Month: February 2022

Americans my age or younger were brought up on a steady diet of TV shows which portrayed the police as selfless public heroes. As a result, there was never any chance that the police were going to be “defunded.” The very slogan was a priceless gift to the political right even before the current spike in violent crime.

The emerging problem for the openly pro-Putin “new right,” however, is that those same TV viewers were brought up to believe that the Russians were an existential threat to our civilization. Stomping into Ukraine and killing lots of civilians isn’t going to change that opinion at all. Americans of both parties are going to rally around Ukraine. That isn’t good news for Trump and Carlson.

If there is an invasion, Ukraine is going to be a wedge issue in the election. It will be particularly interesting to see what, if anything, Kevin McCarthy says. He has openly and consistently sided with the extreme right in an effort to, as he sees it, maintain party unity. What will he do when the bulk of his party sides with Biden against Trump and Carlson on Ukraine?

I’m guessing he will change the subject and hope the issue goes away before November.

Given that the British didn’t have anything like the kind of resources necessary to occupy all of the American colonies, their only hope of success was some sort of dramatic victory that would destroy the morale of the Patriots. It could have happened in New York.

Washington, who had foolishly attempted to defend the city, was trapped in Brooklyn, with the Royal Navy between his army and Manhattan. Due to the incredible fortitude of his boatmen, the inattention of the Howe brothers, and very thick fog, the Continental Army managed to evacuate to safety. From the British perspective, the greatest opportunity of the war was lost. It was just as important as Saratoga and Yorktown.

But what if the evacuation had failed? Would the British have won the war? Based on our experiences in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and the fact that the war continued for several years after the British left Philadelphia with minimal activity on the part of the Continental Army, I would say no. The Patriots still controlled state and local governments all over the colonies, and had the resources to fight. They would have done so, and in the end, the British would have given up.

Some NYT commentators, right- and left-wing alike, have suggested that NATO should give in to Putin’s demand that Ukrainian NATO membership should be taken off the table–permanently. After all, it was never going to happen in any event, so what do we have to lose? It could prevent a war! It makes perfect sense!

The problem is that the record shows very clearly that Putin wants to swallow Ukraine whole; he won’t be satisfied with a mere statement of neutrality, no matter what he says today. Appeasement simply won’t work.

You could make a case in 1938 that Hitler’s statements about his territorial ambitions were reasonably credible. It only became obvious after he stomped into the rest of Czechoslovakia that he wasn’t going to settle for areas primarily populated by ethnic Germans. Today, by contrast, we already know that Putin doesn’t consider Ukraine to be a real country, and views its reasonably democratic government as a bad example for his domestic opposition. It would thus be extremely stupid to take his current statements about Russian security concerns at face value.

It isn’t intuitive that primary and secondary schools should be “free;” that is, financed by the taxpayers as a whole rather than by user fees. Why should I, as an elderly taxpayer with no children in the system, be forced to pick up the tab for other people’s children? The answer is fairly simple; American liberal democracy presupposes the existence of a voting public that is educated, patriotic, economically productive, and reasonably virtuous. All of us who believe in liberal democracy consequently benefit from “free” education which accomplishes this goal. That’s why I don’t complain about it.

The health of the school system is a matter of concern, not just for parents, as suggested by Republicans, but for the community as a whole, since all of us pay for it. Unfortunately, the public schools have become the front line in the culture war, to the detriment of everyone except the extreme right. The GOP has fought this battle for decades by proposing ways to make private education more accessible at public expense; today, Republicans all over the country are upping the ante by increasing surveillance of teachers and creating bounty systems to “stop woke in public schools.” Should we be concerned, even those of us living in blue states?

Yes. Nothing that succeeds in red states stays there. You will see efforts to “stop woke” at the federal level in 2024. You may even see them discussed during the campaign this year.

The Revolution was not inevitable; there were compromises floated that could have led to a very different result, including one resembling the Irish Home Rule Act that would have given the American colonies autonomy in all issues except foreign policy and the Navigation Acts. The 1619 Project crowd believes this would have been an improvement. Slavery in North America would have been abolished, not after the Civil War, but by an act of Parliament in 1833.

Two questions are pertinent here:

1. Would North American slavery have been included in the 1833 abolition act?
2. In what ways, if any, would America look different today?

As to the first question, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire only became possible when the value of sugar production in the West Indies declined dramatically, and when the Reform Act of 1832 precluded plantation owners from buying seats in Parliament. The value of North American slavery by that time had gone through the roof as the result of the vast growth of the cotton cloth industry. Mill owners and workers in Lancashire depended on it, as did traders and bankers in London and Liverpool. The vested interests poised against abolition would thus have been far more powerful. As it was, the payments made to the West Indian plantation owners represented about 40 percent of the annual budget at the time. It is completely unrealistic to assume that abolition and compensation for Southern planters would have been a viable solution in 1833. It is far more likely that slavery would have survived elsewhere in the British Empire as a result of the inability to deal with the American problem.

