History is informative when it allows for comparisons but not predictive because it does not tell you how things will work out. It is therefore informative to point out that there are ways in which the era of the Fifties and Sixties is repeating itself in the Twenties by presenting an intensity of events in the public arena that are unsettling and foment change and are perfectly visible. That earlier era saw assassinations and riots and major landmark legislation and Supreme Court decisions, deeply flawed Presidents contending with real statesmen (though today including stateswomen) and simultaneous actions here and abroad: a war then as well as a major domestic upheaval over race, based on regional conflict, while today there is a still minor scale (for American) war alongside an upheaval over the rights of women and attendant other “minorities”, again based on regionalism (the west coast and the east versus the south and the mountain states). There was rioting in a number of cities after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a little bit of rioting after the death of George Floyd a few years ago. There was back then a President assassinated and one resigned and today there is a recent President who was twice impeached and leads an insurrection and a President, two incumbent’s before, who qualifies now as the second worst President ever for having gone into war on the basis of a lie, the real reason for it still unclear. History, for the duration of the periods, then and now, seems to be moving at quick speed, not having to absorb one moment before there is another one demanding its attention. What is happening that makes us attend to what will happen next, what will unfold in the news cycle, is the long slumbering answer or backlash against the Fifties and Sixties, an attempt to regain what had been supposedly lost as a result of those reforms some fifty or more years ago and reestablish the social order that existed before those changes. It has been a long time in coming, but it has come, and it is unclear which of the two major factions, those who prefer what existed before the Fifties and what came after it, will prevail.
Read MoreWhere Morals Can't Go
Hobbes is treated by intellectual historians as a pessimist because people are so anxious to enter into a social contract that will protect their lives and livelihood that they will rush to anyone who offers such guarantees, including potential leaders who are demagogues or charlatans, so long as they offer peace and security. Never mind that Hobbes gives a back door way to democracy because he is saying that the authority for leadership is the result of the consent of the governed in that the popular majority decides whether they can live with the going or the proposed political arrangement. John Locke, on the other hand, is to be regarded as an optimist in that there is never an end to how people can form a new social contract, a new one created as soon as an old one ends, people always political in that they can frame an ever more useful constitution-- or, at least, the British are always able to. Moreover, there is, in addition to the overall social contract, there are any number of individual contracts that people can make which are mutually advantageous, such as contracts for employment, or to rent land, each crafted that is voluntary and reasonable, even if some people can arrive at a disadvantage as when a person agrees to work for low wages because poor people need the work more than the rich people need to hire one or another of them. Bad contracts are still effective except when people’s lives are endangered, and so slavery is prohibited by Locke as an individual contract because becoming a slave means putting one’s life in danger. And, according to Locke, people have innate rights, regardless of the nature of the constitution or the laws, whereby people are recognized as morally free to act because such things, like free speech or privacy, are recognized as part of a person’s nature rather than just the sufferance allowed by the government. It would therefore seem, in Locke’s view, that morality orders most of social life in that people can appeal to government, freely agreed to contracts, and personal rights, as allowing people to defend, of right, their dignities. But the Lockean question remains: where are the areas of social life where morality doesn’t prevail? What parts of social life have no moral sway, either because of a general social contract, or a particular contract, or as a matter of right? Where is the abyss into which people can descend where there is no morality?
Read MoreNew Yorker Covers and Culture
Some years ago, my friend, the critic of culture Roland Wulbert, remarked that “New Yorker” covers contained only one joke. I did not know whether this observation was a convention unessential to the genre of the magazine’s cover or whether it was an essential point so that this form of understanding could not be the same thing if it were to include multiple jokes. I have been intrigued with this insight ever since. I want to get right what magazine covers are as forms of expression and what they tell about the message to be conveyed or about the temper of the times, cultural critics looking at the nuances of one or another aspect of culture so as to grasp the nature of reality, of existential life, or else the social ambiance of a time, for those items of culture reveal far more to me, at least, than what is told by survey research or by the not so deep thinkers who opine over the airways.
Read MoreJane's Aphorism
My deceased wife had an aphorism that seems to ring true and to which I regularly return. It says: “If you can’t explain what you mean, then you can’t know what you mean”. She arrived at this aphorism by trial and error by noticing people who got confused when they were asked to explain themselves. This insight had been formalized by Bertrand Russell's Theory of Definite Description which propounded the idea that a wrong statement was not just incorrect but made no sense. If a statement were properly propounded, it had to make sense. Jane applied this criterion to any number of people who got very annoyed at having failed to make themselves as clear as Jane required people to be. It was a standard that also applied in the mid Twentieth Century to what was then considered an age of ideology. I would have arguments with Marxists and Stalinists where each of us would try to pick out the crucial flaw in their logic, reducing one another to basic and irreducible axioms. I would argue that Weber’s idea of status and organization were independent of social class as the ways to create power and that was all that had to be said, and a Stalinist and I also came to agree to essentials, he thinking that something called the Communist Party would govern over the dictatorship of the proletariat, and its wisdom would lead us to the future, in whatever way the Party chose and saw fit, while I thought the evolution of society was subject to the constraints of social structure. I thought him quasi religious in he giving himself over to an ultimate authority, or to put it otherwise, to an almighty, but he was clear and consistent. He knew what he meant even if his basic stated principles did seem to me muddled because any leader could call himself a Communist and lord over everyone if there were no independent standards. That point of view is very different from the present one where people can, in effect, invoke the idea actors or feigning roles that “you know what I mean” as a way of providing a sufficient explanation for their meaning, having a sense of it that it would be rude to suggest needed further explanation, and people back in those days also though rude if Jane would persist and insist on people explaining themselves i f they were not to be thought of as engaging in gibberish. No longer insisting on narrowing down to basic principles but only a general sense of things to be respected.
