abrupt transition from a society of rural homesteaders into metropolitan coastal hubs had created two Romes. One world was a sophisticated and cosmopolitan network of traders, schemers, investors, academics, and deep-state imperial cronies. Their seaside corridors were not so much Roman as Mediterranean. And they saw themselves more as “citizens of the world” than as mere Roman citizens.
In the novel, vast, unprecedented wealth had produced license. On-the-make urbanites suck up and flatter the childless rich in hopes of being given estates rather than earning their own money….
[The] novel’s accepted norms are pornography, gratuitous violence, sexual promiscuity, transgenderism, delayed marriage, childlessness, fear of aging, homelessness, social climbing, ostentatious materialism, prolonged adolescence, and scamming and conning in lieu of working.
The characters are fixated on expensive fashion, exotic foods, and pretentious name-dropping. They are the lucky inheritors of a dynamic Roman infrastructure that had globalized three continents. Rome had incorporated the shores of the Mediterranean under uniform law, science, institutions—all kept in check by Roman bureaucracy and the overwhelming power of the legions, many of them populated by non-Romans.
Never in the history of civilization had a generation become so wealthy and leisured, so eager to gratify every conceivable appetite—and yet so bored and unhappy.
But there was also a second Rome in the shadows. Occasionally the hipster antiheroes of the novel bump into old-fashioned rustics, shopkeepers, and legionaries. They are what we might now call the ridiculed “deplorables” and “clingers.”…
Globalization had enriched and united non-Romans into a world culture. That was an admirable feat. But such homogenization also attenuated the very customs, traditions, and values that had led to such astounding Roman success in the first place….
But the new empire also diluted a noble and unique Roman agrarianism. It eroded nationalism and patriotism. The empire’s wealth, size, and lack of cohesion ultimately diminished Roman unity, as well as traditional marriage, child-bearing, and autonomy….
[W]ide reading ensures erudition and sophistication, and helps science supplant superstition. But sometimes education is also ambiguous. Students become idle, pretentious loafers. Professors are no different from loud pedants. Writers are trite and boring. Elite pundits sound like gasbags.
Petronius seems to imply that whatever the Rome of his time was, it was likely not sustainable—but would at least be quite exciting in its splendid decline.
Petronius also argues that with too much rapid material progress comes moral regress. His final warning might be especially troubling for the current generation of Western Europeans and Americans. Even as we brag of globalizing the world and enriching the West materially and culturally, we are losing our soul in the process.
Getting married, raising families, staying in one place, still working with our hands, and postponing gratification may be seen as boring and out of date. But nearly 2,000 years later, all of that is what still keeps civilization alive.
Hanson omits — because Petronious’s prescience was limited — the end game, in which the glory that was Rome was extinguished by internal rot, military failure, and invasion. The first of those — internal rot –is well underway in the United States, “thanks” to the Democrat Party. The second — military failure — has become more or less a habit since the Korean War — a habit that will resume with the eventual return to power of the Democrat Party. The third — invasion — probably will be accomplished in bloodless form by the determination of China’s leadership, when a Democrat administration (having disarmed the country) accedes to military and economic coercion.
And, ironically (but blessedly) that will put paid to the kinds of excesses that Democrats have fostered in their zeal for (evanescent) power: pornography, gratuitous violence, sexual promiscuity, transgenderism, delayed marriage, childlessness, fear of aging, homelessness, social climbing, ostentatious materialism, prolonged adolescence, and scamming and conning in lieu of working.
America’s virtual state of servitude will also put paid to the last vestiges of liberty in the land, though they would have eventually disappeared under Democrat rule.
End of a Generation
The so-called greatest generation has died out in my family, as it soon will die out across the land. The recent death of my mother-in-law at age 98 removed from the scene the last of my wife’s and my parents and their siblings: 26 of them in all.
Their birth years ranged from 1903 to 1922. There were, oddly, 18 males as against only 8 females, and the disparity held for all four sets of siblings:
7 to 3 for my mother’s set
2 to 1 for my father’s set
5 to 3 for my wife’s mother’s set
4 to 1 for my wife’s father’s set.
Only one of the 26 died before reaching adulthood (my father’s younger brother at 18 months). Two others (also males) died relatively young. One of my mother’s brothers died just a few weeks before his 40th birthday as a result of a jeep accident (he was on active duty in the Coast Guard). One of my wife’s mother’s brothers died at age 48 as a long delayed result of a blow to the head by a police truncheon.
The other 15 males lived to ages ranging from 65 to 96, with an average age at death of 77 years. The 8 females lived to ages ranging from 69 to 99, with an average age at death of 87 years. The longest-lived of the males was the only one to pass the 90 mark. Four of the females lived into their 90s, dying at ages 91, 96, 98, and 99.
All of the 25 who reached adulthood also married. Only two of them had a marriage end in divorce. All of them were raised in near-poverty or in somewhat comfortable circumstances that vanished with the onset of the Great Depression. All of them worked hard, whether in the home or outside of it; none of them went on welfare; most of the men and two of the women served in uniform during World War II.
Thus passeth a generation sui generis.
Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
All, all, are sleeping on the hill….Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (“The Hill“)
Peak Civilization
The fate of most human endeavors is that they reach a peak of attainment, which is then followed by a decline due to excess on the one hand and neglect on the other hand. “Classical” music is a favorite example of mine. The form peaked around the turn of the 20th century, then went over the top into — variously — cacophony, atonality, and arrythmic confusion. The best of contemporary “classical” music is merely derivative of the form as it was at its peak.
So it is with myriad endeavors, the most important of which is the endeavor of rational inquiry. In the West, rational inquiry seems to have peaked in the early 1960s. I needn’t remind you of the subsequent descent: mobs, riots, the din of “entertainment”, quasi-religious movements from hippiedom to “climate change”, and on and on into the night.
It all makes me glad that I came of age in the 1950s, when civilized discourse was still possible and scientists were dedicated to the pursuit of truth, not the projection of their hopes, fears, and feelings.
Politics and Prosperity 