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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.

The geopolitical message behind the 2008 Olympics was direct and simple: we’re back and taking our rightful place in the world, baby! That’s not unusual; the message was the same at the Olympics in 1936 (Berlin), 1960 (Rome), and 1964 (Tokyo). China has come a long way, for good and for ill, since 2008, so what is the message this time?

As far as I can tell, it is that China is advanced and powerful enough to do anything it desires, including holding skiing events in areas with no snow. There has been no attempt to reproduce the memorable, intimidating scenes of the 2008 Opening Ceremonies, for which we can be grateful. Still, the joint Xi/Putin appearance put a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, particularly with Russian troops poised to invade Ukraine. No one in America, with the exception of the passionate fans of our gold medal winners, is going to remember this event fondly.

While Putin is busy trying to destabilize Ukraine, his people are dying like flies from the virus. This is due to the reluctance of the Russians to get vaccinated. That, in turn, has two causes: the public, for very good reasons, doesn’t trust the government; and Putin isn’t pushing the vaccine very hard.

The latter point is counterintuitive. Why would a state that has nothing but contempt for its citizens have any reluctance to use strongarm tactics on the vaccine? We’re not talking about America and its history of libertarianism, after all.

The answer is that Putin, like Trump, puts himself forward as the personification of toxic masculinity. He can’t strut around in public like the Marlboro Man and then insist that his subjects do something different without looking like a ridiculous hypocrite, so he doesn’t, and they die.

First, there was the pandemic, of course. Then there was the creepy spectacle of the Axis of Autocracy smiling down from the luxury boxes at the Opening Ceremonies. Then we had the Shiffrin implosion and Gu’s attempted footsie with the Chinese. Now we have a classic example of Russian athletic corruption and bullying. Why are these people even permitted to compete, anyway?

It’s not exactly heartwarming stuff. Let’s hope Putin doesn’t follow it up by staging a Massacre on Ice in Ukraine to avenge the Russian loss at Lake Placid in 1980.

On the freestyle skier named Gu.

She’s Chinese; she’s American, too.

Which comes first? I would say

“Don’t just live for today.

The dispute is much larger than you.”

The central tenet of the GOP–the one that holds the CL, PBP, and Reactionary factions together–is the cult of the rugged individual. It offers economic gain in the form of tax cuts and deregulation for the predominantly wealthy CLs and PBPs, and provides a cudgel with which the Reactionaries can beat historically disadvantaged groups. It is an indispensable part of Republican politics.

But, you ask, why do the Reactionaries buy into this? Many of them are downwardly mobile, and rely on government assistance for their survival. Why don’t they own up to it, and acknowledge that big government is sometimes a good thing, instead of opposing a larger welfare state and denying that modern problems like climate change and the pandemic only have collective solutions?

Because they are constantly told by the CLs and the PBPs for opportunistic reasons that they truly are rugged individuals who have been screwed out of their rights by a government which prefers the claims of women, minorities, and a self-interested intellectual elite to those of hard-working white Christian men. If you can just obliterate the establishment, all those high-paying coal and steel jobs will come back, and life will return to normal.

It’s a lie, of course. But it works.

Three observations are pertinent here. First, boycotts and demonstrations have historically been a major part of American political life; they were used by the colonists against the British prior to the Revolution and by civil rights activists from the sixties to the present day. Second, they are primarily associated with the left. Third, the reason they are associated with the left is that the left had no insider political power with which to accomplish its goals. Boycotts and demonstrations are consequently the peaceful equivalent of guerrilla warfare–the weapons of the side fighting uphill in an apparently unequal battle.

The current problem is with the cause, not the tactics. The white Christian right, which is nothing if not derivative, uses these tactics in a twisted homage to the Civil Rights Movement because it incorrectly views itself as an oppressed minority. In reality, it has a monopoly on every kind of power you might care to name in about half of the country. It considers itself oppressed because it has been denied, through politics, the law, and demography, its favorite “freedoms:” the “freedom” not to be offended by different viewpoints; and the “freedom” to dominate seculars, women, and minorities.

The bottom line is that we have two groups in this country who feel oppressed. The left has something of a case; the right has none. I don’t see any peaceful way forward until at least one of these groups is satisfied that its rights and views are being respected and no longer feels compelled to cancel the other.