Read MoreThe Legitimacy of the Supreme Court
The legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court may be deteriorating, whether because so many decisions are badly decided or because too many of them are so out of general public sentiment. Leaking of Justice Alito’s draft decision to override Roe v. Wade is just a fru-fru that doesn’t amount to much even if Sen. Cruz of Texas says he is sure, without evidence, that a Liberal had disclosed it, and that the perpetrator should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, though it is not clear that this is even a minor legal infraction. After all, this is not a national security matter, just a custom of privacy before everyone has had a chance to edit a decision. Moreover, it is the Conservative Supreme Court watchers who are the ones casting aspersions to the legitimacy of the Court in that they are the ones who seem to find every recent major decision since Brown v. Board of Education to have been flawed and requires being overturned. What validity should Supreme Courts hold if they get everything wrong? Indeed, most major decisions rest on flimsy grounds. Griswald discovered the penumbra of the Constitutional right to privacy and Roe invented legislative like stipulations about when the Court could allow when the government could intervene in privacy (the last trimester), something subject to change every few years when there are advances in neonatal care that move fetal viability to ever shorter terms in their pregnancies. It is a very different way to make decisions from on high as when the Vatican insists it never makes mistakes or apologizes for few papal decisions or even administrative matters where they have erred. If errors are frequent, then how is the Catholic Church to be infallible? If the Supreme Court is regularly erroneous, how are we to think that the Court is wise and thoughtful?
Read MoreThe White House Press Conference
The White House Press Conference is a peculiar institution, one of long standing and going back to when FDR met a gaggle of reporters to crowd around his desk and throw out questions, knowing that FDR could handle any ones that came up, avoiding hot potatoes and providing answers both glib and persuasive if he wanted to say something. Steve Early, His press secretary, facilitated information traffic rather than made much news. Jen Psaki, the present press secretary, who meets in the press room to take questions most days of the work week, follows most predecessors in not trying to make much news. She refers questions to the State or Defense Departments or to agencies to get details, and works hard not to utter a striking phrase or otherwise outshine or anticipate whatever the President might have said about a matter or what the President might soon say. That was different from what happened in the Trump Administration when press secretaries vied to be as partisan as possible and so curry favor with Trump, there being an audience of one for the press room, while Psaki’s audience is to the public, to make the Administration as surefooted as possible and in line with the Administration’s point of view.
Read MoreAnarchic Democracy
Democrats are in the dumps. Poll numbers are cratering for Joe Biden. Paul Krugman says that the Republican field of Senatorial candidates are just spewing hate rather than offering policy alternatives. The Krugman analysis has credibility because Mitch McConnell has said that he is going to run the midterms on inflation, the border, and crime, though he just mentions the topics rather than offers alternative policies. McConnell is just carping, Republicans full of outrage rather than solutions, And why should that not be the case? The Democrats are on the defensive, many of them sure that they will lose both the House and the Senate even if Biden has managed Covid and the Russian Ukraine War quite well. What is the disconnect between governmental results and the electorate? That is the question I want to answer.
Read MoreProphesying From Fall, 1943
By the fall of 1943, World War II, for the United States, was half over and so the contours of what the war was like was well established and what would have to ensue was foreseen. It was two years since Pearl Harbor but it was clear that the Axis powers were in retreat. The Japanese were no longer expansive, the pivotal victory in Guadalcanal victorious, and the ever increasing American armada moving up the island chains in the Pacific to deal with the eventual defeat of Japan, however problematic whether that would need invasion rather than isolation, and not considering what would eventually happen, which was an atomic bomb. What was also forecast were very bloody campaigns, the United States having conquered what might seem the inconsequential island of Tarawa, which devastated the U. S. Marine Second Division, but was a stepping stone to the East. Iwo Jima and Okinawa would follow. And in Europe, it was also the case that Germany had spent its strength, sure to be defeated unless Hitler came up with new wonder weapons, such as sufficient numbers of jet planes and rockets, so as to make up the difference of ever growing American armament. Hitler had already by then failed at Stalingrad, and in a slow but definite retreat on the Italian boot, but everyone knew that a cross channel landing and progress to Berlin would neccesitate great casualties. The war was not over even if the Allies were clearly winning. The question is what was the state of the nation in the midst of the war and what did it foretell about what post-war America would be like, whether the war was transformative as it would show itself to be rather than to fall back into a pre-war mode, has happened in the South after the end of the Civil War, or destabilized, as happened to Germany after the First world War, or surprisingly having few consequences after the Vietnam War, and England, the victor of the First World War, not really changed until after the second World War when Labor created the nationalization of industry and social services, such as education and health. Can we see into the crystal ball of 1943 so as to predict its future?
