This is going to be a long hot summer. The coronavirus is not going away and there is no plan to deal with it until Joe Biden, should he be elected, puts one in place, the current President having no plan other than denial. The public protests that started with the death of George Floyd seem not to be abating, though they eventually and inevitably will, with nothing to show for it, because the Republicans think that they can wait the protesters out, which is the way they handled protests against mass shootings, and so no legislation will get passed to decrease police brutality until Joe Biden gets elected with a Congress that will support him. The economy may rebound a bit, as is indicated by all the traffic on the roads in New York City, people commuting to their jobs and probably avoiding mass transit as a way to do that. But those who are running out of money, which means workers and restaurants and those who own the office buildings where the businesses have switched over to telecommuting, suggests that the road to economic recovery is very rocky and likely to be long, at least until Joe Biden comes up with a plan on how to develop a new economy for post epidemic times, including how to revamp research and forecasting so that we are not caught so badly when the next pandemic rolls around. Meanwhile, what do we do until the election rolls around and we get to see if that is conducted fairly so that the winner can seem legitimate? That is a problem we have never had before, given that elections were conducted fairly in the midst of a Civil War and during the Second World War.
Read MoreOld and New Protests
Rather than think of the current protests in isolation, compare them to the protest that went on during the Sixties. There was, then, much more damage to property, and a far greater impact on social structure. This time the protests are aimed at revising police policies so that they are less brutal without requiring any large scale change in the way society is ordered. Back in the Sixties, demonstrations that led to the burning down of large parts of downtowns, usually those inhabited by African Americans, and that required significant presence of the National Guard in a number of states for a number of weeks, was part of the movement to change American society as a whole so that its Black citizens would no longer be members of an inferior caste but understood as an ethnic group like any other ethnic group in American society. The stakes were bigger and the outcomes more significant. It is a shame that sixty years later, it is that same ethnic group that is at the forefront of national concern, portrayed by some as victims or heroes and by others as troublemakers. That we have not moved further on in black-white relations shows just how much slavery was our original sin. America has not yet found a way to put race behind it.
Read MoreDefunding the Police
Defunding the police is a policy initiative that has arisen in recent days perhaps because of the exuberance of protesters who see that the protests have sustained for a while now and so want to implement something that will really change the lives of people in their communities as well as settle old grievances held in their communities. So the idea of funding new programs that aren’t all that new is yoked with taking revenge on the institutional oppressors, the police, by hitting them where they can be hurt, in their funding. But this is a very bad policy initiative. It does not stand up to scrutiny and so Joe Biden was correct to deny any interest in it right away and not just because Trump wanted to pin the policy on him.
Read MoreThe Current Riots
When the worst riots since those of the Sixties broke out only a week ago, I thought that I was ahead of the curve by opineing to friends that outside agitators were behind them. However much I dislike conspiracy theories, in that I did not think either the left or the right had brought down JFK, even though there did seem some money behind James Earl Ray, the assassin of MLK, so that he could temporarily avoid capture, this time the pattern seemed to be clear. In many cities across the country with not enough time for the rioting to mushroom beyond Minneapolis, there were peaceful demonstrations in the daytime and evening followed by arson and looting in the night by people who were unknown to the local community and who did not identify themselves. That has since become the standard explanation provided by the media, whose interviews of peaceful protestors tell them the arsonists and looters are shadowy figures. I speculate that they are leftists or rightists or agent provocateurs employed by the Russians, who mean us no good and are availing themselves of a tactic well known to the Czarist regime and afterwards. This theory has been picked up by the Trump administration, though they are careful to accuse only the left wing Antifa and not white nationalists of being the perpetrators.
Read MorePolitics Before and After the Pandemic
What happened to the Squad of Four? You remember them, don’t you? They were the set of leftish congresswomen that came into office after the 2018 election: Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and, most notably, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes, the firebrand from the Bronx, quickly in the spotlight because she was so young and had a mouth on her. Trump and his acolytes were quick to pounce on the Squad of Four and proclaim that the Democratic Party had been taken over by Socialists (and AOC was indeed a member of Social Democrats of America). That was what Trump was going to run against in 2020. Right wing rhetoric quickly turned racist, asking these women to go back to where they came from though that meant, in the case of AOC, going back to the Bronx, three of the four women born here though one was black and two were Muslim and AOC was Puerto Rican. It doesn’t take much to see the racism there. Nancy Pelosi had to pass a resolution rejecting racism however much she held these four at arms length, at one point remarking that they were only four of her members and so hardly spoke for her caucus. AOC disappointed people like me who had hoped she would bring new life and fresh ideas to the Democratic Party by opposing the deal whereby Amazon would bring 50,000 jobs to New York City, even though the plan, including tax favors that wouldn’t occur until the project was done, was supported by labor unions, the local Congresswoman, and political leaders throughout the city. Enough with this jejune radicalism.