As to the second question, there would have been no “United States,” so it is safe to assume that the individual states would have enjoyed more autonomy, and efforts to create the single market in America would have gone much more slowly. Economic growth would have been slower. The frontier would not have been populated as quickly. At some point, America would have become effectively independent, as Canada did, but it would look more like Canada than it does today.

For better and worse.

I have read several books about the Revolution and the Founding Fathers over the last few years in an effort to better understand our current legitimacy crisis. One of the things that stands out is the ease and speed with which the Patriot side took control of state and local government, and the thinness of support for the British government. Why was that?

There were two reasons. First, the colonists had little reason to identify with Great Britain; some of them weren’t even British by ethnicity, while the others had either left Britain in the hopes of finding a better life, or were recently descended from someone who did. Second, given the state of transportation and communications and the distance from the mother country, the British government contributed very little to their everyday lives. They consequently felt themselves American, not British.

As a result of this, there were only two reasons to support the British: a direct financial interest (either commercial or officeholding) in the status quo; or the fear that what came next would be worse. The latter could quite easily have come true, and arguably did for slaves. I will be addressing those kinds of issues in posts over the next week.

Now the Beijing Olympics are done.

I can’t say that it’s really been fun.

We eked out some gold

But the losing got old.

In the end, it was Norway that won.

Jake Sullivan has come to the White House to talk about Ukraine. Biden meets him in the Oval Office.

B: So, you’re here to talk about Vlad the Impaler?

S: Is there anything else?

B: He makes me miss Brezhnev and the boys. They were evil, but they weren’t crazy. You knew they weren’t going to take any big risks. They had too much to lose.

S: These aren’t your father’s Russians. Or the Russians of your early political life, if you don’t mind me implying you’re old.

B: With age comes wisdom. When do you think Putin will make the final decision on the invasion?

S: I’ll answer that with a question. When do you think Trump will make the final decision on running?

B: At the last minute. It keeps his options open and gives him the maximum amount of leverage within the party.

S: Exactly. So when do you think Putin will make his final decision?

B: I get it. At the last minute. Do you think there will be a coup attempt first?

S: Probably not. The Ukrainian military would crush it quickly. It might create confusion for a few minutes, but if it failed–and it would–it would make Putin look ineffectual. He wouldn’t like that. There will be cyberattacks and a disinformation campaign, though.

B: Zelensky keeps saying we shouldn’t talk about an imminent invasion. Do you agree?

S: We have different purposes. He thinks Putin is rational, and just wants to keep squeezing him. He may be right, but we can’t take that for granted. Our public comments are intended to deter Putin and avoid the worst case scenario.

B: I’m sick of just having to react to Putin and his malarkey. Is there anything we can do to take the initiative?

S: If this were a board game, we would threaten to attack Iran or Syria if Putin invades. That would make perfect sense. But we’re not playing a board game, and you don’t have the same powers that Putin does. All we can do is what we’re doing–name the price and make him pay it if he invades.

B: So, for now, we basically sit and wait and hope for the best?

S: There’s nothing else to do, except to keep everyone on our side on board. (He leaves)

The anti-vaxxers, of course, maintain they are fighting for “freedom.” There is no strain of responsible libertarian thought, however, which suggests that it is OK to use your “freedom” to damage the interests of others. As a result, if you confront an anti-vaxxer with the fact that he is damaging your freedom, he will probably respond with obvious lies in order to avoid the issue–the virus isn’t that bad, or the vaccine doesn’t work.

What the anti-vaxxers really mean, as opposed to what they say, is that their rights count for more than yours. It is purely a question of power, not rights. It is a supremely selfish and anti-democratic position.

When you think about it, militant anti-vax demonstrations, such as the one going on in Canada, are a perfect manifestation of reactionary thought; they combine populism (I trust the guy on the internet, not medical experts), contempt for government (don’t tread on me), toxic masculinity (how many big rig drivers are women?), and the preference for power over persuasion (my freedom of movement counts for more than your right to remain virus-free, and I don’t care if you disagree). Polls consistently show that the anti-vax position is unpopular, however, and honking horns and blocking traffic is hardly a way to win hearts and minds. It looks like a sure electoral loser. What is really going on here?

This is just another example of base mobilization politics prevailing over attempts to persuade swing voters. The reactionaries are essentially saying that an unpopular minority has the right to impose its will on the majority; they don’t care if they represent the majority or not. That’s not the way liberal democracy works. The left needs to use this as an issue during the 2022 campaign.

PROPOSITION 4: The Civil War was the result, not of polarized opinions on the issue of slavery (these had always existed), but of the election of a candidate who opposed the expansion of slavery to the territories. Expansion was an economic necessity for planters due to the impacts of growing cotton on the soil. The threat to the economic survival of the planters was a good enough reason to risk it all. There will be no second Civil War today because there is no similar threat to the pocketbooks of red America.