Read MoreWartime Atrocities
Let us try to sort out the terms that are now being applied to the newly discovered wartime atrocities found north of Kiev, that term neutral in that it remains problematic whether these events of Russian troops killing civilians, executing them after they are tied behind their backs, is to be treated as a war crime or even a genocide which is what Zelensky says is the case because the Russians are out to eliminate Ukraine as a people. Biden regards them merely as war crimes and regards Putin as a butcher and a war criminal and wants independent authorities to put on trial those who are responsible. Those events of killing civilians are vile and horrendous and certainly to be condemned, but whether to try them is a good question. Today, we say that killing civilians is a war crime because it does not fulfill a military objective. In similar fashion, it is considered a violation of the rules of warfare not to execute prisoners of war and expect combattants to either be wearing a uniform or some insignia or, at the least, be enrolled in a military so that the person is not regarded as a terrorist. But these restrictions only apply to the defeated. Japanese commanders were executed for having mistreated prisoners of war and Germans for having used slave labor camps. But the victors get scot free. Gen. Curtis LeMay was not prosecuted for leveling Japanese cities, the bombing of civilians treated as collateral damage while artillery aimed at civilians is regarded, now as then, as culpable. You could argue that hurting the morale of civilian targets is a military goal, but in that case Russians are now engaged in hurting morale by killing people and so should not be regarded as a war crime.
Read MoreWar By The Book
Some wars are those of necessity in that a civilization is in danger of perishing even if the odds of persevering are slim. That was the case in the Second World War and with the War between the Greeks and the Persians in the Fifth Century B. C. and also, I think, with the Spanish Armada, which was out to destroy what the Protestant Reformation had created. Most wars are less so in that a negotiated peace could have gotten most war aims without the need for carnage. The colonies could have worked out a way to remain tied to Great Britain if Parliament had been willing to negotiate with Benjamin Franklin, the reluctant revolutionary. The North could have swallowed an independent Confederacy, leaving it to its cruelty and rural idiocy while it remained dependent on Northern capital and industry, which in fact is what happened for the hundred years that followed the end of the American Civil War. The Spanish American War was unnecessary for the United States to take over the declined Spanish Empire as part of its economic sphere of influence, sometimes deciding to keep territories, as in Puerto Rico, or give them up, as in Cuba, or hold them only for a half century, as was the case with the Philippines. The logic of the geo-political order trumps the need for war. The same is the case with Ukraine. What appears in newspapers in the past few days are limited Russian war aims--a Ukraine pledge not to join NATO and the annexation into Russia by some eastern Ukraine provinces--could have been agreed to by negotiation before the war started were Putin willing to give up or even defer trying to reconstitute the Russian Empire at the time of Catherine the Great. But some leaders are itching for a fight and we think that prudent leaders are the ones who are reluctant to wager the stakes of war, that you might lose your seat at the table and not just the stakes that had been anted up.
The war of Russia on Ukraine can be understood as a war to rectify the borders of what had happened when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, just like the border wars that occurred when Yugoslavia did in the 1990’s. But those were just ethnic conflicts that got out of hand because concentration camps and ethnic cleansing sullied the point by introducing these matters in Europe for the first time since the Second World War. Putin, on the other hand, was to rectify back to the Eighteenth Century and declared war to do so when that had not been necessary to achieve his major objectives. So Biden decided to take sides in the war very vigorously but without shedding American blood on the grounds that Putin had gone to war in the first place. The war itself was the casus belli for taking sides when Biden could have said that let Putin take Ukraine in that it was outside of the Western sphere of influence even though Ukraine was more culturally allied to Europe. But Biden did not let that pass and so has applied the measures available--arms shipments and economic warfare-- to counter Putin. It is clear that either Biden or Putin is the winner, never mind whatever happens to Zelensky and his people.
How do you keep up this war or any war in a way that is responsible and judicious, which means risking not too much to make sure as to command the resources that will allow a side to win. FDR managed he war wisely, by general accounts, because he did not panic but thought that time was on his side in that his ever increasing arms and mobilization would work to create overwhelming force and that the only danger was that the American people might lose heart and give up on the sacrifices, though the protection of two oceans meant that the domestic front was never seriously threatened. The domestic front was pretty normal, prosperous, in fact, even though casualties mounted. FDR made clear to his people that they should not be distracted from his war aims. It was not a war to protect the British Empire nor a war to rescue the Jews. It was an alliance against Fascism and not to repel Stalinism. FDR was, therefore, careful and circumspect, carefully marshaling his resources and avoiding disruptive matters.