Read MoreThe Politics of The Pandemic
One of the lasting aspects of the coronavirus pandemic will be watching President Donald Trump standing in the White House Briefing Room holding two hour press conferences in which he delivers a mixture of buffoonery, wrong information, platitudes, and self serving rhetoric while yielding to health experts who then contradict what he has just said and can get away with it however polite they are being, keeping up the fiction and the reality of demural to the commander in chief. Fauci says weeks ago that what the President said about opening up the country by Easter was “aspirational”, while what Fauci said himself had to be based on science, and the President apparently liked that formulation, saying he was indeed aspirational and more that he was a “cheerleader” for the nation and so not a person who emphasized bad news, and so admitting out of his own mouth what he really thinks, which he is prone to do, which is that he lies to the American people. Hardly Churchillian. This practice of the experts diverting from what the President standing behind them had just said may be why the Wall Street Journal asks him to leave the press conferences in the hands of the experts because the press conferences are not winning him any votes, but the President is a showman and so unlikely to voluntarily leave the stage.
Read MoreThe Poor Suffer More
When I taught sociology of disasters, which covered everything from the Black Plague to Chernobyl, my students insisted that disasters were times that brought people together in a cooperative spirit. That is what the media would like you to believe, showing anecdotes to that effect so as to calm down the population, but it is the opposite of what usually happens, which is that disasters intensify whatever are already the lines of conflict in a society. The rich become richer; the poor suffer more. And political conflicts grow worse.
Read MoreThe March Democratic Debate
The idea of “The Loyal Opposition” emerged in early parliamentary government. It meant that whatever the issues that divided the major parties, whether that was based on their different class interests or ideologies, both of those holding for Tories and Whigs and Labor in Great Britain, the parties would come together in some national emergency in the interests of the nation, to which all parties felt themselves loyal. That certainly played itself out in World War II when Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labor Party, took up his role as the Deputy Prime Minister in Churchill’s Government of National Unity, even though it was clear that Churchill was calling the shots. The same thing happened in the United States during World War II. Frank Knox, a former Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, took over as Secretary of the Navy in the FDR administration, and Henry Stimson, a long time Republican Party stalwart, who had been Secretary of State under Hoover, became Secretary of War, which meant the civilian in charge of the army and air force. The two managed production and procurement and manpower for the armed services, although it was clear that FDR reserved grand strategy to himself. Other issues than warfare are regarded as ones about which men of good will can disagree and that they do so should not prevent any of them from being considered people with the best interests of the nation at heart.
Read MoreThe Second Super Tuesday
The results of Tuesday’ selection, what with clear victories for Joe Biden in Mississippi, Missouri and Michigan, led James Carville to say that the Democratic Party had decided to move on from contesting who would be the nominee to opening the general election campaign against Trump. The Democrats had settled on their candidate. The end, to all intents and purposes, of the primary season, gives time to pause to consider the shock that was delivered to the political system by the fortunes of some of its contenders. Elizabeth Warren did not get many votes, She had about eight percent of the male vote in North Carolina, and even if you doubled that so that her female vote was 16%, that means she just wasn’t a popular candidate, regardless of gender. That may be because her policies were not all that attractive, or it may be because the electorate will not abide a woman candidate. Warren herself said that if you say that sexism played a part in her political race, you will be considered a whiner, but the truth of the matter is that the American people, male and female, just don’t accept the idea of a woman President. A woman in that role just does not sit well with them.
Read MoreSuper Tuesday
The past week in national political events has been satisfying to me because it put my candidate, Joe Biden, back in the race, and I saw the week before last that something like this was necessary-- either a Biden resurgence or a Bloomberg surge-- so that Sanders would not run off with the nomination because and I thought, as apparently did so many other people, that Sanders was the candidate most likely to be defeated by Trump. Most voters, I think, are not like me, who will support anyone but Trump, but will instead settle for the known evil rather than what they suspect to be the worse evil of a Democratic Socialist. Now we will see what happens with Biden. The week has also been satisfying because it provided a splendid example of political drama, something that happens more often than we might expect because the forces that make it a drama are arranged fortuitously rather than by the hand of a playwright. This political drama brought together engaging and distinctive personalities, noble rhetoric, a clash over issues and constituencies as well as personalities, all occurring, mostly in public view, in the course of a brief period of time that allowed for plot complications as well as for the reversal of expectations. Playwrights should do as well, and certainly Shakespeare did in “Julius Caesar'' and Oscar Wilde did in “An Ideal Husband”.
