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After Putin finishes inhaling Ukraine, the question has to be asked: will he turn his attention to the Baltic states? After all, they were part of both the USSR and the First Russian Empire.

The risk/reward calculus would be totally different. On the plus side: the Baltics are much smaller, and can’t put up much of a fight by themselves; Putin can argue with something of a straight face that intervention is necessary to protect a fairly large Russian minority from persecution; and if NATO chose not to resist, it could mean the end of the alliance. On the down side, the Baltics don’t offer much that he wants, the Grand Duke Vladimir didn’t hang out there, and a full scale war with NATO could result in the total destruction of his regime.

It would be a huge gamble. I don’t think he would do it. But then, Putin seems to have discovered a taste for gambling in his old age, so who knows?

What does Putin do if he captures Zelensky? Have him shot on the spot? Throw him in an old KGB dungeon? Poison him with novichok? Put him on trial? Force him to sign an agreement giving Ukraine to Russia?

There are no options here that won’t outrage the world. Putin would probably be better off if he just lets the guy go into exile.

The standard 18th century formula used by liberals to describe the purposes of government was to protect “life, liberty, and property.” Jefferson used the broader term “pursuit of happiness” instead of “property.” What did he mean by that?

I think he was referring to two related concepts. The first was economic freedom; one had the natural right to pursue any calling and to accumulate and dispose of property without facing any arbitrary interference from the government. The second pertained more to what we call First Amendment freedoms– to educate yourself, speak freely, assemble with others, and participate in political life. These concepts went beyond protecting “property” to reject vestiges of feudalism found in most European countries in 1776 and to promote the realization of individual potential.

Many of our political debates have revolved around the meaning of Jefferson’s words. To a CL, the government’s obligation is solely to avoid creating legal obstacles to business and personal growth; to a modern liberal, government has a positive responsibility to remove practical obstacles that already exist as a result of economic and social inequality. Where CLs and liberals agree, however, is on the emphasis on individual growth and rights; socialists and the “new (actually very old) right,” on the other hand, think the unit of measurement should be the health of society as a whole, not the state of each individual.

The Ukraine invasion should be horribly embarrassing for the two far-right French presidential candidates and for Viktor Orban. What will they say? Will they defend the invasion, or will they say that Putin is a changed man, and that they no longer support him, even though they agree with him on immigrants and gay rights? And how will the electorate respond?

This will be interesting, to say the least.

Last April, I posed a question: since Putin could take Ukraine at any time of his choosing, why had he not done so? I listed a number of possible explanations, including lingering doubts about the quality of the Russian military, concerns about sanctions, and the impact on public opinion in America and Europe. In addition, I threw out the possibility that Putin simply didn’t want to embarrass his good buddy Donald Trump while he was in office, and predicted trouble in the future.

Now that the invasion has occurred, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Biden’s victory in 2020 removed one of the disincentives for war. It is ironic, to say the least, that the presidency of a man who was flamboyantly and obnoxiously pro-Putin, and who famously hated everything associated with Ukraine, might have been Ukraine’s last line of defense.

The two world wars damaged the case for imperialism, so ever since, wars of aggression have typically been sold to the public as wars of liberation. The aggressor isn’t trying to add territory or exploit resources; it is seeking to free the working class, or an oppressed ethnic minority, or the entire country from a tyrannical, unrepresentative government.

But Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a blast from the past. He isn’t arguing that the invasion is necessary to protect ethnic Russians from the Ukrainians. He isn’t fighting to restore rights to which Ukrainians have been deprived by the current regime. He wants to extinguish a state that has the support of the vast majority of its citizens and turn those citizens into the subjects of a new Russian Empire because, well, that’s what they were under the later tsars and the Bolsheviks.

In other words, this is a war of imperialism, pure and simple.

If Putin invades and takes Ukraine, he will have to figure out a way to hold it. There are basically two options: annexation and direct rule from Moscow; or the installation of a suitable puppet, presumably backed by opportunistic Ukrainian politicians and civil servants and some elements of the Russian military. Which would he choose?

Putin’s modus operandi has traditionally been to find the most competent thug available, give him the keys, and let him go. I don’t think that will work in Ukraine, given the size of the country and the level of opposition to the invasion. It would also be logically inconsistent to insist that Ukraine is organically part of Russia and then to give it a separate government. I think direct rule is the more likely option.

There was nothing inevitable about the ratification of the Constitution. But for Madison’s takedown of Patrick Henry in Virginia, it might not have happened. Then what?

Here’s what I think happens:

1. There is no single market. Economic growth is consequently much slower.
2. Since there is no Union to preserve, there is no Civil War. That’s the good news. The bad news is that slavery lasts much longer.
3. With no central authority to mediate disputes, rivalries between states, particularly as to the control of lands in the West, become much uglier. European powers are called in as allies in these battles. What became the United States of America would have looked much more like the Holy Roman Empire.

Anyone here signing up to be a subject of the Empire?

Probably inspired by the 1619 Project, there has been a fair amount of commentary about the relationship between the Constitution and slavery over the last few months. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

1. There was no 18th century equivalent of John Calhoun among the Founding Fathers. No one was making the case that slavery was a positive good. The slaveowner FFs were perfectly aware that they were exposing themselves to a potent charge of hypocrisy. Slavery was defended solely because it was viewed as an economic necessity by the plantation owners.
2. There was a widespread belief, even among slave owners, that slavery might ultimately expire on its own accord at the time the Constitution was written and ratified. That, of course, was before the invention of the cotton gin and the incredible growth of the cotton cloth industry.
3. Without the South, there would have been no United States of America in 1788. Period. The implications of that are mind-boggling.
4. As a result of these facts, the FFs engineered a grubby, short-term compromise in the hope that the problem would disappear of its own accord in the long term. The Constitution neither eliminated slavery nor made its abolition impossible.
5. Realistically speaking, can you blame the FFs? Would we have been better off in the long run without the Union and the Constitution, even with the Civil War and the failures of Reconstruction thrown in the middle? Are the FFs to be condemned because they didn’t foresee the invention of the cotton gin and its implications for American politics, and because they weren’t willing to vote for their own economic extinction? Would you have done anything different if you were in the same position? I don’t see it.

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.