Biden is following this circumspect manner. He is not overly ambitious, not suggesting that Putin will fall (until yesterday), even though many commentators were saying that Putin’s fall is now inevitable. Putin used assistance to overcome Ukraine as he could while not escalating the chips on the table by unlimbering the Western arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, that being the hole card that Putin may or may not keep in reserve. All in all, Biden is playing by the book in that he minimizes risk and consults his allies on every forward move. That is supposedly the right way to wage war, even though some exceptional politicians, like Lincoln, was dramatic in shaking things up to reshuffle the deck as when he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, but that was also a considered move to mobilize the war as one about freedom rather than just union, and only did so after a victory, so that the war was moving towards its endgame even though it really wasn’t yet there, tht waiting for the continued attrition of the Confederate forces. Similarly, D-Day knew that repulsing the invasion of Europe was Hitler’s last chance while a defeat for the Allies on June 6, 1944 meant only that Eisenhower would have to be replaced by a general who could do the trick the next spring-- providing that the Germans did not develop new weapons that could significantly change the war.
Who are the people who could master how to wield a war? It is difficult to say. Monarchists would say that the terms of office for President or Prime Minister are too short so that they have rough experience so as to master their own administrations much less international statecraft. The difference is that politicians who rise in a democracy often have had decades of experience before they achieve the highest rung and so have played many parts and have met enough foreign leaders that they are familiar with handling world events. And so Biden can be thought of as having been seasoned enough to know the playbook he is handling, having been in the Senate for more than thirty years and then as Vice President for eight. But experience is not the best preparation. Lincoln was not experienced. Kaiser Wilhem was experienced but insufficiently circumspect to see the awful nature of a new war. George H. W. Bush was experienced but still got himself into a quagmire where he had to enforce a no fly zone where he was thereby ever vulnerable to Saddam Hussein's missiles and the very experienced people around George W. Bush got themselves in a situation where everybody was firing on Americans. So experience is not the answer even if Biden rests on it but relies even more on judgment to determine how to read the invisible book from which he reads.
So if going by the book is just being careful and deliberate, Biden is measuring up. He has unified NATO so as to shore up his defenses and shipped arms to fight an offense and protected the home front by not putting Americans at risk. He has denounced aggression and it seems to be successful in getting the support of the American people. But none of these matters have been tested in that the Russians have not done something significantly stabilizing? Would Americans rally to the cause if there were serious cyber warfare attacks against the homeland or if Poland was required to answer the Russians for a bit of chemical warfare against Ukraine? It is hard to say, given how weak are the reasons for our war with Russia over Ukraine. After all, it is about just the fact that there was a war at all and that wars engender civilian casualties, which is perhaps not at all a cause for major escalation. The war between democracies and autocracies would seem a pretty thin reed on which to continue a war with damages to our side, especially since most of the war aims,by Putin, which is Ukraine not in NATO and eastern provinces of Ukraine ceded to russia matters that could have been accomplished by negotiation and still available, or so it seems to Zeelensky. Nothing to fight a major war over. So far, Biden playing by the book has been lucky.
Biden said yesterday that He thought Putin did not deserve to stay in power. That was backtracked as meaning that Biden was just responding to seeing the Ukraine refugees in Poland, just as when he said Putin was criminal because of the slaughter of civilians. But commend biden for saying to the American people what he means, which is that Putin is criminal whether or not there is a war crimes tribunal and that, so too, Putin does not deserve to remain as the head of russia given his misbehaviors, and that no one in the west will feel safe if Putin stays in office and so, sooner or not much later, there will be a reckoning about russian leadership. Biden confides to the American people the sense that the American people sense is the truth. But there may be something more hinted at, which is that we are in the end game in the war, that Putin is clearly losing the war, what with hunkering down around Kiev and not trying to defeat it, and bolstering mainly in Ukraine's east. That is why Biden, more aware than the rest of us about the real situation in the Russian armed forces, can be thinking about the future, or when Putin will leave office. He would not be talking about that if Putin’s worst was still ahead. My fear, however, is that Biden is wrong and the worst might be yet to come, however careful has been Biden’s management of this war.