Read MoreThe Nevada Debate
Yes, the Democratic debate last night was certainly a food fight and the candidates had nothing new to say for themselves. The candidates are also getting a little testy out there. But the debate was illuminating nonetheless and pointed a way forwards. Joe Biden gave a very solid performance. He clearly laid out a tax package that made sense, more so than any of the others, and even though no one bothers to mention that Warren's wealth tax is unconstitutional. Biden has to do well in South Carolina and then the media, who are very fickle, and are at the moment conceding the race to Bernie, who they found to have a lot of integrity until it seemed possible he might actually triumph as the nominee and surely to be beaten by Trump, may will come to recoil from Bernie and reconsider the Veep. Mayor Mike had a worse night than was even expected and did not come up with answers to questions he knew he would face. When Elizabeth asked him to release women from their NDA's, he should have said NDAs are not a bad thing and that the #metoo movement had in fact thought women should get training in negotiating them. So where did Elizabeth stand on that? Bloomberg should also have said that Stop and Frisk was a policy supported by many Black politicians because it was a way of protecting little Black girls from being killed by random or drive-by shooters. For some reason or other, New York City Mayors, like Lindsay and Guiliani, never make it in national politics. Mayor LaGuardia became Mayor after serving as an influential Congressman in Washington.
Read MoreThe Iowa Caucuses
One week before the Iowa Caucuses, one poll showed Biden ahead, another showed Sanders ahead, and a third showed the race to be a dead heat. At that point, forty percent of Iowans said they were still undecided about their final choice. What do these Iowan prima donnas want? A third or fourth or fifth encounter with a candidate at a coffee shop so they can make up their minds? They have had since last summer to look these candidates over: to evaluate their programs and savor their characters. The main influence of a Bloomberg candidacy, which is already, by one poll, at double digits, may be to rid us of the influence of the “ethanol” state on national politics. Other candidates have already caught that message in that they were scheduled to spend less time in Iowa than in past presidential years because they are aware that Nevada and South Carolina and then Super Tuesday will quickly diminish whatever victory Iowa seems to provide.
Read MoreThe Dershowitz Argument
Alan Dershowitz, the retired Harvard Professor of Law and well known defense attorney, has offered up a very interesting defense of Trump that deserves to be taken seriously, although I think it displays the limits of legal reasoning rather than the inadvisability of the impeachment proceedings. Dershowitz argues that an impeachment must be based on a violation of criminal law or something close to that, something that can be identified as a crime whether or not in the statutes, rather than on the rejection of a policy of the President where he is doing something of which the Congress may disapprove but is not outside his authority. Dershowitz argues that the Congress had in effect confessed to having engaged in this impropriety when they charged the President with “abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress” because these charges are too vague to be impeachable offenses. They could have charged him with bribery or extortion, but did not, notwithstanding assertions that have been made by supporters of impeachment that a charge of bribery would run afoul of the way that crime is defined by statute as requiring a monetary transaction, which is not what happened in the case of Ukraine, where what Trump was asking for was an exchange of favors. Dershowitz cites Supreme Court Justice Curtis as his authority. At the time of the Johnson Impeachment, Curtis had argued that impeachment was not appropriate for this same reason. There was no crime, only the violation of the Tenure of Office Act, which had been passed only in order for Johnson to run afoul of it while carrying out his legitimate powers to pick his own cabinet. No real crime; no impeachment.
Read MoreThe January Democratic Debate
Not much has changed since the December debate. The Iran crisis dissipated quickly because Trump got cold feet about following up on the assassination of an Iranian general and the Iranians gave him no excuse to take further action. The impeachment process continues, very slowly, and will fizzle out unless Mitch is somehow convinced to have witnesses even though all that they can say is that Trump did indeed hold up aid to Ukraine, which is what the Republicans have always been willing to accept. The polls have remained remarkably steady: Biden is ahead in national polls, and tied or close to tied in New Hampshire and Iowa. Bernie is steady at about twenty percent, but not moving up. So it is time for people to vote. They know what the Democratic candidates stand for and are familiar with their personalities. And voting is, in fact, three weeks away.
Read MoreThe Political Doldrums
Everyone I know is depressed about politics. Maybe it is because we are in mid-winter, and so caught up in Shakespeare “A Winter’s Tale”, where people cannot help but engage in sin for no reason at all and so, one can surmise, are cursed with original sin. Maybe it is because we are almost up to the Iowa caucuses and no Democratic candidate has caught fire, Democrats, as the axiom has it, wanting to fall in love with a candidate while Republicans only care about who is next in line. The Democratic primary candidates all seem unsuited for the role of someone who offers a new day. Warren and Sanders are too Left; Biden is too old; Buttigieg is too young; and Amy Klobuchar seems to be everybody’s idea of a perfect vice-presidential candidate: charming, left of center, a good ticket balancer-- even if Blacks may demand that place on the ticket-- but too narrow a vision in that winning every county in Minnesota is not exactly what you want to go on a bumper sticker.