Whew! There’s a lot to analyze there. Let’s break it down:

1. Bouie is right about the Civil War and polarization, although anti-slavery opinion had been galvanized in the North to a much greater extent than in the past by 1860, due largely to the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act in the North.
2. He is also correct that the planter class viewed slavery as being essential to its economic survival, and that this was an adequate reason to go to war.
3. The election of Lincoln in no way guaranteed that slavery would not be expanded. Lincoln didn’t have the legal authority to stop it by himself, and there was the Dred Scott decision to overcome. Secession was a rash act; given the checks and balances in the system, it was not necessary to protect slavery expansion, let alone to save it where it already existed.
4. While it is true that the growing of cotton exhausts the soil pretty rapidly, expansion to the territories was not a solution to that problem. It was universally understood that the cultivation of cotton was not a realistic possibility in the desert, or in the Great Plains. The real concern of the planters was that the balance of power in the Senate would be upset by the creation of numerous new free states, and that slavery would consequently be abolished where it already existed.
5. Bouie is right when he says there is no economic threat to red America on the scale of the slavery issue. However, red America is constantly being told that it faces cultural annihilation; is that a good enough reason to go down swinging? Bouie’s Marxism says no. History says yes.

PROPOSITION 3: Slavery arose from, and was the logical consequence of, capitalism. This theory is based on the undoubted fact that the cotton cloth business–from the growing of cotton to the sale of cotton clothing– was the world’s first globalized and truly capitalist industry. Is it an accurate statement, as applied to capitalism as a whole?

No–it isn’t even accurate as to agriculture as a whole. Slavery doesn’t make economic sense on subsistence farms, and it is not necessary on farms on which technology permits the replacement of a large labor force by machines. It certainly doesn’t apply to factories, which have never depended on slave labor. Any suggestion that industrial workers were and are just “wage slaves” focuses solely on the imbalance of negotiating power between capital and labor and ignores the profound difference between an individual actor with all of the rights of a human being and a person treated as livestock by the law.

Cotton production is an outlier; the large, docile workforce is still required today, even after centuries of technological improvements. It is a single globalized business out of many. It does not stand for capitalism as a whole.

PROPOSITION 2: Racism is an after-the-fact justification for the social, political, and economic dominance of property owners over workers. I refer to this as the “Grand Unified Theory of Sociology;” it tells you that minority identity politics and socialism are ultimately the same cause, a theory espoused by more commentators on the right than the left. It is completely false.

Bouie seems to be extrapolating all of history from his (only partly correct) interpretation of the origins of American slavery. Historical examples disproving his thesis abound, including, but not limited to: Roman slavery was not based on race; various barbarian groups, most notably the Vikings, captured and sold slaves of the same race; no one at the time ever suggested that European lords and peasants during the Middle Ages were of different races; and American and British mill owners in the 18th and 19th centuries made no effort to import workers of different races–they relied on the indigenous white population.

If Bouie were correct, Bernie Sanders would have won the Democratic nomination in 2020 by sweeping the black vote. That obviously didn’t happen. Minority identity politics and Marxism are, as I have noted before, different sides of the same coin; they are not the same thing.

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that Jamelle Bouie is either an outright Marxist or, at a minimum, is heavily influenced by Marxist ideas. That doesn’t make him automatically wrong; most of his work is based on solid research, and contains a minimum of pointless whining. However, it does mean that he can go off on weird tangents based on ideology rather than evidence.

Over the few days, I will be addressing some of his recent comments about slavery, beginning with:

PROPOSITION 1: North American slavery should be viewed primarily as a product of economic conditions, not racism. This is mostly true; the participants in the slave trade (Americans, Europeans, and Africans) did not enslave Africans out of contempt for their physical features and culture and then try to figure out what to do with them. Slavery arose in North America because large-scale agricultural operations in the South required an enormous, cheap, and stable labor force, and because the alternatives didn’t work. Indians couldn’t adapt to plantation life, died from European diseases, and could easily melt into the forest, while Europeans could not be enticed from their farms to do manual labor on plantations without the promise of land and freedom. Better technology was not an option. What else could the plantation owners do?

That said, the belief on the part of the Americans and Europeans that Africans were subhuman probably preceded slavery, and made its justification easier. It did not come after the fact. On that point, I think Bouie is wrong.

Ukraine has to be endlessly frustrating for Biden, because, due mostly to geography, Putin never has to give up the initiative. He can squeeze, relax, or invade any time he likes. We can only react and attempt to deter.

If we had an autocratic political system, things would be different. Biden could send the Sixth Fleet to the shores of Syria and threaten to obliterate Assad and all of the Russians’ investments if anything happens in Ukraine. The pressure could be increased and relaxed in proportion to the events at the Ukrainian border. Putin would no longer be able to dictate the agenda.

This won’t happen, of course, because Biden isn’t a dictator, and Congress and the American people wouldn’t stand for it. In a world completely controlled by realpolitik, however, it would.