Some wars are those of necessity in that a civilization is in danger of perishing even if the odds of persevering are slim. That was the case in the Second World War and with the War between the Greeks and the Persians in the Fifth Century B. C. and also, I think, with the Spanish Armada, which was out to destroy what the Protestant Reformation had created. Most wars are less so in that a negotiated peace could have gotten most war aims without the need for carnage. The colonies could have worked out a way to remain tied to Great Britain if Parliament had been willing to negotiate with Benjamin Franklin, the reluctant revolutionary. The North could have swallowed an independent Confederacy, leaving it to its cruelty and rural idiocy while it remained dependent on Northern capital and industry, which in fact is what happened for the hundred years that followed the end of the American Civil War. The Spanish American War was unnecessary for the United States to take over the declined Spanish Empire as part of its economic sphere of influence, sometimes deciding to keep territories, as in Puerto Rico, or give them up, as in Cuba, or hold them only for a half century, as was the case with the Philippines. The logic of the geo-political order trumps the need for war. The same is the case with Ukraine. What appears in newspapers in the past few days are limited Russian war aims--a Ukraine pledge not to join NATO and the annexation into Russia by some eastern Ukraine provinces--could have been agreed to by negotiation before the war started were Putin willing to give up or even defer trying to reconstitute the Russian Empire at the time of Catherine the Great. But some leaders are itching for a fight and we think that prudent leaders are the ones who are reluctant to wager the stakes of war, that you might lose your seat at the table and not just the stakes that had been anted up.
The war of Russia on Ukraine can be understood as a war to rectify the borders of what had happened when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, just like the border wars that occurred when Yugoslavia did in the 1990’s. But those were just ethnic conflicts that got out of hand because concentration camps and ethnic cleansing sullied the point by introducing these matters in Europe for the first time since the Second World War. Putin, on the other hand, was to rectify back to the Eighteenth Century and declared war to do so when that had not been necessary to achieve his major objectives. So Biden decided to take sides in the war very vigorously but without shedding American blood on the grounds that Putin had gone to war in the first place. The war itself was the casus belli for taking sides when Biden could have said that let Putin take Ukraine in that it was outside of the Western sphere of influence even though Ukraine was more culturally allied to Europe. But Biden did not let that pass and so has applied the measures available--arms shipments and economic warfare-- to counter Putin. It is clear that either Biden or Putin is the winner, never mind whatever happens to Zelensky and his people.
How do you keep up this war or any war in a way that is responsible and judicious, which means risking not too much to make sure as to command the resources that will allow a side to win. FDR managed he war wisely, by general accounts, because he did not panic but thought that time was on his side in that his ever increasing arms and mobilization would work to create overwhelming force and that the only danger was that the American people might lose heart and give up on the sacrifices, though the protection of two oceans meant that the domestic front was never seriously threatened. The domestic front was pretty normal, prosperous, in fact, even though casualties mounted. FDR made clear to his people that they should not be distracted from his war aims. It was not a war to protect the British Empire nor a war to rescue the Jews. It was an alliance against Fascism and not to repel Stalinism. FDR was, therefore, careful and circumspect, carefully marshaling his resources and avoiding disruptive matters.
Biden is following this circumspect manner. He is not overly ambitious, not suggesting that Putin will fall (until yesterday), even though many commentators were saying that Putin’s fall is now inevitable. Putin used assistance to overcome Ukraine as he could while not escalating the chips on the table by unlimbering the Western arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, that being the hole card that Putin may or may not keep in reserve. All in all, Biden is playing by the book in that he minimizes risk and consults his allies on every forward move. That is supposedly the right way to wage war, even though some exceptional politicians, like Lincoln, was dramatic in shaking things up to reshuffle the deck as when he announced the Emancipation Proclamation, but that was also a considered move to mobilize the war as one about freedom rather than just union, and only did so after a victory, so that the war was moving towards its endgame even though it really wasn’t yet there, tht waiting for the continued attrition of the Confederate forces. Similarly, D-Day knew that repulsing the invasion of Europe was Hitler’s last chance while a defeat for the Allies on June 6, 1944 meant only that Eisenhower would have to be replaced by a general who could do the trick the next spring-- providing that the Germans did not develop new weapons that could significantly change the war.
Who are the people who could master how to wield a war? It is difficult to say. Monarchists would say that the terms of office for President or Prime Minister are too short so that they have rough experience so as to master their own administrations much less international statecraft. The difference is that politicians who rise in a democracy often have had decades of experience before they achieve the highest rung and so have played many parts and have met enough foreign leaders that they are familiar with handling world events. And so Biden can be thought of as having been seasoned enough to know the playbook he is handling, having been in the Senate for more than thirty years and then as Vice President for eight. But experience is not the best preparation. Lincoln was not experienced. Kaiser Wilhem was experienced but insufficiently circumspect to see the awful nature of a new war. George H. W. Bush was experienced but still got himself into a quagmire where he had to enforce a no fly zone where he was thereby ever vulnerable to Saddam Hussein's missiles and the very experienced people around George W. Bush got themselves in a situation where everybody was firing on Americans. So experience is not the answer even if Biden rests on it but relies even more on judgment to determine how to read the invisible book from which he reads.