Read MoreThe December Democratic Debate
The Democratic candidates have settled into their grooves. We pretty much know what each of them will sound like when they go into their spiels and so we had last night a repeat performance which lets the citizenry retaste the flavors to help them decide which one to favor. Joe Biden sounded confident and well informed and crisp on foreign policy. Unlike Warren, who said we weren’t up to the challenge, he said that the reason Obama had not closed down Guantanamo was because the Administration didn’t have the votes in Congress to do so. In answer to a question about the Administration hiding the true facts of what was going on in Afghanistan, Biden sidestepped the question of whether the Administration had mislead the public and said that he had been against the Afghan policy, including the Surge, all along, and that he, if he became President, would get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible, leaving behind only special forces to act as a counter-terrorist force rather than as a counter-insurgency force. Crisp answers. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were full of their righteous indignation about the woes that still prevail in American society and blaming it on the few who have great wealth rather than on the many who voted for Trump and his policies. Warren says the economists who disagree with her are just wrong, and some of the commentators on PBS during the breaks in the debate wondered how long she could get away with that. Steyer said once again that he had always wanted to impeach Trump, and that is certainly true, even if it was before the Ukraine revelations that made the task necessary, which is the way Pelosi and I both see it. The Republicans who claim that Democrats wanted to impeach Trump from Day One are thinking of only a few Congresspeople plus Steyer.
Read MoreThe Impeachment Follies
The current impeachment proceedings are both a tragedy and a farce. They are a tragedy in that the nation has been brought so low by a character who has neither the grandeur of Richard III nor the fatal flaw of character that plagued Lyndon Johnson who, despite his political sophistication, thought he could negotiate with Ho Chi Minh as if the North Vietnamese leader were the head of the United Auto Workers. They are a farce because everybody is fighting against the obvious truth of the charges and defending Trump by saying that he is, at bottom, too stupid and disorganized to carry out any conspiracy. We are in the presence of a very unusual bad guy. It would take Mel Brooks to do him justice, although Alec Baldwin does a very good job.
Read MoreThe November Democratic Primary Debate
It isn’t easy to run for President, or so my reading and what I have observed on television informs me. The primary candidates are in a grind that will get even worse when one of them gets the nomination. Each of them attend four of five meetings a day at civic auditoriums, as well as in living rooms and in diners, marching in local parades, chatting with as many voters as they can, Elizabeth Warren famous for taking selfies with all comers. And, at the same time, the candidates are getting briefed on the news of the day, which means, at the moment, what is being said at the House impeachment hearings, so that they can provide instant judgments on unfolding events, those required by the journalists who trail them, the candidates knowing that any word out of place will be interpreted in the worst possible way. Also, at the same time, the candidates have to keep in touch with their donors, their staff back at headquarters and, for their own sanity, with their own families. How to manage that? It takes a lot of determination as well as a bank of stamina which few healthy people in their younger years would lay claim to, much less septuagenarians, Maybe the staff of the candidates schedule time for a snooze just so the candidate from tiredness will not lapse into a gaffe. (I remember when the Republican candidate for Vice President in 1960, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. was criticized for changing into pajamas for his naps). Maybe it is just that the candidates have been at campaigns for so long that the rigors of campaigning are second nature to them.
Read MoreFrom Whence Contemporary Authority Flows
Max Weber defined “authority” as the ability to convince people to follow your lead, which was different from its companion concept, ”power”, which is the ability to get people to do what you want even if they don’t want to. One of the main and perhaps original sources of that thing he called “power” was what Weber labelled as “charisma”, which meant the ability of a person to be so compelling a figure that people would do what he said, they somehow mesmerized because of that person’s personal appeal. And so Hitler was charismatic, even while FDR, however charming, was also the bearer of the TR-Wilsonian ideology, somewhat modified, that the purpose of government was to make the lives of people better and so to expand the role of government to accomplish that end, a principle Democrats come back to even if not in so many words, it certainly different from the alternative principle, which is that the purpose of government is not to make things better but to put as many brakes as possible on progressive impulses so as to further feather the nests of already rich people.
Read MoreTrump and Decorum
Now that events are moving quickly and Trump may not be in charge for much longer, it is time to consider what it was that made him such a galvanizing figure and why that ran out of steam so quickly. It is important to answer these questions in part to create a historical record while the flavor of him is still with us and also because the way he exits office, whether in chains or on a gurney, as opposed to in a Nixonian display of bravado, may lie in his character, and the clue to that character is why people were drawn to support him in the first place as well as in the three years of his Presidency.
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