So if going by the book is just being careful and deliberate, Biden is measuring up. He has unified NATO so as to shore up his defenses and shipped arms to fight an offense and protected the home front by not putting Americans at risk. He has denounced aggression and it seems to be successful in getting the support of the American people. But none of these matters have been tested in that the Russians have not done something significantly stabilizing? Would Americans rally to the cause if there were serious cyber warfare attacks against the homeland or if Poland was required to answer the Russians for a bit of chemical warfare against Ukraine? It is hard to say, given how weak are the reasons for our war with Russia over Ukraine. After all, it is about just the fact that there was a war at all and that wars engender civilian casualties, which is perhaps not at all a cause for major escalation. The war between democracies and autocracies would seem a pretty thin reed on which to continue a war with damages to our side, especially since most of the war aims,by Putin, which is Ukraine not in NATO and eastern provinces of Ukraine ceded to russia matters that could have been accomplished by negotiation and still available, or so it seems to Zeelensky. Nothing to fight a major war over. So far, Biden playing by the book has been lucky.
Biden said yesterday that He thought Putin did not deserve to stay in power. That was backtracked as meaning that Biden was just responding to seeing the Ukraine refugees in Poland, just as when he said Putin was criminal because of the slaughter of civilians. But commend biden for saying to the American people what he means, which is that Putin is criminal whether or not there is a war crimes tribunal and that, so too, Putin does not deserve to remain as the head of russia given his misbehaviors, and that no one in the west will feel safe if Putin stays in office and so, sooner or not much later, there will be a reckoning about russian leadership. Biden confides to the American people the sense that the American people sense is the truth. But there may be something more hinted at, which is that we are in the end game in the war, that Putin is clearly losing the war, what with hunkering down around Kiev and not trying to defeat it, and bolstering mainly in Ukraine's east. That is why Biden, more aware than the rest of us about the real situation in the Russian armed forces, can be thinking about the future, or when Putin will leave office. He would not be talking about that if Putin’s worst was still ahead. My fear, however, is that Biden is wrong and the worst might be yet to come, however careful has been Biden’s management of this war.
The End Game for the War
History is unkind to the people who lose wars. Rather than go back to their corners and renew a war after having become refreshed, as happened for hundreds of years between France and England, regimes and monarchs are overthrown, something new happened after the English Civil War: the King was executed. That had not been the original war aim of Parliament. The French king was killed after the French Revolution and the French Emperor deposed after the Franco-Prussian War and a new republic was established. The Kaiser lost the First World War and he was deposed as well, and there was regime change in Germany, all unexpected, and Hitler was a suicide when the Allies were taking control of Germany even though Claus von Staufffenberg thought that if he had successfully assassinated Hitler a year before, Germany might still have retained some German conquests in a subsequent negotiation with the Allies. Not likely, given the carnage of the war. Some revenge was necessary. Germany had gotten off lightly after World War I with reparations as had the reparations paid by France to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War.
Read MoreSarah Palin's Free Speech
Free speech is usually understood as a right. That means that every person in the United States is entitled to whatever they want to say about politics and religion and literature whatever they care to say subject to limitations on slander, hate speech (a dubious proposition) and only self administered good taste, as when attacking the child or wife of a politician. The government has the obligation to protect people who engage in outrageous speech, as when the police allowed Nazi demonstrators to march on Skokie, Illinois in , prevented from doing so only because the demonstrators were bought off not to engage in their right to march with Nazi flags and placards. The trial of Peter Zenger in early Eighteenth Century New York established the right for the press to say critical things of the government and that has been established up to the present when Sarah Palin’s libel that associated her and her point of view was associated with the shooting of Gabby Gifford was dismissed because there was no malice in the New York Times, just a mistake quickly rectified.
Read MoreA Primer on the Russia-Ukraine War
When, in the first decade of the Eighteenth Century, Peter the Great had ships built for him by Holland, a great maritime sea power, he could take on what was then regarded as the Swedish Empire. Peter succeeded in his Great Northern War and the Swedish Empire was no more. Ever since, for three centuries now, Russia has tried by war to alter the divide between Europe and Russia, sometimes to the East and sometimes to the West. The main division remains the one between Catholic and Protestant countries in Europe, ones that experienced the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and rapid industrialism, to the more scloratic processes that define Russia. The standard division draws a line where the small countries on the eastern edge of the Baltic are within Europe: Lithuania Catholic as was when it was in confederation with the Poles since the Middle Ages; Latvia Protestant, a remnant of that Swedish Empire; and Estonia, because it's people were sent by the Soviets to that territory, atheist then and probably Russian Orthodox today. Poland was the unfortunate buffer between the Russians and Soviets on the East, to which they shared a common boundary, and the equally hated Germans to the West, also with shared boundaries. The southern flank of Eastern Europe was distrusted to the Soviets and the Russians, they always claimed to dominate those territories. Madelyn Albright, who was Clinton’s Secretary of State, was fully aware that the setbacks in Russian power would be temporary after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and tried to arrange measures that would make the division between Russia and Europe more permanent and in accord with the traditional division between the two. Albright had the Baltic states and Romania tied into NATO, which meant that an attack upon one was to be regarded as an attack against all, and so the military integrity of the continent was associated with the economic ties that had been created in the European Union. That would allow whatever storm arose when new more belligerent Russia arose, which happened with Vladimir Putin. Putin always regarded the movement of NATO to its Russian boundary as hostile even if NATO and Biden regard it as a defensive alliance, though the only one there is to defend against is Russia, NATO sending troops to Afghanistan which it regarded as having been an attack against the United States. Defensive versus offensive doesn’t mean much.
Read MoreWhoopie's Free Speech
Current issues having to do with free speech are repetitive, boring and obfuscating in that they have to do with defending the rights of people not to be insulted and that makes what is no longer permissible speech very broad rather than limited to only important exceptions from free discourse. This idea that people are free from being offended has been a major change in discourse, and was inaugurated, as best I can tell, when universities decided or some of the students decided that classrooms were safe spaces where professors had to be warned if they said something controversial or contrary so as not to make students uncomfortable rather than regard classrooms as places whose purpose was to make students uncomfortable with their received opinions. There are any number of school boards who insist that the curriculum should not include books or ideas that offend either Blacks or whites, as when Governor of Texas Greg Abbott says that no group is to be denigrated in history books, which means you can’t decide that slavery was a bad thing because the white people cannot be thought of having done bad things. I think of such people as Gov. Abbott as being culturally illiterate because they are opting out of trying to understand how complicated things are but retain a naive view of all people as being well meaning rather than having views placed in their own contexts that nonetheless result in differential advantages. Neither slave owner or enslaved can be condemned, in that point of view, even though they are all long dead, and that is to the detriment of all and whatever are the descendents.
Read MoreThe Boxing Match Between Ukraine and Russia
The curious thing behind the ramping up of a possible war between Russia and Ukraine is how the important actors have all limited their options, either overtly or implicitly or by secret agreement, so as to create a kind of Marquis of Queensbury set of rules about how the contest will proceed. The United States has taken off the table sending American troops to Ukraine, which means that they will have to fight it out alone against the very formidable Russian military. Biden suggests that the Russians will take serious casualties, but could probably occupy the entire country, and so will rely on economic pressures to make the russians relent or arrive at some settlement, perhaps with an increased area under Russian control, or economic pressure so significant that russia has to accept a humiliating surrender, which would not make russia look well to China, which Biden believes is the real reason for Russian swagger so that it does not become a very minor antagonist to China. NATO has also stipulated its own self control. It will send munitions to Ukraine but will beef up the military only in the nations already affiliated to NATO to insure that the conflict doesn’t spill over into the Eastern front NATO members. Even more important are the unstated constraints on Russia and the United States. There is no discussion at all about nuclear weapons even given the fact that Russia and the United States have the two largest nuclear arsenals in the world. It seems that nuclear weaponry between the two is passe, and reading the arrangements that ended the Cold War, it seems that the general in charge of the Soviet Rocket Forces are selected or approved of by the United States and so I presume that the guy to be in charge of NORAD is vetted by Moscow. Also, I presume that there are secret agreements between Russia and the United States as to limits on cyberspace. Neither will pull down the electrical grid of the other even if the two will be mischievous and try to get into secret codes of the other so as to spy on one another.
Read MoreMorality is Overrated
Even if you think that every “should” is a command, as Kant thinks, and that “should’s” are ubiquitous in everyday life, as when you should mind your mother and grant favors to friends and comply with reasonable requests by employers, and ubiquitous as well in collective or political life, as when Jesus commands that people be kind to one another, or that Martin Luther king, Jr. commands that we look to people’s character rather than their race, that does not mean that the moral life is neither the only life or even a predominant aspect of life, even though religion feels that it has accomplished and made more powerful and attractive the association of religion with morality, something that emerges with Abraham, who criticizes God for not meeting a higher standard of morality by imposing conditions whereby God will forego the destruction of Sodom and Gemorah, and where the charismatic power of Jesus is wedded with a morality of compassion. Rather morality, as a whole, is just one of the affective affinities and has to be properly placed within the passions, however much religion has stated otherwise.
Read MoreStratification Is Everywhere
Equality means that the social order is based on each group or person having universal rights that guarantee that they can each act independently and are not be subordinated to one another. Individuals and ethnic groups are equal even if their average wealth or modal prestige are different but because none can claim moral superiority one from the other as was the case when Blacks and whites were separated as castes into superior and inferior kinds of people. Under equality, everyone can take pride in their ethnicity and everyone can take pride in their occupations, or in their own individual pursuits of happiness, only some of those occupations, like prostitution or drug dealing, seen as dishonorable. There was a time when actors and actresses were regarded as disreputable and perhaps their celebrity makes them stand out as exceptionally honored, but all an occupation needs to be considered as an honest living to be considered a worthy occupation by politicians and preachers is that it is lawful. In the light of equality, an individual can cultivate his garden or write his essay or support his family or live off his rents, and each can be thought a free choice as a way to live one’s life. Authority, on the other hand, is that the social order is marked by ranks all of them under command of hallowed leaders, whether as persons, such as God or charismatic figures,or captains of industry, or by invisible forces, such as norms or traditions, which require people to know how they are to behave in the subordinate ways of life to which they are assigned. There is always an external instruction and one cannot very well see how it could be otherwise, for then would come chaos.
Read MoreGetting Through to 6ers
The New York Times, in a front page article a week or so ago, could not understand what was so upsetting to large parts of the population of Enid, Oklahoma, and neither could I. It seemed to be about mask mandates, but how could the local populace be so energized about what was a practical and usual public health measure of the sort that had been in place for hundreds of years so as to avoid pestilence? There had to be something more about the matter and the anti-maskers said it had to do with liberty, which is a very big deal concept not to be invoked so cavalierly. So the Times and others tried out alternative explanations which I, for one, found wanting. The article noticed that local residents were concerned about uncertain sexual identifications, but those people have been going on for thousands of years. The article also mentioned that there are more diverse populations in the area, but how does that demographic change impact on a particular person rather than serve as a background for the entire group, and how masking and sex orientation and government distrust are all tied together even though the issues are so different from one another? Masks are a pretext for outrage, but about what? The experts cited said that it had to do with emotions about conflict, but that does not tie it down very much. I will give it a try.
Read MoreConservatives, Liberals, Radicals
Soon after the Second World War, in the early Fifties, Hannah Arendt and others formulated a three part typology to describe political regimes. There was the totalitarian type, something new under the sun in the past twenty years, where the individual citizen, all of them, were subject to such intimidation and terrorism that the very psyche of an individual was shattered, everyone subject to a leadership out to restructure humanity into a new kind of person in keeping with its new ideology and disregarding usual constitutional procedures of law and order. That happened in countries controlled by Nazi Germany and countries controlled by the Soviet Union and inappropriately applied to militant Japan because it was part of the Azis and because the Army and Navy were independant of political institutions even though free speech, for exaample, continued in the press and radio until the last few years of the war. The second type were authoritarian regimes where only political opponents were terrorized and tortured while the rest of the population was allowed to move apace, quickly or slowly to modernize. Authoritarian regimes included Fascist Spain and Portugal and Italy and most of the underdeveloped countries in Latin America and Africa. The third type were the democracies in Western Europe and North America and influenced by British colonialism, including Australia, New Zealand, Chile and India. These countries had free speech, the rule of law, and the other parts of a liberal democracy even if India had gained its independence only recently. A key idea of this three part theory was that there was not much difference between Left and Right totalitarian societies. Ideologies might differ but the structures of terrorism as a cause and a consequence of such regimes was the same. No need to quibble about whether Hitler was more or less worse than Stalin. In both cases, projected utopias had become dystopias.
Read MoreReal Time Politics
Politics occurs in real time. That means that its procedures and events take place in the time it really takes to accomplish those things. That is different from other procedures and events that take place in vicarious experience, such as drama or movies or history books where time is foreshortened so that people as observers do not have to indulge in seeing everything unfold, cuts made in the film so that a walk in the woods is long enough to provide a sense of what it is like to be in the woods but not the entire time it takes to make the trip while real walks in the woods last so long as it takes to get from one place to another, to cover the distance. Vicarious experiences are allowed to be made more dramatic or presented with symbols and stereotypical characters so as to grasp what is happening in a thrice. But politics is vicarious in that except for a few events actually seen, like JFK as a Presidential candidate visiting the Bronx, politics is seen on television however much the issues or emotions that motivate politics are items of interest or not, impassioned or not, for deeply held or perhaps superficially arrived at because the slogans of the media make them seem appealing. It is a mistake to think that what Republicans believe are responses to their interests or their values rather than what they learn on the tube or could dispense with some slogans and adopt others with aplomb if there were a fashion to do so, as seems to be the case with people saying the 2020 election was rigged. They know that only vicariously; somebody told them that. That is different from watching sports, which last as long as they last and so critics have to come to understand why there is drama even in baseball, where there seem to be longueurs when what is happening is that people get beer and hot dogs and conversations while appreciating the ballpark and the crowds and the characteristic noise and pay attention when something important is happening. Color commentators, for their part, tie the television audience to what is broadcast on the field. That is why exhibiting a television broadcast of a football game without sportscasters proved unrewarding. There was an experiment where a New York Jet game some forty years ago was broadcast without the commentators, either play by play or for the color commentator, just to see if it would work. Viewers quickly signed off. All they could do was see their own living rooms to accompany the game while commentators brought the viewer into the picture, the talk from the television regularly updating what had transpired and what might happen next. So much for treating vicarious sports as in unalloyed real time. It needs dramatic emphasis to make it palatable. But politics is different and so its slow paced reality explains a lot about its dynamics and makes it always problematic how the viewers, the voters, are to make sense of what they experience, and so pay attention to its structured and emphasized drama and with less regard to the standby of demographics and policy as the engines of the engagement with the electorate and the political process.
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